I mentioned that there was nothing to blog about. Then I started catching up on all the things I’ve missed in the MMO landscape over the last month or so. CCP VR Layoffs. Apparently CCP decided they didn’t want to be a pioneer in VR after all. Presumably this means they’ll need to figure out how to increase revenue from EVE, a fourteen-year-old game that new players run screaming from.

I usually prefer to post nothing instead of a post about blogging*, but since Roger brought it up, and I just said two posts ago that there’s nothing to blog about, let’s talk about blogging! Rather than write something that stands on its own, I’m just going to respond to the parts of Roger’s post that jumped out at me, as if it were a Usenet post. The Nature of the Beast “I’ve written several pieces that I’m proud of.

In light of the announcement of World of Warcraft Classic, everybody’s abuzz with WoW nostalgia, so I thought it would be fun to re-post my very first thoughts about WoW Vanilla from 2006. From blizzard.com - I can’t find any screenshots prior to 2014. World of Warcraft October 10, 2006 Inspired by the recent episode of South Park, and being bored with FlatOut2, I finally installed my trial version of World of Warcraft yesterday, which I’d gotten with a video card about a year ago I think.

Since I’m done with Guild Wars 2 until November 28th (I got bored with dailies), I had a crazy idea a few weeks back to re-download and play Guild Wars 1 to have a look at the story. I’ve always heard it’s good. I own this game. So why not play it? I’m not entirely sure, but I think I own all of the available GW1 content. I originally bought it somewhere around 2011, and later I think I bought all of the expansions sometime after Guild Wars 2 came out when I saw there were some achievements and titles that you could get from linking your accounts or something.

Bhagpuss said something interesting in his last comment: In general I think the idea that GW1 had good writing is fanciful. Much though I like Prophecies, the writing is pretty shoddy. I think when people praise the writing they are mainly talking about the plotting, which is fairly coherent. The dialog is mostly stilted and unconvincing, often risible. First, I don’t think I’ve ever seen the word “risible” in my entire life.

I’m not going to write about how thoroughly exhausted and beaten down I was last night after completing the epic ~45 minute death march of a fight in the first chapter of the first episode of GW2’s Living World Season 4. Instead I’m going to keep it light and talk about jumping. I saw a remark somewhere in passing about jumping in MMORPGs (apologies but I can’t remember where) which inspired me to write this.

The Guild Wars franchise wins the month. Guild Wars 2 - 37 hours Guild Wars 1 - 21 hours Dark Souls III - 6 hours Final Fantasy XIV - 4 hours I played a little Dark Souls III because I still need a new character to finish my The Ringed City DLC blind playthrough. I feel like it’s been an extremely light gaming month, but when I add up all those hours and divide by 30, it comes out to a bit more than 2 hours of gaming every day.

Hi! I’m finally back with another writing update. I completed NaNoWriMo again this year, and here’s my assessment of my performance. Summary This year’s novel is code-named “Survey.” It’s a science fiction/fantasy set many thousands of years in the future, in a time after a long war between humans and aliens has finally resulted in a treaty. A human captain leads a ship on a mission to survey a planet, where a lost colony had once been established thousands of years before.

I finished up the Living World Season 4 episode Daybreak over the weekend. This post is going to contain story spoilers, so if you haven’t finished it yet, look away! My thoughts are pretty similar to Bhagpuss’s. But I’m going to start with the things I liked about Daybreak. I really liked the quality of the cut scene at the end of the first chapter, Eye of the Brandstorm, when Aurene showed us that vision.

Tobold recently declared that the MMO blogosphere was dead to him (paraphrasing slightly), so I suppose it’s my duty to point out that we’re still here, sort of. Tobold was one of the first, if not the first MMORPG blogger I read, way back in the olden days when he talked about Vanilla WoW all the time. He was one of the original models for how I thought a blog should look.

I alluded to trying out Kritika Online in my last post, so I thought I would write a bit about it. For one thing, I want to have a post to link to later in the year for my “Game/MMORPG of the Year” post, and for another thing, Friday is looming, and I don’t have anything to post yet. I downloaded and played Kritika on November 22nd, the day before Thanksgiving.

I’m not entirely sure how to categorize a post about Warframe. It’s usually covered by the MMORPG press but after only a few minutes with it I can say it’s obviously not an MMORPG. Perhaps I finally need to add that “MMO” category to my blog, for discussing what are effectively little more than regular old multiplayer games. I’ve never heard anyone say they didn’t like Warframe. In fact I’ve heard a lot of “positive buzz” about Warframe.

I’m trying an experiment: I’m going to try not to completely abandon the novel I wrote in November. This experiment has failed every year since 2010. NaNoWriMo drafts from 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2016 languish more-or-less in exactly the same state they were in on December 1st. Drafts from 2010 and 2011 have been edited a lot, but remain woefully unsuitable for submission. But this time I have a plan. Well, a first step in a plan, at least, which is better than I’ve ever done before.

This is a post about The Last Jedi, so don’t read any further until you’ve seen the movie. I’ll give you some blank lines to click away. Note: I added an update way at the bottom of this post. I’ll give you a few more blank lines just in case you accidentally flick your eyes down lower on the page. Okay, get ready. Brace yourselves. This is going to change everything you’ve ever known about everything, and your life will never be the same.

I allowed myself to buy one game in the Steam Winter Sale, which was Divinity: Original Sin. Then, a few hours later, I bought the Skyrim Special Edition, because I saw everyone on Twitter talking about it which reminded me that I wanted to buy that too and, hey, what a coincidence, it was on sale. But this post is about Divinity: Original Sin. It’s an isometric, turn-based strategy RPG which can trace its ancestry back to games like Baldur’s Gate (the earliest example of this kind that I can think).

It’s time once against for the prestigious Endgame Viable Awards for 2017, posted a bit early because the 31st is a Sunday. Hopefully I won’t play any new games over the weekend to skew these results. 2016 Awards 2015 Awards I give out three awards: Game of the Year, MMORPG of the Year, and MMORPG Expansion of the Year. In my warped worldview “Game of the Year” sort of implies Steam game of the year and excludes traditional MMORPGs.

First, statistics for December of 2017. I flip-flopped around a lot during the holiday time, as is pretty normal for me. A surprising addition to this list is EverQuest II, in which I had quite a bit of fun starting a new character, at least until I installed new Steam purchase Divinity: Original Sin, which captured a lot of my attention late in the month. (Said attention waned considerably after two very difficult boss fights in a row.

Here’s my annual summary of PC MMORPGs that are on my radar for the new year 2018. (Here is 2017, 2016, 2015, and 2014). I am only considering “traditional” style MMORPGs in this list, not things like MOBAs or brawlers or Diablo-clones or whatever else people call MMOs these days. Actually, since I find out about these from MMO sites, and most MMO sites now cover things that aren’t traditional MMORPGs, some of these might in fact not be traditional MMORPGs.

It’s time for more video rankings! I know blog readers hate videos, but this is the only place I can put this information for posterity. Major video releases from me in 2017 included: The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind (still unfinished) Mass Effect Andromeda Final Fantasy XIV - Stormblood, The Legend Returns Guild Wars 2 - Heart of Thorns, Path of Fire, Living World Seasons 2 and 3 Dark Souls III - The Ringed City DLC (still unfinished) Below are my top ten videos in 2017, according to YouTube running time.

The last thing I mentioned playing was Divinity: Original Sin. I sort of gave up on it. It’s a great game and all, but it’s just too exhausting. I went through two boss fights in a row (SparkMaster 5000 and Radagoth) and both times, luck was the determining factor for success. That’s just not fun. I don’t know how all the people who play tabletop games do it. :)

We interrupt your regularly scheduled blog post for a blatant, unabashed, self-promotional advertisement that has no purpose other than to shower me with cold, hard cash that I will not share with you.* I have had a book on Amazon called Lute of the Sparrow under my writing name Everett Renshaw for about seven years now. This weekend (starting January 13), I am making it available for free. Please go forth, download it, read it, and post a review.

I haven’t played ARK much since early 2016, so I decided to re-download it and give it another look. The game finally “launched” last year, after all. Presumably all of the problems I had with the game are now fixed. Well, not exactly. Although to be fair I really enjoyed it before, too. I just ran out of challenge. I got to a point where I could go to any biome and survive, and kill any dinosaur in my path, and that is pretty much “winning” the game.

I promised myself I would try to write two writing posts a month. Technically this should be the second one, but it’s actually just the first one. Oh well. While I have not been extremely happy with my progress on editing “Survey,” my 2016 NaNoWriMo project, I have at least *made* progress on it. Last time I described how I was highlighting sections of text that needed attention, and I have more-or-less completed that.

I never thought this would happen, but YouTube finally made changes that affect me. Previously, channels had to reach 10,000 total views to be eligible for the YouTube Partner Program (YPP). …starting today, new channels will need to have 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of watch time within the past 12 months to be eligible for ads. We will begin enforcing these new requirements for existing channels in YPP beginning February 20th, 2018.

I’m trying an experiment here: A list of MMO news that I found noteworthy during the week. I’m trying this slightly retro blogging format because, to be brutally honest, for most MMO topics, I have a lot of trouble summoning up more than a few sentences of commentary, which results in a glut of unfinished blog drafts and a paucity of published posts (ha!). The challenge here will be finding a picture to use.