Take a Moment : NBI

I've been writing for decades but I've been blogging for less than a year so I feel somewhat diffident about giving advice. I've learned more from the NBI than anyone's likely to learn from me and I certainly don't have much insight to offer on the technical side of putting a blog together. So this is more an observation than a piece of advice. If you plan on playing MMOs and blogging about them as well, it helps if you have a job where you can blog from work.

I mentioned last time that before blogging existed I was deeply invested in the zine scene. For something over a decade I wrote, designed, laid out, pasted up, photocopied, collated and mailed apazines. It took up some of my free time but I was fortunate to have a job that let me get a lot of pages finished during the working day. I was able to be enormously productive without really losing out on anything else I wanted to do.

I don't have a job like that any more, so I do most of my posting at the weekend. Fortunately, like Travis McGee I am taking my retirement on the installment plan. I never work Sundays or Mondays and every other week I don't work Saturday or Tuesday either. Those are my blogging days. It works well for mood pieces and theorycrafting but not so well when I want to jump the news train. Sometimes I spot something I'd like to respond to but before I can get anything done the moment's passed.

I really must get a cushion for this chair

Blogging about MMOs isn't always conducive to playing them, either. Keeping up a blog can eat into the day and playing MMOs is already a famously time-consuming hobby. If you plan on doing both there may be conflict and choices may have to be made. Are you going to potter around sorting out your banks? Ask if anyone in the Guild wants to do anything? Or should you knuckle down and get a post done?

An average post takes me a couple of hours, a really well-considered one could take a whole afternoon. Starting up a blog doesn't magically add bonus hours to your day so being able to take your blogging hours from a different pool than your gaming hours helps a lot and I'd guess from the times the posts tend to appear that many, probably most of the blogs I follow are done at work.

Where did I put that blasted thesaurus?

Since it's unlikely and indeed inadvisable that you'll be willing to change your profession just to get more blogging time in, my actual advice is to pace yourself and develop your time management skills. Don't paint yourself into a corner where every post takes hours to produce. Throw in a few short squibs between the dissertations. (Classic "Do what I say, not what I do" there!). Work out where the blogging time's going to come from before you find yourself resenting the tyranny of the blank page that takes you away from the thing that brought you there in the first place - the pleasure of playing MMOs.

And as others have said, don't obsess about numbers, page counts, followers, traffic. Write what you want to write, when you want to write it. Speak when you have something to say, not just to hear the sound of your own voice. Some of my favorite bloggers, like Potshot for example, seem to post once in age but when they do it's like getting a surprise package in the mail. Gordon at We Fly Spitfires dropped from posting almost daily to about once a week but I look forward to seeing what he has to say just as much as I ever did.

I guess what I'm saying is relish your gaming and your writing. Don't let blogging about MMOs turn into yet another MMO grind. And if you can get The Man to pay you while you blog, well that's just sugar on top!

Once Bitten : Fallen Earth

Who can say what made me decide patch up Fallen Earth after all this time. The recent flurry of publicity all came later.   It's pushing a year since Gamers First refitted it for Free to Play and beyond a couple of quick pop-ins I've scarcely thought about the post-apocalyptic sandbox-lite at all. Then on a whim a few days ago I dug out the launcher and stepped back into New Flagstaff.

It always seems to be sunset when I wake up in Fallen Earth. Night and day cycles are long here. Day's bright, night's dark and sunset is orange. Really orange. Skyshrine orange. Once my eyes adjusted to the glare, everything looked a lot better than I remembered. Often  does coming back to an MMO after a long break. I can think of several reasons for that, not least a new monitor and graphics card but developers do have this odd urge to keep tweaking the graphics up and there's been a little of that, definitely. Whatever, a wasteland never looked prettier.

Oh no, not you again

Mounts in Fallen Earth live in the world. There's no packing them away in your haversack. "How do I put my horse away?" is a question I must have heard in the help channel a dozen times an hour when the game was new and bless me if I didn't just hear it again twice in five minutes. It's not my place to poke fun, though - I know my horse doesn't go in my pack but do I know where my horse is?

Tastes best roasted in its shell. Allegedly.

See, I had a horse, but I haven't seen him for nearly a year. Or fed him. If this was a real sandbox, he'd be a bleached pile of bones by now. Then someone would have stolen the bones. He must be dead.

Nope! He was right where I left him! And even in the middle of a bunch of horses all standing around outside New Flagstaff's open-air bank looking pretty much the same, I knew which one was mine! I really did. I looked at them all, said to myself "That's him over there", moseyed over, mounted up and rode away. That's the true, unbreakable bond between a cowboy and his horse, that is!

I'll bend your flamin' ariel pal!

Yes, they say Fallen Earth is a post-apocalyptic MMO but we all know it's at least half a Western. It's like the Wild Bunch meets Westworld. With chickens. I like to think of my character there as a cross between Ian Hunter and Clint Eastwood, although I'm not sure Clint beat bandits to death with a sledgehammer and I'm almost certain Ian Hunter never did.

So I rode out of town. With the sun going down I cast a long shadow. Anyone would in that hat. I was ready for trouble. Alright, I was looking for trouble and I found some, too. More than I could handle, since it turned out I couldn't remember how to fight. I tried everything - left click, right click, double-click, A for Attack. All the obvious options.

Know what it is? Middle mouse button.

My complacent horse watched me take three long, embarrassing jogs up the cracked highway towards Post 23 before I worked that out. He wouldn't have been so complacent if it was ants not bandits chasing me. Ants eat horses. Takes them a while, too. Remember that next time you give me that horse laugh, Old Glue.

So now I know how to swing a baseball bat, I'm safely holed up in the Enforcer stronghold at Post 23 and I even fed my horse. I always wanted to make it to Sector 3. It's too late for Monkeytown but I'd still like to see some real trees. Have horse, will travel.

Positively The Last GW2 Post : GW2

Until the next beta weekend, that is. When is that, anyway?

WvWvW

• First attempt Saturday night: complete failure. Couldn't even find the zone. Went through the Mists, ended up in Lion's Arch.

• Second attempt Sunday night: found the zone straight off. What kind of an idiot would miss it? It's right there!

• Three very enjoyable hours defending a massive castle. Saw three more keeps on map, one for each world. Never went anywhere near them. Thought that was the whole thing Marveled at the size of it. Realized reading the Wiki this morning that was just one of four WvW zones! Understand now what all those portals in Lion's Arch were for.

That's me on the left, protecting our door!

• Fighting was constant, fluid, fun. No lag, no hitching, no strobing. Died just three times in three hours, recorded fourteen kills. Doesn't sound much but the Monthly WvW Kill Target Achievement is only fifteen. No clue what causes a kill to register. Must have been involved in ten times as many. Contribution? Killing blow? Nifty hat?. Who knows?

•  Verdict: Great if it stays packed. That's a lot of space, though.

Random Stuff I Liked

• Charr running on all fours. Bounding, really. Feels gloriously non-human.

• Creatures running at low health. Better still, creatures running, meeting a stronger ally, joining up and coming back. Saw this happen repeatedly with rock drake hatchlings and rock drakes.

I will if you will...

• The vertiginous climb and dive in Lion's Arch. Bit of a Baywatch vibe going on in Lion's Arch, now I come to think about it.

• Buying and selling from anywhere but only being able to collect money and goods from a Broker in town. Ideal compromise between facility and worldliness. Bet that gets changed.

• Creatures fighting each other. Harpies hunting warthogs on Diessa Plateau sticks in my mind but there were others.

• Discovering recipes. Yes it's all on a wiki already but I have enough willpower not to look until I'm stuck and fed up. 

• Talking rats! Found one in a Lion's Arch and a Citizen too! Player race! Player race!

Random Stuff I Didn't Like

• Animals dropping weapons and armor. What is it with game developers? How hard can it be to put appropriate drops on mobs? Spend all that time banging on about immersion and then stuff your wolves with magic swords.

• On a related note, what's with the Globby Goo? Drops off everything. Beta placeholder for unfinished loot tables or global parasitic infection? Either way, get rid of it!

• The extreme speed of learning skills. Shortbow dropped for me around level 16. Off a warthog probably. Pigs are notoriously skilled archers. Took around 15 minutes to unlock all five skills. A few hours per skill would be better. If skills are going to unlock in minutes might as well hand them out with the weapon.

Let's see your papers "Citizen"

• The extreme speed of leveling. Level 19, give or take, in a weekend. I was locked out of the game for a few hours, had to learn new game systems and environments so that's fast. Too fast. As I said in feedback in game. If the famous flat level curve (can a curve be flat?) is still in the plan that means level 80 in around a week. Call it a fortnight to allow for work and sleep. Six months would be better. Three at the outside. Maybe it does slow down. I hope so.

• Super-fast crafting. That thing where if you make a stack of items the first takes a second,  the next half a second, the third a quarter of a second and so on. Really annoying. Watching the progress bar tick down remorselessly on a stack is one of crafting's great pleasures. Also good for making coffee and checking email.

• Naming WvW teams Red, Green and Blue. The enemy's already anonomized enough with all names removed. Hard to work up any "World Pride" when no-one even knows the name of the World.

• Personal Story. I could do without this. Mine was good, but it's out of kilter. Instanced single-player RPG storylines don't fit with an open party open world. Can you even invite someone else into your personal story instance?

That's all I made notes on. Nothing game-breaking there. Not even game-bending. I was enjoying myself far too much to quibble. Not that quibbling isn't enjoyable in itself

Roll on next Beta Weekend. Better yet, roll on launch!

Over Here! I Think You Missed One! : Realms Online

In that way things have of coming together sometimes, Zubon at Kill Ten Rats posted something recently about Salem, an MMO known in so far is it is known at all for its aspiration to permadeath. He came to hear of the game via Heartless, who had posted about it along with two other in-development MMOs, Otherlands and Dominus. Heartless headed his piece "The 3 MMOs you ARE NOT paying attention to but should be", somewhat ironically since one of the three, Dominus, had gone dark only a day or two earlier.

Zubon not only hadn't been paying attention to these titles but as he clarified he'd "stopped actively paying attention to game development years ago". Meanwhile, SynCaine had a busy discussion popping under the post he'd evocatively and provocatively titled "I Miss Massively". In the course of that thread Saucelah observed of Massively that " most of their stories are just write-ups of PR releases", an inarguable truism about which I observed that it was precisely as an aggregator of press releases that I found Massively most useful.

I do like to know what's going on. Even if I have no plans ever to play a particular MMO I still like to keep an eye on its progress. For heaven's sake, I still drop in and lurk on the Alganon forums once in a while! Massively's feed sits in my blog reader and I scan the headlines daily. If I spot an MMO that I don't recognize I'll click through and read the whole article. I'd been vaguely following the development of Dominus, Salem and Otherlands that way for months.

I have (had in the case of the now-defunct Dominus) no great interest in the first two but Otherlands is an MMO I mean to play so I sat up when they recently invited applications to alpha-test. I'm broadly in favor of beta-testing MMOs but I'm more ambivalent about alphas. I'm interested in giving feedback on gameplay but not so much in doing unpaid work to ensure the server architecture is solid and the game engine functions.

There are exceptions. I am quite hyped for the upcoming City of Steam alpha, scheduled to begin sometime in July. I'm hoping for an invite to that one not only because I very much like what I've seen of the game so far but also because Mechanist Games' idea of an alpha test looks rather like some other developers' picture of a game that's fit to launch.

There's been much discussion of late on the pros and cons of paying to beta-test. Gamigo, producers of Otherlands, aren't asking for your money yet but they've found another way to twist your arm. They've combined the publicity hype over winning a place in their alpha with an application process that makes it clear that all you'll win is the opportunity to do some serious work for no pay. I read the application form and decided to pass on their generous offer. I'll wait til open beta or launch, thanks all the same.

So I knew about these MMOs and many more from scanning the headlines, which is how I ran across Realms Online. Or Regnum. Same game, two names. When I noticed this news release a couple of weeks back it piqued my interest. Mrs Bhagpuss had been asking if there were any MMOs we hadn't played that have animal races and I hadn't been able to find any. Then up pop these Lamai, looking something like bushbabies waving swords.

Off I went to the website to look at this new MMO. Only it isn't. New, that is. Realms Online is about to celebrate its fifth anniversary in less than three weeks' time. So much for me having my finger on the pulse of MMO development. Or indeed my eye on the ball.

More surprising than my ignorance (pretty much anything would be) Realms Online appears to be something a lot of people seem to have been asking for - a Dark Age of Camelot clone. Out for five years, servers on three continents, known under two names, filling a gaping three-way RVR market hole, how did I miss it? Was it just me? Did you all play it years ago and now you've all moved on, leaving me to step out of character creation into the snow just as the servers merge? For the love of Mike, it's Argentina's most successful MMO! Oh, wait a moment...

Anyway, I've found it now. It's downloaded and I've played it and so far I like it. It's very old-school, feels like an MMO from quite a while before WoW and I very much doubt I shall ever give it a shake you'd call fair. Too many MMOs, too little time. Especially if new old ones keep creeping out of the undergrowth to ambush me like this.

Still, whenever I feel the urge to be a viking bushbaby with a sword, Realms Online will be my go-to game. And who among us can honestly say that's an urge they'll never have?

A Cow Bunga : GW2

Let me tell you some things about the Charr.

"The charr race was forged in the merciless crucible of war. It is all they know. War defines them...Their culture has developed into a military state where they are raised as warriors from birth"

Source: GW2 Official Wiki

Words not enough? Go see for yourself.

How odd, then, that last Sunday morning my Charr Ranger found himself sitting down beside a Lonely Cow to cheer her up before bowing to a Dignified Cow to enhance her sense of self-worth. All this after catching wasps in a jar and feeding them to a cow who Wanted Something.

The opening Charr tutorial zone is manic in the extreme, all martial commands and chaos culminating in a hectic fight with a powerful undead Duke. The level 1 to 10 zone around the spectacularly militarized city, The Black Citadel, is torn by war from end to end. As you'd expect.

Then comes Diessa Plateau, the next zone over. They do a lot of farming there. Charr are giant cats, after all. They eat meat. A lot of meat. It has to come from somewhere. So the Charr raise cattle. I don't have a problem with that. It's how they raise them...

Cows, huh, yeah! What are they good for?

Almost as soon as I stepped out onto the plateau someone warned me there was a farm where boviculture had taken an odd turn. Listen to him. Odd scarcely covers it. This farmer, by reputation the finest on the plateau, feeds his cows on insects and runs them in races. When you meet him you find he also segregates his cows by emotional state. Naturally he wants your help. I imagine it's hard to find agricultural workers up to his exacting standards.

Leaving aside the question of how, given that all Charr are supposedly under military discipline and orders at all times, my ranger is free to come and go wherever he pleases ad lib and ad infinitum (a question which deserves no more consideration in an MMO than "How can I swim in this full suit of steel plate armor?") we come to the less-easily brushed aside question of whimsy.

Sunbathing after dark. In a bikini and boots. Whimsy or a cry for help?

All MMOs have some but how much is too much? GW2 has a lot. I have a very high tolerance for whimsy indeed but even I found myself questioning just exactly what I was doing chasing wasps with a Mason Jar so I could feed them to a cow.

No such qualms disturbed the equilibrium of the truly inspired cow-launching event, which to me exemplified everything ArenaNet are claiming on behalf of their world. Alright, not everything. I couldn't swear it was "dynamic". But I did stumble upon it and become caught up in the jaw-dropping insanity for fifteen or twenty glorious, disbelieving minutes.

I won't spoil the whole thing. Just go watch this. It's short, we'll wait.

There, don't you want to go do the whole event now? That is Charr-appopriate whimsy. In spades. The Meatoberfest I alluded to in an earlier post is another example of something amusing and unserious that still fits what we think we know about the Charr.

Charr butcher likes to work naked. Gonna argue?

I'm not saying I didn't enjoy the farm-related tasks. For me as a player they were entertaining enough to spend half an hour on, although I doubt it's content I'd go out of my way to revisit. The twinfold problem seemed to be that the basic tasks (farm labor) were too mundane to be of concern either to me or my Charr avatar and that, realizing this, the developer had perhaps gone into whimsy overdrive trying to gussy them up into something less...Farmville.

I'm up for whimsy. When the Asura show their handlebar-eared faces I'm expecting plenty but I think the Charr sense of humor should be a tad more robust (although come to think of it the Asura are about as funny as a cabbage patch doll stuffed with broken glass when you get to know them).

How much whimsy is too much may come down to a matter of taste. The line between what's whimsical and what's plain daft may change with the light. I wouldn't like to see a halfling prang a live cow two hundred yards into the sky over the Shire but my only concern as a Charr would be the waste of all that meat. On the other hand sitting next to a cow to cheer her up sounds like quite right and proper behavior for a halfling.

Let's remember who we're supposed to be and try to get all our whimsical ducks in a line, shall we?

How The Bhagpuss Came To Be: NBI

The New(bie) Blogger Initiative requires three things of me: 

1. An Introduction, 
2. Some Advice 
3. A Conclusion.

I'm good with Number One and Syp is going to provide Number Three. It's Number Two I'm not so sure about.

I first thought of starting a blog back in February 2010. Look here and you can see how far I got! I found a host (Blogger) and came up with a name. Here's my first piece of advice:

The Name of the Blog

Check if someone else thought of the amazingly clever, original blog name you just came up with before you commit to it emotionally or practically. Gosh! Who'd ever have thought it? There's another Inventory Full and they're still above me on a Google search! That said, I've not noticed any confusion or animosity between us since I camped on their lawn so it probably doesn't matter all that much...

I came up with the look and layout for Inventory Full in a couple of hours and then took about a year and a half to come up with my first real post. Why so long? Fear. Second piece of advice:

Don't Be Afraid

It won't be anything like as scary as you think it's going to be. My main concern was harsh feedback. It is to laugh! I got one comment on that first post, and that took ten days. (Thanks, Fluff Factor, now known as CRT Musings). If you end up being Tobold or SynCaine then being abused by complete strangers will become meat and drink to you but it's much more likely the only voices you'll hear will be friendly ones because people who don't like your blog won't waste a nanosecond reading it, far less stop by just to say something snide.

Inventory Full is my first and so far only blog, but I come from a very long background of writing for relatively small, obsessive, responsive audiences. I co-published my first fanzine back in the punk wars in the late '70s, moved to co-publishing a comics fanzine in the early '80s and went on to contribute to many more comiczines in the U.K. and U.S.A. throughout that decade. I was also heavily involved in the APAzine scene right through to the late 1990s.

Then I discovered Everquest and all that stopped, replaced by endless posting on countless forums, primarily EQ's long-gone but never-forgotten original TNZ. I used to post under a different name but sometime in the mid-noughties, for some reason I now forget I needed a new identity. I was sitting at work listening to the radio and two news items came on in quick succession, one about the Oliver Postgate children's TV character Bagpuss and another a report about something terrible going on in Bhagdad. Which brings me to my third piece of advice:

Think About How You Want To Be Known

If your blog gains any traction at all you'll be stuck with whatever you decided to call both it and yourself for the foreseeable future so make sure you can live with it indefinitely. Do you think I imagined I'd be going by the name of Bhagpuss, possibly for the rest of my life? If I'd thought it through, don't you think I'd have come up with something, well, cooler and less demented?

So, I'd named myself and made my blog but I was too nervous to step out into traffic and use it. Yet at the same time I was posting wildly, profligately, and often irrelevantly on a hundred other blogs and forums. Next piece of advice:

Get Your Name Out There Even Before You Start

If you want to give yourself at least a fighting chance of having someone read your first blog, try to build up a subliminal awareness of your existence in your potential audience. Comment on blogs you read and try to comment appositely, relevantly and intelligently. (Do not, however, follow my example and feel that you have to comment on every post because not to do so would be rude. This is a hangover from my apazine days, where to leave anyone's zine uncommented on was tantamount to a direct insult. Blog comment threads don't work that way, as I eventually worked out after Zubon from Kill Ten Rats banned me from commenting on his posts there due to the disruptive effect of my completely irrelevant pontifications. A much needed lesson, thanks Zubon, although one which I can only claim partly to have learned even now...)

In the end I largely embarrassed myself into getting my blog off the ground. Not infrequently my comments on various blogs were longer then the original post. A couple of bloggers pulled my name and/or comment out and used it in the title or body of their own posts. While the attention was great, it was starting to feel unseemly, taking up all that space on other peoples' blogs while not offering any means to reciprocate. Which brings me to my final piece of advice and more importantly encouragement.

Just Do It

Really. Just do it. For the love of all that's holy I do not want to invoke Richard Branson here (or anywhere, unless perhaps there's a large wicker structure standing by) but really, just do it. If you don't like it you can stop but at least then you'll know whether you like it or not. And you probably will, at least for a while. It's fun. Sort of. Sometimes. When it works.

Go on, give it a shot. I've added all the blogs that have outed themselves on the NBI forums
in a Blogroll to the right. If yours isn't on there it's because your URL didn't work - link in the comments and I'll add you. Some of the blogs on there get more traffic than I do and I think calling them "New" might be a stretch but hey, I haven't been doing this for a year yet and here I am handing out advice so if they want to be "New" then they're New. For this month at least.

I haven't had time to visit all of them yet. I will keep the sidebar up for the whole of May and then I plan on merging my current "Places We Go" list into that much superior updating format while winnowing out the places I don't in fact go from both of them. If you've read this far you probably have the time and stamina to go visit some of the links. If you do, tell em who sent you!

Newbie Blogger Initiative

So, I get this email a few weeks back from Syp of Bio Break and Massively fame and since I don't get so many emails from other bloggers straight out of the blue I am naturally intrigued and reply right away. It turns out he has this project going to bring bloggers and would-be bloggers together in a species of kaffeeklatsch only without the coffee, sad to say.

Well, I am flattered to be asked which goes without saying, and all the more when I see who else is in the gang. Around sixty, which is a lot of bloggers and in that three score there are plenty of names I know and plenty of blogs I read, too. Some time this month we are all going to write about how we came to this blogging game, which is a story I am looking forward to hearing from some of the names on that list and that is for sure. There's a list right down at the bottom (borrowed from  MMOQuests without permission! Thanks Stargrace!). If you haven't visited any of these fine sites before then here's your chance!.

Anyway, it seems the point of all this hard work on Syp's part is to encourage anyone that has  been thinking of starting their own blog to take the plunge and to set up some place where they can get advice and feedback and bounce ideas around. On that account he has set up a forum and invited anyone that is interested to take a look-see and maybe throw in their hat.

Until then, if anyone has any questions, other than why I seem to be channeling the ghost of Damon Runyon or maybe Bill Kotzwinkle, the  

Newbie Blogger Initiative is over here

So if you are wondering whether this blogging thing could be for you come over and hang out! Ask questions, get advice, share ideas.There's never going to be a better time to get started. Just remember, there is no coffee. Or cake.


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