I Wasn't In That Much Of A Hurry Anyway - Time-Gating In EQII's Rage of Cthurath Tradeskill Timeline

Rage of Cthurath is shaping up very nicely. Then again, almost all EverQuest II expansions do. I think I usually come here in December, singing their praises in the first few days and weeks, before wandering off to play with some shiny new toy in the New Year.

The whole way I play MMORPGs has completely changed over the last five years or so, though. Before, even including most of my time in Guild Wars 2 (Which was hardly overburdened with the expansions while I was there, let's be honest.), a new expansion for my current game generally meant I'd be doing little or nothing else until I'd at least finished the storyline and quite possibly for several months after.

Now, I don't even seem to be able to stick at it until the end of the main story quest. I do finish in the end but sometimes it takes two or three goes, separated by weeks or even months, usually when I'm off playing other games. Last year, if I'm remembering correctly, it was Spring by the time I wrapped things up on the first character. 

Or maybe I'm imagining that. It's a bit fuzzy when you take multiple characters through the same content. Perhaps I did finish the Signature Timeline on my Berserker before I moved on to something else. I'm pretty sure I would at least have finished the Tradeskill line, if only because those always take a fraction of the time the Adventure ones need. 

[Hi! I'm the Inventory Full Fact Checker. I'd just like to jump in here and say that, actually, that's not quite correct. More to the point, it's totally wrong. As this post confirms, the Berserker (Whose name is Conkers so why not call him that?) didn't get around to completing the Tradeskill Signature Questline for last year's expansion, Scars of Destruction, until nearly the end of January. January 24th to be precise. And let's face it, precision is what I'm here for...)

Okay. Fine! Thank you for your service. Now bugger off. 

But that post is very helpful in making the point I was about to make, namely that this year, in keeping with the loophole-closing I was talking about only on Friday, someone at Darkpaw obviously cottoned on to the way people like to race through the crafting timeline just so they can get flying in all the new zones, before going back and doing the Adventure timeline on the same character. Being able to fly for that makes it so much faster and easier. It totally makes sense to do it that way round.

Only two problems with that plan this year. For one, I forgot to do it that way around. I was so eager to see how my necromancer would handle promotion to Expansion Lead, I never even gave a thought to the Tradeskill quests. I just slammed her into the first zone and started killing stuff to see how it went. 

And since it went really well, I kept on doing it. Right up until she dinged Level 131 yesterday, at which point I thought to myself, you know what? It would be really handy if my Sage, Barnabus, was high enough level to make Mordita's new spells for her as she was ready for them.

With that in mind, I swapped over yesterday and had him start on the Tradeskill line. It was exactly as expected. Some chatting, some sneaking, a lot of gathering and loads of crafting. All very entertaining and enjoyable. I was having a great time.

XP was rattling in, too. I thought about using an xp potion to speed things up even more but it hardly seemed worth it. It looked as though it might take about as long to do the whole tradeskill line as it had taken to do just the first zone as an Adventurer. I hadn't made my mind up whether to keep swapping between the two or to blitz through the crafting quests and get that finished first, when this happened: Problem #2.

That's the final part of Quest Four (Of Eight.) Halfway through the full questline. On paper, anyway. 

It took me about ninety minutes to get there. Maybe a couple of hours. I wasn't timing it. At that rate I'd have had it finished this evening. 

I will not have it finished this evening. I might not have it finished this week.

The final part of the fourth quest is very heavily time-gated. You have to "prove your worth" to the goat-folk of Yon Gorroth before you can get any further and boy, are they hard to impress. In the old days, you'd probably just have had to grind out some crafted item they wanted until your fingers bled, taking the same repeatable quests over and over again. Not any more.

Well, yes, still that, sort of... You still have to make them stuff they're too lazy/snotty to make for themselves, just so they can do you the favor of treating you like a hired hand rather than a potential criminal but now they're being a lot more controlling about it. And exploitative, too.

First, they want to charge you a fortune just for giving you the opportunity to work for them. Five hundred platinum pieces and a rare before they'll even consider giving you the work. Then they tell you it's going to take a full week, real time, before they're going to hand you the merit badge that lets everyone else know you're fit to be trusted with even more menial labor.

At this point you could just sit the week out, if you had the patience. The timer will tick down with no help from you. Feel free to log out and go play someone - or something - else for  few days. 

Is it just me or is that a bit of a risky mechanic for a genre that generally likes to keep people logging in every day? 

There is something you can do about it, assuming you'd quite like to play your character before this time next week. You can take a repeatable quest from the same guy and do that for an eight-hour reduction in waiting time. 

It's not obvious. If I hadn't had the walkthorugh on the wiki open, I would never have known. You have to Hail the goat to get him tell you there even is a repeatable quest. Who hails NPCs these days? Is it 2005 all over again? It's like they don't want you to know. 

Once you find out it's there, though, the quest only takes a few minutes. That's not so bad, is it? You could probably get the whole thing done in a couple of hours and be on your way to the next level and the end of the questline in no time. 

Yeah... nope. You can only take the repeatable quest once every three hours.  

Even if you were insane enough to stay up all day and all night, grabbing each opportunity as it came, it would take you a couple of days. Any normal person is only going to manage three or four of those time-cutting quests a day, if that. Maybe you'd get it finished in three or four days, assuming you played every day or at least remembered to log in every time the damn quest was up. 

Unsurprisingly, there's a thread complaining about it on the forums, hyperbolically entitled  The Tradeskill Timeline Sucks In This Expansion Like Never Before. Having played through every one of those Timelines I would  categorically deny that. There have been plenty of worse ones. 

Then again, I am a Crafter and an Adventurer. This doesn't critically affect my enjoyment. My immediate response was to make my mind up to carry on with the Adventure timeline and just do the repeatables as and when I think of it. I don't really care if it takes all week.

I might be a little more irritated if I only played a Crafter but I can guarantee that almost every player who does also has a whole stable of them, so it's not like they haven't got something else to do while they wait. Plus there's all that gathering to do if you want to have enough Rares to make anything worthwhile.

I really don't see what the rush is, anyway. The expansion is with us for a year. Does everyone really want to be done with it by Christmas? There are people in the thread speculating that someone might have "taken time off from work just do the TS signature quest" and now they're screwed, to which I'd say if they did then the problem probably lies more with that person's life choices than any flaws in quest design.

The upshot for me is that I'll get back to adventuring for now and shelve the plan to make spell upgrades as I go. So far there's no sign Mordita needs them and anyway. The way spell upgrades work in EQII now means even the Expert versions of the new tier that Barnabus could make for her probably won't be better than the researched versions she has of older ones. It's a very unintuitive process in some ways. Experts used to be the gold standard for casual soloing but now you mainly need them as a stage in a much longer upgrade path.

As for progress in the Adventure questline, Mordita can now fly in the opening zone and she's just arrived at the first solo instance in the second. I need a clear couple of hours when I can count on not being interrupted for that one, which isn't guaranteed to happen... ever.

If it's time gating your worried about, you should try living with a dog... 

(Oh, and in case you're wondering what the weird pictures of a fiery, disembodied hand are all about, that's the device you craft that allows high level crafters who don't have an equivalently elevated Adventure level to wander about the map in complete safety. It's slow but it gets the job done. Eventually. 

It's also a great way to take close-ups of mobs, something I hadn't realized until today. I may make more use of it for that.)

You Don't Want To Do It Like That!

Just a short post today (He says, optimistically...) following on from yesterday's report on the purchase of my new island getaway. 

Once I'd gotten all my other responsibilities out of the way last night, I logged back into EverQuest II to see if I could figure out how you go about building a house from scratch. I knew it was possible, or at least I thought it must be, even though I'd never seen it done. I imagine there are plenty of self-builds I could visit but I haven't been to see another player's house for many years. 

Also, it's generally a bad idea to go check out what other people are doing with their houses in EQII, at least if you have any plans to do something with your own. Some of these people are seriously good. It can be discouraging.

All I knew was that I'd seen any number of crafting recipes for Blocks and Windows and similar essentials of the trade. I'd always assumed they had to be there for those players who'd found decorating an insufficient outlet for their inner architect. What else could they be for?

Hmm. That sounds like a set-up. As though I was leading up to saying I'd found out all those recipes were in the books for something else entirely. No, sorry. Just some thoughtless phrasing. They're exactly what they seem.

As it happens, I have a max-level Carpenter on my team, so it was easy enough for me to take a look at what they make. I do, in fact, have several max-level crafters at my disposal - Sage, Alchemist, Jeweller, Weaponsmith, Carpenter, Tailor. I think that's the lot. So far, anyway. I'll probably have the full set some day. I could do with a Provisioner, I know that much...

It can feel like a real grind to get a crafter to the cap from scratch but once you've done it it's pretty easy to stay up to date. It's far easier to knock off those five extra levels every second expansion than it is to catch up as an adventurer. 

The first three on that list I picked because between them they make spells and skills for all classes. That's very important if you're going to solo. Makes you pretty much self-sufficient. Spells and skills can get very expensive.

Weaponsmith, though? That one I picked mostly because I'm an idiot. It's pretty much useless. I would never pick it now but it's what my Berserker does and at this stage I'm stuck with it. I chose it for him for roleplaying reasons and also because I thought it would be cool to make swords and stuff. It's not. And I don't even role-play, so what was that all about?

My Inquisitor, on the other hand, is a Carpenter for good reason. Carpenters make boxes. Everyone always needs boxes. Can't have too many boxes. And they make furniture. I thought it would be very handy to have someone who could help me decorate all those houses I keep buying. 

And it would. In theory. Only, the someone in question usually ends up being whoever put whatever it is I need I need up on the Broker.  For peanuts. 

Here's the irony. Other than skills and spells, most crafted items are so cheap and plentiful it feels like a self-indulgence to make your own. And who wants to stop and craft when you're about to do something more interesting? 

One of the perks of being a Member is access to the Broker from anywhere. It means I can usually just grab whatever I want the moment I need it. And often for barely more than the cost of the fuel and the mats, if I made it myself.

It's not the cost so much as the time. If I do decide to make something for myself, first I have to log in the character that can do it, always assuming I can remember who that is. Then I have to get that crafter to my Berserker's Mara house, which is where I keep all the crafting mats, hundreds of thousands of them, and where I have all the crafting stations set up. 

Unless it's my Berserker doing the job, which it never is because no-one wants the crappy weapons he can make, just getting to his house means a trip to a city, because you have to be in a city to access housing at all, then to the particular crafter's own house, because that's where the portal to the Mara home will be, and then finally to Mara itself.

All of that takes a while, what with loading times. And then sod's law dictates that one of the mats needed will turn out to be something I haven't got in store. I mean, I have a vast hoard of them but EQII is over twenty years old. There are a lot of different crafting materials now. And even if I have the mats, I might not have bought the book with the right recipe. There's a lot that can go wrong, just making something that should be simple.

So, what with all of that and a few other little wrinkles, mostly it always seems faster and easier all round just to let someone else do the work, then pay them whatever pittance they're asking. On the odd occasions that what I want isn't up for sale or if it's heavily overpriced, then I make it myself. Sometimes, when I can be bothered, I even make a bunch of spells and skill and put them up for sale. That can be a real earner.

So, anyway, dragging myself back to the point, crafting is a thing I know how to do. I'd just never had the need to make bricks before. But how hard could it be? 

I woke my Carpenter up, got her to Mara, plonked her in front of the woodworking bench and told her to get on with it. She opened her Recipe books and started looking for "bricks". And there weren't any.

That's because they're called "blocks", apparently. She had a ton of recipes for those. They start at the bottom and go all the way up the leveling ladder. I have far more high-end mats than low, thanks to most of my gathering being done at the cap, so I started her making Shadow Stone blocks. 

One at a time. Boy, was it slow! I figured it would take me hours to make enough for a house that way. And then I remembered a Tradeskill AA, one I'd never seen the point of before: Mass Production. I could see the point of it now, alright.

I'd never bothered to take that AA but luckily EQII is an extremely flexible MMORPG - if you know how to play it. Many years ago, they added the option to set and save multiple AA builds. For free, too. Convenient and generous. Time to take advantage.

I opened the AA panel, swapped to a blank Profile, spent the necessary AAs in the Prestige Tradeskill line and presto! The means of Mass Production were mine.

I wasn't sure how it would work but it turned out to be extremely user-friendly. You just select how many of an item you want to make from a drop-down menu. It goes up in fives as far as a hundred. Then you do a single combine and it makes the lot in one go. Talk about a time-saver!

I made a hundred Shadow Stone blocks and fifty half-blocks. Just to get started. I thought I might need some doors and windows too, so I had a look through the books for those and... 

Couldn't find any. I could find plenty of frames but nothing to put in them. I still haven't. I need to do some research on that after I finish this post. There must be some.

I made a few frames anyway, then took everything to the bank to pop it into Shared Storage so my Warlock, the one with the island, could pick them up and get started on building his new mansion.  

That went... well it went somewhere. Downhill fast, mostly.

The good part is that hundreds of stone blocks apparently weigh nothing at all so moving them wasn't a problem. They also stack, so neither was storage. The Warlock picked up his blocks, took them to his island, picked out a nice spot and started placing them.

There were just two problems. First, the stack itself. Great for transporting blocks, not so good for placing them. Or that's what I thought. It transpires, as I later worked out, that you can place the whole stack and one will peel off automatically, leaving the rest back in your bags. But I didn't know that then.

I started splitting the stacks and putting the blocks into his bags individually, which was slow and annoying. And guess what? The Warlock's bags were almost full even before I started. 

I know! Who would ever have thought? Anyway, splitting stacks isn't just slow and annoying. It's also fiddly and tedious. I did about twenty and I'd had enough. More than enough. 

Second problem, worse than the first. The blocks are quite small. Not as small as bricks but still not what you'd call big. You'd need an awful lot to make a house. 

It was starting to look like an impractical project or at least not a fun one. Still, I'd started and I was at least going to make some kind of hut before I finished. 

And I did. I made a hut. A small, ugly hut with no door and no windows, just the holes where they ought to go. The walls weren't the least bit straight. The flat roof that didn't even sit flush on the walls. The doorway was too small even for a Ratonga. Along with many other shortcomings I won't embarrass myself by mentioning. When I'd finished, even the flying snake wouldn't have lived there.

Here's the thing about EQII. It's an old game. Newer games, particularly all the many survival titles, tend to have a mechanic where all the pieces snap together. You might have a bit of trouble getting the system to line them up just how you want but once you do - Bingo! They snap together like magnets. A perfect fit. 

Sometimes you get a grid to make it even simpler. It's easy and it's fun. 

EQII has nothing like any of that. From Mrs. Bhagpuss's time as a competitive decorator, I vaguely remember there was a third-party add-on you could use to line things up and change angles but that required math. I know she hated using it. It certainly wasn't EZ-Mode. The very opposite, if anything.

Building in EQII is hard. It requires a lot more skill and application than I'm used to providing. Even Landmark was easier than this. 

And yet, I persisted. In fact, I really got into it. Building in games is hellish addictive. Time passed fast as I placed my blocks by hand. It was not, sadly, time well-spent.

My blocks did not line up. It didn't help that the ground sloped. Or that my pet flying snake kept getting in my way and I couldn't work out how to dismiss it. The whole thing was a disaster and yet I couldn't leave it alone. In the end, I only stopped because Beryl barreled in and started jogging my arm to make me pay attention.

About the best I can say for my first attempt at building a house hut is that I learned some things. Things I applied with only a very minor degree of success in my second attempt. What those things were, though, and what my second home looked like, will have to wait for another post because this one's long enough already. And then some.

This could turn into a series. We'll all just have to hope that doesn't happen. 

And We'd Have Gotten Away With It, Too, If It Hadn't Have Been For You Pesky Humans...

Before I changed PC, I had a whole bunch of bookmarks concerning various developments in AI that I was planning on stitching into some kind of post. Because I chose not to transfer anything at all across to the new machine (A decision that feels better every day. It's been like moving from cluttered, disheveled old house to a clean and tidy new one.) all of those are lost.

Okay, no they're not. They're on the old computer, which still works perfectly well. I just can't be bothered to go into the other room where I've left it and switch it on. No-one wants to read a load of old stuff about AI, anyway, not least because anything anyone wrote about it more than a few days ago is almost certainly out of date by now. 

On the other hand, it's that or yet another post where I go into painful detail about what I'm doing in New World, so AI it is. 

It's not like I need all those bookmarked articles and reports and opinion pieces to write a post about it. Things are moving so fast, it's hard even to hold a consistent uninformed opinion, let alone one based on actual facts. 

A couple of months ago, I was wholly convinced by the bubble scenario. The entire AI edifice is completely unsustainable. Millions of people are making a fortune using the almost-free services but no-one providing them has any idea how to make any money from facilitating the much-heralded Webpocalypse. 

Any day now, the individuals and institutions funding the whole thing are going to pull the plug and that will be that. Then the economy will crash and no-one is going to be thinking about AI any more anyway because we'll all be too busy breaking up our furniture and burning it to keep warm, once all those data centers stop super-heating the atmosphere.

Or all these AI services everyone's using for free now will start charging and then charging more and at the consumer end AI will just be another service you can subscribe to if you can afford it but how many of those are you paying for already and do you really want AI more than you want TV or movies or games?

Meanwhile, all the businesses and government departments that bought in to the AI hype will be discovering it doesn't do what they were promised it would and they won't have been able to let as many people go as they thought they would or if they did now they'll have to hire some or all of them back because AI just isn't cutting it on its own.

Any of those. Most likely all of them at once. That seemed like how it would go.

There was plenty of support for all of those timelines. The pieces I had bookmarked were all talking about surveys and reports that said businesses that had tried AI were finding they weren't getting anything done any faster or cheaper and in fact maybe it was even a bit slower and more expensive, what with having to have everything the AIs did checked by a human and probably re-written by one, too. One opinion piece suggested the companies that would do best out of the whole thing would be those who didn't invest in AI at all but instead snapped up all the good people being let go by those who did, so that when the inevitable collapse came, they'd be in pole position to take advantage of it. 

As for the public, it felt like there was so much push-back.  Not just from all the people who, understandably, didn't want to lose their jobs but from the consumers and customers and clients who would supposedly be the ones paying for the products and services AI would make it possible to supply more cheaply and efficiently. If everyone's boycotting your stuff it hardly matters if you saved money getting it to market.

One of the articles made what I thought was a very telling point. Historically, gamers have been among the earliest of adopters of new technology and also the most willing to spend quite significantly over and above the going rate to get their hands on whatever was being sold to them as the latest, bleeding-edge gadget or gimmick. 

This time, though, gamers have to be about the most rabidly anti-AI consumers out there. The merest rumor that someone's spotted a single AI-generated image in a game has them out with their pitchforks and torches. If you can't convince gamers to accept AI, the argument goes, how do you expect to sell it to anyone else?

All of which must feel very comforting to anyone who never liked the thought of AI in the first place. Well, except for the crashing the economy and starting a global recession part, that is. When Mark Zuckerberg said move fast and break things I'm not quite sure that's what he meant. Then again...

Except, doesn't it seem to be taking a long time for this bubble to burst? And hasn't an awful lot of the damage been done already? Once the AI is embedded in the infrastructure, just how easy is it going to be to get it out? And how much would that cost? It's all very well to say we can't afford to keep it but now we have it, can we afford to let it go?

Sticking with games, because I really do not want to think about the AI-controlled robot war dogs that will be taking over the policing of our streets any time now (And they can climb stairs, you know. It'll be like when the Daleks learned how to levitate. Nowhere will be safe.) it's obvious all the really big producers want to go full AI. Some, like Square Enix and Ubisoft, are open about it, but you can bet every one of them has a plan in place already for when they can stop dealing with those pesky creatives and just talk to nice, obedient LLMs that have never been trained on the history of the Union movement.

I could link to any number of news items and articles where games executives are pictured drooling over the prospects but I'll limit it to just this one, which surprised me by its positive tone. It's from GamesIndustry, which I'm guessing is officially neutral on the general topic of AI (Not on the topic of General AI, though, another kettle of extinction for humanity altogether.) but which more often than not chooses to sound quite sniffy about the whole idea.

The tl:dr for that link is that Ubisoft (It had to be them, didn't it?) is in advanced testing for AI-controlled alternatives to players. Obviously not to all players. How would that make money? Just to the players other players would usually play with.

It shoudn't come as any kind of surprise. I mean, it's not like actual players haven't been asking for it for years, is it? How many blog posts have you read over the last decade and a half, where someone was either ranting about how all anyone wants to do these days is play MMORPGs like they're playing a single-player game? Or that MMORPGs would be so much more enjoyable if it wasn't for all those stinky players?

I'll tell you how many. A shit-ton. As I've said a few times before, the first time I really noticed the
strength of feeling on the subject was when Gordon from We Fly Spitfires posted about playing Guild Wars 2 for the first time, fighting the same mobs and doing the same quests but not having to speak to anyone, let alone actually form a group.

We Fly Spitfires is long gone so sadly I can't link directly to it but I referenced that post and talked about the general topic of playing solo with others back in 2018. I don't believe gamers in general have become markedly more social since then so it's hardly surprising if one of the best use-cases for AI is seen as getting rid of other players. It's what a lot of them have been wishing for for years and voting, as they say, with their feet, although with their backsides might be a better way of putting it, what with all the sitting down gamers tend to do.

Whether those same gamers want exactly what Ubisoft is trying to sell them is another question. That GI post describes how the various AI-NPCs have different personalities, varying from "stoic" to "bubbly" for the grunts who join you in the fights to "authentically annoying: self-satisfied and occasionally belittling" for the mission commander who tells you what to do and where to go.

I'd have thought one prime reason many players would like not to have to deal with other humans would be all that messy personality stuff. But then, in a commercial release, once the tech has been passed as ready to meet the public, I imagine you'll be able to pick the personalities of your team to suit your tastes. 

Based on how AIs work now, I imagine the default option will be a bunch of flirtatious sycophants who just can't get enough of your amazing insights and truly incredible ideas. No doubt there's someone out there looking for a sarcastic AI partner who treats them like dirt but I'm not convinced a video game based on a Tom Clancy novels is where Ubisoft is going to find them.  

From a personal perspective, I feel like every week that passes leaves me less interested in and enthusiastic about AI than I was before. It was amusing a few years ago, amazing a few months ago, and now it's starting to bore me a little. It doesn't infuriate me - yet - but it's getting harder and harder to summon up the required goshes and wows for the endless, iterative, baby steps forward.

At the moment, I'm tending towards the opinion that AI in its current incarnation is going to end up being yet another of those not particularly interesting things we all have to use and pay for, whether we like it or not, like broadband service providers and local taxes. Try living on grid in any town or city in the Western Hemisphere without either of those and see how far you get.

Equally, try excitedly and repeatedly telling your friends how wonderful they are. See? Now no-one wants to talk to you any more.

Azuriel wrote a great post bouncing off the last one I put up about AI, in which he suggested the natural conclusion of the course I appeared to be, if not advocating for, then at least traveling along willingly, would be a future where we gave up on "content" altogether in favor of stimulating our pleasure centers directly until we all died of dehydration and/or exhaustion. It's not that I don't find it an attractive picture but I suspect that, at least in the lifetimes of most people likely to have read this far, it'll turn out to be something a lot less dramatic than that.

In my own case, it feels as though the future is probably going to involve considerably more involuntary use of AI, as it embeds itself inexorably in every aspect of all our lives, while at the same time my voluntary, personal involvement with the technology will decline. I've stopped making AI music, for example. It feels like I've done that now and, while it was immensely enjoyable and satisfying while I was doing it, I'm not missing it at all now I've stopped. I'll probably do it again at some point but it isn't something that's going to occupy me for the rest of the time I have left.

Another indicator is what's happening with this year's Inventory Full Advent Calendar. I've shortlisted all the songs now and I didn't use AI at all. In fact, I skipped straight past the Gemini AI summary at the top of every Google search I did and went straight to the links. 

As for the pictures, there won't be any AI images this year. I've decided they're boring. We've all seen far too many and they all look the same. They're also both too good and not good enough at the same time, which is a terrible combination. 

I actually still like making them and looking at them for my own enjoyment but I don't feel it's likely that anyone else is going to share my pleasure, which I'm well aware comes mostly from having made something that looks like the picture in my head, not form any intrinsic qualities of the images themselves. They require back story that would be inappropriate and counter-productive other than as illustrations to a narrative.

The main reason I won't be using any AI for the calendar this time, though, is that AI just isn't cool any more. Two or three years ago, even if some people really, really hated it and left comments saying they weren't going to come back if they were going to have to look at AI images, I felt like it was hip and clever to be making them and sharing them. Now, it feels like the default option. Everyone does it. I'd rather do something a little different, even if it is more work. 

And let's be honest, it is more work. A lot more. No wonder so many people do choose to use AI. It may not get you the right answer or draw you a great picture but it will give you an answer and a picture and it will do both in seconds. 

If you're putting a blog post together, quite often any answer or any picture will do. I mean, no-one really reads this stuff, anyway and even if they did, they'd most likely have the pictures switched off. It's not like I'm using AI to gather evidence for a court case or diagnose an illness, after all. Or even write a job description or an essay that someone's going to grade. No-one would be that lazy, surely. Or that gullible...

Look! All the way to the end and not one word about what I've been doing in New World! I'm really tempted now to give Gemini a precis of what I did in Aeternum yesterday and have it write a post for me, then put it up and see if anyone notices.

I never said I was going to stop using AI, did I? Or stop writing about it, either. I'm just not going to pretend I think it's cool any more. That'd be as bad as believing the best movie ever made was Fellowship of the Ring...

As for using it, I'll guess I'll stop when it's neither fun nor useful any more. We're not quite there yet but we could be soon. That's just the voluntary uses, though. I doubt any of us is going to be able to opt out entirely, ever again, short of going full Into The Wild.

 

Notes on AI used in this post:

Ironically, I didn't use any until I got to the final sentence, when I couldn't remember the name or author of the book I wanted to reference. I typed "what's the book where the guy walks into the Canadian wilderness and is never seen again" into Google Search and the AI Overview came back with "The book you are likely thinking of is Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer", which was indeed the right book.

The AI then went on to point out that it was the Alaskan wilderness, not the Canadian, that the person Krakauer wrote about, Christopher McCandless, walked into, but that there was another book, "Vanished Beyond the Map: The Mystery of Lost Explorer Hubert Darrell", published recently, which tells the story of an explorer who vanished in the Canadian wilds back in 1910. 

Gemini (For it was they, I assume.) then gave me precis of both, accurate in the case of Into The Wild at least, although I'll have to take the other on trust, along with links to Amazon for the Krakauer and the publisher's website for the other, so I could buy them both.

Given that Gemini wasn't just right but righter than I was, I suspect the days of being able to assume the AI summaries at the top of Google Search aren't to be trusted may be limited, although I do have to say that only a couple of days ago the same AI Overview told me about some album or other than sounded really interesting but turned not to exist, at least not so far as an actual Google Search could tell me. So maybe don't stop checking their work quite yet. 

Notes on Non-AI used in this post.

All the writing and all the pictures.  The first and second image are photos of things made by Mrs Bhagpuss and given to me as presents. The third image is two things made by her (The felts.) and two made by me (The mirrors.) all hanging in our hallway, as does the final image, a framed print I won in a raffle back inn the '90s. 

An art raffle. 

It was the nineties.

Don't you miss the nineties? 

A Tiny Bit Of Bitcraft, Bitten Off, Chewed Over, Then Spat Out

When I wrote about Crystal of Atlan yesterday, I certainly wasn't expecting to be writing another First impressions piece about a different game today. And I'm not going to, not really. I am going to say something about Bitcraft though.

Bitcraft is "a true single-world MMORPG" according to its Steam Store Page, which goes on to describe it as a highly social game in which "you’ll foster deep social connections and find endless opportunities for collaboration", so you can see why, although I've known about it for a good while, I haven't mentioned it before or paid much attention to it. All I knew about the game until today was what I'd read in a few news items and a maybe a couple of paragraphs in blogs. I think Tipa might have said something about it once...

Well, now I have the deep insight into the game that comes from having spent almost three-quarters of an hour playing it. It would have been longer but the game is suffering from massive overcrowding, server lag and memory leaks right now and the forty-three minute mark was when my PC gave up and shut it down.

I woke up in a field? What was I drinking last night? 

That short exposure was enough to tell me pretty much all I needed to know, though. It's handy that I played Crystal of Atlan yesterday. It gives me a great benchmark for picking up a new game that I didn't know anything about and giving it a go. It also makes for a fine illustration of the contrast between supposedly soulless, high-gloss, mass-market product and scrappy-but-heartfelt indie niche efforts.

Here's the key difference, as filtered through my tastes and preferences: ever since I logged out of Crystal of Atlan I've been thinking about logging back in and playing some more because it was fun. Even as I was playing Bitcraft and the game was obviously about to crash, I was hoping it would so I could stop playing and go do something more enjoyable instead.

Crystal of Atlan was fun from the start. Bitcraft might get to be fun at some point but it was very obvious it was going to take a long time and a lot of work before anything like that happened. I get that, for lots of people, what I'm labeling "work" is the fun but I am very clearly not one of those people. I might have been once but not any more.

It's not much but it's... okay, it's just not much.

I don't want to rag on Bitcraft. It's very easy to see the appeal and I would guess that, of its genre, it's likely to be one of the better examples. It certainly looks good. Excellent, in fact. The graphics are highly stylized and quite lovely. The UI design is especially well-done, with a book-like aesthetic that manages to be both attractive to look at and comfortable to use.

The same, unfortunately, cannot be said about the controls, which are some of the worst I've had to deal with since Final Fantasy XI.  There was some minor discussion of this in chat while I was playing, although as is common with crafting-oriented games still in testing, there was a good deal of sitting happily inside the silo while chugging the Kool-Aid. Several people referenced Runescape as an explanation of why the controls are as they are but I've played Runescape and I don't recall having anything like this amount of difficulty getting my character to do what I wanted. It's just bad design.

As soon as I got into the game almost literally the first thing I did was to go into Settings and change a bunch of things. The game uses Click-to-Move and Follow-the-Pointer for movement, which is fine. Lots of games do. To look around you, though, you have to use the Arrow keys. Who uses the arrow keys? I haven't used them since EverQuest more than two decades ago. I forgot they were even there!

The camoflage look is in again this year.

Just use mouselook then, you might well say. If only! Bitcraft uses the extremely annoying Middle Mouse Button for that. Not the first game to do so but it never gets any better. I find holding down a small, hard button indefinitely with the tip of my finger is both awkward and uncomfortable. I drive characters using mouselook continously in most games, as I imagine do many players, and having this constant pressure, verging on discomfort, in my right index finger is not conducive to a good time.

Sprint, usually bound to Left Shift in most games I've played, is here bound to Space. What's Jump bound to then, you might be wondering. Nothing. You can't jump. You can climb, though. And "Fast Climb",  too. That's what Left Shift does.

Care to show me your manoeuver,
Heimlich?

As for interacting with the environment, that's on "Q".  Which is an idiosyncratic choice, to be polite about it, but I guess it might have some validity if the game also used WASD for movement. It does not. 

There were other, similar issues. Before I even attempted to move my character from the spot in the middle of a vast field of grass where she'd woken up, I changed all of the above keybinds to something that suited me better. Credit to Bitcraft for having fully rebindable keys, albeit with too many warnings and confirmations to get the job done. (Also for having a simple screenshot option that removes the UI.)

Unfortunately - that word again - a few minutes later I had to change them all back. There's a little Wisp that pops up and takes you through the basics in an extended tutorial. He's chatty and I quite liked him. I was happy to follow his instructions. Only, whenever he tried to show me how to do something, like sprint for example, he couldn't tell I'd done it if I'd changed the keybind. I had to reset everything to default just to get him to move on to the next instruction.

You might notice I seem to have skipped character creation. That's because we haven't gotten to it yet. It takes place inside the game, after you meet the Wisp. He shows you how to open your Vault, which is where you keep your appearance gear, not that you have any yet, and your hairstyles, skin color and masks. Which would be weird if you were human but you're not. You're some kind of automata.

There's lore about that, which forms part of the narrative of the game, I think, but for now let's just say your character is a kind of animated tailor's dummy, dressed in rags. Quite cute, actually. There's a small range of styles and colors to pick from. I went ginger as usual and I was pleased to see my hair color was indeed described as such for once.

Do you have any eyes that don't glow?

From there it's off to the nearby Ancient Ruins, handily marked on your map. The map is good, if a little cluttered. You can click on it and your character will walk to the mark you make, which is just as well because once I got to town it was the only damn way I could find anything. The place was heaving. I couldn't see the crafting stations for the crafters!

The reason it was so busy was the same reason I was there: there's a three week open beta of sorts, actually labeled a "Demo" but effectively the full game, only with progress capped at level 10. It started a couple of days ago and runs until the end of the upcoming Next Fest on June 16th. The game then shuts up shop for a few days before going into Early Access on June 20th.

In town, I was still following the Wisp's lead. He'd already had me picking up sticks and stones and now he got me making flint tools, then gathering fibers to make cloth strips and wood to make logs and then making planks... You know the drill. Only, this is a crafting game so it's not like Once Human, where you make a bunch of crafting stations and the throw in all the mats and out comes the thing you want so you can go use it to kill things.

Would that t'were so simple.

It's not even like Valheim or Nightingale, where more sophisticated items require multiple stations and sub-combines. This is the full-on crafting experience, where every last little thing has to be whittled and sanded and braided and refined in some way before it can be used to make the next thing, which then makes something else and on and on until your fingers bleed. The road ahead is clear, even at the very, very start. I don't want to know where it goes once you begin to make complex tools or sophisticated clothing.

Again, I appreciate this is exactly what a certain market segment is looking for: complexity for complexity's sake I even enjoy a modicum of that sort of thing in crafting myself, on occasion. I just do not want it to be the main thrust of any game I'm going to spend any significant amount of time playing. It's too hard for me not to be aware that instead of doing it in virtuality I could much more usefully be doing the same thing around my real-world home. It's not like there aren't a hundred DIY projects I ought to be getting on with. I made a list of them last week...

So, the appeal of games like this is somewhat mitigated for me by guilt. Still, I could easily be led astray if it was also fun. But it wasn't. Not at all. 

Have trunk, will trudge. (IYKYK, right?)

I think it might have been fun if the controls had been less finicky. A lot less. And if it had been a lot quieter. It's nice to see so many people taking an interest but there's a threshold even for virtual socialization and for me it comes some considerable distance short of a crowded bus station.

All of which makes it sound like I'm writing Bitcraft off. I am not. Even though I didn't enjoy my time with the game today, I can quite easily imagine having plenty of fun with it in the future. It's on my Steam wishlist and it's going to stay there. For me, there's going to have to be some considerable improvement in the control system before I consider giving the full game a try but I strongly suspect that will come in time, especially if the game does pick up traction in Early Access.

For now, though, I can think of better options for doing much the same thing. Palia, for example, or maybe even Stars Reach. Although, as observant readers will already have noticed, I'm not playing much of those two either. 

Maybe I should just stay in my lane. Which is clearly not this one.

Levels And Legacies

Redbeard has a post up today about leveling in World of Warcraft Retail and how fast it is these days, so fast he wonders whether there's really any point in having it at all. I have some thoughts on that but I'll leave them over there, in the comment thread. I thought about writing a whole post but I don't play WoW regularly and I don't know enough about it. I've never even reached the level cap there so anything I say is going to be suspect.

When it comes to EverQuest II, though, I have plenty of experience, albeit mostly from the perspective of a solo player these days, so I feel quite safe giving my thoughts. And what that experience tells me is that getting your levels is the absolute least of it. Even if you have no intention of engaging in end-game content, hitting max level is just the beginning.

Of course, the significance of the number next to your character's name in an MMORPG has always been mutable. Even back at the dawn of the genre, levels were only ever a means to an end.

Back in those olden-if-not-so-golden times, when leveling in MMORPGs was such a chore people sometimes bought their characters on EBay or paid someone else to level up for them, it was widely believed it took sixty levels or whatever the cap was to just to learn how to play your class. 

If you hadn't put in the hours, no-one wanted you in a group. Even if you did have the player-skills, your character most likely didn't. Or they didn't have the equipment. They probably didn't have the flags or the languages or the faction needed because all of that takes time - a lot more time than it takes to get the levels.

In many MMORPGs and especially in EQII, not as much has changed as you'd think. It's true that, over the twenty years the game has been around, almost every aspect of the game has been streamlined, pared down and made more user-friendly but the process only goes so far.

Streamlining something may make it faster but the irony of comparatives is that making something faster still doesn't make it fast. It isn't until you settle down to compare the accrued advantages of a character that's been played for thousands of hours with one that's been played for only a few hundred that you begin to appreciate the vast gulf that lies between them, even if their level counts make an exact match.

And it isn't until you go to do something about equaling them up that you realize just what a huge task it's likely to be. I'll just give one example.

What I've mostly being doing these past few weeks in EQII has been getting my Necromancer's harvesting speed down to 1.5 seconds. I wanted to do it because harvesting is virtually impossible to avoid in the game, even if you never craft or go out looking for crafting mats. Countless quests require it so it's not a skill easily or wisely ignored.

You might just about get away with leaving it alone as a pure Adventurer but I want my Necromancer (Her name's Mordita.) to be an all-rounder. I want her to adventure, craft and harvest. My Berserker (Conkers) does, so if she's going to replace him, she needs to as well. And crafters have to harvest a lot.

If she's going to do at-cap tradeskill content, she'll need to max all the harvesting skills (Mining, Trapping, Foresting, Fishing and Gathering itself.) The cap is currently 700 (Probably. Hard information is so hard to come by for the game these days. It's a worrying sign of the end times, I think.) 

I could raise these skills just by going out and hitting nodes but I've been working my way through the lengthy gathering questline instead. Most of it still involves going out and hitting nodes but it comes with some useful rewards so why not?  

It's taken me quite a few hours and most of Mordita's skills are still less than half-way to the cap so there's plenty more to go, which was why after I got to the end of the second quest chain, I decided I needed to do something about her harvesting speed. 

The base speed to complete one harvesting action is five seconds. Each node has a potential three pulls although not all pulls are successful. With a skill well below the recommended level for the type of node, which is where she's been and will be for a good while yet, you can easily end up standing next to the same rock, picking away at it for a dozen turns or more.

With the help of crafted items you can bring that down some but it still felt glacially slow compared to what I'd been used to with Conkers for as long as I can remember. As with everything in EQII, the exact mechanics and details are obscure but in general, base gathering speed bottoms out at one and a half seconds, which is then affected by your Casting speed. Conkers casting speed is 103% so his effective gathering speed is about 0.75 seconds, which feels pretty zippy.

To get there, he needed the Gathering Goblin AA, which requires you to be at least a Level 90 crafter and some other AAs but that just for the actual goblin, who follows you around harvesting. To turn him into a buff that reduces your base harvesting time to 1.5 you have to do a quest.

It's been a few years since I last did it but I vaguely remembered it involved speaking to another goblin in Obulus Frontier, a zone that arrived with the Kunark Ascending expansion back in 2016. Imagining it would take a few minutes, maybe half an hour at most, I trotted over to the zone to pick up the quest and of course the goblin wouldn't talk to me.

That sent me back to the Wiki to see what the problem was and it turned out to be quite a big one. I'll try to sum it up as succinctly as I can.

To get Growf the goblin to give you the first in the series of quests that concludes with you setting the gathering goblin free and receiving the harvesting speed buff, you need to have finished the whole of the Kunark Ascending crafting signature questline. Growf's bit is just a kind of coda at the end but it's dependent on the full thing.

I wasn't best pleased but it didn't sound too bad. Three or four hours, maybe, assuming I didn't read any of the quest dialog, all of which I'd seen more than once already. So I set about it, only to find you can't just start in on the KA questline out of nowhere. There's a pre-req: the entire tradeskill signature questline from the previous expansion, Terrors of Thalumbra.

This was starting to look like a much bigger project than I'd anticipated. Two complete expansion signature questlines. That was going to take a while, even if they were only crafting ones, which go a lot faster than their adventure counterparts. We're talking several full sessions for sure.

Got to be done, though. Off I went to get started on the ToA sequence, only to find I couldn't get that one either. For most expansions you get a letter inviting you to speak to someone and off you go but it seems that around this time the plan was to make sure everyone saw every part of the content  so before you can get the Thalumbra questline, you have to complete yet another pre-req, The Captain's Lament from the 2013 expansion, Tears of Veeshan. I think it was part of the pre-expansion build-up but it was a long time ago...

To release my Gathering Goblin from indentured servitude and receive, in recompense for my magnanimity, a reduction in my base harvesting speed to 1.5 seconds, I was going to have to complete the full tradeskill signatures from two expansions, plus the warm-up from the one before. 

All told, that comes to more than fifty separate quests. Fifty quests, just to upgrade one small aspect of Mordita's capabilities to bring them in line with Conkers'. And it's not even anything crucial to gameplay, just a minor quality of life improvement.

I wasn't counting but I played most evenings the last couple of weeks, generally for an hour or two each session. Even with the huge boost of instant map travel via All Access Membership, the huge advantage of being a max-level Adventurer, thereby making every mob in every required zone non-aggro, a full walk-through on hand, complete with locs to cut and paste into the game and the lack of any inclination on my part to read for the third time even a single line of quest dialog, it still took me that long to get it all done. 

And I was lucky Mordita already knew how to speak Gobblish, the Goblin language, because Growf doesn't speak anything else. If she hadn't, I'd have had to go do the quest for that as well.

Luckily for me, I enjoyed the whole thing. It had just the right level of simplicity for me not to feel the grind while I had to pay just enough attention to the instructions to make it seem like I was doing something. My sweet spot, really.

Even so, it's a hell of a long time to spend on such a small thing, while preparing one character to take over from another. If it was the only time I needed to do something like it, that would be one thing but it's just an example of a seemingly endless number of minor adjustments and calibrations that have to be made before Mordita is going to feel expansion-ready. 

Getting the levels, which used to be the barrier, is now literally the least of it. You can buy those, quite legitimately. I just had to click a button. But if anyone thinks a Max Level Boost is going to do all the work for them - or even most of it - they can think again. At least in EQII, they can. I don't know about other games. I bet it's much the same everywhere, though.

And let's not forget that all of this was mainly done as a way of speeding up another set of quests. Now that Mordita has the fast harvesting speed, it's back to the harvesting questline itself so she can use it, and that's going to take quite a few more hours to finish. 

After that, I'm going to have to take a close look at her stats and see what else she's missing. She could do with learning a whole bunch of languages, for a start.

Six months to the next expansion. I hope it's going to be enough...

Long Story Short(ish)

I'm always saying I'd like to do shorter posts. Turns out all I needed to do was not play any games and it happens naturally.

EverQuest II

Okay, it's not strictly true to say I haven't played any games. I have played a little EverQuest II. 

I logged in yesterday and finished another of Qho's supremely irritating gathering quests. That leaves just one more in the first set. Then it all starts up again, although from what I remember the second questline follows a different format and can be quite entertaining at times. Well, by comparison to the first, that is. But then it would pretty much have to be.

There's a lot going on in Norrath just now. Even though the Chronoportal event still has a few days to run, Brewday has already started. This is one of the busiest times of the year for holiday events. There are so many they start to overlap. 

I might do some more time-traveling with my Necromancer. I ought at least to take her to visit the vendors so she can spend her Ancient Coins. Not much point earnig them if you don't buy anything with them. 

Brewday, which I suppose comes in March to co-incide with St. Patrick's Day, although I can't recall ever seeing that connection made explicit, has never been a favorite of mine but there's a new tradeskill quest this year, so I'll definitely take a look at that.

It is interesting that the two quests I've seen added so far this year have both been crafting ones. I missed Erollisi Day completely, though. I wonder if there was a new tradeskill quest for that as well. Hold on and I'll check... no, there wasn't. 

I'm guessing the reason for the focus on crafting is either that these events were light on tradeskill content (Other than the inevitable new items that get added to the recipe list year on year.) or that Niami Denmother just really likes writing crafting quests. Both, probably.

The Chronoportal one is super-easy and very enjoyable, if you like very easy quests, which I do. All you have to do is go through a bunch of portals (Eight, I think it was. Might have been nine...) and pick up an item somewhere very near the entrance. All of them are in safe locations with no aggressive mobs nearby, so even crafters with a total aversion to combat can do it easily.

Then you just have to combine some of them to make sub-combines and combine those to make the final result, Grobb Liquidized Meat. It's a disgusting drink, enjoyed by trolls in the original EverQuest, which gives the quest its holiday-appropriate theme. You then trade the drink to a troll in exchange for Sir Fluffykins, the kidnapped cat. The troll hasn't been able to eat Sir Fluffykins because he has toothache and can't manage solids. The troll, that is. Not the cat.

Par for the course with tradeskill quests, really. Most of them are very light-hearted and generally very easy. They can be long and fiddly but they're rarely what you'd call challenging other than to your patience. 

Or they haven't been for a long time, anyway. There was that period when crafting "raids" were a thing and those were quite a performance, what with all the timers and the organization and a serious chance you'd fail. But that was a loooong time ago. I wonder if anyone still does those? I know you can easily solo them now because I've done it but does anyone actually get a team together and do them as they were intended? I bet someone does.

Another thing I hadn't particularly considered until I was summarizing the plot of the Chronoportal
quest just now is how very twee a lot of the crafting quests are. I don't think that was so much the case back in Domino's day, although even then many of them were far from serious. 

Raffik's quests, for example, which I tend to think of now as a jolly romp, are quite sad, what with him having been orphaned and shipwrecked and being close to starving to death when you first meet him. 

He's a great character, always cheerful, even though nothing ever seems to go quite right for him. Over the years, he changes from a lost adolescent to a confident, successful adult but even in the latest expansion, where he plays a small but significant role as the captain of the ship that takes you to Western Wastes, his ship gets destroyed, leaving him once again having to start over from scratch.

That, though, is part of an adventure questline and in adventures things do sometimes go badly wrong. In crafting quests they pretty much never do. You get asked to make something, you go get the materials, you put them together, you give the thing you've made to the person who asked for it and there you are. Sometimes you have to repair something but the experience is much the same.

Now that I think about it, EQII is a very twee game all round. The pure adventure side isn't, so much, although it does tend very much towards the Gods, Dragons and Faerie Queens end of the fantasy spectrum, rather than the blood, gore and bits of goblin flying everywhere kind. Everything else, though, crafting, housing, familiars, vanity pets, mounts, holiday events and most especially all the fancy dressing-up, does often have something of the six-year old girl's birthday party about it.

That suits my sensibilities fairly well but I've also been boiled in the EQII water for so long I barely notice how pink I'm getting. I'm wondering now if the high tweeness quotient might be a contributory factor to so many people bouncing off the game when they try it.

By contrast, there's that huge part of the game I never see (And neither do those new players who give up quite quickly.). Heroic/Heroic II dungeons and Raiding, from everything I read, are really serious business, to the point that most of the commentary I've been seeing for years on that end of the game is about how it's 100% Pay-to-Win because of how impossible it is to keep up with the required gearing needed to handle the difficulty if you don't get your wallet out.

For me, that might just as well be a different game entirely. My EQII has no Pay-to-Win features at all. The opposite, really. I find it hard to spend the Daybreak Cash I already have before more comes in.

Like most older MMORPGs, EQII isn't just two games any more. The old Casual/Serious Player split is there still and so is the Leveling/Endgame divide but the game fractures into many more pieces than that these days. It's entirely possible to play full time in any one of a variety of playstyles and hardly come into contact with the others at all.

Lord of the Rings Online

The really odd thing about all these older MMORPGs is how hard it is to get away from them. EverQuest is twenty-six years old this year and tens of thousands of people still play it. Lord of the Rings Online turns eighteen next month and the MMO news sites have been full of stories this week about how Standing Stone Games radically underestimated the demand for the new 64-bit servers. 

More than a million characters have been transferred apparently. Or, rather, have requested transfers. The actual number moved is presumably far smaller since the whole thing has been quite a debacle. I was going to log in this morning and see if I could at least press the Transfer button, just so I'd have a screenshot of me doing it for this post. 

What I'd forgotten was that I took one of my hard drives out last week, when I was trying to fix some issue with Mrs Bhagpuss's PC and I haven't gotten around to putting it back in yet. I don't feel like doing it right now, either, so my characters will have to wait a little longer. Probably a good idea, all things considered.

That does suggest the question "Why even bother transferring if you're not going to play the game?" and there, right there, that's the nub of it. I didn't have any desire to play LotRO again but then everyone started going on about it and Wilhelm revealed his plan to create a new character and take them all the way to Mordor and that started me thinking about how I've never gotten past the end of the original game - or even to the end for that matter - and suddenly the thought of playing again began to seem oddly appealing.

Would that it were so simple

And that's how they get you, every time. All these older games. It's not FOMO so much as familiarity. They sunk their claws in years ago and they hang on. You think you're free of them but they can always come back. Like malaria or relatives.

I had another thought, too, while I was considering whether I really wanted to give the game another chance. If so many people are fleeing the existing servers for the sunlit uplands of 64-bit Middle Earth, doesn't that mean the old 32-bit servers will be under a great deal less strain? Will that reduce or even remove all the lag problems and so on that everyone has long been complaining about?

Maybe the smart move would be to stay put. The FAQ says 

"At this time we do not intend to close our 32-bit game worlds. Eventually, we would like players to experience the game on our 64-bit game worlds, but as long as the populations of our 32-bit game worlds remain healthy we intend to keep these worlds open." 

I'm sure the last thing they'll want to do after this round of self-inflicted chaos is to rush headlong into another potential disaster so I'd guess it'll be later rather than sooner before any forced migration of the stay-at-homes kicks off.

As for low population levels, one of the given reasons why people wanted to move in the first place, I've always had a liking for low-pop servers. If you mostly solo, the fewer people around the better, generally speaking. 

Maybe I'll leave my existing characters where they are and re-roll on one of the shiny, new servers. That might be fun. And that way I could have my choice of quiet or busy, depending on my mood.

Of course, that's exactly what I used to do, back in the old days, when I had characters on multiple servers in several MMORPGs and somehow managed to find time to play most of them. These days I struggle to play even one character in one game with any consistency so all this is probably idle speculation. Fun, though.

Erenshor

And finally, in this short round up of things I might do in games I might play, there was yesterday's announcement that Erenshor is going into Early Access on Steam next month. 

Erenshor, you may remember, is the single-player MMORPG. Or, as the Steam Store description puts it "A fully simulated MMORPG". I played the demo during a Next Fest in 2023 and wrote about it here, when I found it very odd indeed. I concluded by saying "Whether Erenshor turns out to be no more than a novelty or a harbinger of things to come, I guess we won't know for a year or two."

We know now! Or we don't, because what I was really referring to there wasn't whether the game would get anywhere but the potential it suggested for the use of generative AI in MMORPG game design. 

As it happens, though, Erenshor doesn't even use that kind of AI. When it says the NPCs are "AI-driven" it means the old-school AI we've always had, just a more up-to-date, sophisticated version:

"Note that SimPlayers do not use LLM or any other emerging AI model. They are run by a mixture of state machines and decision trees."

If you want to know more about it, Tipa has been part of the testing program for a while and she's posted about the game several times. (I applied but I never heard back. It's too late now!)  She found it both very enjoyable and extremely redolent of the traditional EverQuest experience. If anyone knows how that feels, it's Tipa so you can take her word for it.

Erenshor has been on my wishlist since I played the demo and I will definitely be buying it as soon as hits Early Access. As always, the question is what I'll do about it after I've bought it. I suspect I might actually play it, in which case you'll hear about it here, whether you like it or not!

And that's all for now. Was that even a shorter post? I'm not sure it was. It was shorter to write, though, and that's what I wanted. 

Op success, then, I guess. I obviously should spend less time playing games.