Malth-y-nous

"The fiendishness of it all is that part of this mass deception is open and voluntary, letting people think they can draw the line between fiction and fact."

 

Stanislaw Lem - The Futurological Congress

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Scribbling a rant on population had me sidetracked by the observation that it's become quite fashionable to shit on Thomas Malthus as having failed his predictions about mass starvation, unsustainable population size and collapse, along with other such predictions like The Population Bomb. But the core Malthusian warning, that resources are finite yet reproduction infinite, remains all too true. We are rapidly running out of natural resources from water to metals to fish, with garbage piling both land and sea.

 

If the Malthusian collapse has not occured worldwide quite yet, it is not because the concept was disproven but because endless strings of scientific inventions have allowed us to stretch the few resources we have farther, while destroying all other life to be replaced with our noisome breed. We are a mass extinction! We were overpopulated by the time the previous century even started, and advances in medicine, sanitation and food production all around that same time repeatedly amplified the problem over subsequent generations. Wonderful inventions, but each should have come with a spaying campaign.

 

Even the kindest interpretation of our refusal to address overpopulation shows it as infantile magical thinking, a blind belief that with every extra billion apes added to our hellish swarm, yet another sanitary or agricultural revolution will, must, surely cannot fail to yet again and again buy us another decade or two. An utterly unfounded and criminal reliance on the superhuman ability of a very few to constantly pull more rabbits out of fresh hats; even if scientists' ability to discover were infinite, we cannot know there remains any further stock of salvation discoverable! But let the hordes of 30IQ subhuman vermin breed to the horizons, and place the burden of stretching those horizons on the first nerd you see.

"The world will change when you are ready to pronounce this oath: I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for the sake of mine."

Shrug. Humanity deserves to die. Let it die.

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edit: the title reference may have been a bit obscure, and hell, I wouldn't have known about Mallt-y-nos either if not for Tom Siddell.

If you're ever just passing through Michigan's upper peninsula (which nobody ever is, but let's play pretend to make them feel better) Hiawatha National Forest is a nice place to visit.

In places like this I'm always struck by the difference a ten minute roll makes, despite the area being anything but mountainous. Down by the river it was moss and fern paradise: shaded lush forest thicket, a bit stuffy but comfortable even in June. Except for the clouds of mosquitos attacking you from the moment you step out of your car; spray still leaves enough bites to get through to realize they'd make a sieve of you without it. A short drive and twenty meters up it was all a patchwork of hill vegetation, everything from grass to scrub to broadleafs and conifers, gently breezy and sunny... and not a mosquito in earshot.

The white fluffy stuff as far as I can tell is some breed of cottongrass. You don't have to make a mattress from it. But you could.

Technobabbleyawn

"Mr. Kamikaze, Mr. DNA
He's an altruistic pervert
Mr. DNA, Mr. Kamikaze
Here to spread some genes now"

 

DEVO - Smart Patrol / Mr. DNA

 

 

How far had I gotten in Wadjet Eye's stock? Let's see... Technobabylon!

Okay, so we've got a cyberpunk dystopia goin' 'ere, I likes me sum o' dat. Dingy public housing, physical surroundings going to pot in favor of virtualia, classic stuff. The wetware's obviously gonna be a recurring gimmick. The "stronger tool" puzzle obviously has a winning solution, but coming back to the game I nonetheless get stumped because after a few days' break I'd forgotten about the virused e-mail. Cheatsheet that detail and I'm home free. Eh, alright, thinks I, cute enough, the repeated meatspace/cyberspace scene transitions make puzzle solving a bit tedious but I can live with that. So far so good.

 

Moving on to Chapter 2. Switch protagonists, maybe for a sort of Resonance set-up where they double up for puzzles, that'd be nice... except... Oh ye gods ... No, no, no, don't do it, don't do it...

New duo, two detectives, one oriental female, one caucasian male. Investigating a lead. White guy says it's a waste of time. Obviously the chapter won't consist of them saying "okay, screw it, let's just go grab some donuts and call it a day" so we're really reaching for some pretext for the SWM to be wrong right off the bat. Then we proceed with the chick needing to lecture him on an overdose of "as you doubtless already know" crap. Plus line after line like this:

or this:

 

How 'bout "emotional invasion" instead?

 

At this point I almost uninstalled, not in the mood to sit through yet another pile of incoherent bigotry which, had it been directed against black lesbians, would not be published even in a niche genre by a minor publisher.

But I did go on. Not a complete waste, as should turn out. Last chapter suffers from some bugged interaction icons even nine years after release, but otherwise Technobabylon's far less of a chore to play than even some of the field's classics like TLJ, Syberia or GK. Voicing and decor are nothing to write home about, but palatable enough. Some good puzzles, decent main plot, and the politically correct gibberish was overall less absolute in 2015 than it is now.

 

So what're we working with here? Adventure games have well earned their infamy for obtuse puzzles and pixel hunting.

Polar bear in a snowstorm? Try mottled bar in a giblet storm.

Technobabylon's worse problem, however, is making you randomly click every piece of scenery for off-the-wall clues and tools to randomly jump out at you. Half the time you're just spamming clicks. Activating a console at first sight without knowing what it does? Sticking your hand in furniture in a random opium den? What? And my character just knows to take a random decoration's magnetic coil... just in case I might need to magnetize something today and that's worth committing a misdemeanor right in front of a security camera while on police duty... WHAT?! Other times (like the post-mortem) the sequence of events makes no sense, or clues you might need appear on screens you think you've cleared (the preacher).

Nevertheless, the puzzles hit a nice stride around mid-game. The jail cell, the botany lab, the abandoned building were all good fun, even if I got stumped a few times by the toolbox thing or the name spelling or the picture emotional blackmail, or any other social manipulation crap. Technobabylon turned out to be a rare example of a relatively hard SciFi video game reaping much of its charm from technobabble (oh, NOW I get it!) sometimes forced but often interesting. Where the core ideas are a bit technical or the puzzles finicky (like the coat hanger above) you do get the occasional hint through dialogue or descriptions. Even the inexplicably empty drawers at the start are meant as a suggestion for much later. On the flip-side it also took the odd decision to try fleshing out its world with a wealth of detail. In a forty or eighty-hour RPG campaign where you're coming down off combat sequences and taking breaks from the action to do some light reading, that amount of flavor text is quite welcome. In an old-timey detective adventure where the action consists of reading clues and piecing together the core plot in the first place, that amount of filler plays like a massive barrelfull of red herrings, or more appropriately to the setting, static.

 

Then you hit the issue of that filler's rather runny consistency.

 

For one thing, the writing sounds... modestly competent. I have to wonder for example why exactly everyone insists on mispronouncing "corps" as "corpse" unless it's supposed to be a joke about them being redshirts... in which case it still falls flat. Where games like Gabriel Knight or The Longest Journey managed to charm by their protagonists' endless snarking, here you get the likes of "advertising, it's all the same wherever you are" and being told it's more interesting if your brain's wired up. I doubt even Tim Curry could've made such material sound clever or cute. And if the "men need emotional openness" line above wasn't enough of a clue, you'll be tripping over gratuitous politically correct posturing all throughout. If you don't mind some light

 

\/SPOILERS\/

 

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Two plot-central characters never get any development beyond "blond villain" and "arabic heroine" and yes of course your male protagonist has to justify his existence by service to women and be redeemed by pining for a lost Lenore of dusky hue and sacrificing himself for his daughter. Not that it was much of a surprise. Guy's got a grand total of two character traits, not much room for a dramatic twist. A grand reveal of transsexualism comes out of nowhere, goes nowhere and serves absolutely no purpose. But even on a character by character basis, the game features some heavy-handed racial/sexual profiling.

- white guy on the subway: exploding religious fanatic from Texas

- black rookie at the station: helpful and polite and gives you free food tokens

- old gay couple in organized crime: black guy wants to go straight (criminally, not sexually) while the white guy's a drug addict who wants to do more crime, 'cuz evil

- arabic woman comes to your rescue

- blond guy in your cell might be technically good, but he's also a fuckup

- Dr. Vargas, hispanic but light-skinned, well mannered, what are the odds he'll be on the right side?

- African woman: tough, no-nonsense hypercompetent martyr being kept down by The Man

- her dark-skinned male underling: annoying but helpful (get it? black good, man bad, he evens out)

- white guy head in the trance club's a jerk

- pong gamer dude's a disgusting fat jerk

- nuke fan dude's a jerk

- preacher in the street, no reason you couldn't get your drugs from the tainted water supply, one more excuse to stick a stupid, crazy, evil white man in the game - never mind Jinsil spouting "insh'allah" and the like, idiotic superstition's only bad when straight white men do it

- then we immediately jump to two women arguing about a woman taking a man's name on marriage

- if a black politician's crooked, it's only because he was being blackmailed for his past crookedness, so totally not his fault! and you should definitely take him at his word that he's a good guy - incidentally, black trumps asian... good to know?

------------------------------

/\END SPOILERS/\

Aside from all the pwecious little snowflakes littering the story, the high quotient of window dressing also renders some rooms almost useless, with one or two clicks required before you move on. I suppose it's at least refreshing to run across woke propaganda that's more racist than it is sexist, and it's not quite as fanatical as some other examples, offering a couple of surprise sex/race twists.

 

Overall, I expected better from Wadjet Eye (they didn't develop in-house) but Technobabylon's worth playing even if you'll grit your teeth at the forced stupidity at times. It even shows a remarkable amount of extra work in some spots, like re-recording all the AI personality mixes' lines. And that forcing, weirdly, leads me to a conclusion I rarely if ever draw for any video game: for once, the developers might've just been trying too hard, in multiple aspects.

Sleepless Domain

"Eye full of sun, hand full of mud

Oh universe, you stink of love"

 

Swans - A Little God in My Hands

(because I'm saving Metric's "Youth Without Youth" for maybe some other epigraphs)

 

 

Had anyone warned me I'd find myself re-reading a magical girl comic complete with maritime lunatic wardrobe change sequences, I'd've called bullshit. More so for it doubling up on the "girl power" crap with currently obligatory lesbianism. But what can I say, the heroine's a support caster! How could I resist? I also arrived there tangentially when the author hiatused her other comic Kiwi Blitz,* seeking mecha mayhem only to innocently fall prey to Cube's nefarious bait-and-switch to poofy dresses. Totally not my fault!

Anyway, both Kiwi and Sleepless Domain are good examples of how to embrace overt manga/anime influences without going full-on weeaboo - probably helps the author actually lived a stint in for-realsies Japan and not just Godzilla's Tokyo. Instead of merely aping she consciously plays on various gimmicks, tones down the bulk of the over-emoting and places welcome emphasis on consequences and ramifications. Where Kiwi got a bit overwhelmed trying to flesh out an entire futuristic society with cyborgs, androids, body modifications etc., Sleepless Domain's mostly stuck to how society would deal with an infestation of magical girls.

 

There ain't a fly swatter big enough...

 

Anyway, turns out a walled city has been living in isolation for ages, monsters materializing in its streets every night like MMO mobs. Lucky a gaggle of teenage girls every generation get magic powers to fight 'em. Not the highest of concepts. There may or may not be some decent worldbuilding behind that, but thus far we're stickin' with high school superheroics. Only in more thoughtful fashion, with the girls being popular heroines around whom revolves a constant media circus, with their own managers and public relations campaigns and product endorsements. On the flip-side, Sleepless interestingly also points out the magic brats are in effect child soldiers, occasionally dealing with the obvious corollary: they are very much not mature enough to be doing that shit.** In fact, if you have qualms about reading such a comic, do what I accidentally did and give it until the end of chapter 2, then decide.

Those conscious distinctions also make for a decently diverse cast, diverging on scales of maturity, sociability, aggressiveness, intelligence, egomania, bravery, etc. Combined with a modicum of attention paid to the nuts and bolts of magic powers' effects, I must grudgingly admit that Sleepless Domain has never gotten boring.

 

 

 

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* - only to now find out that despite Sleepless Domain's update schedule having slipped the past months, she'll in addition be drawing stretch goals for Drive's Kickstarter campaign. Damnit Cagle, focus!

** note to self: watch Evangelion sometime

Hey, what spell do you need to cast to get more European actors into Indian cinema?

Paleful Bollymorph.

"Keeping time time time in a sort of runic rhyme"

"Will you, won't you want me to make you?
I'm coming down fast, but don't let me break you
Tell me, tell me, tell me the answer"

 

The Beatles - Helter Skelter

 

 

Fear tha space wolf, fer he gots apsides on the brain, Mundust in's nostrils an' a non-relativistic clock in's belleh, AaawooOOOO!!

 

On a completely unrelated topic I decided to catch up on my Wadjet Eye backlog with Technobabylon. Barely started before groaning at a tired old gimmick:

I've played enough adventure games to parse "a few hours" as "until the next scene featuring this backdrop" but every time I see a character reference an actual timespan I can't help recalling my thirteen year old self wondering "wait, so can I just leave the game running overnight to get another item?" No. No, young werwolfe, you cannot. Time is not time. Time is scene transitions. Also, don't let that old CRT monitor overheat, even if it does have a snazzy star field screensaver. And ffs wipe down your mouse and keyboard with rubbing alcohol once in a while!

Anyway, just to state this rant's thesis clearly like your high school teacher told you to do:

game designers, be consistent on whether time does or does not matter. When is time time?

 

Granted, in many or even most genres the question doesn't apply. FPS/RTS tend to be solidly real-time by the minute and second and millisecond and dick-measure their actions-per-minute, while turn-based strategy sticks to its turns whether we're talking cards or chess or Civilization. cRPGs though, for emphasizing immersiveness through everything from armor frills to pettable pets to the slant of light on a winter afternoon, routinely end up tripping over themselves when conveying critical or non-critical timeframes. Especially after Morrowind raised the bar on portraying a living, breathing world.

Games dumbed down from better formulae for mass appeal frequently feature the passage of time as shallowly as everything else.

Vampire: the Masquerade - Redemption, despite emphatically warning you vamps don't tan, featured a grand total of what, one(?) mission where you sidestepped some windows? Otherise nights never ended. At least Bloodlines was a bit more honest about everything happening at night and just flatly ignored the issue.*

Greedfall would occasionally tell you to wait for night. So you did exactly that. Hit the "wait for night" button at your hideout, and that's all there is to it. They didn't even bother with an in-game clock.

Mechwarrior 5, as I already complained, has a timeline you just fast-forward until the next event.

Such one-to-one relationships are meant for imbeciles incapable of holding more than one thought in their heads at a time.

Time as mechanic needs many more factors feeding into it, with some of the best examples being suvival-themed games where bonuses rapidly decay, monsters patrol or everything revolves around day/night cycles. I may have trashed Don't Starve for forcing mindless restarts (and stand by that) but I did enjoy it making you fear the dark and stock up on protective light. Frostpunk and its meal/hunt larder management and outpost deliveries, Miasmata's pitch-black nights making you depend on your paltry lighter, Banished, Dawn of Man or Northgard staving off winter starvation, such adventures greatly benefit from their cycles.

My favorites let you set the cycle.

Mount&Blade made a name for itself as a hack'n'slash physics simulation, but as that market filled up became more noteworthy for its tactical or managerial sides. Even when your army is standing still during a siege it's doing many things at once. It takes time to build siege engines, time to knock down walls, time for other bands to trickle in as reinforcements, during which both attackers and defenders are eating into their supply of food, wounds are healing, morale drops, etc. Though I was disappointed at Bannerlord dropping food spoilage as a management concern, on the flip-side it enlarged the map allowing for longer and more diverse trade runs, buying low and selling high from desert to tundra and shore to steppe as territories shift ownership around you. Caravan management in fact makes an excellent premise for a game based on scheduling.

 

Vagrus: the Riven Realms is turn-based, with your actions per in-game day limited by action points as you shift goods across the desolate postmagipocalyptic landscape, but there's quite a bit of fine-tuning involved in keeping your comitatus' mood above threshold while occasionally driving them to exhaustion rushing to the next town by day's end, buying as little food as possible (to leave more room for saleable goods) while avoiding starvation, chopping the odd horse up for burgers, weighing the amount of food passengers might eat versus how quickly you can cash them in at their destinations, foraging chances along your route, food prices at your future stops, and so on and on. What a bother, and what a joy to be bothered!

But here we're already getting into some issues. While Vagrus's design remains consistent for basic managerial mechanics, its questing side is a bit hit-or-miss in that regard. Most quests have no limits. Some give you fairly clear deadlines but might drop them on you unexpectedly (Finndurarth) while others just get huffy if you passed some limit you were never informed of (the Ashkulites with the stolen corpse) and still others blatantly lie (wind shamans tell you to wait a week but according to forums it's just a couple of days) and for a more manageable but frequent nuisance the companion attitude minigame places cooldown timers on gifts but doesn't auto-track when you gave the last one.

 

Those copying The Elder Scrolls' formula tend to be both best and worst at this. KCD for instance puts a great deal of detail into NPCs' daily routines, whether it's Father Godwin preferring to eat breakfast outside before he takes a bit of time to mend his fence

or, since the 1400s are a benighted superstitious times, pausing for prayer by those great

 and small

or managing to fill your 24hrs despite most characters being uninteractable at night

 

I arrived at a camp in the woods some hours too early to question the locals about bandits. I could "wait until morning" but since this is a better game I instead filled my time with a bit of honest robbery (lots of low-level sound sleepers with no guards around) then read a book until they woke up. You can also fill that supposed dead time at night with travel or poaching or alchemy or bounty-hunting. Quests involving hunting/poaching for instance tend to be some of the most challenging/frustrating as you must both luck out finding game and get the meat back before it spoils - during daytime! Night has its own activities, making it feel - imagine this - different from day!

 

Unfortunately once again many quests don't warn you they'll be timed or don't tell you the timer, or don't tell you they'll keep you involved for some period of time. One of the most important pieces of information: you can put off the main quest indefinitely at the step requiring you to meet Lordy FuckFace for a hunting trip, even if it says in the "morning" while other times "morning" does indeed mean next morning, like Johanka getting pissy if you don't escort her to preach in the woods.

When is time time?

Your guess is as good as mine.

And those are hardly the only examples

Pathfinder: Kingmaker's barony management because rather infamous for blindsiding you with timed events you couldn't schedule properly.

That piece of crap GameDec had its third act "action" timer, where little indicated what counts or does not count as an action.

In Tides of Numenera it was crumbling houses and serial killings.

In BG3 Lae'Zel rushes you to meet her people in Act 1 but it doesn't seem to care when you do it. But later, merely talking to the newspaper owner automatically kicks off a timed quest. The prison break round timer doesn't care how fast you reach the boats, because you're expected to just abandon the prison breakers and rush out the door. Some events are set off by the number of rests you take... but moving between maps also counts as a full rest. Does that eat into my timers? Does it eat into my food supply? Best head for the wiki and forums, 'cause nothing actually tells you when time is really time.

Even the original Fallout rather infamously had to drop its campaign time limit for running against the game's main charm of exploring all the settlements.

 

In fact, while adventure games or city sims will occasionally run into this issue, you can look at most any cRPG over the past thirty years and find players infuriated by being forced to reload old saves upon discovering they've been on some invisible timer or weren't informed they'd be setting off a timer just by walking into a room. And that's all it does: force reloads, unless you know the campaign beforehand.

 

It's always been a running gag that what sounds urgent in video games (like the world about to explode) moves only at the speed of the plot, so take your time. Introducing more deadlines can be generously interpreted as an attempt to cure that lassitude or the well-worn cRPG pattern of sweeping all side-quests in order of challenge rating between main quest steps. I'm especially fond of "per day" or "per rest" advancement mechanics and encouraged such when discussing daily rests and inns/taverns. Yes, as long as you properly notify me what I'm getting into. Being surprised with a timed quest when I have ten others on my plate doesn't make me reschedule the ten to prioritize that one. It just makes me reload to avoid the starter pistol. Discovering that exactly two of my fifteen "do it by tomorrow" quests actually fail if not done by tomorrow... when it's already tomorrow... tests neither neither my priorities nor my time management skills, but only my willingness to cheat and read about every quest before talking to NPCs. If you're gonna do it, do it right. Gratuitously forced wiki binging OR DIE is not a feature I've ever been interested in buying. It's a bug.

 

I'm sorry, I must've lost track of time and got sidetracked... what was I talking about?

Oh, right, Kerbal Space Program!

Do you notice how in that first screenshot I have alarms set up for when my launches hit critical points, and precise to-the-second estimates for my vessels' orbital positions and target intercepts?

Why is that so hard for cRPGs to do?

When is time time?

Either your game's timed or it's not. If yes, notify me when a task is indefinite. If not, notify me of any exceptions before I undertake them and track the timer through the interface. But I should not have to play a constant guessing game over whether the pill you labelled "morning after" actually works the morning after!

And, yes, yes, I hear you scream that interface record-keeping breaks that devil-may-care adventuring spirit of immersion, sure, sure. But you know what else breaks immersion? Gratuitous reloads so companies can pad their "hours played" marketing fad.

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* I wonder whether Bloodlines 2 will... no, I will not seek hype, I will not seek hype...

Call of the Fang

(musical suggestion: Timothy Vajda - As the Crow Flies)

 

White Fang and The Call of the Wild were once so thoroughly entrenched in the youth literature canon across two continents that as I grew up everyone I talked to simply assumed I had read them. Which of course I had. In that order. So the notion grew in my head that Buck must be White Fang's descendant, even if the details didn't quite dovetail. Only well into adulthood did I discover White Fang was written as a sequel and thus Buck, if anything, the progenitor. But of course the books' arrangement prompts that train of thought from either direction, both volumes' scenery cycling into each other, nature and civilization intersecting at savagery.

 

Jack London seems to be gradually dropping out of public consciousness over the past thirty years (along with... books, in general) and I don't think I'm over-attributing by blaming political polarization in this case. A socialist fascinated by the struggle for survival, his stories now scream "heathen" to the right wing and "trigger warning" to a left wing he would find clownishly unrecognizable. Sure, with the benefit of a hundred and twenty years' historiography and nature documentaries, anyone might toss the odd critique at London's presentation of "nature red in tooth and claw" or wolf pack dynamics. But I do believe quibbling over factual minutiae serves as smokescreen for more visceral aversion.

I've made the case before that we've misfiled environmentalism as flower power and pictures of baby pandas. Modern, trendy urbanites are raised into an allegorical image of nature as a baby-ish, cooing, cuddly, hapless ingenue, the better to enlist our instinctive altricial protectiveness in its defense. Jack London saw nature as brutish, merciless, chaotic with fits of tyranny... and loved it as such, gloried in the spectacle. So that I have to wonder how many of our modern snowflakes who see everything as a "with us or against us" dynamic with no room for nuance can even grasp that presenting nature's unpleasantness is not a condemnation, or that the man in the red shirt is still a villain regardless of "winning" his conflict and then exiting stage thataway.

 

Or, for that matter, that London's love of nature did not presume a hatred of civilization. It is not that he thought modern humans had no place out there, but that they should not blunder out gormlessly. Conversely nature's violence did not make it a threat to be eliminated but a system of grim necessities to be better understood. Pay attention to where the most disgusting conflicts occur in both novels: at the intersection of the two, a maladaptive and dysfunctional border. Dogs broken for export to the frontier, wolves enlisted to slash the throats of dogs in fighting rings, brash inexperience turning suicidal, alcohol employed in deliberate ruination of an otherwise (if not explicitly noble) contentedly functional savage.

 

Leave aside the books' main focus on nature itself for a moment and note their more interesting warning: society is perverse and nature is merciless, but truest cruelty comes at intersection where civilized mores are actively disrupted or wasteful viciousness is economically enabled.

 

 

...

 

 

 

(mused the lycanthrope)

These Are the Songs that Saved Me for Death

My dirt team minds my business my bossiness my busbyness my bark leanings to big productions over cry every guy who sees no evo hears no devo speaks no devolution revolves all volition in vilific hay seeding beneath your cortex the cambium in's poring ova all your New Year's rez elutions sporadic dilutions homo genizing unto dissolution but for my eloechotion. When I had a child's delight I was a fever, I caught a glimpse of feats out of my cornered eye but they lie, cheat and steal, they lie, cheat and steal, what can I tell to rate you for ichtyophthirius blanked bulges on your politically shed scales why did you never accept my fleece I was molting two thousand light years from home, a very model bother 'pon all rhymes, now only fangs refrain.

 

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P.S.:

Apologies to Tool, Pink Floyd, The Rolling Stones, Gil 'n Sully and whoever else I ripped off here. These stream of consciousness rants really are mostly that; thus my consciousness streamed this time. I also ended up calling back this for some reason, some heathens' season of diss end. Tiredly tiered erd leeways of apologists, hare up eruption a rap sheet ruptured reap cheering in the clearing your mindfulness medium taze own zone stalked and balked for a while at ball coneyzation lupine supine lose for chasing both but one is the antidote and the other the poison which witch is we each when the loup pines for neither and runs from both is the life/dinner priciple in play? Must we always taste such decay? I told you escape was the only thing worth capturing. Must every night be of the lepus? May no howl sing the moon's stay? Oaf, execute the dictaphone, I'm dumb for today.

Friend Zone Lined

"Your princess is in another castle"

- an old gimmick even in 1985

 

I had an odd conversation last year in LotRO. Some guildmates referenced the current expansion's plot and it was revealed I hadn't played the main quest all the way through yet. When asked why not, I pointed out the reputation bar for that zone was locked at a weirdly low level, wasting any rep gains from questing until the limit would inevitably be raised in future patches. Fanboys were incensed that I would dare accuse the noble and mighty d'evs of such frittering micromanagement. Obviously they knew better than me how high to set the bar and if the bar had been set at "friend" level that's where it would stay. I doubled down with a "what are you, an idiot?" pointing out that obviously the whole point was to waste your current effort and make you grind all over again next year.

So here we are next year. Note the empty progress bar.

Discerning middle earthlings may also note my character is nowhere near Umbar now. I've logged in a few times the past week to bum around the Wildwood, a zone whose reputation I haven't even raised to "friend" level yet because it was released a few years back as a blatant timesink, two factions with ten "kill ten(s) rats" quests each to be repeated infinitely. Hell, I still haven't ground out Minas Tirith timesink rep from over a decade ago and probably never will.

Designers: do you not ever notice how many of your attempts to game gamers and keep their interest while offering nothing of interest are having the opposite effect? Gotta say I'm not feeling any burning need to finish last year's quests even now that I'd get my reward for them. You poisoned the well. Here's a facet of the gamer mindset you apparently never noticed in your decades' worth of experience in the business. You can give me an impossible task and maybe I'll give up or maybe I'll bash my head against the wall trying to finish it no matter how unfair... so long as it's unfair on its face. But if I spot you trying to play me I WILL SHIT IN YOUR MOUTH!