Oh, For Pete's Sake, Blogger...

I guess it's too much to hope for Google to stop mucking around with Blogger.

This is what greeted me this morning:

On October 23, 2026.

It takes a certain amount of skill to break everything, I suppose.

And then just like that, it was back to working properly.

EtA: Blogger is now personally messing with me. Just after posting this, it's baaaack....

Third Verse Same As The First Two

I swear that Murphy must love those of us on Blogger.

The other night, I was getting ready to log and head to bed when I noticed something odd: the listing for my MMO Blogroll feed was messed up again:

As of 11:50 PM EST on October 13, 2026.

See all those regularly updated blogs unfairly shunted to the bottom of the pile? Yeah, I couldn't explain it either, but when I clicked on one of the links I got basically a bunch of HTML garbage, as if Blogger couldn't understand what the feed was. 

Anyway, by during the day yesterday it certainly looked like things were back to normal, except for poor ol' Wilhelm, who had somehow avoided the issues last time but was stuck in hell this time:

From 5:00 PM EST on October 14, 2026.

I Have Touched the Sky has been broken since forever, so I discounted that one, but I did check and verify that The Ancient Gaming Noob has a brand new post as of October 14:

As of 5:01 PM EST on October 14, 2026.

Ironically enough, both the old post found in my Blogroll and the current post have to do with Richard Garriott of Ultima fame, only 14 years apart. Wilhelm's post encapsulates my opinions of Garriott quite well, so I don't need to hash it out here. I will say, however, that there must have been something in the water at Origin Systems, because both Garriott and Chris Roberts of Star Citizen have what I will politely describe as gone off their rocker over the years. I guess you could call them both a case study in people who have come into too much money and 'street cred' far before they were mature enough to handle it, but I digress.

I guess I was going to have to wait for Wilhelm's blog to be properly read by Blogger, until I was perusing the blogroll and noted something odd:

As of 6:30 PM EST on October 14, 2026.
Yes, I went back and got this screencap after I'd
started writing this.

Knowing Shintar and her current interest in WoW Forever, I didn't trust that that was her most recent post. Sure enough, when I clicked on her blog, I found that yes, she'd made a new post today:

As of 6:12 PM EST on October 14, 2026.

So yeah, something is up once again. In the meantime, Blogger has been active in other areas:

I noticed this early in the day on October 14, 2026.

I read the notice, and it was all about adult content, non-consensual adult content, scams, hate speech, etc. My first thought while reading this was "You mean to tell me this wasn't there before now?" Better late than never, I guess, although in today's world some people might read this rather reasonable announcement and cry "Censorship!" or worse, "Woke!" But that's the world we live in today in 2026.

Stay tuned, peeps, because I'm sure this whole situation will change in a few days. Again.

***

And just as I was prepping this entry to post in the morning, this happened:

As of 7:06 PM EST on October 14, 2026.

Yeah, I don't get it. I mean, it's a feed, and all you have to do is poll it when you reload the blog and you get the latest post. Why did it take so long for Blogger to realize it was there? And still no sign of Wilhelm's blog either.

There are days when I wish that this was 1998, because at least the hypertext was simpler and I knew that if something broke I could fix it. But now, I'm completely dependent upon a company whom is little better than Microsoft at rolling out patches for a platform that I'm not quite convinced that they want to keep supporting.

***

And guess what? The issue on last night HAPPENED AGAIN.

Taken on 11:45 PM EST on October 14, 2026.

This time at least I took a screencap of what happens when I clicked on a link or two, such as Priest With a Cause:

Taken on 11:49 PM EST on October 14, 2026.

And here's Kaylriene's Blog:

Taken on 11:49 PM EST on October 14, 2026.

About the only thing I can say is that if you hover over the blog entry on the problematic links, it definitely shows the /feed hyperlink, not the actual blog hyperlink. On the properly working links, you see the actual blog URL address. How Blogger is screwing this up after well over a decade of stability is a complete unknown to me.

/sigh

FINALLY

Their Googleness finally fixed the Blogroll:

As of September 30, 2026 at 8:49 AM EST.

That is all. Back to your regularly scheduled doomscrolling.

Why Am I Now Getting Google Analytics Ads?

Seriously.

Email received as of September 8, 2026.

I don't get it.

I've not had a blip of email from Google Analytics --aside from the rare Google Notifications email-- in ages, and now within the past couple of weeks I've begun getting semi-regular spam from Google itself.

Email received as of September 3, 2026.

This is the sort of thing that appears when a post --typically a Meme Monday-- gets an inordinate amount of clicks. Let's be real here: those clicks are most likely web crawlers and LLM bots and they just happened upon this blog. It's not as if I suddenly gained 10k readers or something. Yes, Google Analytics shows a bit of a boost at the beginning of September, but like I said, it looks like it's going to be pretty temporary:

Screencap of Google Analytics' active user
trend for the past 90 days as of September 14, 2026.

As you can see, it's already reverting to the mean, so I'm not exactly shocked here. Still, why all the sudden spam from Google Analytics like the email I led with, anyway?

I figure it has to be that the results of two weeks worth of 80k+ users has something to do with it, and that Google's algorithm has decided I'm worth "investing" in.

I did hop on the Google Search Console just to see if that translated into Google finally acknowledging that PC exists as a Blogger blog, but...

Google Search Console Indexing Chart
as of September 14, 2026.

Google still hasn't indexed anything from PC lately. However, note the sudden spike on August 10, 2026. I went from 1031 to 2646 pages "Not Indexed". I'm not sure what to make about that, but there was one change to the environment: 

Google Search Console Sitemap Info
as of September 14, 2026.

I periodically re-submit the sitemap.xml that Blogger automatically generates, just to see if one part of the vast Google Empire can interact with another. And whaddya know, this time it actually read the XML file! It may not have all of the pages on PC discovered, but it's a lot better than what I have had in the past:

Google Search Console as of January 17, 2026.

We'll see if anything comes of all this rigamarole, but I'm still confused as to the big question: Why now?

The only reasonable explanation is that PC suddenly became big enough to register, but that just doesn't feel right to me. I'm more likely to believe that the wheels of Google just suddenly aligned and spat out some weird results. I'm not about to ascribe the sudden interest to anything I did, since I've been doing the same thing for years. 

So... Thank you, LLM bots... I guess...

***

There has been one other weird development that I wanted to mention and see if anybody else has noticed:

PC Front Page as of
September 14, 2026.

It may not look that interesting to you, but I noticed right before I left this past weekend that Bhagpuss of Inventory Full hadn't put out a new post in several days. Given that Bhagpuss is quite prolific, I found that quite odd. At first I thought "Well, he probably went on vacation," but when I looked on his blog he quite obviously had more recent posts:

Inventory Full's front page as of September 14, 2026.

I thought that maybe there was a problem with his feed, but then I noticed that all of the blogs on my Front Page that use Blogger hadn't been updated in over a week as well (see above). 

And yes, I did check several of them, so I'd need not bore you with extra screencaps.

So yeah, there's an issue with Blogger where the feed isn't getting updated. Is that happening with anybody else?

Checking Out

And it seems such a waste of time

If that's what it's all about

Mama, if that's movin' up

Then I'm movin' out

--from Movin' Out by Billy Joel

By the time you read this, I'll be on my way to Milwaukee to spend a weekend up there visiting my oldest and her partner.

I had to explain to the members of my amateur
radio club that Ham Radio Outlet having a store
in Milwaukee had absolutely NOTHING to do
with our trip. (Honest!)

We'd set this weekend up before I even realized it was also the weekend of BlizzCon, so I guess I'll be out of the loop regarding what'll be going on over in California. Probably for the best, if you ask me, considering I expect this to be the last BlizzCon for a few years, if ever. 

Microsoft isn't a company that will throw "extra" money into brand building unless corporate purchasing is involved, and even their ongoing Copilot debacle didn't get much in the way of actual face-to-face interaction with their corporate partners beyond the C-suite level. The costs involved to put on a BlizzCon, from renting the convention space to all of the physical items, come straight out of the XBox budget, and you can imagine that Asha Sharma isn't thrilled about losing money for a physical convention when they could simply give you some digital assets and do a virtual dog-and-pony show instead.*

So, if there's anything prediction-related about this year's BlizzCon from me, it'll be that you'll not see another physical BlizzCon for quite a while after this one.

Oh, and I'd also expect another Dan Olson video in a few months, especially if there's another debacle like last time.

***

Wilhelm Arcturus had a post that provides you a link that creates your very own BlizzCon Keynote Bingo Card, based off of a bunch of potential predictions that he inputted into the site.

Here's a graphic of the Bingo Card I got when I clicked on the link:

Generated on September 6, 2026.

I did print out a hard copy just for reference, so we'll see how I do when I find out the various summaries of the Keynote Speech.

What, you expect me to listen to the replay of the Keynote Speech? I haven't listened to a Keynote speech for anything --no matter what convention or topic-- in at least a decade, and I likely will continue to do this until Jensen Huang stops wearing his leather jacket.

As far as the rest of BlizzCon is concerned, take a gander at the Graphic on the Battle.Net Main Page, snipped for this post:

Here's the BlizzCon 2026 logo on the Battle.Net Main Page.
Looks like (in clockwise order from the left): Diablo, Starcraft,
Hearthstone (judging by the cards), and Warcraft.
Missing: Overwatch and Heroes of the Storm.

Pretty safe to say that these four franchises will be represented at this BlizzCon. Also missing from the above: Arthas, Xal'atath, and Lilith.

*Wizards of the Coast, and their corporate masters Hasbro, haven't really done much in Gen Con for several years since it's a lot cheaper to farm out management of their floor space and whatnot to third party companies. So, beyond the presentation they put on annually for D&D, WotC doesn't have that much of an official presence at Gen Con these days. It still feels kind of weird to be saying that, given that Gen Con was founded by D&D co-creator Gary Gygax back in the 60s, and it was officially owned and operated by TSR (and its descendants) for decades until it was sold to WotC founder Peter Adkison in 2002.

We Are the Limitation

In the era of LLMs, you can't hide.

Whatever you say will be pulled out from the internet and presented to you, so you might want to be a bit wary about that.

Of course, Google still doesn't know PC exists, but hey, nobody's perfect.

Data as of June 1st, 2026.

List of Indexed Pages, as of June 1, 2026.

As you can see, Google has completely wiped out all of the "Indexed" web pages owned by Parallel Context, as if Google decided they didn't really exist. They are presently listed as "Scanned, Not Indexed", so if you can imagine the warehouse scene at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, it's a bit like that.

Google: "Top men are working on it."
Indiana Jones: "Who?"
Google: "Top. Men."

So when Google decided to announce changes to their search interface on May 19, 2026, I made a collective yawn. It doesn't matter how fancy the interface is, if Google itself isn't finding or indexing the data, you're not going to find it on Google.

I have been amused by the fact that Google and other AI companies might just be missing a major problem with their push to make everybody irrelevant: their own data pool. 

Copyright issues notwithstanding, if your search engine's webcrawlers aren't providing you with data --and I presume that a small blog like mine isn't the only website that has issues appearing on a normal google search-- then your AI isn't really being trained as effectively as you think.

Results using a private browsing window
on Firefox on June 1, 2026.

 And just for completeness (and, well, to rub Google's nose in it), Microsoft Bing knows I exist:

Results using a private browsing window
on Firefox on June 1, 2026.

That's damning with faint praise, as I'm really sick about Copilot this and Copilot that. Even though Microsoft threw in the towel and is beginning to back off from pushing the Copilot button so aggressively, they're not exactly giving up on Copilot either. 

And remember Google Glass? The eyeglass wearable that ended up being pulled by Google because people who wore them started getting beat up by people who resented being on video without consent? Well, fast forward to 2026, and Meta, Apple, and Amazon have made eyeglass wearables a thing now. And nobody cares anymore that they're being recorded.

Given that I can go to the grocery store and (unintentionally) be following someone up and down the aisles and hear both sides of their entire conversation for 40 minutes, I guess I shouldn't be surprised. I don't think any of the people who behave like this --and there are far far more of them than I'd ever have believed-- realize that anybody could record them and then use their discussions against them because they are holding a conversation in public. 

This goes on all the time, and I'm the one who gets funny looks when I put my earbuds on when I'm at the grocery store, although that might be due to me using wired earbuds more than anything else. No, I don't hold phone conversations at the store, although I have been known to call home to ask whether Brand X or Y is fine since Z isn't in stock. No, I put on my earbuds to keep the noise at bay (I have tinnitus) and so I don't have to listen in on whatever the latest gossip that some fellow customer is insisting I hear by talking loudly into a phone a couple of feet from me.

I guess it's only a matter of time before all of these wearables such as the eyeglasses become used by Big Tech to feed LLMs. And I'd bet money that even then, Parallel Context won't show up on a simple Google search.

A Solved Game Forces You to Respond to It -- Whether You Like It or Not

In the midst of planning the construction of some raised garden beds, studying for the Amateur Radio Extra Class License*, and handling family-related activities, I've had plenty of time these past few weeks to do some thinking. 

The biggest thing on my mind was why I actively avoid trying to follow the crowd and follow the clearly defined optimal game path when playing any video game. 

Am I committing self-sabotage by doing this?

When I play a single-player game, it's not a big deal because there's nobody looking over my shoulder to tell me I'm doing it wrong. I'm quite aware that just about every video game, from Baldur's Gate 3 to Oregon Trail** has wikis, walkthroughs, and meta-builds out there for people to use, but unless you're actively streaming your gameplay*** people will be none the wiser. 

But in the case of an MMO, there is always a best way of doing something --courtesy of algorithms and mathematics-- and if you're not following that meta build that's going to be a bit of a problem. Maybe not if you're playing the game solo, but if you want to do any group content there's always somebody who will be annoyed if you're not "doing things properly".

That's one of the big reasons why I never played what was at one time THE best rated boardgame on Boardgame Geek: Puerto Rico. Aside from being a Eurogame with a pasted-on theme designed to hide a mathematical exercise, Puerto Rico suffered from what for me was a fatal flaw: if you follow everything perfectly the winner will be explicitly determined by your initial turn order. Some Puerto Rico fanboys were so into the meta that they'd absolutely flip their shit if you didn't play exactly according to the meta.

Eurogamers aren't very fond of randomness
in boardgames either. From Pinterest.

If you play MMOs, does that sound familiar?

***

Here's the thing: whether or not you play according to the meta of a game, the mere existence of an easily obtainable meta for a multiplayer game means that you have to deal with the consequences, even if you consciously ignore it. Other players will expect you to play it, and if you don't that will impact their opinion of you as both a player and a person. Ignorance is unfortunately not an excuse for a subset of MMO players, and once you become aware of the meta**** you really have no alternative but to deal with it. 

Yes, I deal with it by actively ignoring it, but that's also because I kind of figured out a lot of the meta playstyles in my Classic WoW toons through experimentation while questing. Sure, I'm not aware of the entire meta of a particular class, but a short jaunt to Icy Veins or Wowhead will present it to me in full gory detail. I guess you could say that I'm happy I got 80% of the way there by myself, and it's frequently enough for the pugging I do (or casual play). Raiding would certainly put that philosophy to the test, because a) I don't want to look like an idiot and wipe the raid*****, and b) I have a certain amount of pride in playing well and not being a liability. At the same time, I know that looking at the meta is opening Pandora's Box, akin to downloading and utilizing your first Damage Meter addon: once you see how you're really doing there's no going back.

There's a post by Shintar on her SWTOR blog, Going Commando, that's 4 years old this month about this very phenomenon. Titled My DPS Is Bad and I Can't Look Away, it has been living rent-free in my head ever since I first read it. That it came out 3 months after I gave up my progression raiding career certainly had something to do with it, and I completely sympathize with her opinion. At least with SWTOR the game culture doesn't trend toward hardcore that the versions of WoW do, but for me, that post was uncomfortably close to the lead-in before I'd have another "discussion" from a raid lead about "getting my DPS up". 

But that's the thing: we're all responding to the very nature of a solved game. Consciously playing a different way from the meta is as much a response to the meta as embracing it. 

***

I was thinking about this when my Questing Buddy spent some time playing Stardew Valley over the past Winter. In her usual way, she went out and found a playthrough so she could follow the best path to completing the game. I counseled her to just go and explore the game; sure, you get a "score" after two years but you can keep playing indefinitely after that. Unless you're deliberately trying for something very hard to do, such as completing the original storyline within one year, there's no real reason to follow a playthrough guide.

But you can guess the outcome, can't you? She kept up with the guide.

*Yes, I'm studying for the highest level of Amateur Radio license available in the US. It is certainly much more technically oriented than what I found in the other license coursework; while I originally thought I could be ready to take the exam by April, I have since come to the conclusion it'll be more likely late Summer before I'm really ready. 

**Seriously, there's walkthroughs on how to win a game whose whole purpose is to get you to understand how migration on the actual Oregon Trail was like. Talk about missing the point.

***I'm very glad I'm too shy to consider streaming, because I would not be amused by such commentary.

****Typically having been told of its existence by another player wanting you help you get better at the game. I'm going to be charitable and it was a positive interaction, but if you know MMOs it's equally likely it was a variety of "git gud scrub" followed by a group kick.

*****OF COURSE I've done that before. Do you have to even ask?

Attack of the Murder Floofs

In case you aren't aware, Bhagpuss of Inventory Full has an annual Advent Calendar of music, culled from all ends of the Internet. I honestly don't know how he teases out all of the weird and obscure Christmas music he does, but I'm always grateful to enjoy the fruits of his labor.

So, in return, I'd like to provide him with a musical Holiday gift.

The origin of this particular piece of music lies in the Yule Cat of Iceland, discussed here on PBS' Monstrum:

As I watched the video, I noted that Björk had sang a cover of a poem about said Yule Cat, and set out to find it. There's a few copies out on YouTube, but I got this one from the "official" Björk channel:

Although I admitted expected something more modern and Pop-oriented --it is Björk, after all-- the song is most definitely neither Pop nor Rock, but a folk tune. And I found it really cool to listen to.

So, Happy Holidays, Bhagpuss!

***

Oh, you want another Christmas monster?

How about Krampus, then?

False Positives

There are times when I really really dislike bots and web crawlers.

This is what I discovered when I looked at the results for the past week on Blogger:

Observed on November 20, 2025.

As you can see, the number of people who actually read my last post is around 29, which is on the low end but it hovers typically between 20-50 views. I'm used to that.

But look at the numbers for the site as a whole, and things are a wee bit out of whack.

Almost all of that I can attribute that to bots and crawlers, as it gives the false impression that people are swarming all over the blog. If they were, I'd expect to see more comments this past week than I have.

This stuff comes in waves, so we're in yet another wave that'll likely end around Black Friday. 

EtA: The number of views were originally 22, but by the time I got to a screencap they were 29. Corrected in the post.

Still More Technical Silliness

An addendum on my post on Tuesday...

Is there some circle of hell where Microsoft is better than Google at something? Asking for a friend.

I'm not being (very) facetious, because Microsoft's Bing Webmaster Tools has accepted Parallel Context's sitemap.xml file, but Google has not:

Microsoft's Bing Webmaster Tools...

Google's Search Console...

I even looked at the XML file just for curiosity's sake and discovered there are so many posts on PC that there's three sub-XML files. So, I tried uploading them directly to the Google Search Console with the same result as you see above. At this point I'm tempted to think that the problem is with Google, not with the XML file. After all, the sitemap.xml file is created by Blogger, not me, and last I checked Blogger is owned by Google.

Oh, and I got yet another response to my request for indexing after fixing my "Redirect error".

This came in on September 24, 2025.

Yeah, right. I followed their analysis tools linked in the help section and discovered that they're being redirected to the mobile version of the website. Yeah, so... There's a mobile version. That's a problem how? If you're running a version of Chrome that is mobile in nature, you're going to get the mobile version.

/sigh

Anyway, I apparently had poor ratings for Accessibility, so I had to change PC's layout to one of the "new" standards, which is a slightly different colored version of the original, and got this:

This is for desktop, as of 9/25/2025.

And mobile as of 9/25/2025.
Note the comment about redirect in the listing.

I had to change the mobile settings to show the full website, which I really dislike. The whole point of a mobile setting is to make it easier to read on a mobile device. So after some more tweaking and switching it back to what I consider a "better" mobile setting, I got this:

As of a bit later in the morning on 9/25/2025.

Accessibility went down, but the other scores went up. 

Still, there was one last trick to pull off, and one that I'd been meaning to do anyway, which was to change the main art piece.

It'll do for the time being.

However, the result in the tools was a whole lot of "meh"...

Well, I like it...

Anyway, I'm no longer in the red for any of the scores, so I'm going to give it another try.

How Do You Fix Something When You're Already Dead to Google?

Curiosity can be a real bitch at times.

After I’d made this post about how Shintar had discovered that Parallel Context wasn’t showing up in Google’s search results, Bhagpuss’s comment led me to investigating what the Google Console was all about. For a guy who likes to pride himself about being on the internet before the first browser was invented, the fact I never knew the Google Console or its Bing equivalent existed was a blow to my ego. Still, I swallowed my pride and poked around.

Once I started looking over the Google and Bing consoles, that was it. Like any kid who read his share of Encyclopedia Brown books (and Sherlock Holmes stories) I love a good mystery, and on the consoles I found mysteries in spades.

For starters, why was the Google Console telling me that I had a security alert on my blog?

I knew I hadn’t deliberately done anything stupid such as linking to a picture from a sketchy website –I’d gotten tired of picture links vanishing underneath me so I simply made local copies with citations—so it had to be a link to a website that had gone bad. Or worse, something about Blogger that had raised the ire of Google.* The Google Console was completely unhelpful as to which post or link was the offender, so I was left to my own devices to try to puzzle through this.

The best course of action was to start with the links on the main page, because those are found on every blog page. If that didn’t work, then I was going to have to slog through every single post to find the culprit. I began with the blogs with the longest period of inactivity and worked my way back toward the newest, and I eventually found the culprit: it was Hawtpants of the Old Republic, Njessi’s SWTOR blog. She’d had periods of inactivity followed by a few clusters of posts, but the last post on her blog had raised my eyebrows because it didn’t have Njessi’s authorial voice. I’d even fired off an email to her asking if her blog had been hacked, but I never got a response. This time when I clicked on the link, however, her blog simply exploded with all sorts of spam pop-ups and stuff completely unrelated to an MMO blog (such as online gambling). I cried a little inside, removed the link to Hawtpants of the Old Republic, and submitted the blog for security review to Google Console.

It took a few days, which surprised me given how quickly Google tends to yank people's access to things, but I got this emailed response:

This was on September 3, 2025, for the curious.

Okay, so I then submitted the site for indexing, and several days later I got this response:

This was on September 14, 2025.

WTF, Google. I tried hunting down what they meant by that, and at that moment I learned something important: Google's help pages aren't worth crap. There was very little in the way of anything resembling constructive assistance, probably because Google, like Microsoft, wants you to pay for the privilege of fixing your website. Eventually I figured out that there was another problem on the blog, likely a link that is going to a different location than what the link expects.

Well, this is going to suck trying to figure out which link is the problem. Just because the link doesn't go to where you expect --yet is NOT a link to a security risk-- shouldn't be a reason to not index the blog. My disgust with Google's lack of assistance aside, I started poking around once more. 

"URL is not on Google". No shit, Sherlock.
From September 20, 2025

Turns out it was this little widget that was the problem:

NOTE: This is the correct widget, not the one
originally posted here.

Despite the description, the RSS feed has long since gone away, one of those few times that Blogger has actually been proactive in removing something that was being sunset. That left Atom and links to Yahoo and Netvibes (or something like that). Atom worked, although it wasn't in "normal" HTML format, but Yahoo and Netvibes went to each website's 404 address.

Surely, this couldn't be the root cause, could it? Could it? I tested the live URL, and...

It's the same result as I got a few days ago.

Okay, we're getting somewhere. So I resubmitted the page for indexing and waited.

And waited.

And waited.

And I finally got a result:

Really? I mean, REALLY?
From September 21, 2025.

Basically they didn't index the page because the page hasn't been indexed. If that wasn't a truly abominable case of circular reasoning, I don't know what is.

So... I pretty much have gone as far as I can with indexing, because Google will eventually fix the "Crawled - currently not indexed" issue when it gets around to it.

At least on the bright side I cleared up a security issue and a couple of bad links, but nothing resembling a positive result. Parallel Context is still dead to Google.

*Oh, the irony of THAT one. If Google were complaining about its own Blogger service, someone should get these two to talk together. Well, maybe not, now that I think about it; Google might decide the easier course of action would be to kill off Blogger instead.

EtA: Corrected the "Feed" widget with the "Subscription Links" widget, which is the actual widget used. 

More Silence on the (Guild) Banking Industry

I figured I ought to provide an update on the Great Blizzard Bank Heist. Kurn dropped yet another YouTube video Monday evening,

Basically, Blizzard hasn't done much of anything, despite Kurn trying to stir the pot to at least get some visibility on the matter. She's also tried to get some visibility by going to Bellular Gaming, Wowhead, and Blizzard Watch (among other people) without so much as even an acknowledgement response. Blizzard saying nothing I pretty much expected --anybody who has had to try to navigate Microsoft's helpdesk knows how frustrating that can be-- but I at least expected better from Michael Bell and Blizzard Watch.

The Retail WoW community in general has collectively shrugged and moved on in the same way that people not directly affected have moved on after Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton.

Other than that, I don't have much to add. I guess there's a big patch coming up in the next day or two which also includes some changes to the banks, so... Uh, good luck with that.

No FDIC Insurance for Your Guild Bank

Kurn posted an update on the Great Blizzard Bank Heist:

The short summary is that no new items were restored, and she provided commentary on the comments from her first video.

That Blizzard hasn't provided any communication on this issue isn't surprising to me, because a huge monolithic corporation --Bobby Kotick's version or Satya Nadella's-- has other things to worry about if the contract doesn't call for their explicit attention. Put another way, the people who lost items are too small in stature for Micro-Blizz to care*, and it also wouldn't shock me if Blizz never bothered with a proper restoration because that cost money (in terms of people and space).

The longer this has gone on, the more it seems to me that changes under the hood that led to the deletion of massive amounts of items from some guild banks was actually a data wipe; items that were no longer in the game or may have had some potential data corruption from years of activity were simply removed, and that was that. I've seen "database cleanups" that have had this sort of effect before, particularly on unstable databases. At those times, you have to do a manual dump of the database contents and potentially clean up the database by hand. It is by far a miserable task, but cleaning up a database like this is something that ought to be done. It will take a ton of time, but there also needs to be a full amount of transparency involved with the customers (us).

I'd actually respect Blizzard a lot more if they were up front about what they were doing instead of this whole "too bad, so sad" non-response after items were removed. If the answer to "fixing" the data meant removing all the items from a guild bank into a temporary guild bank and then putting items back into a rebuilt guild bank to fix any potential corruption, that should have been done.

***

Oh, and once again, a Season of Discovery rollout affected Classic Era. As of a week ago, all of our bars were reset, so you have to go back into every toon on settings and re-enable your action bars.

One of my WoW friends was in Blackwing Lair on Thursday night, and the drakes in there were massively bugged. They hadn't wiped to them in ages, and yet they kept wiping due to wonky drake behavior. I didn't get any real details other than "this crap sucks!", but let's say she's not a fan of SoD impacting Era's raids.

And some pull down menus, like that found on your toon to reset a dungeon, have that table's font and font size absolutely huge compared to the rest of the UI. Given that Blizz has implemented "some changes" into Era in the past few months, I'm not confident that this will ever get resolved.

*If you think that if you were a larger customer you'd get better customer service, well... Let's just say that some Fortune 500 companies are beginning to discover that Azure Cloud and AWS don't really give a crap about any special services for them, unlike when they might have gotten that extra service in the past from outsourcing firms that had their own datacenters. 

EtA: I meant to write action bars. Corrected.

The Great Blizzard Bank Heist

I kind of keep an eye on Retail WoW, but I don't follow much in the way of details. For example, I couldn't tell you the names of any of the zones from areas after Mists of Pandaria (and probably only half of Mists itself), or any of the bosses in raids since Wrath.*

However, Kurn of Kurn's Corner had a post this morning about what she's calling The Great Blizzard Bank Heist. She also posted a video on YouTube describing the situation and what she'd lost out of her own personal guild bank. A lot of items you simply can't get anymore, such as the various dragonscales that would drop from drakes throughout the pre-Cataclysm world and in Blackrock Mountain instances/raids.

Being a bit of a packrat myself, I can feel for her and for all of the others who'd been squirreling away rare and no longer obtainable materials/gear/patterns only to find them all wiped out by the data changes made by Blizzard in prep for The War Within.

Yeah, it's all just pixels. I get that. And yes, I'm sure that Blizz has hidden away in their Terms of Service some language meant to protect themselves from problems such as this, describing it as "Best Effort".

That doesn't mean you are immune to the emotional impact of the loss of items you'd been collecting for years --or well over a decade, in Kurn's case-- and being without any recourse other than maybe getting a few items back really sucks. That's the real tragedy here: the accidental reveal by Blizzard that you really own nothing, and despite what we may believe and what attachments we have to in-game items and achievements, they're all just a misclick away from it all vanishing into nothingness. Blizzard pulled that curtain back, and we can't unsee what they showed us. Even if people were to get everything back like they ought, nobody will ever forget that Blizzard could take it all away again in the blink of an eye.

*To be fair, I didn't know the names of many raid bosses at all until I started raiding in Classic WoW.

Speaking of Pandora's Box

Long time blogger Kurn has tried out Follower Dungeons in Retail WoW recently, and wrote about her experience with it on her latest blog post. To say she was impressed with the NPC groups she had is an understatement.

My original comment on her post, that it was a technical solution to a people problem, is likely the most obvious take. After all, MMOs in general --and WoW in particular-- is infamous for toxic behavior toward tanks and healers in instance and raid groups. This solution, presented in Retail, is an obvious way toward allowing people to see group content without actually fixing the toxicity itself. 

The more I've thought about it, however, the more I wonder whether this will become the ultimate goal toward making an otherwise dead or empty location in an MMO feel alive. 

If you go to a place such as Silvermoon City or The Exodar --both out of the way cities that first saw light in WoW's Burning Crusade expansion-- other than a few bank alts and some new toons running here and there both cities are dead.

Blizzard tried to make them seem more alive by having a few groups of NPCs roam both cities, but the paths followed and statements made are pretty much on repeat. There are similar instances of in-game NPC interactions throughout Azeroth that are gradually more elaborate but still on rails throughout all of the expansions I've played. While I give Blizz credit for trying, it isn't even close to what it's like to having a real vibrant community.

If you hop over to Guild Wars 2 and Divinity's Reach, that's a bit more of what I believe Blizzard is attempting to do. By comparison, Divinity's Reach is a lot more "alive" with NPCs --namely that there are more of them around so that the place feels less empty-- although NPC interactions with the game world are still pretty limited. 

But what if you programmed NPCs to act more like what you find in Follower Dungeons, but interacting in the game world itself?

You know, a step or two away from Westworld...

It's from Pinterest, but it's a screencap
of HBO's Westworld.

Of course, Westworld is what you'd get if a Renaissance Faire were entirely composed of robots who never broke the fourth wall (or never were aware there was a fourth wall).

The bane of MMOs isn't toxicity, but apathy. If there's nobody to interact with, the main selling point of MMOs is dead. But if a game company can fill a game world with NPCs that interact with the game world as if they were real players (minus the toxicity) then you can negate the worst problem of the MMO genre.*

It's a tempting proposition, isn't it?

And holy crap, I just realized how this could be used in "adult" MMOs. (Again, just like Westworld.) 

Yikes.

Whether or not we like it, I think that there will be some game companies that will move video games toward truly immersive experiences, with NPCs that interact in a more lifelike fashion with each iteration of generative AI. 

And I'm not exactly sure what I think about that.

*I guess the bots would quickly follow suit and up their own game, wouldn't they?

EtA: Corrected a sentence from "to to" to "to do". Got all that?

Keeping the Fire Going

Sometimes the inspiration for a post comes from out of left field*, and this certainly fits.

Zinn over in Jinxed Thoughts --yes, Zinn's back!-- had a post this evening about a Choose Your Own Adventure book series, called Dice Man:

From Jinxed Thoughts.

Zinn is a fan of Judge Dredd, and so that cover caught her eye. Only one of the stories covers ol' Dredd, but that's fine. That post she wrote jogged my memories about the Choose Your Own... style books that I'd bought back in the 80s while I was forbidden from playing RPGs, and I have no idea where they are now: Tolkien Quest/Middle Earth Quest series and the Lone Wolf series.

***

I had the top three books, but this is
a sampling of what was put out.
From u/aelphia on this Reddit thread.

Let's talk Tolkien first, shall we?

This was my gateway drug into the Middle-earth Roleplaying System by Iron Crown Enterprises, but I'd almost completely forgot that little factoid. Back in the 80s when I was banned from RPGs, the first book appeared at one of our local bookstores,** so I naturally snapped it up. 

Inside the book looked a lot like the traditional Choose Your Own Adventure books, only there were fights and skill checks involved, and for those checks you could either close your eyes and point a pencil at a page in the back with random numbers on it or you could get out some dice and ...you know... roll for it. There was even a miniature character sheet in the back, as I recall, and the story itself was well done.

I know now that the book, being produced by Iron Crown Enterprises, meant that the quality was bound to be high, but I had no idea what to expect. I mean, the old Choose Your Own Adventure books themselves suffered from uneven quality from book to book, so I had kind of steeled myself for a potential let-down.

But the best part? It looked like a Choose Your Own Adventure book, so it passed whatever invisible inspection my parents' had, and besides it was the size of a paperback***, so I could easily toss it in a book bag or in the middle of some other books and nobody was the wiser.  After the third book I didn't see any more being published, but that was okay by me; by then I'd moved on to hiding the MERP RPG books themselves in my room.

Having done some short research, it appears that the series was restarted when I was away at college, which is why the actual number of Middle-earth Quest books is much larger than the three I remember.

***

There was also another reason why I was okay with the Middle-earth Quest series ending, and it was this series that I stumbled upon at that same bookstore:

From the Lone Wolf Fandom Wiki.

I knew from the moment I saw it that I was too old for the target audience, but I quickly snapped it up and skimmed the inside anyway. There was a similar system in place to that of the Middle-earth Quest books, so I acknowledged that it was more for elementary and middle-school kids and swallowed my pride and bought it. 

Looking back on those Lone Wolf books now, I can see the obvious kid-oriented plots, but I was still happy to feed my RPG habit with these supercharged Choose Your Own Adventure style books. The funny thing is, I tired of these more quickly than the Middle-earth Quest books, mainly because after the first story arc finished, the author Joe Dever went back and started another story arc with your character essentially starting all over again. In an echo of complaints about every MMO expac ever, I wasn't so thrilled to essentially toss out all of my old abilities and weapons just because. Still, I have some very fond memories of these books that kept the RPG flame alive for me in the 80s when things looked bleak for me.

#Blaugust2023

*A slang term referencing baseball. The outfield in baseball is the farthest away from home plate, so "out of left field" is slang for "from out of nowhere".

**It feels so weird saying 'bookstores' these days, but when I look back on it, the 70s and 80s were 38-48 years ago. We even had a bookstore at the local strip mall a short bike ride away from my home, and that's something my own kids would never ever comprehend. To them, going to a bookstore is a "pile into the car and drive for 20 minutes" event, especially since the Borders 10 minutes away closed back in 2011. And that was the summer before our oldest mini-Red began Seventh Grade; she'll be 25 this Fall. (!)

***And cost as little as one, too!