I have a bunch of thoughts, but none of them coherent or thought-out enough for a whole post, today. Nothing special about Friday, though – how’s that for random?

–Syp of Bio Break asks, Do racial variants add value to MMO’s? It looks like the conclusion is, they can! But do they? I don’t know. On first thinking of it, I had thought the first time I saw this was when I recently started FFXIV, and saw that the Viera had two variants: a forest viera and a mountain viera. Besides a very slight favoring of the base stats to martial or magical pursuits, respectively, it didn’t seem like much of a difference, besides flavor. I don’t even know if anyone else can find out which one you picked. Maybe there was some slight difference in their starting fetishwear, perhaps.

But as I was thinking on it, Star Trek Online has a variation of this. There are, technically, three Federation factions: the normal one, the TOS one, and the STD one. All three have different starting locations, different tutorials (well, the STD tutorial is merely a literal reskin of the standard tutoral), and a slightly different post-tutorial experience. But after that, the only difference is cosmetic. It could be argued that the Romulan and Dominion factions are similar, especially in how the ship distribution has been changed recently. I know three Federations isn’t exactly a race thing (especially since there are actual race differences inside the faction), but it feels the same as what Syp was describing.

-Twitch is going to be making their own streaming software, to go with their service. Makes sense. The move is because they perceive that streaming is too complicated, and that drives away potential streamers. I believe that is absolutely the case. I’m no streamer, mostly because I don’t have content I think needs to be streamed (streaming for yourself is way more pathetic than blogging for yourself), but also because there was just way too much setup to get it going. I made a Twitch account for the purpose of streaming, once, so that I could stream me sparking in GBF. It’s always a hoot to get everyone in on someone’s bad luck, and I wanted to spread that joy. But instead of some easy pick-up-and-go thing, like I thought it was, there was a whole load of other software that was needed to do it right. And I wasn’t going to get into that for 15 minutes of streaming every six or so months. This is a very encouraging development, though one I think is way past due.

-I saw that FFXIV was having a summer event, and I wanted in. There was no in-game encouragement, like I thought there would be. It was just on the launcher. So, I followed that link, and find out you need to be lvl 30 to participate. Well, I’m only 17, so I was planning on powerleveling (as much as one can do so at low levels and not knowing what one is doing, like me) last night. But, I bump straight into global emergency maintenance! I’ve never played a huge game like this before, and I’m not really part of the active community yet, so this blindsided me. So no playing last night for me.

Oh well, I have another MMO to play. Went back into ESO. Forgot that they have login bonuses, which I’ve been missing the past couple of days. Whoops. Not that it skips or anything, but I figure most of the better stuff is towards the later part, to encourage consistent play. No sign of a summer event, so that’s somewhat disappointing. Went and did some quests, one of which wanted me to do some PVP thing. I did it, but for some reason they mix low-level people like me with almost-post-tutorial players. The whole bracket is lvl 10-49. That was crazy. I was nothing but a short distraction at best, and an active detriment to my team.

Also, tried what is apparently a dungeon meant for multiple people, by myself. Despite the quest being lvl 11, which was my level, I wasn’t able to even scratch a single one of the swarm of enemies that I somehow agro’d. There was no in-mission indication that this was intended as a group activity. And I saw one other player there, who looked to be about my level. They probably did the same exact thing I did: just followed the quest marker, and got wrekd. Not the best game design, perhaps.

-Arena of Sompek is back in STO. Honestly, this is probably my favorite recurring event in the game, especially since they changed how the Crystalline Catastrophe event worked. I’m one of those weirdos that loves the ground game, and this is everything good about it distilled, without most of the bad parts (that aren’t inherent to the gameplay itself). And I’m very close to getting the free ship. I’d thought I would have it by the end of the last Featured TFO event, but I’m only a couple days away. Don’t care about the completion prize this time, and not just because it’s more STD material (though combined, I’m just not going to even get it for completion’s sake). But I will play this every day, because I like the event. Though it does lose some of the fun by trying to pack what should be a gauntlet into something everyone can do easily; both the infinite and timed versions are better, I think. But it sounds like maybe they will become permanent additions after this event is over, which would be so cool.