A Truly Remarkable Life

Sometimes I have this urge to post multiple times in a day, after having not a lot to talk about over a week.

Kind of just figures, right?

Several years ago, I was aware of a WoW player named Mats Steen who'd passed away back in 2014 from Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy, and his parents were surprised when several of  Mats' WoW friends showed up at his funeral. The events were picked up in a story first presented for the NRK (in Norwegian) in Norway in 2019, but translated and presented on the BBC in English.

It was a touching article, and a reminder that the friends we make in MMOs impact far more people than we may never know. People like Mats are the reason why I play MMOs: not for the shinies or the achievements or the story, but for the people. I'm afraid that too many players lose sight that it is people that make these games special, and not just your buddies on a raid team. It's all about the friendships you make along the way. However, I thought that was that, and the memory of Mats faded over time.

Then I was surprised to see this pop up on my YouTube feed on Tuesday:

From BBC Channel 4.

About a minute into the interview, I realized that yes, I remembered the story of Mats, but... What is it with the animation?

Then I realized that someone (Benjamin Ree) had made a documentary about Mats, and his main, Ibelin. I quickly searched for The Remarkable Life of Ibelin and found the trailer on YouTube:

How did I not know this was coming?

The documentary releases on Netflix in the US on Friday; I was concerned it might be only watchable in Europe. It's already garnered a bunch of awards and nominations at Sundance and other film festivals, so that's a very good sign.

And yes, I checked and we have enough tissues so that when I'm ready to watch it, I can.

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.

Meme Monday: New to MMOs Memes

We've all been new to an MMO, right? Whether it's WoW, Final Fantasy XIV, SWTOR, LOTRO, New World, or some other game, we've all been the newbie to the genre. So this is dedicated to those first few months that we've spent figuring this genre out.

Trying to figure out what MMO to play is always an
adventure, and not necessarily the good kind. And no,
I don't know what game the scantily clad elf is from.
My guess is BDO. From YouTube.

(And if you understand MMOs now, let me know. I still have a curve ball thrown at me every other week, and I've been  playing since 2009.)

Emblematic of all games, but MMOs in particular,
it's hard to understand the lingo and systems
while you're getting acclimated. From Reddit. Again.

Keeping new players engaged is a real
problem, and weaponizing FOMO is starting
to get a bit old. Once it gets past a certain
point, game companies are going to have to
figure out something else, because the cynicism
will overhwelm any sense of FOMO.
From Reddit. (Do I detect a trend?)

Yeah, this sort of thing happens all the time.
From Pinterest.

Interacting with other players can be good, 
but some MMOs encourage toxic behavior
by design. From Reddit (once more).

Some games are highly customizable with addons, 
which... becomes a problem. Then again, a lot of
MMO players turn off the music and sound and
focus on the addons anyway. From Reddit.

And finally, you knew there was a Starter Pack about MMORPGs...

I feel like they're picking on WoW Classic and
Old School Runescape here. From Reddit.

Making Sense of Incomprehensibility

Sometimes I wonder just how traffic flows on the internet.

Oh, not the technical version, mind you, because at one point I could tell you precisely how networking via TCP-IP actually worked*, but I meant in terms of why traffic flows to a specific location.

If you know the name of this character that Peter
Falk is playing, you might want to go schedule
a colonoscopy. From Tenor.com.

I keep up with the Meme Monday posts for a couple of reasons, namely to push myself into posting more often by having a regular column and having an outlet for my snarky sense of humor. However, another reason to post Meme Mondays is that --by and large-- more eyeballs look at those posts than any of my other ramblings on this blog. That shouldn't be a surprise since those posts have the broadest appeal as opposed to the gamer-geek centric fare typically found on the blog.

Still, I can be surprised by what takes off and what doesn't.

When a post takes off within gamer space, that's typically driven by eyeballs on a post itself. What I mean is that traffic goes directly to that post because it got a bump from somewhere out there in the blogosphere, such as the times when a post from PC would get a mention on the now-defunct WoW Insider. The first time that happened, on the series of posts I made comparing Blood Elves and Draenei back in December 2011, caught me by surprise. All I knew at first was that our traffic had spiked from a dozen or so views to 2000 or more, and I had no idea what the hell was going on. It was only after I dug into the data that I realized almost all of the traffic was coming from WoW Insider, whereupon following it back I discovered we'd gotten a mention in their weekly blog spotlight column. The traffic eventually reverted back to normal levels, but for a week or so PC got a nice boost.

This sort of behavior has happened from time to time, based primarily upon getting a mention in other blogs or websites with readership far greater than our own, but it could also be due to pertinent data appearing in a post. Such as Souldat's post on How to Effectively Tank the Lich King from 2010, which remains our single most viewed post on the blog. It didn't get a spike in viewership, but it had a steady number of views for several years. That it used to get on the main page of Google Search results didn't hurt.**

That being said, by and large the majority of spiky traffic that does come to the blog goes to the blog's main page rather than a specific post, which tells me that that traffic isn't driven by the gamer geek ecosphere.

Here ya go; the last three months' worth of traffic.

While I can guess what might have driven some traffic --the spike at the end is likely due to the magic words "Discworld" and "Kickstarter"-- a lot of those spikes come from way out of nowhere. I can't assume that a single post drove traffic to the blog, because the spikes in July, September and October show up during my "dead time" between posts. Blaugust is also no help, since you can't look at an individual post and say "yeah, that's brought people here". There's also the undercurrent of web crawlers and whatnot that will flow through all of your website creating a higher base level than what I'd call the true number of regular readers.

***

I've always known that the internet is a fickle beast, but blogging over the past decade and a half has reinforced those opinions. I still laugh at people --typically business types and marketers-- who think that "making something go viral" is just what internet creators do. "We need you to create a viral video for this" is a query I've heard on occasion***, as if you can snap your fingers and views will magically appear, but it's the sense that some people who "get" the internet and can manipulate it to their own ends that drives me batty. 

The internet doesn't work like that; what goes viral and what doesn't is pretty much an unknown. So I'll just continue to wonder just what the hell it is that occasionally makes PC's viewership spike.

*If you gave me an hour or two I could refresh my memory on all of the details beyond the basics of hubs, routers, setting up a local LAN behind a firewall, etc.

**In case you're wondering, the advent of Wrath Classic and the opening of Icecrown Citadel did not result in a corresponding spike in views. I presume everybody ran to Wowhead to find out what the currently accepted strat is for the Lich King fight. Since I never actually got to raid ICC, I couldn't tell you whether the current meta matches what Soul had written down over a decade ago.

***Never directed at me, thankfully.

Adding to the "To Be Read" Pile

I knew that Sir Terry Pratchett's novels were popular, but I underestimated just how popular they are.

As of 5:05 PM today.

This is kind of bonkers, but it also underscores the popularity of Discworld.

I never read any of Sir Terry's work, even though I was very much aware of it, because I've been a bit intimidated by it. I'm aware that there's a lot of puns and humor in the novels, and my concern was that I simply wouldn't get the humor in them. Kind of like watching Red Dwarf, I know there's humor there, but a lot of it simply flew over my head because it was so British that I didn't get the context.*

Or maybe trying to understand some of the Monty Python's Flying Circus social commentary, particularly with (then) current political and celebrity characters appearing as caricatures. To me, I simply had no grasp of the context at all, so it could have been humor surrounding Warren G. Harding and the Teapot Dome Scandal for all I knew. The Parrot Sketch? Sure, I got that one. The Ministry of Silly Walks? Yeah, because every country has a blasted bureaucracy. But a lot of Terry Gilliam's cartoons? Eh, not so much.**

But given Sir Terry's popularity, underscored by the support for the Discworld RPG, I think I might give the series a chance.

Yay, one more book (or is that set of books?) for the TBR pile.

*Before you ask, yes, I gave Red Dwarf a chance. My brother-in-law loved the show, which is how I was introduced to it.

**Although I did see a graphic of Edward Heath in a couple of them. I know him not because of The Beatles' Taxman song ("Uh oh, Mister Heath"), but because I attended a question and answer session with Mr. Heath when he was in Dayton for something or another back when I was in college. Let's just say that Mr. Heath does not suffer fools very well, and I'm glad I decided I wasn't going to ask him a question even though the opening was there.

Kind of a Busy Day in Crowdfunding Land

I guess Tuesdays are a good day to launch crowdfunding initiatives --in the same way that it used to be book and music release days*-- because two initiatives I'd been keeping an eye on dropped today.

The first, the Kickstarter campaign for Terry Pratchett's Discworld RPG, launched at Midnight Eastern Time, and has already blown way past it's abnormally precise goal of $130,549:**

As of 12:41 PM, EST.

To say that Sir Terry's novels are popular is kind of an understatement. While this Kickstarter covers editions in English, German, Spanish, and Polish, the French edition is being handled by Arkhane Asylum.

For the curious, the Discworld Quickstart Guide PDF is presently available from Modiphius (both the US and UK websites) for the low low price of.... FREE. The link is from the Kickstarter that takes you to the UK store, but when I went there it asked if I wanted to move to the US store instead.

At this current rate, I'd imagine that Modiphius is going to break the $1 Million barrier by tomorrow.

***

Long before I became aware of the Discworld RPG, I knew that Atlas Games was going to put together a crowdfunding campaign for a reworked version of the Ars Magica 5th Edition rules. 

To which I can loudly say: THANK GOODNESS!!

The more I dug into the 5th Edition of Ars Magica, the more I felt that while the rules were good the presentation was lacking. I didn't mention it in my RPG From the Past entry, because I was still working my way through the system, but you could tell that the game was written with an eye toward people who had played previous editions of the game. As I tend to be a person who rails against that self-limiting design and story in MMOs (looking at you, Retail WoW), I'm sensitized to that weakness in other things. The layout could be better, the art was closing in on 20 years old and hadn't aged as well as older editions, and in general the system needed some good ol' TLC.***

So when I found out about a year ago that Atlas Games was planning on creating a "Definitive Edition" that basically presented the same rules in a better format, I was on board. 

Then Atlas Games announced that Ars Magica's crowdfunding would include an Open License; a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license. This would allow players and creators to legally share and publish their own additions and modifications to Ars Magica, allowing people the same sort of creative outlet that other games such as Pathfinder, D&D (for the moment), and FATE to have. 

The Ars Magica Definitive Edition launched at Noon Eastern today on BackerKit, seeking a goal of $15,000. While not having the sizeable fanbase that Sir Terry's works has, Atlas Games saw their crowdfunding effort shatter that goal in a grand total of 3 minutes:

As of 1:32 PM, EST.

The Definitive Edition is definitely aiming toward the fans of the game with an elaborate slipcase cover that holds the Core Rulebook, a Reference Guide, a Storyguide Screen, and a Poster Map of Mythic Europe. The physical edition isn't cheap at $150, but a digital only version of the core rulebook is $40, and a bit more practical if you're trying to save money. 

Yes, the rules are exactly the same as that found in the current 5th Edition of Ars Magica, but the layout has been reworked and all of the "extra" rules scattered across all the supplements have been incorporated into this version of the Core Rulebook. Throw in the new artwork and layout, and...

Well, here's hoping that the reorganized 5th Edition Rules explain the game better, because if you want to grow the game you have to get people involved and up to speed on all the details. 

As for me, taking the Mythic Europe setting and the Ars Magica rules and creating a rules-lite version using, say, FATE, would be absolutely awesome. (As I've gotten older, I prefer a more free-wheeling type of game. Can't you tell?)

*I was informed by my wife that music releases have moved from Tuesday to Friday close to a decade ago, and given that she works at Target she ought to know this sort of thing. I'm not that plugged into music release dates anymore, since I rarely buy music when it first comes out (and I'd rather support smaller or local artists).

**Aha! Found it! That value is a conversion to US Dollars from a backing goal of £100,000.

***Tender Lovin' Care.

EtA: Added in the source of the $130,549 goal.

EtA: Helps if I include the link to the Backerkit project for Ars Magica Definitive Edition!

Meme Monday: Weekend Warrior Memes

I spent some time working on the deck the past few weekends, and that push has gotten me to thinking about people who tackle projects on the weekends and evenings for a variety of different reasons. And that, naturally, led me to memes about this...

When you've got a project, you don't think in
terms of "having the weekend off". From the NFL.

This was me last night, and I think it carried
over to today. Still, I'm not a morning person
per se, so this may be normal.
From @corporatebish and Cheezburger.

Okay, I'll admit it: I put this one here for the Knight
Rider GIF. From Yarn and Knight Rider (naturally!).

But the really bad part about being a Weekend
Warrior is that Mondays bring no comfort...
From Cheezburger.