30 | December | 2023 | The Ancient Gaming Noob

Back again on the path out of 2023 with what is sometimes my final reflective post to be written during the year.

My 2023 banner courtesy of our daughter

Once more I am going to wrap up the year in something of a stream of consciousness flow of highs and lows on various topics. For the historical perspective, here are past posts:

It is a measure, a test, of what stuck with me through 2023 as much as anything, so it probably says more about me than it says about the importance or relevance in the grand scheme of things. If I have forgotten anything critical… and I am sure I have… let me know.

Blizzard

Highs

They have finally jettisoned Bobby Kotick
Microsoft deal closed successfully, and Microsoft is generally a good place to work
Diablo IV shipped and received a good initial response
Wrath of the Lich King Classic delivered all I wanted out of it… I am quite satisfied
Cataclysm Classic announced, so core WoW Classic will carry on
WoW Classic Season of Discovery is an interesting twist
WoW Classic Hardcore servers show Blizz is listening some
WoW Dragonflight held on to its customer base better than Shadowlands
Warcraft Rumble landed on mobile devices
Overwatch 2 shipped or something
Hearthstone is still cranking out expansions
Rumors that they might actually be able to get back into China under Microsoft

Lows

Bobby Kotick was so greatly enriched by this deal that it makes one ill to think about it
Is Microsoft going to necessarily be a better steward of the A-B portfolio of titles?
Diablo IV managed to alienate users with a post-launch, fun killing nerf patch
Overwatch 2 PvE? Unpossible!
It feels legitimate to ask if there is there any point to WoW Classic after Wrath
I mean, I am going to play Cataclysm Classic, but it might just be to get myself ready for Pandaria
WoW Season of Discovery isn’t the Classic Plus some were looking for
Classic Plus will never be a thing
The varieties of WoW now available seem to mean that retail WoW will forever be diminished… at least I have no interest in going back to it
We complained when Blizz did what it took to not get kicked out of China and we complained when they did get kicked out of China… is that market worth the effort?
Wasn’t there some sort of survival game they mentioned a year or so back?
StarCraft?

CCP

Highs

Hey, EVE Online is 20 years old now!
Two new expansions shipped this year
The “back to expansions” plan seems to be working so far
The Viridian expansion seemed able to fight off the dreaded “summer slump” even if it wasn’t all that exciting
The Havoc expansion saw a big boost in players online
Lots of players online since October, whether you prefer the average online or peak concurrent measure
Actually have plans for other products including a board game, a mobile title, and what might end up being a PC title
Got that EVE Online API Microsoft Excel plug-in to work finally, long after it was announced
Finally seemed about to ship EVE Vanguard, that first person shooter they have so longed for

Lows

20 years is an achievement, but the baggage is not to be ignored
Jury still seems to be out on pirate insurgencies… I mean, the pirate factions love them, but the system might need some tuning
WTF CCP? Why is EVE Online chat breaking still a thing after what… five years with the new system?
CCP giveth and CCP neglecteth or something… the Abyssal tournament and the EVE Portal app die for lack of attention
EVE Vanguard is on the main launcher, so we’re going to have to live with it even if it too dies of neglect
EVE Vanguard is a long way from being done
The Microsoft Excel plug-in only works with the Office 365 version of Excel
Expansions aren’t ALL going to be faction warfare focused, are they?
Project Awakening, the crypto blockchain title promises to be a disaster, and while it is $40 million of Marc Adreesen’s money, it is still an opportunity cost for devs to work on that rather than something that won’t be a flop

Daybreak / Enad Global 7

Highs

Expansions for all the titles… or all the Daybreak titles I keep an eye on
Doing well financially
Being publicly held means we get more detailed news about the company
EverQuest 25th anniversary is coming up
Plans for a new EverQuest title
Plans for a new H1Z1 title
Roadmaps adhered to and generally good updates adopted

Lows

Ji Ham still pursuing his acting career
Most of the financial good news is on the back of My Singing Monsters, a success that is receding
Being publicly held, capitalism is requiring that the company hand over half of its profits without any consideration about reinvestment
Oh, it just so happen that the profit demands benefit greatly those in charge at EG7, so no surprise they didn’t argue for reinvestment
No remaster for LOTRO and no 4K support for LOTRO any time soon, if ever
Do I need to say “Console plans for LOTRO scrapped” as well? I guess I do
The “new” H1Z1 title is reviving H1Z1 Just Survive, which was previously closed for not being financially viable
The new EverQuest title might land in 2028, maybe
The idea that an EverQuest title that is hardcore like Elden Ring is a good idea

Tech in General

Highs

We have finally turned the corner and blockchain isn’t constantly being touted as something worthwhile
The FTC is finally reigning in crypto organizations that were clearly just trying to bypass trading and securities regulations… those laws are in place because unregulated capitalism becomes a con game very quickly, as we saw in 1920s Wall Street
The metaverse has gone back to being a niche talking point for enthusiasts… even Raph Koster, the most believable of the metaverse proponents, says he needs a game there first before a sandbox can be achieved
Decentraland proving that trying to cross pollinate crypto AND the metaverse was, at best, a comically premature idea, though I am convinced that the perverse incentives it created doomed it and will doom any future imitator

Lows

Did I mention layoff under games? Under tech in general as well… that link in the last section covers tech as well
The subscription model for software like Officer 365 is becoming harder to avoid… my copy of Office 2021 looks to be the last version that won’t require a monthly fee to use
Getting out of the blockchain cycle required a lot of people being scammed out of their investments
I am sorry so many people bought into the hype and failed to understand either the technology (slow, awkward, expensive, and a poor alternative to existing solutions) or basic economics (BitCoin only has value if you convert it to a real world currency so it hasn’t replaced anything) but the signs were out there and people were shouting it was a scam all along
How are people still having their bored apes stolen? How are there any left and how do they even have any value that makes stealing them worth the effort?
Now eight out of every ten headlines at VentureBeat, my personal barometer for over-hyped tech, is about AI or LLMs, meaning we’re headed for an AI crash at some point
Having been there for the rise and fall of Netscape, I have always been convinced that Marc Andreesen was more lucky than good, but his Techno-Optimist manifesto just confirmed to me that having money and being smart are not the same thing (I generally go link and tag free on these posts, but for that monstrosity I’ll make an exception)
The New York Times suing OpenAI essentially because if you prompt it correctly it will summarize articles from the paper… a paper that has a long history of summarizing without credit the works of others… is not just typical hypocrisy, but also a return to the bad anti-AI idea that remembering and learning from reading something is somehow a copyright violation

Television and Movies

Highs

Writers and Actors strikes settled with some gains
Some necessary consolidation of streaming services
I have settled on a focused set of streaming services, though I will add or remove them as we go off to find some new show
Netflix has something new on a regular basis… every Friday night for me… that it remains worthwhile to us
Apple TV+ rolled out some surprisingly good stuff this year
We’re starting to get some bundle deals, to you get Hulu and Disney+ for a reduced price, or when you subscribe to Paramount+ you also get Showtime content
We went out to the theater to see a few movies this year
Movie theater popcorn is still the best

Lows

The meager ask of the writers versus the profits of the studios just highlights the greed inherent in the system
Studios spent many months not negotiating hoping to starve the writers out, expressing a desire for them to lose their homes
The implosion of HBO, ditching the name, removing shows, and otherwise making easy for me to cancel it… sorry John Oliver
Disney is just determined to milk the MCU dry with more content that just isn’t getting much traction
Same with Star Wars, with the possible exception Andor
I think we saw THREE movies in the theater, Barbie, Oppenheimer, and Ferrari, which isn’t enough to keep theaters alive no matter how much popcorn we order
My wife steadfastly refuses to allow butter on the popcorn… it is still good dry, but I love greasy, over-buttered (or whatever it is they pour onto it) movie popcorn
JFC why is there always some old guy… and it is always an old guy… who has to check their phone five times during a screening? (And it isn’t me, I put my phone in my pocket when the previews start and don’t take it out until the credits are rolling)
Streaming as a revenue stream has completely failed to replace the old post theatrical release DVD sales channel
There isn’t room in the market for more than Netflix and one or two competitors in monthly subscription zone… sounds like MMORPGS
For Streaming, there is a parallel free to play future called FAST… Free, Add supported, Streaming Television… which is exactly what it sounds like, a return to TV with ads just like when many of us were growing up, just on demand now
Those who can’t be Netflix and haven’t gone towards FAST yet remain locked into the “one episode a week” model to try and keep their audience subscribed
More services, including Amazon Prime, are now going to put ads into their current model and require you to pay more to remove the ads which sounds like a very “I don’t understand consumer psychology” view of the world… seriously, just raising the price of Prime and offering a discount if you wanted ads would have been a much better path

Social Media

Highs

I mean, Elon Musk hasn’t completely broken Twitter… you can still block him, the nazis, the racists, the anti-semites, the MAGAs, the insurrectionists, and the awful tier of ads now showing up… Cheech & Chong edibles are dearly missed… and just stick to the “Following” tab, you can still achieve a nice balance of interaction with the Twitter circles that remain
Nobody is calling Twitter “X” and even news outlets who try to always feel they have to append “Formerly Twitter” to every article because “X” is a bad name that left behind the value of the brand
Most of the really dumb ideas Musk has floated… Twitter will be a bank, or a dating services, or a floor wax, or a desert topping… have failed to come to pass
Grok, Musk’s AI addition to Twitter became “woke” immediately and called out his own lies when asked
The PopTarts Bowl mascot coverage this week was a brief flash of what made Twitter great
There was the rise of the Twitter alternatives in 2024, with Post, Tribel, Substack Notes, Mastodon, Spoutible, BlueSky, Threads, and probably a few more I have forgotten
There is also Reddit, Facebook, Tumblr, LinkedIn, TikTok, and whatever…

Lows

Twitter is in an awful position (for users) of remaining the unquestioned dominant player in whatever its category is, so you cannot leave it without leaving friends and communities behind, while just being run by the least well adjusted billionaire in town… and as a class billionaires are the worst people
Musk has vowed to re-work Grok until it is as horrible as he and his fans are
Twitter hired a CEO whose job it is to follow Musk around and whenever he shits the bed, the take in a deep breath of the aroma and announce to the world that it was a masterstroke and smells better than Channel No. 5
The Twitter alternatives, the seven (or however many) dwarves, all started off against Twitter, but now have formed their own little silos where they complain about each other, often more bitterly than their actual primary competitor
If you want news about Twitter go to Mastodon, BlueSky, or Threads, as there is an audience on each absolutely obsessed with Twitter and ready to bring back any tidbit of news
And even if they aren’t talking ABOUT Twitter, they are copy/pasting Tweets FROM Twitter
Also, a good percentage of those people are still ON Twitter and cross posting everything anyway
I am not above blame as I am still on Twitter while using a few of the other platforms
I have almost no followers on any other service… despite being one of those people who cross-posts all the same stuff across multiple platforms… and the few I have are often the same individuals from Twitter… and with low engagement comes low interest
I am also very bad at finding people from Twitter on other services, so I am also not following that many people
How can we be beyond a year of Musk owning Twitter and its major competitors still don’t have all the basic features of Twitter?
Meta Instagram Threads has the same algorithm that Amazon has where when you buy a new router every decade the site offers up new routers for the next six months every time you visit the site like you buy 20 routers a year… so I hit “like” on a post about some Threads feature and then got several dozen similar-to-identical posts in my feed
WTF did Reddit change the UI to be like this time… seriously, I am not a old Reddit adherent, but after a dozen years or so there I am in danger of becoming one…

The Blog and Blogging

Highs

There are still a few active bloggers out there on the MMORPG beat
WordPress.com turned 20 years old in 2023, and I’ve been around for 17 of those years
WordPress.com, for all my complaints, has been and remains a reliable platform on which to write a blog… the end metrics that count, things like availability and uptime are solid
Kind of a strange and unexplained uptick in traffic in the last two months of the year
That traffic coincided with a boom in ad quality during the holiday season, which meant I paid off my annual hosting bill in two months (Please use ad block, I want bots to pay my hosting bills, not actual readers)
I still have a core base of readers who comment now and then
I made enough that I put EVE Online Pictures on a personal plan to remove all the toxic ads from it
Bing relented and put me back in their index, so them and the services that use Bing like Duck Duck Go and Yahoo, gave me a thousand page views in 2023… or less than 1% of what Google sent me… but it is NOT nothing….
I now have 52 email subscribers, a net gain of 2 in 2023
RSS is still a thing, and a good thing at that… read about it… wow, another link, I am really breaking tradition

Lows

WordPress.com does keep breaking things
The favored WP.com technique is to push something to production and let the customers find the problems in a way I would be embarrassed to do as a professional in the industry
The late 2023 traffic boom will end and things will settle down to the old, post-blogging era normal
The comments to posts ratio went down again, landing at 2.8 comments per post… in 2009 the ratio was at its peak with 9 comments per post and even as late as 2016 it was 6.4 comments per post, and comments are the life blood reader activity for a blog
At some point WordPress.com lost/purged/forgot a few hundred email subscribers… maybe… I look at the list of 52 and I don’t see myself on it, but I get daily notifications in one inbox
WordPress.com introduced a new paid promotion service called “Blaze” that absolutely does not deliver on its promise… seriously, promote something through Facebook before you bother with that (I did a couple of parallel tests because I was bored and curious)
There was that whole WordPress app versus the Jetpack app thing that I still don’t understand
WordPress.com introduced AI assisted search for blogs… but only if you pay for it, and it doesn’t seem wort the price
It feels like a lot of us on the MMORPG beat have branched out into other topics… myself included with all those telephone related posts
The EVE Online blogging neighborhood especially, once a large and vibrant community, has shrunk to a few regular writers and even the EVE Online news sites, once considered a threat to the blog community, have all but gone silent… it is bad when I am writing more EVE Online news posts than the news sites…

Real Life

Highs

I am still here, married, relatively happy, employed, and with only the typical health problems for my advancing age… my doc keeps saying these things are common for somebody of my age and profession
Oh, and I have pretty decent health care options
Our daughter will be graduating from college in the spring; parental op success!
My wife and I have managed to make it through four years of paying for college for our daughter… grad school, should it be a thing, will require negotiation
In my current job I do something that seems to matter, that makes things better for some people… more so than a modem or a computer caller ID device ever did
I work from home, so I no longer waste time and money on commuting, and my car racked up a whopping 4,000 miles on it this year
I got a 3% raise this year… which is tiny by my early career standards, but between 2010 and 2020 I think my biggest raise was 2%, was more likely to be 1%, and was just as often a “you should feel lucky you have a job” sentiment from the C-suite, where everybody got at least six figure, and sometimes seven figure, bonuses
At least I stopped hearing the word “charcuterie” so damn much in 2023… though that is what we’re having for new year’s eve

Lows

Having reached something of a major parenting milestone with our daughter’s college graduation… there is still marriage and grand kids or whatever possible out there… one does begin to feel like one has entered the denouement of one’s story… is this the end of my purpose in life?
Also, continuing with the naive assumption that life has purpose beyond biological imperatives
Those typical health problems are all quite annoying
Working from home means I can go five or six days straight and never venture further than the curb to roll out the trash cans for pickup
I do not miss the commute per se, but I miss the time I used to spend with an audio book while commuting
I no longer work for what one might consider Silicon Valley or on telephony related products, and my ongoing telephony tales will eventually come to that juncture

The World

Still in crisis. Covid is going to be with us for a long time, though at least vaccines mean it won’t kill another million people in the US alone. But it is still a hazard to the old and ill. My mother’s assisted living home has been on Covid lock down a few times this year. I wear a mask when I visit, both to avoid bringing anything in and carrying anything out… and the one time I forgot was the one time they called me two days later to tell me my mother was positive for Covid.

The war drags on in Ukraine, Israel and the Palestinians are back to escalating violence, there is still a civil war going on in Syria, and we’re on the edge of terrorism here as Republicans declare that if they can’t win at the ballot box then they see violence as a completely acceptable alternative, as they did on January 6th. The curse of interesting times seems to be ours.

2024

I cannot get there yet. I’m going to stay in 2023 for now. We’ll get to next year when it arrives on Monday.

The Ancient Gaming Noob

Veni, Vidi, Scripsi

Daily Archives: December 30, 2023

Looking Back at 2023 – Highs and Lows

Blizzard

CCP

Daybreak / Enad Global 7

Other Video Game Items

Tech in General

Television and Movies

Social Media

The Blog and Blogging

Real Life

The World

2024