A Token Effort

Introducing...

The Community Token System

Wait! What? What the heck is that? 

You may well ask. Here, I'll let Angeliana, Senior Community Manager for EverQuest II explain. 

Got that? Good, because I'm not sure I have.

As far as I can make out, it's a new reward system for participating in events. Sometimes inside the game itself but mostly on social media. 

There's one running already, Can you guess what it is?

No, you can't. You'd be all day trying. It's an anagram competition in which you have to unscramble the names of ten NPCs. Here, have a go. See how you do.

• ovine roofgarden
• bermilksop nostril
• age hypo thorp
• alvina vibes
• ashton kneecapped
• celery mayo
• balking bilgegregg
• adrea hemoglobin
• atomize hats
• alga stung

No? Me neither. I've been playing this game since 2004 and none of those is ringing any bells. And do you know why? Because, like any rational person, I don't pay any attention to the names of NPCs. 

Why would I? I'm not going to hang out with them or call them up on the phone. Either they want me to do something or they serve a function. Why would I need to know the full name of a bank teller or a shopkeeper? Maybe, if it was on a name badge, I might know their first name but would I remember it for next time? 

In fact, I have all overhead names in EQII set to Mouseover so I only ever see them when I specifically target someone. I don't need all that visual clutter and cruft.

Looking at the anagrams, several of which are really good, I suspect Angeliana, or whoever came up with the list, enjoys making anagrams out of peoples' names in real life. I've known people who do that, some of them quite compulsively. 

People who aren't engaged with the whole anagram concept but want to make some kind of puzzle tend just to randomize the names or words into gibberish. True afficionados make new words and often try to make them as funny as they can or fit them somehow to the personality of the name's owner. That's clearly what's going on here.

Obviously, I won't be sending in my answers because I don't have any. If I did, though, I'd be sending them directly to Angeliana in a Private Message, which seems quite an odd way to go about it, although I guess you can't have people just posting the unscrambled names on a forum thread.

Except I have seen other games do similar puzzles and use exactly that form of response, which always suggests the whole thing is actually a giveaway, not a competition at all, like all those codes you can type in to get freebies that are supposedly special rewards for doing something in particular but which get re-posted on third-party websites and social media and work for absolutely anybody. Not that I ever uses any of those...

In contrast, this is a genuine competition. There are only thirty prizes and Angeliana is going to select them randomly using  a "Wheel Of Names", which she says like it's a thing we all know. She's even going to record herself doing it "to show validity of the wins."

It all seems remarkably complicated to me, especially for a couple of tokens to spend in a gift shop. Maybe Ogor the Ogre (Even Ttobey isn't buying that name.) sells really good stuff, though, like the endgame raid gear Shintar was telling us you can get for another new token feature in Star Wars: the Old Republic. 

Yeah, he isn't, though. I was curious so I went to have a look at what he's got to offer. He was very easy to find. He's in Qeynos and Freeport (Because in Norrath it's standard practice to be two places at once if you're an NPC.). I never have a clue where any new NPC is likely to set up their stall in Qeynos but in Freeport it's always down by the docks or in the charmingly-named Execution Plaza (Political prisoners executed every hour, on the hour, since 2004.)

Better yet, you can ask a guard and get directions. They used to just swivel on their heels and point but now they still do that but also send a glowing trail right to the person you're looking for. I tried it just now and Ogor was literally about  fifty feet from where I was standing, so that was embarassing.

As you can see, he is not doling out raid gear for a token or two. He hasn't got any useable gear at all. Someone more cynical than me might say he hasn't got anything useful at all.

He's got a lot of house items, which is always nice but nothing so special you could imagine anyone wanting to unscramble a whole bunch of anagrams, then type the results into a chatbox in the hope of winning a lottery to get enough tokens to buy two of them. And remember, this is "a bit harder of an event", which is why you get two. Mostly, I can only assume, you'll be getting just one. If you're lucky.

Other than that, Ogor has a couple of quite nice petamorph wands, some decent appearance-slot robes, a couple of illusion items, some fireworks, two vanity pets and a peculiar-looking ground mount in the shape of a wolf wearing a saddle and bridle. The wolf looks like there's moss growing on it, too.

This is all the same sort of stuff that routinely gets given away in holiday events, of which, as I've noted before, Norrath has a plethora. It appeals to a very specific demographic that seems to make up a significant proportion of forum posters and quite possibly of the playerbase as a whole. I can't remember exactly when it happend but at some point in its twenty-year history, EQII became a game suited mostly for absolutely obsessive min-maxers at one end and completist collectionists of fluff at the other, with not an awful lot of room for anyone inbetweeen.

The latter are going to see some merit in the new Community Token System, I'm sure, although collectors and decorators tend to be picky. The endgame statisticians are presumably going to ignore it entirely. Whether there's much cross-over between the two factions I wouldn't care to speculate.

I don't think I'd go out of my way to earn tokens for any of Ogor's stock. If I happen to acquire any, though, I won't complain. I'd quite like those petamorph wands. 

I suppose it's going to depend mostly on what the events are like. I note that as well as competitions and similar events on the forums or Discord, Guides can also hand out tokens as rewards in the game itself. I haven't seen a guide event for a while but it's nice to know they still exist and also that Guides now have a way of encouraging players to join in with ad hoc events rather than just re-running the familiar Guide Quests (Not that those aren't always welcome - you can get some nice bags that way.)

Angeliana does also say that "From time to time, he will even get some items added" so we can hope for better, later. I very much doubt he'll ever have anything more than cosmetics to give away, though.

And that's fine. When I first read the forum post announcing the new feature I did worry for a moment that it was a replacement for Panda! Panda! Panda!, which does give some very good gear for the minor effort of some extremely easy questing.

The supposed lore explanation "Ogor the Happy, wants terribly to be an adventurer. Alas he cannot, so he needs you to get him some Norrathian Fables and bring them to him. In turn, he will let you choose from a plethora of items he happens to have sitting around." does make his motivation sound remarkably similar to Yun Zi's. I suspect that has more to do with lack of imagination than anything else. It's also how Qho's super-annoying gathering questline is explained.

Also, I just proved myself a liar by remembering their names immediately, without having to look anything up. I guess some NPCs do familiarize themselves over time after all.

Good luck getting a funny anagram out of either of their names, though!  

I Couldn't Possibly Comment

A couple of consecutive posts by Naithin at Time To Loot had me leaving comments, hinting I might have to write reply posts of my own, so I thought I'd combine the two responses into one post here today. It's taking a bit of a risk - Naithin might drop a third post tomorrow and start the whole thing rolling again - but you have to get on the bus sometime...

The first post was a very restrained and polite reaction, not in any way a rant, about something I remember being a little less sanguine about last year, namely the lack of on-site commenting in many of the newer blogs. 

In part this is attributable to the current fashion for minimalism, a trend I otherwise rather like. Many of the new wave of blogs look sleek and stylish and feel very comfortable on the eye. There's an interest in design and aesthetics that's welcome after years of gaming blogs that just want to get the job done and don't care to get all dressed up to do it.

What the minimal look gains in style, though, it loses in function. Not in every case but in what certainly feels to me, and clearly felt to Naithin, as too many. 

A few of these blogs operate as completely static websites, neither allowing or expecting any interaction with the reader. In a way, that's the better option. It is, at least, unambiguous. Here's something I wrote. Read it. End of Message. 

The odd thing about that is that a large part of the drive towards minimalism appears to be coming from a wish to escape the corporate nature of the new web and return to the glory days before the billionaires and tech bros got their claws into it but ultra-flat websites seem to hark back not to the noughties or even the late nineties but to the very first time I ever web-browsed, in the early 'nineties, when I'd just read websites because that's all you could do with them.  

More of the minimalist blogs prefer to offer some means of leaving feedback, just not on the blog itself, which must remain pristine. If you have thoughts or questions or wish to make a comment, you're invited to send an email or to visit the author's preferred social media platform and interact with them there.

Email is fine if your goal is to talk directly with the writer of the post. As I said in a comment to Naithin, I find emailing complete strangers a bit weird (I said "creepy" but I'll revise that to "uncomfortable", like having to talk to someone who doesn't understand or respect the concept of personal space.) but I grant that may just be me. 

Whatever your personal feelings about sending emails to strangers, though, what's objectively true is that only you and the person you're emailing are going to see it. If you want to keep your comments private then I guess that makes sense. There's an email address on this blog somewhere that, very, very occasionally, someone will use to get in touch with me but the handful of times it's happened it's never been to leave a comment on a post.

Generally, comments on blog posts are only in part a communication with the OP. They're also left for the edification or amusement of anyone who reads the blog. Comments are for readers as much as for bloggers. Blogs with active readerships often have comment threads in which readers talk to each other without any further input from the person on whose blog they're holding their chat party.

Email is completely useless as far as that kind of communication goes but social media is built for it, so I can see why some bloggers might like to carry any discussion over to their preferred platform. They already have an audience there and it's more than likely they're cross-promoting their blog in their social media already, so from their view-point and the perspective of their social media circle, the whole thing is both logical and organic.

Except not for anyone else. For all other readers of the blog, who may not use the particular platform in question (Almost always some outpost of the Fediverse or BlueSky thse days...), the options are to keep their thoughts to themselves and move on or to create a new social media account purely for the purpose of leaving a comment. One of those is frustrating, the other is annoying. Actually both of them are annoying...

To a considerable degree, I'm sympathetic to the disinclination to provide on-blog comment threads. Even on the big, corporate blogging platforms, mostly WordPress or Blogger these days, comment systems are finnicky and awkward. We've all had serious problems just leaving a comment at a blog that does nominally have an option to do so, I'm sure. 

A lot of that derives from a suspicion that having an easily-accessible comment thread is going to mean getting abusive, disturbing or upsetting comments from scary people. Which is a thing that happens, although not as often as all that, thankfully. 

In order to minimize the chance of it happening at all, comment systems frequently require first-time commenters to sign up with a service they otherwise wouldn't need, which isn't much different to joining a new social media platform, or to link that service to one of the big, corporate web presences (Google, Facebook, X) they're already signed up to, which is what minimalist bloggers are trying to avoid dealing with in the first place. It's a vicious circle.

On this blog, I have comments set to the lowest level of security allowed by Blogger and I still get plenty of complaints about it being hard to leave a comment here. Comments are already much harder to leave on blogs than they should be, even when all the work is being done for you. 

I don't code my own websites but I gather from many posts I've read by people who do that adding a custom comment section is one of the more difficult aspects of the craft. It's not surprising if people really don't want to get into it, given they probably aren't keen on the whole concept to begin with.

And finally, there are some bloggers who have very sound and understandable personal reasons for not wanting to open themselves to the exposure of public comments. I get all of this. The reasons for the absence of comment options on blogs is very understandable.

Which doesn't make it any the less annoying for the reader. 

In a few cases it is apparent that the "blogger" just doesn't want comments because they're really running a low-profile website, which is fine. I'm good with having a few websites in my RSS feed that look a bit like blogs but aren't really. 

The rest, though, the ones that do seem to be blogs but on which I can't leave comments, I find problematic. Ironically, the ones that don't interest me are the ones I'm more likely to keep reading (Or glancing at...) I wouldn't be leaving comments on them anyway, so why would I care that I can't? Or even notice, for that matter.

The consistently interesting ones are in the middle in terms of irritation factor. Their content is good enough to feel rewarding in itself so I'm likely to carry on reading them and even look forward to new posts. After a period of frustration with not being able to comment, I'll settle into a mildly disgruntled acceptance, where I treat the blog as a website even though it really does look and feel like a blog. It's a trade-off and a compromise.

The real stinkers, though, are the intermittently engaging blogs, where mostly I wouldn't be commenting anyway but once in a while something comes up that I really want my say on. Those are the times when I get very grumpy and start unfollowing people.

And none of it is ever much of a problem at all except during Blaugust. The rest of the year, who cares? None of my business. You, as they say, do you. Knock yourself out. Other out-of-date cliches are available.

For Blaugust, though, it has long been an understanding that bloggers support each other by leaving comments on other bloggers' blogs. And it's always been deemed especially important that the more established bloggers should make an extra effort to get out there, read the new blogs from the new Blaugustinians, and leave comments wherever possible. 

It's supposed to be encouraging. It's supposed to foster a sense of community. It's supposed to express solidarity and support. 

It's also always been assumed to be something new bloggers will appreciate. 

So what happens when it's not and they don't? When said new bloggers, many of whom aren't even new in any sense other than "new to Blaugust", don't invite or even welcome comments and certainly don't want to host comment threads that could potentially turn into conversations about them or their work, between people they don't even know?

I said on Naithin's comment thread (Which I now see has grown into a huge debate that stands as an exemplar of why comment threads are so important and in which several people have already made all the points I've just made, so go me for coming up with them on my own, I guess?)  that static site blogs aren't a good fit for Blaugust but I think what that really means is that Blaugust might need some clearer definitions of what it is and what it's aiming to achieve. 

As Naithin said in reply, it's not an acceptable solution to exclude blogs that don't allow comments. There are, as I've said, good reasons for that. We do have a Discord, of course, which allows for open discussion and which some Blaugustinians are very active on, but again, it's an external social network.

I wonder if perhaps we ought to do some more with the Blaugchievements? People do seem to be motivated by awards. There's already one specifically for leaving a comment on another blog but maybe there should be one just for having a comment section in the first place. And there could be further awards for starting or contributing to comment threads, as opposed to leaving single comments. 

I'm not really the one to brainstorm this, not being much of an Achiever archetype. And people wouldn't be tempted to game it by getting together in advance or just leaving meaningless comments, would they? No, surely not...

So much for Naithin's first post, anyway. A lot of waffle around a topic about which I turn out to have nothing to say that hasn't already been covered in his excellent comment thread. Oh, the irony. Do leave your sarcastic comments in my comment thread...

And so on to Naithin's second post. Blimey, this is going to run long, isn't it? I'd better keep it short.

In fact, let me for once be sensible and also senistive to the valuable time of my readers (A pretentious expression, if ever I heard one.) and hold back the second part for another day. By when, of course, other things may overtake us and it may never appear. Either that or I'll be stuck for ideas and be glad I saved it. One or the other.

Until then, let's just hope Naithin doesn't post another thought-provoking, must-reply piece today or I'll never get ahead of this thing...

Layers And Players

MassivelyOP's talking point for the day asks "Is ‘layering’ tech actually MMO community poison?" A little over-dramatic, maybe, but it's a worthwhile topic for discussion. Predictably, perhaps, much of the commentary revolves around "making friends" and whether instancing and layering makes that less likely to happen.

I have to wonder if focusing on whether or not people “make friends” with each other isn't kind of missing the point of what a community is. A community doesn’t rely on friendships, it relies on acquaintances. 

Think of your local community, whatever that happens to be. A school, a college, a workplace, a neighborhood. Anywhere people find themselves gathered together out of circumstance. In just about every scenario you can call to mind there's an expectation that some kind of community will result. Communities aren't an aberration, they're a norm.

Welcome them or shun them, communities are what we all know, and in any of those communities "friends" will make up, at most, just a small fraction of the whole. It's entirely possible to feel part of a community - and be accepted by others as part of it - without having any friends there at all.

Sam Kash, in the in-house intro that frames the MOP thread, offers an excellent example of how community is founded on experiences other than friendship. He talks about his time in Final Fantasy XI, when there was "the character who remained in the kneeling position by the shops... He wore a pumpkin head and was always there, like a fixture of the landscape". Sam goes on to describe the day that "fixture" got up off his knees and ran to the trading post: "It was like the whole map was involved, like a celebrity was moving amongst us".

It's exactly why layering and instancing works counter to the spirit and intent of any virtual world. For community to form there doesn't need to be friendship but there does have to be familiarity. You have to be able to recognize the same individuals over time.

In a real-life community or neighborhood there will be any number of them, people you recognize only by sight, about whom you know only a very little. Their presence seperates the place where you live from the places where you don’t. It's the difference between feeling like a stranger and feeling like a local. At its best it brings a sense of belonging but at the very least you know where you are.

You don’t need to talk to these people, although it might be nice if you did. You certainly don't need to befriend them. All you have to be able to do is retain a vague sense of familiarity. You have to know them but you don't have to know them.

When the mmorpg genre was young, no-one had to engineer any of this. The technology to sift players into discrete copies of the same zones didn't exist. Would-be virtual worlds cleaved much more closely to the conventions of the physical. Zones had maximum capacities in just the same way sports stadia or cinemas do.

 

Back then, if too many people wanted to be in the same place at the same time there would be overcrowding. If things got really bad some players - paying customers - might have to wait outside until others left. Unsurprisingly, that wasn't popular with either the players or the companies and since the companies were the ones paying people to manage the situation and deal with the complaints they were more than happy to employ technological solutions to prevent it happening.

By the time those solutions became available the direction of travel for the genre had already begun to drift. The whole concept of "virtual worlds" was going out of fashion. Mmorpgs, having begun as something new and strange, were being re-integrated into the mainstream as just another type of video game. 

The advantages were clear but for a few, at least, so were the disadvantages. Not every company was thinking about the effect the new technology might have on community but some were aware of the risks they were taking with the glue that held their games together.

 

When Guild Wars 2 implemented their megaserver architecture they used some fairly sophisticated parsing to try to make sure people got sorted into new maps alongside roughly the same subset of other people every time. As you can see from the conversation (okay, monologue) I recorded in screenshots when the change came it wasn't an immediate success but ANet iterated on it for a while and in the end it worked out okay.

These days I never think about it but by and large I do tend see the same names pretty regularly even when there might be several instances of the same map. Long after the megaserver took effect I would run into the people I'd added in my test, particularly on the World Boss train, something that regularly kicks off secondary maps. I still see a few of them even now, on occasion. It's not as obvious as the glory days of Lion's Arch, when I'd both see and hear the same people chatting in the same place day after day but it's something, at least.

In GW2’s World vs World, however, where the old single server architecture still applies and there’s no instancing at all, I see the same people all the time. (Until the bi-monthly relink resets the whole thing but that’s a different issue altogether…). I’m still playing alongside some of the same people who were in the Mists with me six, seven, eight years ago. I don’t chat with them, or not often, but I “know” them, right down to how reliable their call-outs are likely to be, whether I can expect any back-up if I call for help and what I can expect to hear in chat when one of the team's "characters" logs in.

 

Phasing, instancing and layering all work very efficiently. If all you want from your mmorpg experience is a single-player or co-op game that's always available and which gets a steady stream of new content, it's a done deal. And that's exactly what many, quite possibly most, modern mmorpg players do want.

If you still yearn for that sense of stepping out into a living, breathing, persistent virtual world, though, finding yourself being sliced and sorted and separated in ways you can't control can be disorienting, disheartening and destructive. It risks turning the entire experience into a succession of unrelated episodes instead of the long-running soap opera it ought to be.

That's the problem right there. It's nothing to do with making friends. Layers don't stop you talking to anyone you meet and adding the ones you like to your friends list. Instancing doesn't prevent you sending people whispers. Nothing about the siloing of content mitigates against discussing strategy in guild chat let alone meeting up with online friends at conventions, assuming such things ever come back.

Layering doesn't even remove all possibility of chance encounters. You still see other people all around you. You might even see some of them more than once. 

What layering does strip away is context. You don't arrive at a world boss knowing the show-off who always does a count-down in /say will be there. You don't log in after an update expecting to recognize the names of half the people logging in alongside you. These things might happen but they probably won't. Everything feels much more random than it was. And the human mind does not enjoy randomness half so much as it enjoys patterns.

Layering doesn't harm the gameplay, though, far from it. The opposite in fact. The reason the technology was implemented in the first place was to make playing the game easier for everyone. If all you want is to get to the designated fighting area as quickly and efficiently as possible, kill your requisite number of rats and get out, then layering and instancing were made specifically with you in mind. 

 

If you want to feel part of something that feels a little more, somehow, than just a video game, then the picture's a lot less clear. You haven't lost everything, not even nearly, but you've lost a little. And when it comes to community, every little counts. 

I'll go back to that soap opera analogy. Soap operas last for years, decades even. Episodic dramas come and then they go. Mmorpgs need to emulate soaps if they want to survive because the alternative is simply too hard. No-one has the resources to provide a never-ending stream of content at the pace players eat it up but communities create content, continually, for free.

Just think of your school, your office, your neighborhood. Most of the people there aren't your friends but they are what you and your friends talk about. Other people are content but you have to be interested in what they do to care to consume it. You aren't going to hold that interest for long if you only ever see someone once and never again. 

None of which is to say there should be no technological solutions to the problems of lack of access and overcrowding. There should. Those are real problems. They deserve sensitive, well-designed solutions not quick fixes.

In Memoriam: Cloudrat

In the years between the closure of our original, launch-era home, Steamfont , and the opening of the game's first Free to Play server, Freeport, Mrs Bhagpuss and I played almost all our EverQuest II on the Test server. It was a small community, insular even, and it was exceedingly difficult to avoid learning the names and at least something about the personalities of almost everyone who played there.

One of the most active and vocal members of the community was Cloudrat. She was always around, usually building or decorating some house or other, often offering advice and assistance, sometimes chiding, usually encouraging. I thought of her as a Test local but over time it became apparent she played on just about every server.

Long after I stopped playing regularly on Test I could still hear her chatting away on the cross-server Test Channel. When SOE added Leaderboards for housing her name began to appear prominently in the lists of award-winning houses, not because of her amazing decorating skills but because she worked tirelessly to install fully-functioning public transport hubs wherever she played.

Cloudrat's Dojo is a small, two-room house stuffed to overflowing with just about every portal and transport device ever added to the game. You can go from there to pretty much anywhere. Whenever something's happening in some obscure corner of Norrath - a guide event in Cardin Ward, for example, or the recent Heroes Festival event in Obol Plains - and someone asks plaintively in General chat how to get there the answer, likely as not, will be "Use Cloudrat's Dojo".

I'd noticed back in the Autumn, playing a lot more EQII this year as I had been, that I'd not heard her in chat for a while. I wondered if she'd finally had enough of the game, as even the most dedicated players eventually may.

It also crossed my mind that she might no longer be well enough to play, or even that she might no longer be with us at all. As long as I'd known her, she'd always been unwell, in some unspecified manner that she'd mention but not dwell on. MMORPGs do tend to become homes and playgrounds for those whose options in the physical world are limited and both EQII's Test server and its housing community have historically attracted more than the average number of such players.

When this Winter's Frostfell update arrived at the beginning of December, one of the new items was a Ratonga Tree Topper Plushie, ideal for placing on the highest branches of one of the game's many seasonal trees. Being a huge fan of both Frostfell and ratongas, almost the very first thing I did to clebrate the season was to buy one.



As soon as I examined my Tree Topper I exclaimed out loud "That's Cloudrat!". She'd long had a signature look: a tiny, honey-colored ratonga, reduced to the smallest possible size (which in EQII is very small indeed), dressed entirely in flowing white with a circlet of flowers on her head and fairy wings to carry her on her travels.

The Tree Topper was her to a tee. I was as sure then as I could be that Cloudrat had levelled up, ascended, passed on.

Sure enough, over the next few days several people asked the question in chat and those who knew her much better than I ever did confirmed she'd died during the summer. Someone at Daybreak had taken the trouble to immortalize her in the game she'd loved (and found infuriating) for so long.

I went back to the goblin vendor and bought ten of her effigies but it wasn't until today that I got around to placing some of them. My Berserker keeps two Frostfell trees, year round, in the entrance hall to his Maj`Dul Mansion. Both of them now have a small, white, winged ratonga at the very top.

He also maintains a Frostfell crafting area at his Mara Estate, where he and all his imaginary friends come to craft. Cloudrat's avatar looks down on the crafting tables there, smiling.

I hope she'll be happy there. I hope she's happy, wherever she is. She wasn't Aradune but she had an impact on Norrath that won't soon be forgotten. Norrath remembers its own.

No Comment, In Which I Disappear Up My Own Fundament

I rather blew my chance of a good, meaty post today by using up a lot of the material in reply to a couple of very interesting posts by Kaylriene and Naithin. Looking at it from a Blaugust advice on blogging point of view, it exemplifies a perennial problem: when to comment and when to post.

A blogging "scene" requires certain key elements to sustain itself: enough people blogging to create a critical mass, a significant degree of interaction between them and a willingness to share. Get all those in place and you have a good chance of a stable community maintained by synergies that are self-sustaining.

Bouncing off other peoples' posts is an essential element. It's also crucial that, when doing so, each blogger not only credits their inspiration but links to the source. That's how blogs find new readers and readers find new blogs.

Commenting is also deeply important. Comments validate the effort of the blogger who wrote the post that inspired them and let them know that someone out there is not only reading but paying attention. More importantly, comments create conversations.

Individual blogs can exist perfectly happily in a void. If you're keeping a personal journal there's really no need for readers. Blogger actually has settings that allow you to make your blog available only to invited readers or even to make it unavailable and invisible to anyone but you.

I have absolutely no doubt that there are people out there knocking out thousands or even hundreds of thousands of words every year that no-one ever sees. Not everyone wants other people reading their diary, after all.

Random shot from Kingdoms of Amalur because you have to break the text up with something.

By definition those private bloggers don't matter to anyone but themselves. Effectively, for the rest of us, they don't exist. Everyone else likes a bit of feedback and if there's going to to be a blogosphere or a scene, the feedback needs to form a loop.

Most of the time I have no problem encouraging and facilitating that. I habitually bounce off other bloggers and spray links in all directions. It's one of the best ways to keep a blog lively and current.

Not infrequently, though, I find myself facing a minor dilemma. I'll be reading a post that piques my interest and I'll start writing a comment, because I can no more resist the sound of my own voice than I can breathe treacle.

As I get stuck in and the comment grows longer and more convoluted, it will occur to me that a) comments shouldn't have a dozen paragraphs and b) I could probably turn what I'm writing into a full post. At that moment I have to decide which way to go and it's not always a straightforward decision.

I often think it's a bit rude to remove a lengthy comment from consideration without the blogger in question having any idea it was ever there. If other bloggers are anything like me they'll cherish their comments, metaphorically rolling around in them like Scrooge McDuck in his money pit. It's cruel to deprive anyone of that pleasure even if they never find out.

My solution is often to write a very short comment saying I was going to write a longer one but then I decided to turn it into a post of my own. I'm never sure how welcome that really is. It could sound a bit like someone telling you they had a great idea for a birthday present for you but after they bought it they realized they liked it so much they decided to keep it. And then gave you a photo of them using and enjoying it. As your present.

It's getting prettier as I get further in.

On the other hand, discovering that a post you've written has inspired or provoked another blogger into a response post of their own is at least as satisfying as receiving a comment. More so if it's a good post that expands on the subject, as when Everwake posted something on Developer Appreciation Week which referenced my post on the same subject.

Then there's the question of how much you really want to write the post. It takes me about five per cent of the time to write even a lengthy comment than it would to put a full post together. I freestyle comments and don't read them back (as you can easily tell from the high incidence of typos, spelling and grammatical errors).

Even if I've already written an overlong comment running to a few hundred words the chance of cannibalizing any of it to cut and paste into a post is minimal. I sometimes try but it's more trouble than it's worth. Easier to start again from scratch.

It does sometimes occur to me to leave the whole comment in situ and then do the post as well but somehow that never sits quite right. It leaves me with the strange feeling I've just plagiarized myself. And it seems a bit of a cheat, as if I'm trying to get double credit, although from whom I couldn't tell you.

In both cases today, bashing out comments to Kaylriene and Naithin, I had in mind the amount of effort it would take to do a proper post on the highly nuanced and complex issue of Sandbox versus Themepark gameplay. I had ideas sparking like lightning across my synapses and I was uncomfortably aware of the minimal likelihood of any of them being amenable to tamping down.

Also, I'm absolutely certain I've pontificated at considerable length about this subject before. Several times. Not that that would stop me but I knew that if I wasn't going to just repeat my established position and trot out some of the same well-worn anecdotes I'd have to go and do some primary research.

Also hotter, drier and dustier. And more orange.

I do a lot of research. I enjoy it and I really hate getting facts wrong. I actually did some research even to comment on Naithin's post, because I was refuting something another commenter, Quin, had said and I wanted to be sure I wasn't talking through my hat.

As a complete aside and also an illustration of how rabbit holes can open up under your feet at any time, when I tabbed back to Time to Loot to get the above link to Quin's comment, I clicked on his name and it took me to his blog, Where The Monsters Are. I had seen his name as a commenter before but I had no idea he had a blog, let alone one in which his latest post is a direct counterpart to my DAW post (linked above, let's not over-egg it), taking almost the opposite stance on exactly the same developer.

Where The Monsters Are looks like a very interesting blog indeed and I immediately added it to my blog roll, not least because I'm already on his. If anyone else has me on their blog roll and I haven't reciprocated, please nudge me.

Unfortunately, when I checked to see if it had worked I couldn't see Quin's blog anywhere. I scrolled all the way down to the bottom and there it was, showing the most recent post as this from seven years ago. I fiddled around for a while but I couldn't get Blogger to recognize the current WTMA. Anyone with any ideas on how to fix it please let me know. It works fine in Feedly...

Getting back to the point, assuming I ever had one or could remember it if I did, sometimes a comment is all you really need but sometimes it takes a full post to get your message across. Knowing when to break out and when to tuck in is an art rather than a science. I'm still working on it.

Then again, you can always comment first then spiral off into a post that's tangentially related at best. That works too!

Do You Even Blog, Bro?

Comments are the lifeblood of blogging. I love getting them and I love making them. It's one of a couple of things saving blogging from being not much more than a high-tech way to keep a diary, turning the whole process into a strange kind of slow-burning conversation. (The other, in case you were wondering, is cross-posting).

Given the importance of comments, it's a great pity blogging platforms often seem to go out of their way to make posting them as difficult as possible. There are some blogs where I never comment because of the hoops I'd need to jump through and others where I only comment on rare occasions because it's such a pain to navigate the required permissions.

Granted, sometimes it's because I run NoScript in Firefox, but even if I switch to Chrome there are a few blogs that just defeat any attempt to communicate. All of which makes it particularly irritating when some faceless beaurocrat (hmmm... good character name...) decides to remove one of the few existing options that actually works.

I'm an undemanding user when it comes to software. Quite demandingly undemanding, in fact. I generally like to use the most basic versions, usually on the default settings. Once I've familiarized myself with an app it's very rare indeed for me to want to adapt or upgrade it in any way.

Feedly, for example, is always trying to nudge me onto the paid version by offering me things I can't do for free. It doesn't work because, if anything, even the free Feedly has more bells and whistles than I want or need. They'd have more success making some of the paid-for options mandatory for free users and then charging a fee to disable them - not that I want to give anyone ideas...

One of the great benefits of using Blogger over the years has been that Google mostly seems to have forgotten it exists. The downside, especially following the sudden and unexpected demise of Google Reader, is that it does create a sense of unease over Blogger's longer-term future. Other than that slight anxiety, no news is good news.

Unfortunately it appears that someone at Google wandered past the Blogger office this month, brushed aside the cobwebs, pushed open the door and decided, in their own words, to do a bit of "spring cleaning". That's management-speak for taking away stuff we don't - in their opinion - need and replacing it with stuff that - in their opinion - we do.

Most of it I'm not fussed about one way or the other. I'm surprised they're bothering to fiddle with Google+ integration, though. I thought everyone pretty much agreed G+ had been a complete washout and we were all just waiting for it to close down altogether. Then  again, perhaps changing widgets specific to G+ into more generic HTML ones is preparation for that very day.

As for the changes to localization, I never understood why my blog comes with a separate modifier for every national domain in the first place. Good riddance to that.

The change that does annoy me is the removal of support for OpenID. The justification given is that it had "very low usage"and I admit I don't use it often myself...but "low" and "not often" don't equate to "non-existent" and "never". There are a couple of blogs where just about the only way I've been able to comment is by using OpenID and I would guess at least the occasional person uses it to comment here.

All the changes, coming and going, are detailed in the Blogger Blog. Yes, Blogger has its own blog. How meta is that? I don't "follow" it. I barely ever look at it. It does, however, have a comment thread, where irony is raised to a new level.

As commenters line up to complain that recent, undocumented changes have removed the option to send comments to email, making it harder to purge comment threads of spam, The Official Blogger Blog's own comment thread itself is filling up with the exact same spam people are asking Google to help them avoid. Here's an example. I don't believe an actual, living, thinking commenter composed and posted the following:

"Hey, this article is really helpful to me thanks for sharing your intelligence with us. As a new member of this community, I needed these pieces of information.Getting Involved in Conversations can also make my communication skill better, nice piece of advice there. thank you!"

Or this one (link deleted but it was something about girls in bikinis...):

"Nice I am here for backlink exchange visit my blog and give some remarks with your blog url. I am coming to you within some days as this cooler".

The thread is stuffed with such gems. It makes me wonder; if Google can't even be arsed to purge their own comment thread of stuff like this, do they actually read any of it? Ever?

Anyway, if you rely to any degree on OpenID to comment on this or any other Blogger blog, consider yourself On Notice to find another means of making yourself heard. Also, in a revisionist move George Orwell would probably have appreciated, "all comments that previously used OpenID will be anonymized". You never said that, right?

From now on, according to Google:

"New comments can be posted either from a Google account or labeled as “Anonymous” on blogs that allow it."

Inventory Full does allow anonymous comments so at least there's that.

Here's hoping that after this brief flurry of activity everyone at the Blogger office goes back to sleep for another few years. If it ain't broke, as they  say...

Chipping Away At The Foundations : EQ2

I haven't logged into EQ2's Beta Server yet but I have been browsing the forums, where the tone is markedly different from the grinding negativity of Live. Similarly, the /Test chat channel, which I've been in for a decade and more following my five year residency on Test as my main server, has been buzzing with positivity as the stalwarts there take a run at the next Holiday on the rank, Hero's Festival.

The EverQuest games have always benefited from a strong culture of dedicated service among a subset of players, those who have always understood that MMORPGs are a collaborative hobby as much as a commercial enterprise. From the Guide program, through well-established, permanent Test servers to an extensive and well-organized beta process with a full supporting incentive and reward structure, determined, invested players and developers have co-operated to build the best games possible.

The latest iteration of this worthy and welcome process is the Daybreak Insider program. I haven't signed up yet but only because I'm not sure I can offer the time and commitment just now. It looks like a good way to become involved in the future direction of the MMOs we play and enjoy, not to mention getting some insider gossip and advance knowledge. I wonder if there's an NDA?

Stats! We love 'em!

The reason I was on the Beta forums this morning was to see what people were saying about crafting. While I have four Level 100 adventurers ready to go and an instant Level 100 token in the bank, I only have two max level crafters.

The Collector's and Premium Editions of Planes of Prophecy both come with the first ever Tradeskill Boost but I didn't buy either of those and I'm not going to upgrade. In any case, it's not getting to the starting line that concerns me - it's getting to the finish.

The last few expansions all came with fully fleshed-out crafting questlines that matched the adventure version in depth and complexity. Well, almost. They were substantial and satisfying, anyway, and for every expansion since Velious the crafting line has been the one I completed first.

That was when we still had Domino. Now that she's gone back to Canada things are different. I'm not even sure EQ2 has a dedicated Tradeskill dev any more and we already know there won't even be a Signature Tradeskill Questline when PoP launches. It's scheduled to be added in an update at an as-yet unspecified later date.

Nevertheless, we'll be getting ten more levels on November 28th. With no questline to bump up the xp, my Weaponsmith and Sage are both going to have to settle down at workstations and grind writs.

According to the Beta forums, at the moment that's a mountain to climb. There was a brief period when crafting xp flowed like water but that was because of a beta buff. Once that was switched off the complaints began to pour in.

There was good reason for the change. It wasn't just to slow testers down or make it harder for them to get the promised reward for hitting max level in Beta. As Caith, one of the EQ2 devs, put it on Discord:

"The reason we turned off the beta bonus xp is so that we can get an accurate picture of how it would be on live, and adjust as required".

Very sound. Unfortunately, not all of the necessary pieces are yet in place to give an accurate reading. The invaluable and indefatigable Niami Denmother explains it thus:

"You need to do level 100 or higher rush orders or work orders. (Only level 100+ have the new xp rewards on completion) *Currently* they're using Maldura recipes for the level 100 ones and not everyone bothered to get those recipes. This is temporary. They've cobbled together a leveling path for all the eager testers while they're still working on the real writs, and some other crafting goodness for us. We've got a month - they ARE making progress, we're just trying to progress faster than they can keep up."

Isn't it always the way? Players burn through content so much faster than developers can churn it out - even in Beta.

Sparkles are good

Meanwhile I'm working on my harvesting skills. It's all very well getting an instant Level 100 crafter
but unless you plan on buying all your mats from the broker (very expensive) you're going to need at least one maxed-out harvester to go and get the stuff.

Or maybe not. These days anyone can gather or mine or lumber or fish. The minimum skill levels were removed a while back. All that happens now, when you harvest a node well above your skill level, is that you fail a lot. Which is fine, because you also get a skill-up on most attempts, successful or otherwise.

So, you can go out and gather the mats you need if you have the patience and skill up while you're doing it. It's a monumentally slow process though. And you don't get any rares at all until your skill passes the former threshold.

I spent an hour this morning harvesting in Sinking Sands with my Level 100 Inquisitor who is also a Level 50 Carpenter. She was boosted from nothing to 100 and has never done much field work. With a cap of 500 based on her Adventure level most of her skills were in the 20s. After an hour they're all around 100 and she has enough mats to do a few levels on Rush Orders.

Too lazy even to get off the horse.

I could find out what the relevant trade questline is for her level and go do that. If there is one. I'm not sure there is. It depends who the tradeskill lead was when the game was going through the fifities. If it was Behn there'll be nothing.

If I did, though, she still wouldn't have the harvesting skills because most craft quests provide their own mats or don't use any. There's a whole separate Harvesting questline - several in fact - that I could do to catch up. I've written about that before. It's very good. Maybe I'll do that.

Only, harvesting is really relaxing. And fun. And satisfying. It is in most MMOs but especially so in EQ2. What's more, if you're catching up on a level 100 in older zones, everything's gone grey. The wildlife wanders past you and leaves you alone. You can drift.

That's the one I want!

Even in level-appropriate zones at 100, geared up from the last expansion, topped out with panda hand-me-downs and guarded by an equally well-turned-out mercenary, there are precious few interruptions to the zen-like calm brought by knocking chips off rocks.

I took my Berserker around Phantom Sea and Obulos Frontier for a couple of hours on Saturday, buffed up with an old potion I dug out of the bank that came from when I was still religiously doing my Crafting Apprentice quests every day.

With maxed skills, harvesting AAs and items and the boost my Berserker/Weaponsmith has a 27% chance per strike of getting a "Bountiful Harvest" (more stuff) and a 9% bonus to his chance of finding a Rare. It was Rares I was after, looking to supply my Warlock/Sage so he could upgrade his, the Necro's and the Inquisitor's 90s spells to Expert before the expansion lands.

I have no idea what to do with this but it sells for 84k Plat...

It was a very successful run. I came back with eighteen rares. Naturally, only two of them were the specific rares I needed but if necessary I can sell the wrong ones and buy the right ones with the proceeds. I won't though. I'll end up using them all.

I also bagged some rares I didn't know what to do with and after investigating them I realized I barely even understand EQ2's spell progression any more. Or the augment system. Or the various upgrading options for gear. It's so ferociously overwrought after fourteen years of continual development I'd be amazed if anyone knows what's going on.

And that's the fun of it. Come the new expansion it'll be all change again. I'm going to try and catch up then, in theory if not in practice. I can hardly wait!

All of which means this probably isn't the best time to be revisiting old systems and trying to remember how they work. I think I'll just go and hit some rocks. That, at least, never seems to change.

Everyone Loves A Parade : GW2

It wasn't long after I began playing EverQuest, seventeen years ago this November, that I stumbled upon a community-organized event. Not specifically something by or for the then-substantial role-playing community, although there were many of those; something looser, more inclusive, with which anyone could join, in or out of character.

The one I remember  most vividly from those very early days was Talent Contest held on The Stage, an open-air theater on the west side of the much-missed original Freeport. Mrs Bhagpuss and I just happened to be passing by when we heard the event being announced in /ooc so we went to see what was happening.

We ended up sitting on the dusty Freeport ground for a couple of hours, watching mostly inept and amateurish performers take the stage to recite poetry or act out barely comprehensible skits. It felt like being in a true alternate reality. It was magical.

Over the years I've seen countless similar community events, from ad hoc improvs that drew a crowd
to huge, organized extravaganzas that took weeks of planning and were trailed across the interwebs months in advance. There have been mass protests and sit-ins, marches for and against all kinds of causes or outrages, demonstrations and celebrations of every stripe and kind.

The biggest and best known can require detailed rules of conduct for the audience like Weatherstock in LotRO or dire warnings for innocent bystanders like Burn Jita, which even managed to break into the real-world global news agenda, because EVE.

The best community events, though, are always the ones you just happen upon. I was in Citadel sorting through my banks as usual on Sunday when someone in guild chat mentioned they'd just seen a whole load of Quaggans marching through Lions Arch.

Quaggan Parades are a thing in GW2 and have been for a while. If you google you'll find a whole load of links to YouTube videos going back several years. Here's a small and annoying one from 2013 or a somewhat larger, better-organized and certainly better-shot version from the year after.

I can't say I've ever shared the widespread affection for Quaggans. I prefer to make jokes about their culinary potential rather than coo over their supposed cuteness but it can't be denied that to catch a whole gaggle of Quaggies toddling along is a bit of cultural milestone in Tyria. Kind of like naked gnome races in EverQuest and about as ethnically sensitive.

It took a bit of effort to find the amphibian posse. The first instance of LA didn't have them so I whispered my guildmate, partied up with him and zapped across to his map, where I found the Quaggan horde trundling through the east side of the city.

Arriving in a rush I hadn't thought to grab my own Endless Quaggan Tonic from the bank, where it waits, hopelessly, not having seen use for a very long time if, indeed, ever. Even if I'd had one on me I still wouldn't have blended in because I only have the Black and Blue versions and almost every Quaggan in this particular parade was red.

It was a very well-organized event, with two Commanders leading the way and everyone following at walking pace. Large turnout too. There was some mention of  charity involvement but in the fifteen minutes or so that I spent following the Quaggs no-one rattled a bucket or linked to a website so I remain none the wiser on what we were supposedly supporting.

Eventually the conga line arrived at the portal to Lornar's Pass and all the Quaggans passed through into the snowfields beyond, where, in a marvelous piece of theater, most of them turned blue. We all hung around for a few minutes while the organizers started to sort out advanced parties of non-Quaggans to head out along the proposed route and clear it of hostiles.

Around then I made my excuses and left. A parade is one thing but this was starting to look like a recreation of the Long March. How many Quaggans made it and where they eventually made it to is going to have to remain a mystery.

This minor, meaningless, serendipitous happenstance is a very small example of what's spoiled offline RPGs for me forever. No matter how brilliantly written and realized, no matter how finely-tuned the AI, with current technology there is simply no chance that you'll ever experience anything like this in any virtual world that isn't populated at least in part by other people.

Maybe one day we'll have algorithms or even sentient AIs that can provide the same level of found fun-making on the fly although the recent example of No Man's Sky suggests that day could be a long time coming. In the mean time I'll just carry on enjoying every new online gaming day as it comes - freighted with the unexpected courtesy of my fellow players.

A Couple Of Comments On AdventureQuest 3D And DCUO

It's not uncommon for bloggers to claim that the true measure of success is found not in page views or followers but in the quantity and quality of the comments they receive. That's certainly how I see it.

Five years ago, when I was vacillating over whether or not to take the step up from commenting on other people's blogs to starting a blog of my own, perhaps the biggest concern I had was the risk of opening a comment column to...well, to the world. After all, I certainly wouldn't want to wake up of a morning, sit down with a cup of coffee and find myself confronted with some of the comments I'd made.

In the end I decided to risk it. After all, as Wilhelm observed in his magnificent Ten Glorious Years post, in extremis you can always just switch people off because "life is too short to put up with that sort of thing".

Judging by the moss on the boots I'm guessing this place gets a lot of rain.

So far, fingers crossed, that hasn't been necessary. Most of the comments here are well-intentioned, good-mannered and a pleasure to receive. I'm very poor at checking my spam folder so most of the automated nonsense there goes unseen. Apologies to anyone who may have had a comment left there to languish but there are only so many hours in the day.

The best thing about comments is how much you learn. I try to fact-check before I post but this is a blog not The New Yorker and sometimes I just wing it. It's great to be corrected or be given fresh information by better-informed readers who just want to help, not score points.

Last week I had two extremely welcome comments that I was happy to put to immediate use. One was from an anonymous reader who explained, with appropriate links, how to access the nested levels of DCUO's Style tab so that I could undo the creation error that gave my new character banana-yellow lips.

Tell me again. Why can't we just start here?

It turns out that was a "Make Up" option. I vaguely remember fiddling with that in Character Creation to see what it did before deciding it didn't do anything I wanted. It seems that when I closed the window I left the pointer in the yellow quadrant of the color chart and that's how it saved. Thanks to the anonymous commenter my Hero now has lips that match her face and I have a much clearer idea of how to use the Style tab.

The other comment was from Kaozz of ECTMMO. She was one of the few people who read my  recent post on how much I was looking forward to trying AdventureQuest 3D. The AQ3D fan club doesn't seem to have many members in this neck of the blogging woods. It might just be me, Syp and Kaozz because that post probably had the fewest views of any post this year.

Although I mentioned in the post that Artix Entertainment was planning on doing some Closed Beta giveaways I hadn't come across any on the MMO sites I read and I hadn't taken the trouble to look any further. Luckily Kaozz had spotted that there were keys to be had at MMORPG.com, a site I haven't looked at in years, and thanks to her alert in the comments I was able to snag one of the last few.

They were down to a hundred and fifty or so by the time I arrived and that had dropped to just over a hundred in the time it took me to make and register new accounts for both MMORPG.com and AQ3D. It's not a quick process, let me tell you.

I'll come back when you're ready.

There's no NDA as far as I can tell so I'm free to say that getting the game itself up and running is very quick and easy. I've only played one session so far so I've barely got a feel for the game yet. Still, "First Impressions" matter and so far mine are very positive.

Character Creation was very simple and straightforward. Four classes, two genders, one race. Some basic appearance choices. In and out in a couple of minutes. That leads into a strange kind of limbo wasteland introduction that I didn't really understand, where your character is confined to a very small area with never-ending skeleton spawns and a quest to find a wheel for a wagon to get you out of there.

I couldn't find the wheel and the quest interface was far from clear. After a few frustrating minutes I gave up wheel-hunting and just clicked on the "Travel" option the goblin-analog was offering. A swift loading screen and intro movie later and there I was in the real starting town of Battleon.

Sorry, I can't concentrate on what you're saying with that...thing...watching me.

I'm not entirely sure why we don't just get sent to Battleon directly from Character Creation or what the whole "I can't take you until you get me a wheel" thing was all about. That needs some tidying up or I need to L2P. From then on, though, everything was much clearer, smoother, better explained and a lot more fun.

It's apparent this is still beta. Most of the buildings and some paths to other areas come up short with an abrupt "Currently in Development" screen. There's plenty to be getting on with, though, with some nicely humorous, occasionally disturbing, quests and some delightfully designed creatures to kill.

Combat animations are fluid and satisfying and the UI overall is slick and extremely easy to use. The cross-platform aspect of the game is evident in the clustering of controls at the sides and corners of the screen, where thumbs will naturally find them on a phone or tablet. They work perfectly well for a mouse-clicker as well. It's an elegant solution.

Prime example of meta. Her full name is Robina Hood and she puts the gold on the monsters that you kill so you can loot it. Of course back in the glory days of EQ we literally did do that...

From reading the developer posts on the AQ3D website I was forewarned that leveling in this game is not the blink-and-you'll-miss-it afterthought you might expect from something with such child-friendly graphics and cross-platform aspirations. Well, they weren't kidding. It's flipping slow!

I played for a couple of hours and my character is around 10% into Level 3. What's more, everything is a tough fight. Take on a mob one level above you and expect it to be close. Get an add and expect to die. Go in the Level 4 dungeon at Level 3 and don't plan on making it past the first pull.

I died a lot. A lot. There doesn't seem to be much (any?) penalty for dying other than the delay and the shame but there doesn't need to be. This is a world that requires you to pay attention from the get-go. Try yoloing this and you will regret it. When you wake up.

Surprisingly nihilistic. Or maybe fascist?  Definitely not kitten and bunny talk anyway...

The writing is interesting. The whole game has an off-kilter, meta feel to it, a kind of post-post-modern sub-ironic knowing-yet-innocent stance that reminds me somewhat of Project: Gorgon. This is fantasy gaming for sophisticated gamers who come with an innate understanding of the layered patina of the form. Or else it's for kids. Same thing, really.

Anyway, I enjoyed it. I will play more and write more as I learn more. Whether anyone else is interested I guess we will find out from the comments - or the lack of them.