If You Can't Say Something Nice...

Thanks to my current obsession with Noah's Heart, it's been a while since I last logged into... well, anything else. I am still subscribed to Daybreak All Access, though, and my annual renewal is due soon, so I thought I probably ought at least to drop by to collect my monthly stipend of 500DBC. 

As it turned out, although today's the day the next handout arrives (It's the fifteenth of the month for me although I'm not clear on whether that's a universal or if it's tied to the day I paid my last sub.), when I logged in it was still too early in the morning to collect it. All Daybreak titles operate on PDT, what with the studio being in San Diego, and as I write this it's just gone one in the morning in California.

When someone over there wakes up and unlocks the imaginary safe (I have a vague idea it happens at 9am PDT) my DBC stash will break 27k. This raises an interesting philosophical point, somewhat akin to the old "tree falling in a forest" koan: if you have money that you never spend, is it really money? Especially when it isn't even real money in the first place.

Here's a link to an article in The New Yorker. It's by Anne Wiener, the author of Uncanny Valley: A Memoir, which I've just added to my Amazon wishlist on the strength of it. 

The piece is called Money in the Metaverse and it's one of the better - and better-researched - takes on why so many rich people are so keen to sell us on their concept of the future. It doesn't really tell us anything we didn't already know but the way she puts it all together is instructive and some of the quotes she pulls out are blood-curdling.  

I strongly recommend reading the whole thing but if you have virtual crops to water or pets to feed and just don't have time for long-form prose, the tl:dr is it's going to make those rich people even richer and help them keep the rest of us where they think we should be: down.

I jest, of course. If you're six paragraphs into this post you self-evidently do have time to read. Chances are you also have time to write. It's an odd thing about mmorpg players; they have to be more than averagely literate. There's a deal of reading and writing involved.

Even though voice has been an option since the near-earliest days - I remember people arguing in /ooc about which VOIP package was better back when I was hanging out in Lake of Ill Omen around the turn of the millennium - I'd bet even now, a couple of decades later, most conversation in most mmorpgs happens in text. Players either don't talk at all (most of them) or they talk a lot, or so it's always seemed.

Certainly that's always been the case on official company forums, where it used to be said that one per cent posted, nine per cent read and everyone else didn't even know the game they were playing had forums. All of this, random as it may seem, came to mind this morning when I was logging into EQII. 

As I've mentioned once or twice, these days the Daybreak Launcher has a very useful News section. EQII patches and loads faster than most games I play but there's still usually time to scan the latest headlines and click on anything that looks interesting. It's where I get most of my EQII information these days since none of the feeds I set up in Feedly ever seem to work. 

This morning one particular headline caught my eye: terse in the extreme, it read, simply, Forum Guidelines. Odd. Surely we already have those? Why are they suddenly back in the news? 

I'll get to the "why" in a moment. Let's cover the "what" first. Here's the full forum post from Angeliana, Senior Community Manager. 

I found it an interesting read in its own right, not just from the perspective of an EQII player and occasional forum-user. I'd be interested to know exactly what's been changed from the previous iteration, although obviously not so interested as to actually go find the old version and make a line-by-line comparison.

Whatever the details, I'm pretty sure the new rules have been tightened significantly. There's very little wiggle-room here for rules lawyers, of which the EverQuest games have always had far too many. As well as clarifying exactly what constitutes an offence under the rules, there's also no doubt about the penalties, which range from closure and removal of threads to suspensions and bans.

Of particular note are the specific examples relating to cheating, which now cannot be mentioned on the forums at all, let alone discussed: "If you wish to report cheating, please contact Customer Service, or privately contact the community team." No more posting the details of an exploit while claiming you're only doing it to draw attention to the problem. 

Similar blanket bans apply to things like personal attacks, illegal activities and trolling. Suggesting someone should lose their job, a common response to just about any update, is now specifically forbidden. Generic abuse of groups is as unacceptable as direct attacks on individuals, meaning you can't call out the company either. 

The harshest sanctions are very properly reserved for "Attacks specifically regarding race, religion, political affiliation, physical or mental attributes, or sexual orientation", which are "grounds for immediate suspension or banning", as they well should be, although I am a little surprised to see "political affiliation" on that list. Has that ever been an actual issue, I wonder?

Perhaps the most significant line in the whole post is this definition: "Trolling can include: Non-constructive feedback or comments."  Granted, it's framed as a conditional but even so it's a very strict interpretation of the concept. 

It doesn't mean a complete shutdown of all criticism; as it says at the top of the post, "Disagreements with others are acceptable but must be expressed in a reasonable and polite manner." It would certainly make you think twice before hitting "Submit" on yet another rant about how summoners are broken, all the same.

The whole thing takes the tone of a no-nonsense teacher, restating the ground rules after coming back to the classroom and finding everyone rolling around on the ground, fighting. Whether it'll have any effect remains to be seen.

As to why it's happening right now, I have my suspicions. As we've seen, Daybreak's portfolio brings in roughly three-quarters of all EG7's revenue. There are no more acquisitions planned and future plans seem to revolve around growing the current titles. 

Most of the work will necessarily go towards managing the installed base but if there's to be any hope of attracting interest from outside the core group of existing players, it's crucial the games maintain a clean, professional, successful image. That means busy-looking servers but also good word of mouth. Few things create a worse first impression on discovering a new game than hearing it being trash-talked by the people already playing.

The EQII forums have been a cesspit for that kind of self-hatred on occasion. There's always someone ready to jump into any positive thread to derail it with their jaundiced take on everything they think is wrong with the game. It makes you wonder why some people play at all.

And there's some history here. When EverQuest was the most successful mmorpg in the western hemisphere and player numbers were growing faster than the servers could handle, the forums became so toxic SOE had to close them down completely. The fear was the flood of curious newbies would drain to a trickle as they came to check out the amazing new game they'd heard about only to find it was apparently a broken, buggy mess no-one in their right mind would play, even on a bet.

The official EQ forums went offline for weeks and when they came back the rules were severe and the moderation draconian. It took a few years before things loosened up again, by which time World of Warcraft had all the players and all the problems and no-one was googling "Is EverQuest any good?" any more.

If I take anything at all from this unexpected restatement of the ground rules it's that at least someone at DBG is paying attention to the forums at last. For far too long the boards have been like the back room of a members' only club, where the same handful of old soaks come back again and again to bicker and fight and tell each other how the world ought to be run and how much better a job they could do than all these kids nowadays.

It also underscores the refreshed commitment to the future of the existing games, as does the ongoing renovation and smartening of all the portals, from the launcher to the website. How realistic it is to build a successful future on a clutch of ageing games is something we'll find out only if it happens but it seems someone's at least trying to make the most of the options available.

Just so long as no-one in the boardroom gets a bee in their bonnet about crypto or NFTs, we should be fine. But that would never happen in a responsible, reputable games company, would it?

The Rain, Arlo Parks and Other Things

I still have an unconscionable amount to say about Noah's Heart but I think it's probably time for a break on that front. I also have a music post brewing but I'm working Saturday and Sunday, so I think I'll save it for the weekend. Music posts are always relaxing and fun to put together after a long day at the book mines.

Since it's the end of the week, let's have a good old Friday grab-bag, why not? I'm sure I can come up with something... 

I'll even throw in a few screenshots I took last night the Olmec Rainforest, the brand-new island that got added to Noah's Heart in the most recent patch. It's very close to the mainland. I think you're supposed to arrive by boat but I was able to fly across the narrow straits on my jetpack. Did I mention we get jetpacks?

All the content there requires level 75 so I wasn't able to do anything more than ride around but it looks amazing. Shame about the never-ending rain but then, y'know, rainforest...

Ok, here we go! This is a good one. Sure to cheer you up.

Snoop Dogg and Eminem to deliver metaverse-inspired performance at 2022 MTV VMAs. 

I lifted that verbatim from a headline at the NME, where news reporting tends to be text-book neutral in tone. If you click through and read the whole thing, you'll find it's even more disturbing than it sounds.

Snoop and Eminem are inarguably two of the biggest, most recognizeable names in the most commercially successful form of popular music in the world. Granted, both of them base their fame on work done quite some years ago, but they still have A-list name recognition and immense cultural clout. 

Their impramature is significant so it shouldn't be too surprising they've given it to the best-known of the upstart NFT/Crypto tyros, Yuga Labs, the Bored Ape people. That in itself is concerning to those of us who fear the wrong metaverse is coming but there's something a lot closer to home to worry about for mmorpg fans, specifically.

The VMA performance is going to be actual not virtual, unlike the upcoming Charlie Puth gig in Fortnite. (I had to google Charlie to find out who he is. I'd heard the name but I thought he was an actor.). It will apparently be inspired by “the world of the Otherside metaverse”, which is “a gamified, interoperable metaverse” that “blends mechanics from massively multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPGs) and web3-enabled virtual worlds”. It will, of course, be fully integrated with and reliant upon NFTs and Cryptocurrency, specifically ApeCoin.

Given the heft of the names here, I think it's reasonable to feel a frisson of doubt about where this all might be leading. I know we all like to handwave the future away when it doesn't suit us but change happens. None of us want this kind of multiverse but we might be getting it anyway.

Of course, as we know, making mmorpgs is a lot harder than people seem to think it is and takes a lot longer. Making mmorpgs that anyone wants to play for more than a few weeks is even harder still. 

The chances of Otherside turning out to be something other than a cultural curiosity seem slim, especially since even Mark Zuckerberg, with all his money, doesn't seem to be making much progress. On the other hand, I'm old enough to remember when mobile phones were comedy gold and the bursting of the dot-com bubble spelled the end of the internet. I wouldn't assume all this is going where we'd like it to go just yet.

It was Guild Wars 2's 10th Anniversary this week but I couldn't bring myself to care, much less log in. It's been well over a month since the last time I played. I understand there's no such thing as a cure and it's one day at a time but things are looking good.

There's certainly nothing in the current celebrations to tempt me back. If there's any company that underplays anniversaries like ArenaNet I've been fortunate enough not to play their games long enough to notice. Here's what you can get for ten years loyal service:

•   Birthday Booster (guaranteed) (2)  Teleport to Friend (guaranteed) (5)
•   Bag of Spirit Shards (guaranteed)  Birthday Card (guaranteed)
•   Black Lion Statuette (guaranteed) (2)  Proof of Legend (guaranteed)

Let's summarise that, shall we? 

• Two basic utitlity items you can get from daily login rewards. My banks are stuffed with them. 
• A bag of the kind of shards I get dozens, maybe even hundreds, of every day. 
• A "birthday card" with no picture and no greeting that can be converted into five thousand Karma, the game's legacy currency, of which I have tens of millions already.
• A couple of tokens for the cash shop. Enough to buy you some extremely basic utility items and nothing more.
• And finally, the one item original to the actual 10th anniversary itself, a measly single token to go towards the new "Decade’s armor set". It won't even buy you a single piece.

Compared to the never-ending shower of gifts anyone playing any of the latest imprted titles has come to expect, this is a joke. Those games also depend on cash shop sales but somehow they manage to give away mounts, skins, hats, weapons and every kind of boost and utility as a matter of course. Would it really bankrupt ANet to come up with some actual gifts once in a decade instead of clearing out the lint from the bottom of Evon Gnashblade's pockets? No, it bloody wouldn't. 

In other GW2 news, the game finally went live on Steam this week but only for new accounts. Existing accounts can't be linked for tedious but understandable financial reasons (Valve's 30% rolling finder's fee, basically.) I did briefly consider making a new account, as I did when the game went Free to Play, so I could do a blog post about it. I still might but as far as I can tell there isn't any substantive difference between the Steam version and the regular F2P so there's probably not much to say. Also, I really don't need a fifth GW2 account.

And in other, other GW2 news, it also arrived on GeForce Now this week. Didn't see that coming. Since one thing I've never had any cause to complain about in GW2 is any kind of frame-rate lag and my ancient PC can run the game as well now as ever, I don't think I'll be adding in the extra step but it's good to know the option exists. 

On a similar theme, I finally pulled the trigger on a VPN this week. I've toyed with the idea many times but it always seemed like too much of a bother to go through the set-up and payment process. Then, in the middle of the week, Firefox sent me yet another promo for their in-house version, at a discount.

I clicked through and read the details and it looked good but before I made a decision I looked at some reviews of the service, from which I learned that Mozilla uses a pre-existing VPN from another provider, Mullvad.  Firefox rebadges that service and charges about twice as much for it.

 

Granted, if you have a Firefox/Mozilla account it's neat and tidy to keep it all under the one roof but it turns out Mulvad is almost pathologically dedicated to avoiding any kind of paper trail, so setting up an account with them is about the simplest operation imagineable. You can literally send them cash in an envelope if you want.

I didn't do that. I paid by PayPal. It's very cheap. Five euros a month, flat rate. No discounts for longer contracts because they don't do contracts. For that they'd need to know more about you than they want you to tell them.  

It was super-easy, too, and very fast, as was the set-up process. And the service works just as advertised. I tried it for a while, logging into various U.S. media sources that usually block my I.P. All of them worked just fine. 

The problem is, anything worth watching still requires a paid account. It's all very well being able to fool HBOMax or Warner Bros into believing you're dialling in from New York but they still want to be paid. If I ever decide to subscribe to a service that doesn't operate over here, I would certainly use Mulvad to do it, always assuming I could find a way to pay that didn't trigger cross-border alarms but for now I can't see that I'm going to find much use for  a VPN.

The whole thing also has a downside that none of the reviews or discussions I read mentioned. It was all very well telling new websites that didn't want to know me before that I was now One of Them but old sites that already accepted me suddenly had no idea who I was. Using the VPN, I kept having to sign back into places that normally let me in on the nod.

Consequently I have the thing switched off most of the time, only flicking the switch if I want to visist some ring-fenced oasis of culture like the CW. It defeats about 95% of the point of having a VPN at all, which as far as I can see is to be able to creep around the World Wide Web like some kind of ghost-ninja, leaving nary a trace. 

Personally, I gave up caring who knows what I do online years ago. If anyone wants to track my progress from MassivelyOP to BBC Cricket to Pitchfork and back, good luck to them. I think it must be at least a couple of decades since I knowingly visited a website I wouldn't be happy to mention on the blog. I'm old. Nothing I do is likely to be interesting to anyone.

I doubt I'll renew the subscription to Mulvad when it expires in a month but I'd certainly pay them another five euros any time there happened to be TV show I wanted to see, if it was showing on a free service I couldn't access. It's a very low price for even one season of a good show.

And finally, out of my random sack of fun, I pull a video! It's Arlo Parks covering Julia Jacklin for Like A Version, which is one of my YouTube-subbed channels. Arlo Parks was one of my "discoveries" from this year's BBC coverage of Glastonbury. She won the Mercury Music Prize in 2021 for her album Collapsed in Sunbeams, something I failed to notice even though it was reported on all the music sites I follow. Shows how much attention I was paying.

Anyway, better late than on time, as any fashionable party-goer will tell you. 

I was even later to the Julia Jacklin party but now I'm through the doors, I'm having a great time. There's something about her voice and the arrangements she uses that have an almost ASMR-like effect on me. She has a new album out. I read a review today on Pitchfork and it sounds great. I already know some of the tracks, including the wonderful Lydia Wears a Cross and the excellent I Was Neon, both of which have already appeared here.

I'd buy the album now but this is the time of year when I have to start thinking about what to tell people when they ask me what I want for my birthday and Christmas. Yes, I do need to start building my wishlist that far in advance. I'm going to put Pre Pleasure on it. In fact, I think I'll go and do it now.

It's kind of an approrpriate title, now I come to think of it...

Jumping Someone Else's Train

Mojang caused a certain amount of sage head-nodding in mmodom a few days ago with a pronouncement that all forms of NFT and Blockchain-related activity would be banned from Minecraft because the fad "creates digital ownership based on scarcity and exclusion." Amen to that, right?

I mean, who would argue against anyone who says online gaming ought to be about "creative inclusion and playing together", right? Certainly not me.

And it makes perfect sense for the kind of game Minecraft is. It's all about the creativity and the community. Mmorpgs, though, for all they like to foster an image of social harmony, they're kind of built on the concept of "scarcity and exclusion", aren't they?

As far back as the days of classic EverQuest (Or just "EverQuest", as we knew it then.) it's all been about the haves and the have-nots. What were all those endless camps for, if not to put your hands on something that was really hard to get? Something most people didn't have.

Seriously, who'd have spent days, weeks, sometimes months, wishing, hoping, praying for the Ancient Cyclops to pop or Quillmane to fly past, if it hadn't been because those creatures were so damn difficult to find but so worth it if you did?

Scarcity and exclusion is what those spawns and their even rarer rare drops were all about. Even needing a credit card to pay a subscription before you could play at all reeks of exclusivity. For every player who buckled down and powered through there must have been scores, hundreds who just couldn't bring themselves to make the effort and millions who refused to pony up at all.

Almost no-one I ever ran with successfully camped either the AC or Quill and those were some of the more accessible of the hard-to-hit targets. A few tried then gave up. Most never even started. When you know something's been made that hard to get on purpose, it feels like a trick you shouldn't fall for.

That's how I felt, anyway, which is possibly why, although I find NFTs to be laughably transparent as the con trick they are, my blood doesn't begin to boil at the thought of them inveigling their way into our games. For sure, they'll make things even worse than they already are, in the way there's stuff most of us will never see or own, for whatever value of "ownership" you care to apply, but that ship sailed before I even reached the dock.

So, NFTs are bad and Blockchain sucks but as usual that's not what I'm here to talk about. No, what that Mojang quote made me wonder was whether there might be too many mmorpgs.

It's not something that's ever really occured to me before. I've always been very much a maximalist when it comes to all forms of entertainent and popular culture. It's not as if music or movies or comics or tv are some kind of zero sum game. Having more options doesn't mean we get less out of each of them.

Or does it? When it comes to mmorpgs maybe it might. Is that the reason we all go through phases of finding the genre moribund, claiming "MMOs are dying", even as we scramble to download the latest seven-day wonder the moment it tumbles off the assembly line?

I was pondering all this while I was staring at the login screen for Noah's Heart, the new all-systems mmorpg that finally got its PC launch today. At 9AM. Or so I thought. Apparently I can no longer tell time. I learned to read an analog clock when I was five years old but it seems that's not enough any more.  

Archosaur Games kindly sent me an email yesterday to let me know they'd be opening the servers at "9:00 UTC-5) on July 28th". They told me I could download the game right away, so I did. 

They also mentioned something called "Preset Customization", saying "Preset customization is also available for you to share with your friends in advance. The character data will be saved in the game system. Explorers who finished preset customization could enter the game with their characters while the server opens."  

I didn't have any friends who'd be interested (Outside of the blog, that is.) but I fancied the idea of being able to get into the game immediately when it opened and anyway who can resist making a character in a new game, even if you can't actually log them in yet?

I stayed up half an hour later than usual making a character. There were a lot of options although most of them might as well have been labelled "Will never be seen in game". I mean, how often do you check the slant of a character's eyebrows during a firefight? Also, no nods to the zeitgeist with any "Body Type A and B" on the "Select Gender" screen; just plain, old vanilla Male and Female.

Eventually I had something I was happy with, namely the usual generic anime girl I always end up playing in these games, unless there's an anthropmorphic option. Noah's Heart is no Chimeraland in that respect. You'll be human and you'll like it although you can have pointy ears if you want to pretend you're an elf. (You can show yourself out over there, if that sounds like a good idea to you.).

I did try to make her short and round but you can see how that went. Archosaur's idea of "plump" is quite different to mine. The balloon pants pretty much make up for it, though.

This morning I was very keen, excited almost, to get back from walking Beryl and see how the game played. At eleven in the morning I thought the servers would have been up for a while. They weren't, of course. 

It took me an embarassingly long time to work out why, and while I was fiddling about I somehow managed to delete my saved character appearance. Never mind. Turns out I had three hours to work on another.

Four hours, actually. Even after I reminded myself how UTC works, I forgot to allow for British Summer Time. The servers finally came up at 3PM my time, either one or six hours later than I expected, depending where you stand.

As I was sitting around, messing about with sliders and mithering about the delay, it occured to me how very, very many times I'd done the same thing over the years. I used to know how many mmorpgs I'd played but I lost count long ago. Still, I'm pretty sure it has to be well over two hundred by now. 

"Scarcity and exclusion" may still drive mmorpg gameplay but the days when it also applied to how many there were and how difficult they were to access are long, long gone. For many years now, there's been an absolute glut of mmos to choose from, more than any rational person could ever try, let alone really play.

As for the monetary gatekeepers that once had offline gamers shaking their heads in disgust and disbelief, not only do most games no longer ask for a monthly subscription, many of them have waived the entrance fee altogether, handing out the whole game for free to anyone with an email address and sometimes not even asking for that.

If we're all a little cynical about the process it's hardly surprising. If we find ourselves gobbling down games like candy and feeling just about as satisified after, whose fault is that? 

Well, everyone's I suppose. The companies for piling games onto the ever growing pile without much intention of curating the experience for longer than it takes to get away with the cash and us for falling over ourselves to grab each new toy as it appears, only to throw it aside a hot moment later to play with the next.

Alright, maybe that's just me. I really can't resist a new mmorpg, especially if it comes with a flashy promo and some great scenery. If I ever had any genuine wish to find a new virtual home where I could settle down for more than five minutes, it long ago evaporated. Now I just want to get in, see the sights, take a few photos and get out. And if I can finesse a few juicy posts out of it all, so much the better.

Once in a while something comes along that sticks for a while, like Chimeraland or New World, but not very often. For all the money and time they take to make and the supposed longevity they enjoy, most mmorpgs entertain me for a handful of sessions at most. It does make me want to ask if a bit more "scarcity and exclusion" wouldn't sweeten the pot.

Forget about the cultural, technological and moral dead-end represented by NFTs. If mmorpg developers made fewer games and made those they did more exclusive to play, would that re-kindle interest in the genre from sated, satiated vets like me?

Nah. Shouldn't think so for a moment. It'd just be very annoying. I'm with Mojang on this one. Let's stick with "plenty and inclusion" at least for a while longer. I'm not bored yet!

Oh, Noah's Heart? Yes, I did get in, eventually. I logged in at two minutes past three and played for an hour and a half before I had to stop so I could write this post. First impressions to follow, although if you're a regular here you can probably guess what I'm going to say and save yourself the suspense.

Cheap At Twice The Price?

Time for a very quick Friday Grab-Bag. It's almost becoming a thing here. Maybe I should try to think of a fancy name for it. 

Going to be slim pickings on the blog for a couple of days but I'll give notice now; it could get worse. This is my working weekend but I have dog-minding duty Fridays as well, that being one of Mrs Bhagpuss's main work days, so every other week is going to be a three-day drought. I probably should think seriously about giving up the post-a-day routine.

As I explained in yesterday's post, though, there are some unexpected benefits of having a puppy in the house. I am finally starting to get to grips with writing shorter, faster posts, something I've complained about wanting yet not being able to do for years. All I have do is work out how to make them worth reading and I'll be home free! 

On to to the meat, such as it is. (I've been a vegetarian of sorts since the late 'eighties so what would I know about meat?)

Everything So Expensive These Days, Isn't It?

I guess the big news of the day is the announcement from CCP that the basic monthly subscription for EVE Online is jumping a massive 33% from $14.99 to $19.99. Wilhelm has a post up about it, including the wide range of pricing options avaiable, depending on how long you want to commit to the game. It drops as low as $12.49 if you're willing to buy in for a couple of years.

Back when subscriptions were the norm, I almost always paid by the month. In retrospect I can't imagine why I was so unwilling to go for the six-month or annual options. I could certainly have afforded it back then and it would have saved me a significant amount of money.

These days, the only mmorpg subscription I hold is Daybreak All Access, which I pay for annually at a very considerable discount. According to DBG's website, the annual rate is currently $119.88, a weird-sounding number that actually works out at a neat $9.99 a month. 

That's a good deal for four mmorpgs, EverQuest, EverQuest II, DCUO and Planetside 2. Even more so since I actually play three of them, on and off. It would be an even better deal if Daybreak's owners, EG7, decided to turn it into EG7 All Access and threw in the rest of their games, including Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons and Dragons Online. I'd pay a discounted annual fee based on a regular $20 monthly sub for that. 

Wilhelm speculates on which other subscription games might follow CCP's lead but there aren't really all that many left, are there? Almost every game has some kind of optional sub these days but hardly any make it mandatory. I imagine the few that do will be watching carefully to see if EVE players complain then pay or complain and leave. If the price rise is deemed a success, though, it will set a new baseline. 

Get Your Filthy NFTs Off My Nice, Clean Metaverse!

There's been some suggestion that the hike is either a passive-aggressive or a desperate response to the company having been forced to backtrack on the potential introduction of NFTs to EVE. If that's caused a potential shortfall in income, maybe it has to be made up some other way.

There was a very good opinion piece at Gamesindustry.biz about NFT's and the metaverse that I'd like to bring to the attention of anyone still capable of caring. The fundemental argument is handily summed up by the title: "Metaverse concepts should distance themselves from NFTs". They really should.

I particularly liked the author's take on NFTs: "which can most charitably be described as a solution in desperate search for a problem, and perhaps more realistically as a home-brewing kit for wannabe Ponzi scheme orchestrators". The metaverse, or more probably metaverses, is going to happen whether we like it or not, in the form of "some blend of virtual world technology with location-based augmented reality, delivered over high-speed wireless networks to a whole spectrum of access modes ranging from immersive headsets to discreet wearables" but NFTs absolutely don't have to be any part of it.

At least Raph Koster, all in on the metaverse as he seems to be, isn't showing the least interest in adding NFTs to his mix. Venturebeat has an interview with him about Playable Worlds, the "sandbox mmo" he's working on and for which he's just received $25m in outside investment, partly from Korean publisher Kakao, formerly home of Black Desert, now of Elyon and ArcheAge.

We still don't know what Raph's game actually is. As the interview rather coyly puts it, "The founders still aren’t quite ready to reveal their intellectual property and setting behind the game". We do learn that it's been "in the works for about two years, and now it is in full production", which I guess means we might get an alpha sometime around 2024.

Skim-reading the interview, it sounds about like you'd expect a Raph Koster project to sound, all economy, interdependency and socialisation. He's been banging the same drum for over thirty years now. I don't imagine metaverses are going to shake his rhythm.

I did have a couple of other things I was going to mention but certain puppy-related incidents have bitten into the time available so I'm going to leave it at that. That way, I still have a couple of items in reserve for tomorrow evening, when time's going to be even tighter still.

Also, in case anyone's trying to find any significance in the screenshots, you can stop now. There is none. I just don't like posts with no pictures and any excuse to use some of my Secret World poses.

Cost Benefit Analysis

Redbeard at Parallel Context has a thought-provoking post up, poking away at that hoary old flogging-horse, fun. Wilhelm at TAGN, meanwhile, has a weapons-grade, mad as hell and not taking it any more rant aimed squarely at everyone's least-favorite spaceman, Lord British.

At first read, the two posts don't seem to have all that much in common but I was struck by the way they both reveal a little of the darkness that lies in "giving people want they want". Or should that be what they think they want?

Looking back to the dying days of World of Warcraft's Wrath of the Lich King era, Redbeard brings back some of the mixed emotions aroused by the fast-moving changes Blizzard brought to what has always been a slippery and ever-shifting genre. The surprise, if there was one, should have been that we didn't see it coming. 

The myth about sharks is that they'll drown if they ever stop moving forward. Mmorpgs are the same.

I was almost done playing WoW, my first time through, when Blizzard introduced the earliest iteration of the automated group-making tool. Mrs Bhagpuss and I had been playing for just over six months by then and we'd both seen about as much of the game as we cared to. She'd already stopped logging in. I think she'd gone back to EverQuest II. 

I hung on a little bit longer. I was waiting for the patch that introduced the Group Finder. I was very curious to see how it would work. I wasn't expecting it to change anything for me, personally. At that point I'd never pugged a dungeon in WoW. I'd barely even been in a dungeon in WoW and I had no plans to start. I was waiting to see how the innovation would change the game itself and by implication the genre.

In the event it took me just three runs to decide that a) the LFG tool was a clever and useful addition to the game and b) I had no interest in ever using it again. I could also see that it was a genie that would be very hard to cork.

For someone who had already just about had enough of Azeroth for the time being, far from opening up a whole new era of possibility, what it did was confirm my feeling that it was about time I found somewhere else to be. I moved on but I was very well aware that no matter how far or fast I was moving I wouldn't be able to outrun history. You can't unhave ideas. Automated group-making had been loosed upon the virtual world. Nothing would be the same ever again.

The Sparkle Pony, as Redbeard goes on to say, marked another turning point. At this remove I can't remember (Or be bothered to check.) if Blizzard was the first major player to introduce paid-for mounts into a Subscription game. I know Sony Online Entertainment did the same because I was there when it happened but whether that was before or after The Ensparkling I don't recall.

And it doesn't matter. Whoever did it first, soon everyone was doing it. And why wouldn't they? It turns out people like spending money on stuff that doesn't exist, even if they have to pay an entrance fee to get into the store. If you were making games to make money wouldn't you do the same? If people want to pay you twice, why not let them? 

Well, I guess one good reason would be if those same people ended up losing faith in your game's ability to entertain and amuse them and took their custom elsewhere. That didn't happen even though many said it would. 

Oh, I'm sure there were people who stopped playing and claimed it was because of all the shiny ponies sparkling up the streets and maybe sometimes it was even true. I mean, I left EQII's live servers for the tumbleweed emptiness of the Test server mostly because I got into a snit about the flying carpets that came with the Desert of Flames expansion. Or I said I did.

It was a factor, just like the coming of the LFG tool to WoW was a factor in my leaving that game. It just wasn't the main reason I left. It was, as these things so often are, a handy excuse to do something I'd been wanting to do anyway. 

It was also not forever. It so rarely is. Not for me, anyway. The plethora of retro and restart servers everywhere you look these days, coupled with the endless marketing drives to bring back former players to just about every mmorpg there ever was, suggests my yo-yoing loyalties are anything but unique.

Observational and anecdotal evidence suggests the membrane holding players inside or outside the current bubble of any mmorpg is becoming ever more permeable. The whole business model used to rely on locking paying customers down. Now it's increasingly about keeping the leash loose enough so they don't feel the tie until you tug.

Every barrier that comes down weakens the next, too. Those sparkle ponies seem almost quaint now. Strike the almost. Crowded places in just about every mmorpg I play (And most I don't, I imagine.) look more like carnival parades than whatever they're intended to suggest. As recreations of fantasy cities they bear about as much resemblance to even an imaginary reality as Disneyland's Main Street USA does to any American town you can actually drive through in your own car.

It's easy enough to see it all as a degradation of some kind of preternatural authenticity that existed before but is it? Was there ever anything more to the experience than what we brought to it? Aren't we just bringing different things, now? 

It's another of those "You say you want it but you don't" moments, only this time it's "You say you don't want it but you do." Money talks, as the saying goes, and what it's saying is "I want a Pony!"

Or a spaceship. In castigating erstwhile elder now turned pantomime villain, Lord British, Wilhelm brings in another rockstar dev, Chris Roberts, as a point of reference:

"I am not a fan of Star Citizen, but this announcement has made Chris Roberts palatable by comparison.  I don’t believe CR will ever be able to deliver on all, or even most, of the promises he has made, but he is selling a dream and has something tangible in alpha and has managed not to get bored and wander off mid-project.  If you were to ask me if you should buy a spaceship in Star Citizen or give money to Lord British, I’d say knock yourself out with the spaceship."

This really struck me as a crucial paragraph. A lot of people don't like Chris Roberts and his Star Citizen money press, largely on the grounds that the game he's been promising to make for years can and will never become a reality. I have always thought that misses the point.

Star Citizen isn't a game. It's a showroom for imaginary spaceships. There probably are people genuinely still waiting for a full-function mmorpg to emerge from the endless development process over at Cloud Imperium but I would hazard my best guess they aren't any kind of majority. 

Star Citizen is a toyshop. People buy shiny spaceships there and go Vroom! Vroom! in their minds. Space Sparkle Ponies if you like. And people do like. They like very much, which is why Star Citizen keeps making more money. 

In some ways, not having a real game to go with them makes the whole thing more fun. It's like me when I played Riders of Icarus. All I really wanted to do was log in, get my next amazing mount, ride it around the city for a while, take a few screenshots and log out. The fact that I knew there was an actual game there just put me under pressure to stop having fun and do some damn work. Go and do some levelling. Play the actual game. That, among other things, was what led to me drifting away.

In that sense, you might think that Lord British's titanic vagueness over what game, exactly, he intends to make "on the blockchain" shouldn't be all that much of a red flag. It is, though.

Here's the difference, as I see it, between Chris Roberts and Richard Garriott: Chris Roberts really likes spaceships; Lord British really likes money.

Which is not to say Roberts doesn't like money, too. Of course he does. We all like money. But he's pretty clear on what he's selling. If you pay him for an imaginary spaceship that's what you get. If you buy an NFT of a spaceship, as Tipa's been wondering, just what exactly does that get you that any mmorpg or cash shop can't sell you already?

I'm assuming here that NFTs are involved in Lord British's plans somewhere down the line, along with Play to Earn and all the rest of the buzzwords. 

The single, obvious advantage of selling sparkle ponies and spaceships "on the blockchain" rather through a regular cash shop is, as it seems to me, the license that gives you to charge orders of magnitude more money for them. I can see why that's attractive to some people. Mainly the people doing the selling but also those who think a thing's value lies in how much it costs. There are names for people who think that way. None of them are kind.

Given the lead time required to make a new mmorpg, there's every chance all this will be over by the game comes out, if it ever does. I guess that won't matter much. By then the last drips will have been squeezed from the low-hanging fruit and the whole caravan will have moved on to the next mirage, taking Lord British with it, likely as not.

Leaving us all to play happily with our ponies and our spaceships in the actual games that take actual money for imaginary toys. And even if some of those games are still just sketches of a promise of a dream, they'll still be more real than anything "on the blockchain".

Fun is where you find it and we already know where to look.

Try To Keep Up!

Isn't there a lot of news around at the moment? Gaming news, I mean. Well, entertainment news generally but I already covered that or at least a bit of it. It doesn't stop, though, does it? And everything's getting muddled and mixed, like when they cross the streams in the first Ghostbusters movie, which is supposed to be bad. Crossing the streams, that is, not the movie, which is great. You knew that. (Although, does anything bad actually happen when they cross the streams? Oh, yeah, I guess that's not so good. Not if you had the appartment below the penthouse suite, anyway.)

What am I talking about? Well, we all know NFTs are bad, right? But now Kanye's on our team. Are we happy about that? I mean, judge a person by the company they keep, right? And Ye's only saying nay "for now". It's always good to keep your options open.

I know, I know. This has nothing to do with gaming. Okay, maybe not. But this does. "Of all the applications, gaming is a place that *players* can benefit a LOT from blockchain." So says Mike Shinoda of Linkin Park, a band I have never willingly listened to although sometimes these things just happen. 

Why gamers should listen to what musicians think about gaming I have no idea although, like every driver's a potential pedestrian, when they're not driving, I guess every musician's a potential gamer, when they're not playing. Playing an instrument, that is. Not a game. Just go with it, aright?

Wilhelm has a really solid, in-depth post up about why Mike Shinoda is, shall we say, mistaken, although the post is technically about the metaverse, not NFTs - but who can tell the difference these days? Certainly not the people throwing money. 

As Wilhelm says, in repy to my comment querying why gamers are getting dragged into this thing in the first place, "As for “why gamers?” I think that is just the easy, lazy answer to the question based on who is already interested in virtual worlds." 

One of these days I'm going to have to do that post about what I think the metaverse is or will be. Is, really. It's at least halfway here already, by my definition. That day is not going to be today.

No, today I'm here to talk about a couple of much more specifically mmorpg-related news stories. The one that's getting all the traction is Blizzard's unexpected announcement, rolling over on decades of tradition and lore to prop up falling populations on World of Warcraft servers make everyone's lives just that little bit better. (Does anyone click through all these links, by the way? I seem to be hyperlinking like it's 1999 today.)

The reaction across the blogosphere is just starting to roll but what I've read so far has been a little mixed. There's a bit of "about time" and a lot of "it's a start" and some "why now?" I expect to see a lot more opinions in the next day or two but I don't really have a dog in this fight. (And isn't that an archaic expression?)

No, well, okay, maybe I do. Not as far as WoW itself, since I'm not playing and was never invested even in the slightest in the bipartite struggle between... what is it, anyway? Good vs evil? Order vs chaos? Smart vs casual? 

I do, however, have some pretty hardline views on the general concept of opposed factions in mmorpgs, which is that if you're going to have them they should be immutable and unchanging. Pick a side and damn well stick with it and that applies to devs as well as players. 

If you want to service a clientele that considers "playing with friends" an important selling point, then don't make people choose sides in the first place. Conversely, if you're constructing a narrative based around opposing forces and building mechanisms into your game to enforce compliance, accept that you're going to exclude a lot of more casual, social gamers and get ready to cater to extremists.

Either way works. Just don't cross the streams. Oh, I did that one already... make it "change horses". At least you can't say Blizzard bent with the wind at the first light breeze. It took a hurricane of bad news to shake that sour fruit loose.

Interesting though that news was, like the report of Sony swallowing up the Destiny and Halo studio for a mere $3.6 billion, I don't feel I should say too much about it. As for Sony's spending spree, the deal involves games I don't play made by people I don't pay. It would be rude of me to comment.

Another mmorpg developer I haven't given any money to is Gameforge. At least I don't think I have. I might need to fact-check that. There are various theories going around about why Sony might want Bungie on board but there's no question as to why Gameforge have decided to switch Swords of Legend Online to Free to Play: it's because no-one is. Playing Swords of Legend, I mean.

I quite enjoyed SoLO when I tried it in open beta last year. It's been on my Steam watchlist ever since and I nearly bought it when it briefly appeared in a couple of sales. I'm glad I didn't, now!

As the press release notes, the box price of the Buy-to-Play game has been "a limiting factor for a lot of people." Curiously, if you have more money than you know what to do with, the option to give some of it to Gameforge still exists, for the moment at least. The cheapest option is the Standard Edition at £35.99 but you can go as high as £89.99 if you want.

Maybe the Deluxe and Collector's editions still have some value but since, according to the FAQ, "The full game experience will be available to everyone for free. This includes all old, new and future content, like the new classes and zones", it's probably a better idea to wait until the 24th of February, when you can have it all for nothing.

Despite my previous enthusiasm, I probably won't bother. As I may have mentioned, there's a lot going on just around then, what with the Guild Wars 2 expansion, the new EverQuest II server, my infatuation with Chimeraland, New World doing whatever it's doing to make solo play more appealing and who knows what-all else. 

Don't you wish these people would get together and arrange their releases so they don't all overlap like this? I mean, they're going to have to get it together when they all sign off on the deals that allow us to take out NFT swords from one game to the next. They might as well get started on those non-competetive, non-commercial contracts right now!

A Position Of Ignorance or What Did NFTs Ever Do For Us?

Naithin at Time To Loot has a post up in which he looks ahead to 2022. I could even say he "looks forward " to it because he's really pretty positive about what might be coming next. I definitely wouldn't be able to say the same about some of the prediction posts I've read so far.

Among other things, Naithin talks about his hopes for blogging. One of the things he says he'd like to see are more "Discussion posts" by which he means "posts that have the seed of an idea worth (in at least one person’s mind, at least) discussing." I very much agree with him that these kinds of conversations are one of the best parts of blogging and since his post sparked this one I guess the ball's rolling already.

That's the good part. Before you start to feel all warm and fuzzy, wait until you see the fire that spark lit.

Yes, it's NFT time again! When isn't it? It is, so ironically, the gift that keeps on giving. 

It's weird to think it was barely two months ago I found out what an NFT even was. Tipa was the first blogger I read on the topic but a whole raft of people have weighed in since as more and more gaming companies throw themselves onto the blockchain/crypto/NFT dogpile.

UltrViolet at Endgame Viable begrudgingly joins the party, late and irritable, with a thought-provoking post wondering what the hell the fuss is all about. He concludes "My basic point at the end of it all is something like: NFTs aren’t great, but I’m not yet convinced it deserves the level of righteous fury on display lately. Just … don’t buy them."

Maybe he's right. It seems a little unlikely it'll be that simple but maybe it will. It's far from clear yet what NFTs in online games will look like. Perhaps we will just be able to ignore them. 

If I'm honest about it, although I have a pretty clear idea what NFTs are by now, I'd still struggle to tell you what they're for. Other than money-laundering, of course. That part's obvious.

UltrViolet suggests there's a conflation of unrelated concepts when NFTs are linked with "Play To Earn" and player-made content. Maybe he's right. I might have misunderstood how it works.  Actually, though, I think it might be UltrViolet, who's getting mixed up. 

As I understand it, "Play To Earn" means generating some form of cryptocurrency by performing in-game activities, not designing and being paid for in-game content per se. NFTs are the means by which such activity would be recorded and recompensed. It means you do your dailies and earn 0.0001 of some made-up currency the company owns, which in theory you can then trade out for real-world dollars when hell freezes over.

Player-made content in the sense of in-game items is something different. We've certainly had plenty of that in games before. It was one of John "Smed" Smedley's many Big Ideas back in the days of Sony Online Entertainment and he for sure wasn't the first to come up with it.

As Wilhelm often points out, online gaming companies can already do all the things they say they need NFTs for without NFTs and they always could. Some of them did. So what's the difference? 

I don't know! If I had to guess, though, I'd say it's money. Square Enix President Yosuke Matsuda claims he expects to see "an eventual right-sizing" of NFT-backed digital goods sales but given the starting point, transactions in six and seven figures, it seems all too likely the "right size" will be a lot higher than anything we've been used to until now.

There's also convenience. SOE's Player Studio was always bedeviled by a convoluted, time-consuming process of application, approval and payment. Binding the whole thing to the blockchain might speed things up. Maybe? Who knows?

That's the thing. No-one does know. All of this could end up dead in the water like 3DTV or it could be the next Free To Play revolution, all but impossible either to ignore or avoid.

Which is why it's such fun to write about. Here's a dirty litle blogging secret - it's a lot easier to write about things no-one really knows much about than it is to put together posts on stuff people know really well. That's one of the reasons we all end up jumping on the back of every latest hot game or news story. Anyone can bang out a thousand words of speculation or excitement or outrage based on nothing more than a few buzzwords and some vaguely-remembered headlines. If no-one knows any better, who's going to call you on it?

I have a dirtier secret than that, though. There's another reason I can't seem to stop myself posting about NFTs (And the Metaverse, for that matter, but I'll save that revelation for another day.) The thing is, I kinda like the whole idea of NFTs. 

Oh, I don't like the moneygrubbing part or the crass commercialism or the cynical exploitation or the climate-wrecking cost. All of that stinks. No, the part I like is how abstruse the whole thing feels. 

It has an aesthetic that reminds me of a lot of things I like and admire, particularly certain 20th century art movements. There are resonances that echo Futurism, Dada and Situationism, for sure. Particularly the last one. I keep thinking of John Cage's 4.33. The whole slippery concept is so hard to grasp that most commentators I've read fail to agree, let alone explain, exactly what having paid for an NFT gets you.

I love the idea that you can "own" the right to point to something that doesn't exist. As has been explained in enormous, numbing detail in some of the pieces I've read on the topic, someone who owns an NFT owns neither the image itself, nor the reproduction rights, nor even guaranteed access.

The comparison has been made to owning a star, something you've been able to do for many years but that's a bit like comparing owning a pet rock to owning a pet. Everyone understands that your star or your pet rock is a conceit. NFTs, we are meant to believe, are real. As real as a dog or a cat.

Or an ape. It needs to be admitted, at least by me, that some NFTs are cool. I mean, come on, admit it. Those Bored Apes are great. You'd like one. I'd like one and I don't even like apes. 

They're cool because someone came up with a great name (Bored Ape Yacht Club is so slick it almost slides off the page.), added a great look (Those things are really drawn!) and topped it off with a gloss that made it feel spaceage and strange. Why bother with substance when you can sell style?

Plus exclusivity. That always works. Or it works for those who can duck under the velvet rope.

Public feeling in gaming right now is very much opposed to NFTs and most likely for good reason. Chances are they won't make any of our games better and they might make them worse. I suspect the main reason most people don't like them, though, is that they know they'll never be able to have them. Not at the kind of prices they cost now, anyway.  

Which is also why Squenix's boss thinks the price needs to come down. When NFTs begin to feel affordable to the more affluent gamer, then we might begin to see a split in the resistance. Even gaming whales most likely won't pay hundreds of thousands for single NFTs of in-game items but they might pay thousands of dollars for hundreds of them. It's a strategy that's been working up to now, after all.

All of which speculation brings me back to something else Naithin mentioned, something I'd already been thnking about: Valve's hard nope to NFTs. It was an unadulterated good news story when it broke back in October, wasn't it? We all cheered when we heard Steam was banning all blockchain and NFT games.

Did we, though? I'm not so sure we did. I'm guessing a lot of us either didn't notice at all or looked at the headline blankly and wondered "What's an NFT?"

Valve may have gone too early to get full PR credit for their clear-eyed vision of what's good for gaming but now they're stuck with it. As AAA gaming company after AAA gaming company comes out with tentative plans to invest in the future by bolting blockchain and NFT onto their existing properties or building it into new ones from the ground up, where does that leave Steam as the platform of choice going forward?

It's not all that hard to imagine a scenario where, in a couple of years' time, most new games will come with some kind of NFT feature as standard. Are none of them going to be allowed onto Steam at all? Conversely, is access to the platform so vital that developers will give up the right to make the money everyone else is making just so they can be on Steam?

Yeah, I have no idea. That's kind of my point. It's impossible to predict but such fun to try. It's going to be messy, whichever way it falls and fascinating to watch. All this stuff may be horrible but like a lot of horrible things it can be hard to look away.

All of which is as much as to say I'll probably be writing about all of this from a position of ignorance for a while yet, at least until I'm as bored as one of those hyper-expensive apes. I'm not sure it's the discussion Naithin would have wanted to kick off but it's the one we've got. Anyone going to follow on?