Real life’s been kicking me in the teeth lately-I’m adjusting to a new work role/schedule and of course there was the annoying end of Daylight Savings. So my MMO gaming (and writing, and overall mental attitude, and almost everything else) has suffered. Oddly enough I’ve landed on Path of Exile as a mental tonic, a game which I had previously rejected as uninteresting all the way back in its nearly-perpetual beta. Now I see that it has one very compelling feature: You can play it one-handed. (297 words.)

Syp generated some conversation and controversy by posting a somewhat strongly-worded post against procedurally-generated worlds, but I think he’s absolutely correct: If a developer tries to cut corners by substituting a computer-generated world in place of what should have been a hand-crafted world, it probably won’t be fun. I’m not sure which game he was talking about, but it might have been Crowfall or H1Z1, both of which embrace procedurally-generated worlds and claim to be MMORPGs. (423 words.)

My last post was a “February Status” but it was posted at the beginning of February, so in reality it was more of a “January Status.” It’s now the beginning of March (sort of), so this writing update will actually cover February. As of now my manuscript from November is over 80,000 words, and Scrivener says I wrote nearly 12,000 words in February. Not great, but better than nothing. A couple of interesting story twists occurred in February: 1) I killed off a character that was no longer doing anything interesting, and 2) I came up with a new idea for an interesting group of people to encounter in the post-apocalyptic wilderness. (263 words.)

Thanks for the nomination j3w3l! I find these things kind of silly, but I guess it would be rude not to participate in the phenomenon that has taken over the MMO blogosphere lately. I’m such a perfectionist though it’s taken forever to put this together. :) Eleven quick facts about me: I’ve self-published a book on Amazon and sold over three copies. I used to write music and record songs in a home studio. I’ve had tons of dental work done. I secretly wish I could do slight-of-hand magic. My perfectly sane retirement plan is to become a best-selling author. This year I’m hoping to buy a house; I’ve been renting for three years. I hate talking about myself which makes job interviews painful. I used to have really long hair but I cut it short on my 40th birthday. My favorite pickle is the Mt. Olive Kosher Dill pickle. I don’t talk much but sometimes I can be annoyingly verbose. I can juggle up to four balls. Answers to j3w3l’s questions: (1120 words.)

Most of my time lately has been spent playing Banished, which is a city builder game that I picked up on a Steam sale for $6. This might be the best $6 I’ve ever spent on a game. I love this game. Historically, I am terrible at city builder games and usually give up on them quickly because it’s no fun to watch people starve to death. (That’s how my cities usually end up.) Even going back to the earliest city builder game I can remember, a type-in BASIC program called Hamurabi that I played on a TRS-80 Color Computer, I almost always starved my people. (294 words.)

I think I’ll make this a “thing” and do a monthly progress report of all the MMOs I’m playing. I started running a time tracking program* called ManicTime so I can actually record precisely how much I’ve played every game now. FFXIV (22 hrs)**. I unlocked most of the new 2.5 dungeons and World of Darkness, however I haven’t actually gone into any of them yet. (To this day I’ve only done one level 50 dungeon-Amdapor Keep for the Relic quest.) In other news I leveled my Rogue class from-you might want to sit down for this epic achievement-10 to 15. (1168 words.)

A number of people are questioning whether Crowfall is asking for enough money to make their game. I don’t really care about that. (But I think they know what they’re doing.) My main worry is that they’re making an MMO that I won’t like. And they know it. I suspect that’s why they are crowdfunding like this: Real investors wouldn’t support making a game intentionally targeted at a small niche market that doesn’t include mostly-casual PvE players. (845 words.)

More alarming news about SOE/Daybreak/EQNext. Speaking as a gamer, even if EQNext had launched with the Storybricks AI (and I use the term “AI” loosely) included, it almost certainly wouldn’t have been as impressive as it sounded (see this demo), and it probably would have ended up being a non-factor in the game like that UO “artificial life” thingy. I’ve been very skeptical of SOE’s claims of “emergent behavior” ever since they first started talking about it. (231 words.)

There have been three controversies in the blogosphere lately that I haven’t had a chance to comment on. (Well, three that I know of, at least-I’m sure there are more floating around.) I don’t particularly like to be controversial on this blog but I did want to at least voice my opinions. Twitter and MMO Gypsy made me aware of a Rock, Paper, Shotgun interview with Peter Molyneux that made the rounds of the blogosphere. Regardless of what I think of Molyneux and Godus, I personally found it an appalling example of tabloid journalism if not an outright abuse of press credentials. Hard questions do not need to be openly belligerent. I really hope that’s not the direction that games journalism is heading. (Interestingly, or perhaps shockingly, that style of interview turns out to be fairly normal overseas.) I wrote a big long post about this but honestly I don’t want to dwell on it that much. (370 words.)

I started this post in November 2014, and TAGN’s recent post on addons reminded me that it was still sitting in Drafts. So I thought I would finally post it. Addons are a fact of life when you play World of Warcraft. You can play without them (I’ve done it), and most of the gameplay basics are there, but Blizzard has consistently refused to put in any of the quality-of-life enhancements that we are all used to from every single other MMO released in the past ten years. (I’m thinking of Rift in particular here, which put in just about every quality-of-life improvement you could have ever wanted in an MMO UI.) Thus you’ll probably want some addons for WoW. Here are my favorites, not so much to recommend them but more as a handy index for later when I inevitably lose them all after a reformat. (909 words.)