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Yesterday did not go according to plan, and as a result I wound up not making a post at all.  Essentially I woke up at 5:15 yesterday morning and by the time I finished showering and checked into the world around 5:30 I noticed that we had a major system down at work.  This caused me to leap into crisis mode and instead of going upstairs to blog, I went upstairs to remote in and try and assess the situation.  As such you got a brief tweet stating that there would be no post and I moved on with what turned out to be an eleven hour day.  I had intentions of making a post last night, but by the time I made it home I was mentally soup.  I had some awesome tamales from the coney place down the street and largely avoided any mentally strenuous activity.

The only problem with this is that I missed out on making a post for an initiative that has been going on for several years in the blogosphere…  but that I have never actually participated in.  Everyone knows about NaNoWriMo or National Novel Writing Month, where you are challenged to crank out 50,000 words worth of cohesive prose that can in theory get edited into a novel that makes sense.  I participated in that initiative back in 2013 and wound up live blogging it as I progressed through the goal of writing 50,000 words.  You can see the rough and unedited form here in a series of posts that I started cross linking at some point.  The sad part is I never really made it much further than this…  there is a google doc floating out there with some edits done but I feel like at some point I largely just need to nuke this from orbit and rewrite the entire thing.

IntPiPoMo plays on the statement that a picture is worth a thousand words, and if NaNoWriMo requires you to crank out 50,000 words….  then IntPiPoMo asks you to post 50 pictures/screenshots/whatever during the month of November.  This initiative started back in 2011 and has changed hands a few times until it landed in the lap of my good friend Chestnut who was insanely helpful during the recent running of Blaugust.  Admittedly I have never really set out to participate since I felt like it would be cheating…  given that my blog is already super screenshot heavy.  During the month of October as an example I posted just shy of 100 pictures associated with my blog posts.  However she indicated that this didn’t matter and that I should sign up anyways…  and as a result I am going to be supporting this process with Aggronaut.  If you also feel like participating then you should totally check out her post outlining all of the specifics.  There is a very short sign up process and an image seen above that you can incorporate into your side bar as I have done with mine (albeit scaled down a bit since my sidebar is narrow).

One of the things I am sorta known for is my nonsensical storage of screenshots.  I have a network attached storage device full of loosely organized screenshots from the various games I have played, and at some point I wanted a way to just randomly pick a few shots from the pile.  I thought this was an easy way to do a post when I wasn’t necessarily feeling up to writing something more well formed.  The idea being I have the tool pick a few screenshots and then write something about each of them.  This is largely something that I built for my own purposes but if you are interested I threw it up on GitHub at the suggestion of a few folks.  If you are interested I highly suggest you grab the source code and download Visual Studio Community edition to compile it yourself just to make sure it is completely safe.  If you don’t feel comfortable with that I have uploaded a compiled and ready to run version of it out on TinyUpload.com.  If you get stuck on trying to decide what screenshots to use on a given day, a tool like this might come in handy.

As an example I decided to use it myself this morning and grabbed 3 random screenshots from the stack.  This one is from the PC Beta of Destiny 2 and I largely know this… because the file is named “Desktop Screenshot” because annoying the only way I can get Destiny 2 to capture is by running it Borderless Windowed and capturing it with Nvidia Experience…  which probably has another name for the screenshot functionality but I don’t know what it is.  I am consistently annoyed that I cannot use a more proper capture technique to grab Destiny 2, but regardless that has nothing to do with the screenshot itself.  I have dozens and dozens of screenshots of the “warp” graphic from Destiny 2 because I think it is so damned pretty.  This is probably one of the first ones I captured during that PC Beta, and it is making me want to go equip that ship again in the live game for nostalgia sake.

This is a screenshot from Everquest Landmark Alpha…  and I am not sure if this was the first reset or the second reset.  I am pretty sure this is from the first alpha because I believe I had a better plot when the first major reset happened.  Regardless I miss the hell out of this game, because quite frankly it was one of my favorite building games.  I loved the tools that it gave us to build really interesting shapes… and then create templates off of them.  I also loved the way that you could harvest with a group… and all get the loot that was harvested by any one member of that team.  I remember running around with Lethbridge and Rae running amok harvesting everything in sight and all reaping the benefits.  I wish someone would functionally reboot this idea in a modern crafting game.  Part of the reason why I have a dislike of Daybreak is admittedly because deep down inside I blame them for the death of Landmark.

One of the cooler things about Legion were the hidden artifact appearances.  One of them for the Warrior involved finding a shield that looks like Deathwing in a cavern full of Kobolds.  What made it frustrating however was that it was a random chance sort of thing, and you had a single chance each day at getting it to show up.  It became a ritual on my Warrior to log out at the cave every night, and then check it first thing in the morning and again that night just in case it was on the daily reset cycle and not on the server time cycle.  I even had a macro that would tell me whether or not the shield had showed up… just to make sure that I didn’t miss it.  The day that it finally showed up for me was extremely exciting, and as a result I took a screenshot for my blog before actually looting it.

A few days ago it was announced that Trion was acquired by Gamigo, a company that I knew very little about in truth because it catered to an end of the MMO market that I don’t spend much time in.  As a result there were massive layoffs at Trion Worlds.  I am not exactly sure what the starting number was but it is reported that they are down to a shell of 25 people.  Essentially with one action all of the people that I knew that worked for Trion… no longer do…  with the exception of one that I am not entirely certain about the fate of.  I have a feeling that the 25 remaining will only be there during the transition period.  At least with SOE being purchased by Daybreak, it felt that the name changed but the company as a whole was going to continue trying to do the same thing.  This however feels like a completely different beast.

If you follow the course that Gamigo has taken it sort of fits the pattern of a company trying to gobble up intellectual property.  Here is a little timeline that I was able to cobble together rapidly this morning.

• February 2013 – Acquires Outspark the publishers of Fiesta Online.
• September 2014 – Acquires Intenium – which is labelled as “a publisher and distributor of casual games designed for females” whatever the hell that means.
• May 2016 – Acquires Aeria Games – a bunch of Korean localized MMOs – the only one of which I have played is Echo of Soul.
• July 2016 – Acquires Highdigit – which appears to be a SaaS CRM sort of platform that targets marketing and sale of games.
• August 2016 – Acquires HoneyTracks – which appears to be a game focused Analytics company.
• March 2017 – Acquires MMO Games – which you will know for MMOGames.com a site that I wrote for briefly a few years back, and largely dissolved my relationship with because while the other writers were awesome… the company behind it always felt a little sleazy.
• July 2017 – Acquires Mediakraft Networks – which proclaims to be an “Online Television Network”.  It sorta looks like a German language BuzzFeed?
• October 2018 – Acquires Trion Worlds – which of course is the reason why we are here reading this post in the first place.

So there is a pattern here…  grab IP content, grab distribution and analytics, and then grab media networks to advertise your products.  It makes sense but it also doesn’t exactly make me have warm fuzzies about the way this is being set up.  The ultimate question is going to be how they manage Trion games like Rift going forward.  Do they crank the loot box and gacha dial up to 11, or do they leave things largely running as is?  I said above that the only Gamigo game that I had played was Echo of Soul…  which I got access to while I was still at MMOGames.com.  This was technically before the site was acquired but regardless… it now feels a little odd.  I was going to write a review of the game, but quite frankly I had nothing positive to say about it.  It felt like a cheaply made generic MMO that didn’t have open world areas… but instead these Guild Wars 1 style on rails “corridors” that you traversed between regions.

I didn’t end up writing the review because I knew it would never see print.  There had been another game that I felt was extremely cheaply made, and wrote what I felt was a fair assessment of its positives and negatives.  I focused on the few things that I did enjoy about it, but the final product wound up being about 50% positives, 50% negatives.  The article never saw the light of day however because the company behind the game was a big advertiser, and as a result wanted positive press to push their product.  I felt like anything I would write about Echo of Soul would be a similar experience so I politely declined the article and moved on with my life.  While I legitimately stopped writing for the site because of personal reasons… it was events like this…  that made me feel not exactly comfortable having my name associated with it.  I’ve been torn for years about this reaction because I had a lot of really good friends who relied and still do technically rely on a paycheck from the site.

Basically I am at this point where I have deep concerns about the fate of the Trion Worlds games, because I am not entirely certain that Gamigo cares about these games or their communities.  I legitimately think this is a grab for more potential revenue streams, just like they made grabs to cover the marketing, distribution, analytics and advertising.  Gamigo seems to have assembled this machine for pushing MMO games hard to grind out whatever profits that they can get from them.  On the Wiki there is a list of fifteen games that they have discontinued, this doesn’t include the five that were announced but never made it to production, or the three that they lost the licensing rights for.  None of this really makes me feel like my stable of characters in Rift… or the time that I put into Trion or ArcheAge are really going to be safe.

I don’t want to be all doom and gloom… but ultimately I have some deep concerns about this move.  The problem is…  MMORPGs are fighting over what seems to be a static pool of players.  We are likely going to see more of this in the future rather than less of it, as the properties that have been struggling for awhile find a new home in a potentially less than reputable environment.  Ultimately…  play and support the games you love because there is the real possibility that at some point they simply won’t be there…  or else may be so changed that they are barely recognizable from their former selves.

One of the things I have talked about in the past are the odd constraints that I have on trying to be fully functional gaming in two different locations.  One of the things I learned early on is that for martial bliss I need to be able to game from the living room without actually taking control of the television.  My wife and I are the sort of people who are completely happy doing different things, while in the same room…  occasionally watching something on television together while doing these different things.  So she will be on her end of the sectional cocooned in a blanket fort messing with her laptop, and I will be doing roughly the same on my end of the sofa playing on my laptop.

The only hitch in this setup is that gaming laptops do not stay relevant for long.  Mine for example is from 2015ish with a 4th Gen Core i7 and GTX 960M dedicated graphics, however it performs considerably lower than that as is the case with pretty much every laptop designated for gaming.  Generally speaking you can effectively drop every component by a generation, so in this case it probably performs similar to a Desktop 3rd Gen i7 with a 750 graphics card.  Effectively there are a lot of things it plays fine… like World of Warcraft or Final Fantasy XIV…  but a lot of things it simply cannot handle like Monster Hunter World.  Other things like Destiny 2 it just doesn’t play well enough to make it worth trying to play.

So essentially I am left with the decision…  do I shell out another $1500-$2000 on a gaming class laptop that is going to be irrelevant in another two years or do I look for other options.  This has lead me down the path of trying to remotely stream games off my desktop upstairs.  So many of the options have issues, like Steam Link for example seems to have a high instance of stranding the game running and locking me out of remoting in to try and fix it.  Splashtop works great if you are wanting to stream to your mobile device, but in dealing with 720p or higher it is just too laggy input wise to play games on.  This lead me to Parsec and I have talked a bit about how great that service is in the past.

The only negative is that still I run into issues where there are “hiccups” in the stream for various reasons.  Like things are going smoothly for a good long while, and then all of the sudden the music hitches and the control input lags for a moment while the stream catches back up.  I don’t necessarily blame this on Parsec itself, but on the fact that I am streaming over a wireless network, and this becomes especially bad if we are watching something off Netflix or streamed back from my Plex server.  So I started thinking about alternatives to try and get a more stable connection between my desktop that is wired into my router with Gigabit Ethernet, and my laptop that is downstairs and has no clear path to run Ethernet to.

Powerline Ethernet was the first option I looked into, but there is a problem that I simply do not have a free power outlet near my router since I have so damned much hooked up in that vicinity in my office.  The thing with powerline is it has to have a direct connection to the power outlet because I have heard horror stories about folks who tried to hook that up and get it running through some sort of a power strip.  While I would love to get conduit run with multiple gigabit Ethernet drops in every room… that just isn’t in the cards and is an extremely expensive proposal to retro fit it into a house built in 1980.  This lead me down the path of trying to determine ways to improve my wireless signal enough to make the process viable.

I have the nonsense TP Link spider looking Archer C5400 router upstairs that has three separate channels for wireless, one in the 2.4 ghz band and two in the 5 ghz band… one of which I have already dedicated for nothing but my gaming devices.  So I opted to look into TP Link repeater devices, several of which have a built in Gigabit Ethernet port.  I ultimately decided upon the AC1750 device and rather than simply relying on it as a wireless repeater am effectively treating it like a nonsensically powerful wireless modem.  It is bonded to the 2.4 ghz general network and the 5 ghz gaming network, and then I have Ethernet running from that device to my laptop.  Sure this is a silly solution, but it seems to do exactly what I was hoping it would…  provide me completely lag free parsec streaming.

Almost all of my Monster Hunting of late has been done across this connection from my laptop, without running into issues where I need to twitch move out of the way of an attack and hit a lag spike.  Similarly I can play a game like Destiny 2 over the connection without running into issues now.  Previously it worked well, but even at its best I could still tell I was remotely playing the game.  With this setup it feels like I am legitimately just sitting at my desktop upstairs from my laptop downstairs.  Again I think I am probably the only person who tries to game in the fashion that I do…  but I thought I would write about this today just in case anyone else out there is looking for an option to make things feel more like sitting at the gaming machine.  Tonight I plan on doing some experiments with the native Playstation Remote app to see if that feels better now than it did, since I would like to play some Dad of War at some point.

This isn’t exactly a cheap solution.  The device in question costs around $45 on Amazon for a refurbished model, and about $70 for a minty fresh factory sealed one.  There are likely cheaper options as well, but effectively what you are looking for is something in the AC band with a Gigabit ethernet port built into the device that bonds to the 5 ghz signal.  The end result however works extremely well for me personally, and you can even use something like Photoshop and the brushes all feel responsive.  Sure you are tethered to a wireless repeater, so it isn’t exactly the best option for wireless play.  I do however want to do some testing without the Ethernet connected to see if the signal is stable enough without the physical connection.   The biggest test however is that we can be streaming something from Netflix and the gameplay seems completely unphased by it, as was the case Monday when I was off work hunting monsters on the laptop while streaming shows through the Roku.