In The Country

Just a short post to say I'm back from an equally short holiday where we stayed in a "log cabin" (Aka converted garden shed - but very nicely converted!) on a farm that turned out, somewhat to my surprise but rather to my delight, to have no WiFi coverage whatsoever. I took my laptop but all I used it for was to watch old music videos that I had thoughtfully taken with me. That may result in a back catalog post at some point.

It was quite odd not to look at anything online for almost three days. I could technically have used my phone but the signal was barely there either and I chose not to bother trying to find a better one when we visited what passed for civilization in those parts. It was really nice not to have to think about looking stuff up for once, although I think three days was probably enough.

Anyway, we had a great time, the weather was unbelievably good for the time of year and Beryl went crazy when we took her to the seaside, which we did twice. It was worth the trip just for that. 

We're back now and what passes for normal service will be resumed tomorrow. Probably. If I'm in the mood and if I have time after I've picked up the more than a hundred apples that fell onto the lawn in the time we were away. Literally. I counted a hundred and thirty before I gave up.

Always Nothing Much To Say

For once this really might end up being one of those "short" posts I'm always promising. I don't have anything much I want to talk about but I didn't want to miss another day after I took Monday and Tuesday off while we took our first mini-holiday of the year. 

With the pandemic making proper travel far too unpredictable we're opting instead for random day trips with the odd overnight stay here and there thrown in as the mood takes us. On Monday we drove down to the south coast for a very enjoyable seaside break. The weather was positively Mediterranean, which made it very easy to imagine we'd gone somewhere more exotic.

It really was a short break although we packed so much in it felt a lot longer. We timed it all so neatly I  managed not to miss any of my dailies in Guild Wars 2. I did one lot around breakfast before we left and another just before bed when we got back. I suppose I could even have played an mmorpg while I was away - I have two or three installed on my Kindle Fire - but I didn't need much more entertainment than the sunset from our balcony.

Speaking of my Kindle Fire, it's starting to give me some concern. For the moment it will still take a charge, with a bit of fiddling about, but it likes to sit there bleating like a distressed sheep while it's doing it, something I find unreasonably disturbing. 

 

I tried several different chargers, one of which almost fried the whole thing, but eventually I discovered it's most likely the charging port beginning to fail, a very common design fault with Kindles. 

It's particularly annoying since I bought a Kindle quite specifically for the build quality, which I thought would be good. Certainly better than the several previous tablets I've had, some of which have developed faults on their own and the rest of which I've managed to break.

If I have to replace this one, I think the average lifetime of a tablet owned by me will dip below twelve months. I have a box of the things now. Some of them kind of work, in a way. Some are completely inert and I should throw them away. A couple could, theoretically, be repaired but since that would cost almost as much as the price of a new one it seems somewhat pointless.

It's getting to the stage where I do wonder if maybe I should just buy an iPad. The ridiculous upfront cost has always stopped me even considering it in the past but if I'd bought one as my first tablet it would probably still be working now. My iPod Touch is and that has to be at least ten years old. 

On the other hand, although the iPod hardware lasts forever, it's been a long time since anything much would run on it. The most recent version of iOS my Touch can use is so out of date there's barely an app left that will accept it.

 

But enough of my problems. Let's talk about Crowfall's. And Phantasy Star Online: New Genesis's. 

I imagine I'll have something more to say when Crowfall launches three weeks from now but for the time being I'm done with it. I found it a very strange experience indeed. As I wrote, I kind of enjoyed myself even as I was thinking what I was doing was utterly pointless. And quite possibly stupid.

The extended tutorial takes you all the way to the soft cap at Level 30. I believe you can do five more levels after that but to do so involves a bizarre necromantic practice by which you dig up body parts to upgrade your "Vessel", the disposable entity you've probably been thinking of as "my character". That's a habit you're going to have to break.

With increasing effort I pushed through to thirty. The entirely linear questline takes you just about that far although I did have to kill a few extra mobs along the way to fill out a few small gaps. It was fairly painless. Xp for mob-killing is decent and the sacrifice mechanic, where you throw items you've looted from mobs into a fire, gives significant bonuses.

At thirty the game sends you to the zones that used to be a separate world called the Infected, a tripartite Realm vs Realm set-up similar to so many others. As many people have observed, good luck finding anything to do there. I ran around for an hour or so and saw one other player. And he was on my team.

When I went to Reddit to see if other people were finding the whole thing as weird and ill-judged as I was (they were) I found many cynics recommending ignoring the quest line completely and just grinding mobs from the get-go. 

 

Apart from one or two obvious white knights, the near-universal opinion seems to be that the New Player Experience is about as useless as it could possibly be. It determinedly trains players to expect an on-rails PvE questing experience and then throws them into a game with literally no quests of any kind, where almost the entire gameplay consists of fighting other players. It would be disorienting enough if there were any other players to fight. It's completely mystifying when there are none.

The general theory appears to bethat the dev team, having given up any hope of making the game they were originally planning, settled for bolting something they could manage on the front and leaving it at that. I have no idea where the truth lies but I'm going to say right now that I can't see how this game is going to find any kind of audience after launch, much less make any money.

PSO2:NG is having very much the opposite problem. As MassivelyOP put it today, when they reported on the apologies and compensation coming to players very soon, "having so many players that it’s hard to play isn’t a bad problem to have". 

The lag that's had Sega handing out the goodie bags hasn't affected me at all. I'm not sure I noticed it even once. I was playing in EU hours on the east coast NA server but even so there were loads of people around and everything was silky-smooth all the time. 

I haven't played much since the last time I posted but I do keep thinking about it. I was trying to work out how I could have wrung the small amount of pleasure out of Crowfall that I did and it came to me that I just want a good, old-fashioned mmorpg leveling experience right now. It seems like a while since I last had a new character I cared about in a new game I didn't already know pretty well.

For the reasons I gave in the first impressions posts, PSO2:NG isn't going to be a game I devote a lot of time to but it might just have to stand in for that game until a more suitable one comes along. That might be Bless Unleashed, which I find myself almost pining for after my brief beta exposure, or I guess it could be New World.

Amazon are really priming the pre-launch pump right now, with press releases and lore and gameplay videos aplenty. It's all having an odd effect on me. I find myself less and less excited at the prospect of playing, not least because the game seems to be lining itself up to be the next Elder Scrolls Online, a game I never really got on with all that well.

I have an uncomfortable feeling New World is going to end up being one of those games I'll harp on about having been "so much better in beta". Not because it was better, of course, but because it was smaller, more manageable and less overwhelming. 

Really, all I liked doing there was exploring, gathering and fighting zombies. It was extremely atmospheric and very relaxing. I can't say the prospect of a full-on quest-hub exprience with instanced dungeons was what I imagined I'd be getting when I pre-ordered. 

Still, I'd sooner have that than what the poor sods who pre-ordered Crowfall are going to get, that's for sure!

When You Get Out Of The Hospital

It's been a bit quiet around here for the last week or so, which usually means I've been away on holiday. I was indeed lounging around, doing not very much, but I was doing it in a large hospital, not some pensión in the back of beyond.

As I briefly mentioned earlier in the year I had an investigative procedure that turned out to be positive and last week I went into hospital to have 30cm of my upper bowel removed. Everything went well - the surgeon's report described the operation as "uneventful", which is, I guess, exactly what you'd want your surgeon to say.

There was an interesting moment a couple of days into recovery, when they thought I might have had a heart attack. I was surprised to discover you can have one without noticing. It was a false alarm, fortunately, and I was judged well enough yesterday to come home.

If my ongoing recovery goes to plan, I probably have a month, maybe a month and a half,  before I go back to work. Then, all being well, I really will be on holiday for two weeks in June!

When I go on holiday I usually take a complete break and avoid looking at any blogs or gaming news but in hospital I was often looking for something to keep me amused and entertained so last week I read everything as normal. The hospital wifi, which I was piggybacking (they hadn't bothered to password it) didn't permit any kind of uploading or downloading so I wasn't able to reply to any of the interesting posts.

It's probably a bit late to start now. If you posted something in the last week, just imagine my reply. I would almost certainly have said exactly what you think I would. I usually do.

Since I'm supposed to be taking it easy and not overdoing things I should have plenty of time for blogging and also for trying some new MMORPGs. If I can find any.

That's about all I have to say on the matter except to do the thing everyone always does after they've had some potentially life-threatening condition diagnosed and (hopefully!) averted.

I really had no inkling I was seriously ill. I felt fine. I had some minor pains but they were occasional and familiar. There's no way I'd have gone to a doctor about them. It was just good luck that I dinged 60 in real life last November and because I'm fortunate enough to live in a country with a National Health Service one of my rewards for leveling up was a free test kit for bowel cancer.

Even then, I might easily have ignored it but because I tend towards Lawful Neutral I went along with what I was being asked to do, even though it ended up taking three goes and six weeks to get a definitive result. As a result, the operation I ended up needing has been smaller and less impactful than it would have been had I waited until symptoms appeared, always assuming that by that stage it would have been operable at all.

In countries with socialized health care there are generally a lot of free checks you can get. Medicine is all about proactivity these days. I don't really know how it works it countries that base healthcare on insurance but I imagine insurers would generally prefer to pay less earlier than more later so there are presumably options there, too.

Without getting all political about it, I'd just say that whatever checks you can have, you should have. If they offer them, take them. If you have to ask, then ask. Yes, it's annoying. We all have better things to do with our time than take an afternoon out to go to some clinic and have holes poked in us. Until we don't.

When I'm fit again I need to take my own advice and follow up a couple of other, less urgent, flags that popped up in some other precautionary testing I got free with my 60th birthday. For now, though, I'm going to sit back, drink tea and play games.

Normal service will be resumed shortly.

World In Your Pocket

Apologies for the abrupt loss of signal. I did mention a few times, in passing, that we were going away, but I neglected to put up a Service Interrupted message. Always bad form to go afk without warning.

Mrs Bhagpuss and I got back yesterday, around tea-time, having thoroughly enjoyed another excellent holiday. While we were away we had a number of lengthy philosophical discussions  - long drives will do that - about the way the world has changed in our lifetimes. Getting older will do that, too.

One particular observation occurred to me as we were traveling that seems almost emblematic of where the culture finds itself now. It's is not anywhere I - or most people, probably - expected it would be. We all grew up expecting a science-fiction future but who expected to go on holiday carrying no fewer than five computers, any and all of them probably more powerful than the mainframes that filled rooms when I was in college?

I took my new 6" Android phablet, my elderly iPod Touch and my dual-OS 10" tablet. Mrs Bhagpuss had her Kindle Fire and her iPhone. This seemed normal. It probably is normal.

That surprises me almost more than anything. It was only a few years ago that I was pontificating on the way digital ecosystems would compete with and devour each other, the way previous technological revolutions had taught us they should.

We drove deep into the country to see the Chufin Cave. It was closed. We never saw a single Chufin.

I found it difficult back then to imagine why anyone would want to own - far less carry - a variety of separate devices, when a single machine could do the work of all them. I thought tablets would eat laptops, mobile would consume desktop and who would want to bother lugging around a dedicated device that just read books or only played music?

Plenty of people, apparently. The death of the laptop, which was widely predicted by far more widely-read pundits than I, seems further away than ever. The airports were filled with folk nestling clamshells on their actual laps, most of them branded Apple. Every child had its own device playing Peppa Pig or Postman Pat. I also saw plenty of people reading text from screens although, speaking as someone whose livelihood depends on it, a comforting number of people were reading actual paper books.

Scanning through the many hundreds of unread posts in my Feedly feed last night, it appears that another technological extinction, widely predicted a few years back, has failed to arrive on schedule. I remember reading any number of reports in the quality press not so long ago, predicting the then-current generation of Gaming Consoles would be the last. Gaming would thrive but the specific devices associated with it would not.

Then again, if this is the size of a Chufin egg, it's probably just as well.

Hasn't happened and, if the reports coming out of E3 are to be believed, it's not about to happen any time soon. The success of The Switch seems to confirm that hardware designed specifically to play games is still in demand and console technology appears determined to keep up with increased audience expectations.

I certainly wasn't alone in believing the technological future was going to be more streamlined, more minimal and in some ways it is. The days of traveling with two suitcases per person are gone. We both managed happily for almost two weeks with a bag each not much larger than the one I used to carry to school every day in the 1970s. The devices themselves get smaller and thinner and lighter, their physical footprint dictated only by the size of screen you prefer to watch.

We travel the world with a freedom that would have seemed dreamlike even in the 1950s, when mass tourism was getting started but, more than that, the world travels with  us everywhere we go. It's still possible to leave it all behind but to do so takes a concerted effort these days.

Every hotel and cafe has wifi and usually it even works. Many cities pipe free connectivity into the air. Vehicles come with charging points for your devices built in and the mobile signal carries almost everywhere. It's an opt-out life we live now, not opt-in.

Who would win in a fight between a Lion and an Eagle? Unless that's a Chufin...

And for a short time I did indeed opt out, if only partially. I gave myself a complete break from the kind of thing I do every day at home, at least. I declined to check Feedly or post on my own blog. I had MMOs on two devices but I played none. I didn't watch YouTube or read Pitchfork or even listen to music on my iPod.

What I did do was use the phablet or tablet every day to check the weather, book hotels and plan the route for that day's drive. Oh, and I started reading an eBook on the last day. I didn't consciously decide to avoid anything non-traditionally holiday related - mostly doing anything like that just didn't occur to me.

Mrs Bhagpuss stayed more connected. She managed her business via her iPhone, taking bookings by SMS and email, giving me the tremors every time she held it out over a bridge or a sea wall to take a photograph. She also used her Kindle Fire to play various games of the Candy Crush variety and we played Eggheads together on my phablet most evenings, just like a regular late-middle-aged couple.

I certainly don't eschew the concept of playing games when I'm away. Gaming has always been a part of going on holiday.  We used to take cards or dominoes or travel board games but with the streamlined luggage, gaming on the phone makes more sense.

When you pay two Euros to see inside a small castle in a small village in the mountains you don't expect something like this. Chanting, lights going out, screams, 1930s radios playing torch songs, rocking chairs, faded newspapers, mysterious men in black... I wasn't sure whether we'd time-slipped into a 1970s Hammer Horror or portalled into The Secret World...

Sticking to games I never play at home maintains the break in continuity and that separation is essential, I think. Or, at least, it is while I'm still working. When I retire and we can - all being well - go away for longer periods and more often, maybe that particular firewall can come down. Then, I can imagine taking a laptop and both playing MMOs and blogging about them in the long evenings.

Ironically, having read - or at least glanced at - something like three hundred news items and blog posts since I got back, I'm not entirely sure I'd be able to find enough to write about anyway. Not a lot seems to have happened. I certainly don't feel I've missed much.

I notice Daybreak Games hasn't gone dark with the coming of sanctions so I guess that was all a storm in a samovar after all. ANet has fallen even further behind on their self-imposed schedule for The Living Story. There was some gimmicky special week in WvW to take our minds off the absence of new content. Glad to have missed that. There was the Steam thing...

Anything else? Don't think so. Given the choice I'd rather have stayed on holiday but failing that I guess I'll just log in and slip back into the old routine. Roll on retirement!

Meant To Last - EverQuest Turns Nineteen

This month marks the nineteenth anniversary of the launch of EverQuest. Unlike Wilhelm, I can't claim to have been there on day one. I turned up fashionably late to the party some eight months later, just after the game's first major live event, Bloody Kithicor.

At least, I think that's what happened just before I got there. It's surprisingly hard to find the details nearly two decades on. Even the invaluable patch archive at Allakhazam is, well, patchy when it comes to that first year.

When you come to think of it, maybe a few gaps in the record aren't so surprising after all. I vaguely remember reading an interview with John Smedley that he gave not long after launch, where he estimated something like a three year lifecycle for the new game. Five years if things went even better than they dared to dream.

Certainly no-one back in 1999 was expecting the game would still be around nearly twenty years later, far less that it would still have enough traction in the marketplace to justify the production of annual expansions and the creation of new servers. And yes, Daybreak is celebrating the anniversary with yet another Progression server; Coirnav.

Just how many retro-fitted new beginnings can one game stand? DBG have taken so many bites at this particular cherry they must be gnawing on the stone by now. You'd think there'd come a time when diminishing returns would kick in, especially with the quasi-authorised Project 1999 always available for an even more authentic old-school buzz. If so, it seems that time is not yet.

Getting kinda meta.

I have no plans to play on the new server. I barely play EQ at all at the moment but if I did I'd probably do a bit on my 94 Magician while the bonus anniversary xp is running (until the end of March). I was briefly tempted but it's not even double xp, just 1.5x and that's not going to make a huge difference at the glacial leveling speeds of the mid-90s.

Even Keen, possibly the purest EQ loyalist still blogging, almost had to talk himself into starting over yet again - but there he is, heading back to Crushbone once more. He commented a while back, when he was debating with himself whether or not to return to Norrath for the umpteenth time, that his brother was less than impressed: "...when I told Graev I was going to play again he gave me the sourest look of disgust and said, “Isn’t it time to move on? After 20 years don’t you think it’s time to play something else?”"

Well, maybe. In Keen's case it's not even a case of going back to play through the whole game, just a very, very small subset of EQ's vast and sprawling empire of content. Really, though, as Jeromai said in a comment to yesterday's post, "I like comfortable, thank you. It makes me happy." If you find something that works for you then work it, why not?

Even though I don't want to level another character uphill both ways in the old-school snow or grind more thankless upper-tier tasks for Franklin Teek, I might just pop my head around the door anyway. Looking at the Producer's Letter, there's quite a lot going on besides the new server and the bonus xp. I note, for example, there are four new Anniversary-themed missions, "Depths of Darkhollow and Mayong Mistmoore-themed!".

Just a few of the many items available from various anniversaries. There's some very useful stuff here, from food and drink that would offer major twinkage at low levels to 30 and 34 slot bags that would be welcome at any level. Also, up in the top right corner, a new window with clickable icons that promote a whole raft of Anniversary events.

I have fond memories of the Depths of Darkhollow expansion; it was, I believe, the last one Mrs Bhagpuss and I played together, at level and at time of release. I wouldn't mind poking around in those subterranean caverns again. And anyway, there's so much more to EverQuest than Vanilla/Kunark/Velious. Some of the mid and later content is a match for any of that Golden Age stuff. I mean, you don't keep thousands of players for almost twenty years purely on nostalgia...do you?

With expansions in mind, there was some welcome news in the most recent EQ2 Producer's Letter. It may only be March and everyone playing may still be heavily invested in the most recent expansion, Path of Prophecy, but EQ2 Producer Lauren “Mooncast” McLemore confirms Daybreak is already working on the next: "Last, but not least… expansion! It’s already in progress, but you’ll need to wait a bit longer for more details!"

I'm not sure I can remember an EQ2 expansion being confirmed quite this early in the cycle. It makes me wonder, with the crash-and-burn of major DBG moneymaker H1Z1, whether some more resources and attention might not go the way of the two Norrath titles this year. DCUO seems to be humming along very nicely but other than that the EverQuests might be where Daybreak's fortunes rest right now.

He wouldn't give me his quest. None of the 19th Anniversary NPCs would, although they were all quite willing to chat to me. It seems this year's offering requires ownership of the current expansion. Never mind - I still haven't done most of the quests from the last half-dozen!

As well as confirming the expansion, the Producer's Letter contains another surprise: EQ2 is getting two more holidays. As I may have mentioned before, EQ2 already has more holiday events than just about any other MMO I have ever played. Niami Denmother made the point when she observed only a few days ago, as she prepared to test three upcoming Norrathian holidays, Beast'r, Chronoportals and Bristlebane Day, "Lots and lots of event overlap this year!".

Well, we can add two more to the calendar. This summer sees the addition of The Oceansfull Festival and the Scorched Sky Celebration. Which is wonderful. I'm always up for another holiday. Just so they don't clash with Tinkerfest, that's all I ask!

EQ2 turns fifteen this year, which is one heck of a milestone for an online game but next year is the big two-zero for EverQuest. The media absolutely dote on round-number anniversaries so it could offer a major P.R. opportunity. It might even earn the game some coverage outside the gaming press if DBG play it smart.

And wouldn't the twentieth anniversary be the perfect time to announce a new EverQuest title? Something a little more realistic and pragmatic than the wish-fulfilment fantasy that was EQNext. Something that might actually get made. And played.

Well, we can dream, can't we?

Archetypal Behavior

And we're back. We had the best holiday for a long time and we're pretty good at going on holiday so that's saying quite a lot.

The whole of the Iberian peninsula was in the grip of a ferocious heatwave. There were huge forest fires all over the place, some extremely serious. Temperatures broke records. The nightly news was filled with multicolored maps and spiraling numbers.

We spent a lot of time in the mountains, in forests or by lakes. We avoided cities, staying in small, dusty towns and villages. We drank a lot of water and sat in the shade.

As we traveled we marveled at how many new wonders still remain to be discovered even in places you've criss-crossed so many times before. Also, how readily those old fantasy tropes become real.

We took to parceling up the landscape by race. We passed through wood-elf country into the lands where humans and elves intermingled. Half-elven hinterlands slipped into dwarven stonelands. In the peaks the evidence of giants and rock trolls lay all around us.

Little wonder these images are so prevalent or that they come so easily to mind. In times when it took days to travel from town to town, under the hammer of the sun, surrounded by birdsong and the drone of insects, every new horizon must have shimmered with strangeness and change. They still do.

We drove along dirt tracks to a Visigoth church, whose stones were piled close to a millennia and a half ago, to find it filled with music, the keyholder sheltering from the sun, playing his guitar in the dim, dirt-floored interior, waiting on the off-chance anyone should happen by. We stumbled across pocket castles not much bigger than cottages and craned our necks looking up at sprawling fortifications half the length of a city.

I had good intentions of posting at least once or twice while we were away but technology frustrated those hopes once again. Wi-fi has improved in availability since the days it was listed as an occasional luxury but it has yet to improve significantly in any practical sense. Most days I counted myself lucky if I was able to keep a connection long enough to book ahead for the next night.

I didn't do myself any favors, either. I took three internet-capable devices with me - my Teclast dual-OS 10" tablet, my aging Android 7" and my ancient iPod Touch, now almost a decade old.

I forgot the charging cable for the Teclast and it wouldn't charge from any of the several other cables I did have. The 7" died completely three days into the trip. In the end I relied mostly on the iPod touch, which performed stolidly. One up to Steve Jobs.

It seems that a mobile (cell) phone is expected these days if you plan on staying in anything less well-equipped than a three-star hotel. The Rural Hotels, private apartments and rooms above bars I was picking all expect you to call them by phone when you arrive so the owner can pop on their sandals, put down the pruning shears and trot round from their home several streets away to hand you the key, after which you never see them again.

Mrs Bhagpuss had her iPhone so that shouldn't have been a problem - except that her network, O2, has a known bug wherein it adds spurious extra digits to any non-UK number. I, of course, don't own a mobile at all.

We couldn't phone anyone, anywhere, ever. That led to some shenanigans. We eventually got in to every room I'd booked although there were times I thought we might not. Always depend on the kindness of strangers. Still, I'm taking a mobile next time and I'm buying a local sim card to put in it when I get there.

We agreed that we made for the very model of the Explorer Archetype throughout, with a fair portion of Achiever thrown in (we took a lot of video and photographs and ticked off a lot of culturo-historic Points of Interest). The repeated performance of the Ritual of the Keys gave us a decent smattering of Socializer cred. The only Bartle box we didn't tick was Killer - unless you count the thousand tiny insect bodies smeared across the front of our car.

Due to a peculiarity of this year's working schedule it's less than three months until we go away again. I can hardly wait!

Home Again, Home Again, Jiggitty-Jig

We returned yesterday after an excellent, meandering trip that took us through Portugal's Alentejo region into Spain's Extremadura and South Eastern Andalusia. Mostly we were revisiting places we'd been before but there were plenty of new experiences sprinkled in.

We slept two nights in a tree museum, trudged through the sandy streets of a town that might have come from the Old West and looked down on the clouds from a castle that seemed to be floating in the air. We played no MMOs at all but every day something led one or other of us to comment that we seemed to be living inside one.

WiFi connectivity in hotels has improved immensely and there are whole city squares and parks offering good, free access. We could easily have gamed and I certainly could have kept up with my Feedly feed and even posted a time or three. We did none of that.

For all I've written enthusiastically about devices that can bring internet access to the palm of your hand and the ever-increasing feasibility of playing full-fat MMOs on the go, I find that, in practice, mostly I don't want to. In the daytime we preferred to read or just sit and watch the world going by and after dark, well, we mostly did the same.

We took a case of DVDs but in the end the only one we watched was the 1983 BBC TV series Johnny Jarvis, which Mrs Bhagpuss had never seen and which I had seen only once, when it was originally broadcast, but had never forgotten. Like the author of the linked post I had to resort to a website of dubious provenance to get hold of a copy of this criminally neglected gem in the BBC's archive. I remembered it being brilliant and it turned out to be even better than I recalled. Sometimes rose-tinted glasses see truly after all.

I read the third and fourth of Robin Stevens' Wells and Wong novels, a series intended by its publisher for the "9-12 year old" category but which, like much of the best writing for that age group, is equally suited to an adult readership. Also just about perfect for holiday reading.

After that I moved on to a book I've been meaning to read for a decade or so - Donna Tartt's first novel The Secret History. For some reason I read Tartt's second novel, The Little Friend, before her hugely celebrated debut. I absolutely loved The Little Friend, to the degree that I delayed reading the supposedly superior earlier book, concerned that it might either overshadow its successor or disappoint in comparison.

It did neither. Each is almost exactly as brilliant, compelling, engrossing and delicious as the other. Tartt could really not be any more firmly in my wheelhouse as a writer, so why it's taken me this long to get two-thirds of the way through her very sparse back catalog is a mystery. Next up, The Goldfinch. I'll try to get to that one in less than the ten years it took her to write it.

The Secret History has some unexpected fantastical elements. It reminded me in places of The Secret World. It also made me wish that gaming in general and MMOs in particular had more texture, more variety, more reach. I often wish TSW could have been more of a commercial success than it was. I don't think launching two months before GW2 did it any favors although it was probably the combat that really held it back.

Walking through the sandy streets of El Rocio, past hitching rails and signs in Spanish reading  "No Parking - Reserved for Horsemen", I wondered yet again, where are our MMO Westerns? Reading Donna Tartt and Robin Stevens, I asked myself why are there no murder mystery, private detective or police procedural MMOs?

Why, indeed, do so many pegs on which entire popular culture sub-genres have hung for decades going into centuries now, stand empty and unused in online gaming? I do hope EverJane does well, even though I can't imagine I'll ever play it seriously. We need, we deserve, a lot more than just an endless parade of Elves, Zombies, Pirates and Spaceships.

For all that I enjoyed a whole week with no MMO action and no gaming news, though, within half an hour of dumping my bag in the hall I was logged in and working through more than 200 Massively OP squibs before plunging into the scores and scores of blog posts I'd missed. If these are the dying embers of blog nation thank heavens I wasn't around to feel the heat of the full blaze.

After a couple of hours clearing those decks it was back to GW2- once I'd reset all our accounts. Every time I switch the Router off, as I do if we go away, it generates a new IP address that ANet finds suspicious and requires me to authorize. I wish every MMO was as diligent.

Halloween is in full flow and apparently farming is even more of a thing than in previous years, Merry Mike O'Brien taking a much dimmer view of Diminishing Returns than Colin Johanson ever did. I did some of that for a while but I've never been mad keen on Halloween. I'll wait for Wintersday for my farming sessions.

This weekend I plan to get started on the To Speak As A Dragon quest in EQ2. Feldon at EQ2Wire has an extremely useful guide on how to get ready for the coming expansion and one of the essentials appears to be That Quest, which I've managed to avoid for the last decade or so.

There appears to be a surprising amount of homework required for Kunark Ascending. There are also some disturbing comments in the EQ2Wire thread concerning the current commercial viability of EQ2, referring to rumors that the game could even be "in danger of sunsetting". I'd be surprised if things were that dire but I'm also not entirely sure that the current focus on making things more hardcore and less alt-friendly are well advised.

Whatever the truth of the finances, there's an expansion on the way and that's always cause for celebration. I've pre-ordered mine and now I'm off to prepare for it. It's good to be back.

Home Again, Home Again

Okay, that's not actually a picture of me and Mrs Bhagpuss on holiday but give it a few years...

Anyway, we're back and we had a fantastic time, thanks for asking. One thing that was very noticeable is how the quality of internet access in hotels is improving. We stayed in a different place every night (explorer archetype in full effect) and even in the most out-of-the-way, backwater locations (one of them at the end of a four kilometer unpaved dirt road) I was able to web-browse with barely any delay.

I took my Windows 10 tablet, which meant that, in theory, I could not only have blogged but even played some MMOs. In the end I did neither, preferring to read (actual paper books) and stare at the scenery. I did manage to keep up with my blog reading to some degree, if only to avoid a repeat of last time, when I came home to a waiting list of more than 250 blog posts in my Feedly.

When it comes to blogging, coming back from a break is always revealing. After hitting an all-time high in July my page-views fell by around 20% in August even though I posted twice as often as I usually do, literally every day. Views in September then promptly fell off a cliff although I returned to exactly the same posting schedule as normal.

Train!

In October they hit the bottom of the cliff and started to dig a hole. Going away and not posting at all actually improved my daily page views, partly thanks to Syp linking me in Massively OP's Global Chat, which always leads to a flurry of visits. It rarely generates any comments (well, not here anyway - I try to avoid reading the comment thread at MOP for reasons that should be obvious) but this time it did lead to one lengthy and thoughtful response.

I'm particularly poor at checking older posts for comments. About the only time I remember is when I come back from holiday. I have had comment moderation set to kick in when a post has been up for more than three weeks but I've just doubled that to six to cover for my appalling inability to go back and see what's caught in the net. I have just noticed that there's a field to set an email address for moderation requests (probably should have spotted that earlier...) so with that enabled perhaps I'll be able to do a better job of fielding them.

Judging by the experiences of a number of bloggers it's just as well I wasn't around for the WildStar F2P launch. It seems to have sorted itself out now and I hope to take a look at how things have changed later this week. There are a few practical considerations to take  into account before that can happen, though.

Hey, is that one of the new ranger pets?

One undocumented change that seems to have rolled up with the change to payment model is the dropping of region restrictions. That complicates matters somewhat because I would prefer to play on a U.S. server but the one character I already have is on an E.U. shard because the digital download I got was locked to that region.

I also have an unopened physical box, which I bought from Amazon U.K. but which arrived from a U.S. shipping address, meaning it was, at that time, presumably, region-locked to American servers. To top it off I have another unused digital code from the same source I got my E.U. one, which I bought so that Mrs Bhagpuss and I could play together if she decides to give WS a go. I might just start again.

It is, of course, less than two weeks until Heart of Thorns lands and chances are that will push most other gaming to one side for a while, anyway. The new information on Tarir, The Golden City, is intriguing. It does suggest that, eventually, there could be a city/service hub in HoT that might replace Lion's Arch and/or Divinity's Reach as the center of gravity for non-combat player activity but only after we, the players, progress the storyline far enough for that to happen. What with that and Guild Halls I wonder whether we will see something of the kind of siloing of populations other MMOs have suffered after expansions?

The first of the EQ2 server merges is going to go through the same week HoT hits if DBG stick to the tentative schedule they've announced. That one only affects my older characters that I rarely play any more so there shouldn't be any friction between the two events as far as I'm concerned. Still needs an eye kept on it, though. Don't want anything going missing.

All in all it's shaping up to be a very busy Autumn. Spring would be better for me but I'm sure I'll manage, somehow.

Postcards From Costa Del Sol : FFXIV

Inventory Full is on holiday. Again.

Home Again Home Again Jiggety Jig

As a week's total silence indicates, we've been on holiday. Well, I say holiday. Maybe it was a secret mission where we infiltrated the hometown of the bots. You be the judge.

I never trusted those dwarves...

We also saw a real dragon.

I said "real" not "live".

I was hoping to keep in touch via the amazing new invention of "the internet" but apparently when hotels say "WiFi available in all rooms, free of charge" what they actually mean is "unless your room is more than ten feet from Reception, and then only if anyone knows the password, oh and by "free" we meant 5 Euros an hour". Still, it was nice for my laptop to get out and about for once, even if it never actually got switched on.

Consequently I returned to over 250 unread blog posts in my Reader. If, as was supposed to happen, we got WiFi installed at work while I was away, I might get through the backlog by the weekend. If not, well I read and enjoyed them all in another quantum universe.

Off to see what's happening in Tyria. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.

Jingle All The Way: Rift

Trion really missed a trick when they named the Rift midwinter holiday Yuletide. I can't believe no-one thought of Riftmas!  But then, MMOs have always shied away from mentioning Christmas directly, preferring to reference its pagan precursors and commercial spin-offs. Much less controversial that way.

It's hard now to recall the times when an MMO holiday celebration came as a real novelty. There are so many these days that some games even give you an in-game calendar to keep track of them all. Occasionally the celebrations belong entirely to the imaginary world in which they take place or mark an anniversary in the life of the game but mostly they are lightly-disguised analogues of real-world events. Errolisi Marr, Norrath's Goddess of Love, holds her Erollisi Day celebrations right around the time we're all opening our Valentine's cards for example, and turkeys tremble in Azeroth when the Pilgrim's Bounty holiday rolls around just as WoW players sit down to their Thanksgiving meal.

Still Life with Fish

And so to Telara. A society riven by internecine conflict, locked in existential struggle, trapped in a world where at any moment the sky may spew out a roiling, thrashing rift filled with extra-planar nightmares bent on nothing less than the complete and utter destruction of life itself. Time to break out the fairy lights!

In fact there does seem to be some shaky internal logic. Let's forget for a moment that Telara appears to be a world without seasons, which calls the very concept of a Midwinter festival into question. Let's forget that the entire continent is overrun by psychotic dragon cultists and Cthonic hordes. Really, let's forget all that. If the people living there can forget it, then who are we to argue?

As far as I can work out, back in the summer during Rift's first Big Event, one of the six dragons trying to invade Telara was killed. I haven't done the Greenscale's Blight raid and there is much dispute over whether the Greenscale in question is the "actual" dragon or an avatar thereof. All the usual MMO nonsense. The upshot, though, is that the Fae who came under his control are now free.

No CRB checks in Telara, it seems.

And apparently there's nothing a free Bogling likes better than to slip on the old red felt jacket and bobble hat and make like  a Department Store Santa.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about Rift's Yuletide festival is how very closely it follows the established Rift Event pattern. It's exactly the same grab-bag of minor lore quests, non-combat dailies and special rifts that we've come to expect. I'm not even going to go through them in any detail. They are pretty good if you like that sort of thing, which as it happens I do.

Oh, you look cute now...

What I did really enjoy was the level of detail. I might find the idea of draping decorations all over a city that's supposed to fighting for its very right to exist pretty ridiculous. (Okay, there's really no need for the "might" in that last sentence). Nevertheless, if you 're going to decorate you may as well do it in style and Trion have thrown style on by the bucketful.

I loved the strings of lights that really flash on and off like proper Christmas lights. I loved the Bogling belief that no decorating theme is complete without fish. The trees and the piles of presents are pretty much pitch-perfect. The clouds that hover above the heads of the humbugging Yuletide deniers, literally raining on their personal parade, are a touch of genius.

And yet something isn't right. But that will have to wait for next time.