Well, the blog’s been irregular as…you know, I’m not actually going to complete that joke. That’s going to places I fear to tread.
Despite this irregularity-and despite that I didn’t make an entry for last year-I’m at least gonna take a look back at 2022 for the eighteenth anniversary of this blog. If the blog were a person, it’d be graduating high school now. Scary thought, that.
So, what did I spend my time in?
Star Citizen got the bulk of my time again, but it seems to be suffering from a slowdown in content release-which is not the best look when you’re in active development in an Alpha status. This isn’t to say nothing happened; a number of vehicles were released, ship refueling from other ships happened, more missions added, including another dynamic event. But it was all drip-drip-dripped from April onward. The rationale is that a lot of work is being done for two major bits of technology which-in theory-will dramatically move the chains forward. But the last patch is very overdue (to be fair, if they rushed it live now, it’d be a minor disaster), and one could be tempted to observe that this year’s work had better show some awesome stuff. I stream my gameplay a bit on Saturdays, so to toot my own horn a bit, if one is feeling masochistic to see just what one can do, I’m not hard to find.
Star Trek Online tends to occupy my Wednesday nights, and I’ve been moving along playing the Klingon Warrior J’Dan, who’s nearing the end of his career to open up a slot for a new captain. That plan’s been in the works. As far as the releases for STO, well, it’s marginally better than Star Citizen; they’ve had three “seasons” released, each featuring the ongoing issues with the Mirror Universe and all the troubles that entails; mostly they seem to have one or two episodes and a task force operation. Not much new in the way of mechanics, which may be for the best. And of course, there are regular lockbox updates. I did take some time during the year to actually do that year’s event campaign, which will allow me to choose a ship usually only found in lockboxes-which one, I’ve yet to decide upon. I was going to use it for the next captain, but stuff happened, and I found that I didn’t actually need to do it anymore. Welp-not the first time I’ve out-clevered myself. This is the other game I do on streams, so again, not hard to find me.
At this point, despite the lack of any official reactions, I think it’s safe to call the assorted rogue servers in City of Heroes as phoenixes, and not zombies. We’re closing in on four years since the assorted servers were born again, so to speak, and they’re still going strong. I don’t talk much about the assorted servers these days, since I prefer not to be caught up in any drama between them-but if you look back at my posts, you know where I’ve been playing, and it hasn’t changed over time. Again, time constraints limit me to one day a week on this one, and on that day, I work on a villain called the Chronopolitan, a time/beam defender, and he’s in his mid-40’s range. I play him with a group of other villains, and odds are good that when he hits max level, I’ll keep developing him, as I view him as “what if the Doctor had absolutely no scruples?” In other words, he’s been fun to RP. As far as development goes…well, since the servers all go their own way, it’s hard to nail down the assorted changes they’ve gone through. Still, I was always of the opinion that if the game were at least in maintenance mode, I’d still be playing-and that hasn’t changed for me.
As far as other games? I’ve spent some time on Valheim, which took the gaming world by storm a while back, and while I didn’t get involved much with the multiplayer aspect, I did find it as a very fun game, and well worth the relatively cheap price to pick it up on Steam.
As far as this blog goes? It’s still on an irregular status, and who the heck knows when I’m moved to post something. Time’s a lot more limited for me these days, and sitting down to type something out is a bit more challenging than it used to be. But I’m still alive, still kicking, and still playing those MMOs, even eighteen years later. (I try not to dwell on how old that makes me feel sometimes.) If you’re reading this, I do still appreciate you taking a little bit of your time to read what I’m writing, and who knows? Maybe I’ll have more to say as this year goes on. At worse, I should be here this time next year for 19!
Faces of the Ranger 