Cozy MMOS, Here to Slay, and a Blaugust Roundup

I'm having a good time keeping up with all the Blaugust posts flooding in. I figured there would be a pretty heavy bias towards posting about MMOs, but there's been a goodly amount of lot of other, non-video-game posters too.

One thing I have to keep reminding myself to do: click through from my RSS reader to their site. So many bloggers have delightful websights, and I wanna make sure I get to see all the web design that's gone into 'em too. Contrast to the owlblog, which is intentionally boring and bland. It accurately reflects my posting, ha ha.

Just now, I learned that "godpunk" is a genre, and I've already started reading it. I didn't know how to search for "more things like Gideon the Ninth"¹, but now I do!

I've seen some kindred spirits posting too:

I started Player Vs Auction House for the release of the Cataclysm expansion, and despite that ultra-niche topic, the blog did well enough for itself.

While I am long retired, the Cata pre-patch is when I too decided to engage in Market PvP. I was the dominant force on Trollbane/alliance for a few years, doing the old ore shuffle. I eventually got my hands on a spectral tiger that way.

I love that there's an EVE screenshot blog. This is another thing I'm long-retired from², but it's such a beautiful game. They've always tried to stay on top of the graphics, but even in 2002 when I launched the beta client, it was just breathtaking.

Cozy MMOs

I read a review of Spellfarers by Bhagpuss on Inventory Full, and it got me thinking a bit.

I was excited for a similar game, Palia, when they posted their original announcement. Harvest Moon But MMO is definitely a thing that I want to play, but every time I try something like that, I feel like I immediately bounce off because there's just ... nothing to actually do.

The gameplay loop for Palia was more-or-less get resources -> sell stuff -> upgrade house -> repeat. You could see other people in the world, but there was almost no reason³ to ever interact with them. They were actually a problem if you wanted to gather bugs or hunt deer, since then you're competing with them for spawns.

There's a lot of NPC relationship stuff in Palia too. That's great in Stardew Valley, but as soon as I'm in an MMO mindset, I'm way more interested in social activities than NPC reputation grinds. And I think that's where this whole genre falls flat on its face: they're prioritizing the PvE aspects of Stardew Valley and largely ignoring the community of real players living in the town.

Maybe the whole 'cozy MMO' thing is a bad idea, and what I actually want to play is Guild Wars 2 with more mini-games⁴ and long-term communal goals.

Here to Slay

I ran the department sumemr picnic yesterday. The original plan was to hang out on the lakefront, but the weather was iffy, so we used the patio behind the office instead. This necessitated replacing the kites with something a little more parking-lot-friendly.

Here to Slay has been on my games shelf for a while, but I'd never opened it up. I grabbed it⁵ since it was up to 6 players.

It ended up being a big hit. This is one of those sabatoge games. Each player gets a cute woodland animal as their Party Leader, and as you draw you get heroes to put in your party and other stuff. The goal is to either have a full party in play with all six classes⁶, or to slay three monsters and claim their corpses as Victory Points.

It's got modifier cards that anyone can play when anybody else rolls. So somebody would try to activate an ability to steal another player's hero, and they'd put a +4 modifier on their roll. Then the defender would throw a -2 modifier on them. Then somebody else might add another +3 to the stealer's roll, since the defender was getting ahead.

With the full six players, it took us about two hours to finish the game. We largely ignored monster-slaying and just focused on stealing or killing everybody else's party members.

I've got an expansion pack for it, and I think there's another that I don't own. Lucheek sent me some homebrew expansion packs too.

I may bring this back for the holiday party, but upgraded so we can have ten players. That will be a total clusterfuck and I cannot wait to see it.

Meta: Participant OPML

I mentioned this yesterday, but FreshRSS isn't handling reloading my Blaugust category from the OPML file very well. This is because some blogs are in there with a non-canonical URL⁷ for their RSS/atom feed, and FreshRSS figures out a more correct URL, stores that, and then sees the old URL when I reload the OPML and decides it's a new blog entirely.

I could take a stab at fixing that in FreshRSS itself -- I still may! -- but as a more immediate solution I don't have to get merged upstream, I have set up a thing to grab Bel's OPML file, resolve any redirects for the URLs in there, and republish it in this FreshRSS-bug-friendly manner.

It's not working perfectly yet. All the Blogger-hosted feeds are still being re-created when I update it, so there's more troubleshooting to do there.