Yesterday was a beautiful, sunny day. Not humid at all, and a pleasant breeze coming from the northwest.
A good day to finish off this batch of wood for the deck:
10 year old grill not included.
I flipped over and began working on the side of the deck closest to the porch, so I could exploit the wood I had left. I could cut out the bad sections of the replacement decking and still have enough left to replace these small pieces. That photo is kind of deceptive, however, as the board lengths rapidly grew to requiring 12 foot boards.
I have now exhausted that first batch of wood and have about 60% of the deck rows left to replace. The length of the rows isn't nearly as important as the number of rows, because the number of cuts on the saw will be the same for most of what's remaining. I'm thinking of getting one batch of wood in September and then another in October, and that ought to finish up the decking. All I'd have to do then is wait until Spring or early Summer to paint the deck.
Oh yeah, and begin Phase 2 of the rehab: the railings and stairs.
It's an oft-referenced saying that you are the hero of your own story, just like how people never really see themselves as the villain.
Yes, I was thinking of this sketch. From imgflip.
This has some interesting effects when considering where we came from versus where we're going. We try to make sense of our lives and unconsciously put ourselves in the best light possible. Nobody likes to think of their ancestors as mere peasants. But that's the thing, isn't it? Just on sheer numbers alone, most people living today came from peasant --or worse-- stock.
Although perhaps another quote from Henry David Thoreau would be a more apt one: The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.* In that respect, the desire to see yourself as the hero is quite strong.
Where would the video game market be without the ability to see ourselves as the hero? Or the pencil and paper RPG market? Or even the printed word?
We as humans watch sporting events and cheer on our chosen teams experiencing highs and lows through their exploits. Just ask Liverpool fans what it meant when they finally won the Premier League, or Chicago Cubs fans when they finally broke the century long curse and won the World Series in 2016. Or ask Crystal Palace fans when Manchester United came from behind to beat them in the FA Cup in 2016.
So... When we play the hero in a game, is it escapism? Or do we delude ourselves into thinking that everything we do in our lives can turn us into the hero, and we feel cheated when we're not considered as such, even in something as a video game? Honestly, I don't know the answer to that question, but the older I get the more I wonder whether in our youth we convince ourselves of our own greatness and then spend the rest of our lives dealing with the disillusionment that follows. If we're lucky, we find a sort of equilibrium, where we can acknowledge our highs and lows in equal measure and simply accept ourselves for what we are.
Nothing in particular really triggered this introspection, but it has been growing on me for a while now. I can't look at the elitism found in a lot of activities --we see it in gamers/gaming and comics, but it's prevalent everywhere-- without wondering just how much of that is driven by that insecurity that we feel when we wrestle with the reality that we aren't the heroes we imagine ourselves to be.
*Here's the full quote in context from Thoreau's book Civil Disobedience and Other Essays: "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things..”
Okay, I’m going to say something that ought to be patently obvious: visible activity by other players in an MMO is critical to an MMO’s success.
It’s a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised at the number of games that struggle with that simple notion.
"Hello??!! Anybody here??!!"
I remember when I first started playing WoW, there were people running to and fro in Eversong Forest; not that many, mind you, but enough to get the feeling that there were others inhabiting the world. Then I was taken/escorted to Orgrimmar and… Holy crap was it crowded.*
But as I leveled, outside of a few critical places that were busy, such as Hillsbrad or Stranglethorn, the number of other players I encountered dwindled until I barely saw another soul in Outland or large sections of Northrend. At the same time, I began to see “Dalaran” more and more as the location of people I encountered and put on my friends list. It wasn’t until I reached where Dalaran floated above the Crystalsong Forest in Northrend that I truly understood just how many people played WoW on my server.
And, more importantly, where they all were.
After that revelatory moment, I began to keep a closer eye on how MMOs handled the “multiplayer” aspect of their games.
***
It’s a rather common problem that over an MMO’s lifetime people will gather at watering holes where the current content is located. The problem is that is not where the new players are, so to a new player it certainly seems like nobody –or nearly nobody—is playing the game.
If you don’t want people around, that’s fine; I’ll be honest in that I kind of prefer the isolation to an extent. However, if you want to do any form of group content, well… Good luck with that.** It’s just that you need people out there and visible in the world to give you the impression that the game is viable.
***
By all indicators, WoW Classic Era doesn’t have a large population. The server selection screen identifies the East Coast Cluster as having a low population, and if you look at the raiding population it’s not exactly overwhelming.
However, if you enter the two capital cities in Classic Era, you’re going to find a decently sized group of people just hanging around, even at 1 AM server time. Given that you periodically return to a class trainer to train, you’re always returning to a major city while leveling. Additionally, the leveling process itself funnels you into the capital cities early on, acquainting you with the fact that this is where people go no matter their level.
The impression it leaves on a new player is that the game is active even at the beginning.
***
Lord of the Rings Online does something similar in that your intro zone and first leveling zone –for clarification purposes they are distinct zones based on your race— may be active, but they all funnel you toward Bree. Bree becomes a major hub within LOTRO itself that is always active, no matter the expansion. While the leveling zones have fewer and fewer players in them, Bree is always omnipresent as a watering hole. Sure, the central location of whatever the current expansion is gets the lions’ share of players at max level, Bree is probably one of every player’s top three hangout locations. Bree shows a new player that yes, people do play the game, and some of them are even at max level out there. LOTRO may not have the activity of even WoW Classic Era, but it is active in its own way.
***
When you get to Retail WoW, however, a lot of the systems put in place back in the Classic game are no longer present or no longer needed.
Blizzard quickly discovered that people at max level congregated at a central location in the current expac zones, abandoning other areas. Shattrath City and Dalaran was where the people went, and the major cities became ghost towns. History repeated itself in both TBC and Wrath Classic, only more so, as there were very few new players out leveling in the world. Blizzard's solution was to put the focus back on the capital cities in Cataclysm, but it didn't exactly work as intended. Automated systems, declining subscriptions, and server transfers all meant that while some servers had active players where Blizzard wanted them, others did not. And to make matters worse, servers marked "New Players" were frequently those with the lowest population in the WoW ecosystem.
Instead of server merges, Mists of Pandaria introduced connected realms, clustering servers with low population together so that the world would feel like an active world. Blizzard abandoned the idea of returning max level players to the capital cities where low level players could see them, and as time went on more systems were created to get people to max level as quickly as possible. If you were new and wanted to feel like part of a living world, you had to skip over all of the "old" content to get to the new stuff.
***
When J1mmy put out this video:
There was a particular sentence that resonated with my experience in many MMOs since 2009:
"...but sure enough the second I hit 60 right on cue my pager's going off and I'm getting contacted from people in Stormwind begging me and pleading me to return and start the Dragon Chronicles and so I went back to Stormwind, I got to the dragon place, I think I leveled up like once or twice and then I logged out cause I realized that through that entire experience [of leveling through Battle for Azeroth to Dragonflight] I had yet to talk to a single other human even once."
It's kind of ironic in that for many MMOs the most active you see players out in the world are in the starter areas and the main hubs in a current expansion.
The starter areas are where new players inevitably begin play***, and the hubs at the current expansion are where all of the max level toons go. But it's once you leave that starter area where things get mushy, and if you don't see anybody around the promise of seeing other people at Endgame can seem like so much vaporware.
To combat that emptiness you need good gameplay, good systems, and a story that remains valid throughout the leveling experience. And all three demand one thing that a lot of game companies don't want to utilize: a development team's time. It costs too much time and money to make sure the mid-game is taken care of, despite it being a critical part of keeping a player playing your game. It costs far less money --and is more profitable-- to simply put new items in the cash shop rather than plan for the long term.
*And more than a little intimidating. Ironically enough, as soon as I arrived, I was accosted by someone looking for guild signatures. Having someone come up to me out of the blue kind of froze me in my tracks. I have since gotten over my fright of that sort of behavior, but it did take quite a while to do so.
**And the overall lack of players available to perform group content at level is one of the reasons why automatic group finders are a thing.
If my occasional comments on Bhagpuss' Inventory Full haven't clued you in, I'm a bit of a music nerd.
I listen to most musical genres --with the notable exception of Country*-- and if you saw the albums I have on my typical playlist, you'd be bewildered by the range. But because of that range, I can enjoy all of the new (to me) music that Bhagpuss posts.
So when I was perusing YouTube for something or other close to a month ago, this particular video popped into my feed:
My biggest takeaway was Phil Aaberg. If you hear his music, you may get a specific image in your head of Phil, but the real Phil looks nothing like that: gravelly western voice, a large frame, and shock of white hair and beard sitting at the piano.
As I watched the video, I kept thinking "How the hell did I miss this on Kickstarter?"
I guess the magical search engine failed to pinpoint me as a Windham Hill fan, because I easily found the Kickstarter campaign, perused it, and tossed a few dollars their way.
The campaign ended the other day, so I checked out the Community section just to see who were the people who backed the campaign:
Can you see it?
On the left is what you'd expect of a musical label and genre that began out on the West Coast: Berkeley, Oakland, San Francisco, San Jose, etc. And sure, New York City makes sense too, given its size and variety.
But what the hell are Dallas and Cincinnati doing in there?
I can't speak to Dallas, but I know exactly why my hometown is on the list: WVXU-FM.
***
If you listen to WVXU (91.7 FM) today, you'd think that it was always an NPR news/talk radio affiliate, but that current format only dates from 2005. (Yikes!) Before then, WVXU was owned by Xavier University (hence the "XU" in the callsign) and had an eclectic list of programs: NPR's Morning Edition at dawn, classic radio shows (Jack Benny, Fibber McGee and Molly, etc.) in the late morning, and music in the afternoon and evening.
The type of music the station played was something rarely heard these days on the radio: Jazz, Blues, Big Band Jazz, New Age, Acoustic, and Alternative/Progressive that bordered on the Avant Garde.**
'New Age' and 'Acoustic' umbrellas kind of cover a wide range of styles. Sure, there was John Diliberto's Echoes program, but the main afternoon show on WVXU, Audiosyncracies, was less New Age and far more acoustic oriented. Audiosyncs had a lot of Windham Hill artists in rotation and even featured Alex de Grassi's Clockwork as the intro music to the program.
I may have first been introduced to Windham Hill music while at college, but WVXU kept it going. In the mid-late 90s, while I was coding or debugging at work I'd have my headset on, listening to Audiosyncs. And when it was Christmas time, WVXU sponsored and promoted the Windham Hill Winter Solstice concerts locally when the tour came to town.
Alas that all good things come to an end, and in 2005 Xavier University sold WVXU to the local public radio company that owned WGUC-FM (formerly a University of Cincinnati station) and the format shuffle led to all of the NPR shows being transferred to WVXU, ending most of their music programs.
So yeah, Windham Hill has a history here. And I'm glad that a few of us were able to provide some funding to help tell the story of the small label that found success going against the grain. While the label Windham Hill is effectively dead --it is owned now by music giant BMG in the same manner that EA has done to numerous video game companies in the past-- the spirit of Windham Hill lives on in Will Ackerman's current label, Imaginary Road Studios.
Maybe I ought to send a link from that Kickstarter to a friend and ex-coworker of mine; she's a relative of the late George Winston.
*I've mentioned it before, but my dislike of Country music comes from my Catholic School music class as a kid heavily promoting Country music as an alternative to our 'traditional' music we covered: hymns for Mass.
**There was also Saturday Night Loud, a heavy metal program that played metal that you rarely heard on the radio back then.
If there's one thing about Gen Con, you're never sure what will attract your attention. To borrow an overused term, you think you do, but you don't.*
And 2024 certainly delivered on that premise.
My wife hadn't attended since 2015, so she was excited to go. We picked up my son and his partner at 7:30 and pointed our car west on I-74. Destination: Indianapolis.
We parked just outside of Lucas Oil Stadium and headed north a block or two to the Indianapolis Convention Center.
Yes, the Colts play here. Does it show?
Along the way, there was evidence that there was going to be a crowd inside.
Uh oh.
Yes, Gen Con was sold out all four days beforehand. According to the post-con press release, there were over 71,000 attendees throughout the entire con, and yeah, once you got inside the Convention Center you could tell.
I apologize for the blurry photo, but I was in a hurry as I was being jostled along. But hey, dice are dice and Chessex was everywhere.
(The rest of the report is after the jump break due to the sheer number of photos.)
NOTE: The Gen Con report will come out on Wednesday at the earliest, as I'm still letting everything cook in my brain for a while.
But in that absence, here's a YouTube link to Saturday's Cosplay Parade:
There are a few notable tweaks that came into play during Wrath of the Lich King, such as the automated dungeon finder or the 10/25 person raids. While TBC Classic added random compliments from an NPC if you became Exalted with their faction, Wrath saw an expansion of that by having more NPCs throw an "atta boy" your way when you pass them by.*
In a similar vein, there's the interaction with Gryan Stoutmantle out in Grizzly Hills that highlights what Blizzard could potentially do with a toon. If you've gone through the Defias quests in Vanilla Classic that lead up to and through The Deadmines, Gryan greets you as an old friend. If you haven't finished those quests, Gryan gives you a generic greeting. The decision tree on that sort of interaction isn't very difficult to implement --it's pretty much "if X is marked complete, then do Y else Z"-- but it provides a certain amount of familiarity to a player. The customization makes you feel a bit like you're part of a larger narrative in a small way.
But what happens when the game acknowledges you concerning events that you never performed, such as raids and whatnot? It's kind of hard to be the Champion of Azeroth if you never went raiding or even played 10+ years worth of expansions.
There is no easy way to let a player experience a story if they come into a game that's been running for ~20 years, or if they've been away from the game since Cataclysm or Mists. There's too much story, too many NPCs, and too many changes to the world** to easily digest. Therefore, I have to wonder if Blizzard hasn't simply thrown in the towel and is tailoring expansions to the 'in-crowd' who have already been playing consistently through the years and only stopped playing after Legion or during Battle for Azeroth.
This is inherently a self-limiting design, because a design team would want to draw in as many new players as possible. However, this becomes more feasible if the overall pool of lapsed players is large enough, but only to a certain extent. My complaints about WoW's story focus since about Wrath onward aside, once you are away from a story long enough it simply becomes impossible to catch up with what's going on.
I liken this to taking a break from watching a soap opera and then coming back to find yourself so out of touch with the story that you have no idea what's going on. And yes, I do have experience in that manner, having spent part of my sophomore year at UD watching Days of our Lives. Soap operas crank out new half hour episodes every day during the work week all year long, so you kind of have to keep watching to stay current. Taking even a week or two break from watching --and this was in the days before people had widespread access to online services, never mind the internet itself-- put me so far behind that I had major issues following the plot.
Or, to put it another way, if you stopped reading a book series at book #4 and you want to step back in at book #15, well... I hope you like reading, because that's going to be the easiest way to catch up in a comprehensible manner.
After a while, the publishers/producers just have to simply shrug their shoulders and just keep moving on, even at the cost of limiting their overall potential readership/viewership.
And that's what I think Blizz has done at this point with World of Warcraft. Sure, they'd like me to spend money on a Retail expansion, but they're moving ahead whether I do it or not. They get far more profit out of fewer subscriptions but a lot more cash shop activity than more subscriptions but far less out of the cash shop.
*The first few times it happens, it's cute. But after about the 20th time it starts to get really old. Especially if you're like me and want to blend in with the crowd, being called out in Dalaran by Linda Ann Kastinglow with "You couldn't ask for a finer person than Quintalan, I say."
**Dalaran? Whaddya mean there's more than one Dalaran? It's still back under a bubble north of Southshore like in TBC, right? And what's this about a spoiler? What?
