It’s time for another performance review of my YouTube channel. Thanks to YouTube’s change in monetization strategy at the beginning of the year, I basically stopped putting any effort into video production in 2018. The only videos I upload now are completely unedited-basically mini-streams without a chat room. (Occasionally I do some edits, but it’s minor and rare.) In fact, toward the end of the year as I’m writing this, I would say that I only upload about 1 video for every 10 that I actually record. (1127 words.)

Here’s my annual summary of PC MMORPGs that are on my radar for the new year 2019. (Here is 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, and 2014). I’ll warn you up front it’s bleak. I am only considering “traditional” style MMORPGs in this list, not things like MOBAs or brawlers or Diablo-clones or whatever else people call MMOs these days. Actually, since I find out about these from MMO sites, and most MMO sites now cover things that aren’t traditional MMORPGs, some of these might in fact not be traditional MMORPGs. (1410 words.)

Raiders tunneling into Ancient Danger. Again, the screenshot looks dumb and meaningless. Just trust me when I say this was a super dramatic, white knuckle, holy crap moment. People on Twitter are probably sick of hearing about RimWorld by now, but blog readers can enjoy these quips for the first time! Unless you follow me on Twitter, then you’ve probably seen them before. But now you can read more about what I meant with the power of more words! (2082 words.)

Every screenshot of RimWorld kind of looks the same unfortunately. First, just the month of December, though I hardly need ManicTime to tell me this: RimWorld, 142 hours. The final tally changed right up to the end of the final day. Incidentally, as I look at the blah screenshot of RimWorld up there, I should say that I never found the game the slightest bit interesting from looking at other people’s screenshots or descriptions. (338 words.)

It’s time once against for the prestigious Endgame Viable Awards for 2018. 2017 Awards 2016 Awards 2015 Awards I give out three awards for PC games only: Game of the Year, MMORPG of the Year, and MMORPG Expansion of the Year. In my warped worldview “Game of the Year” sort of implies Steam game of the year (because that’s the only place I buy PC games) and excludes traditional MMORPGs. (1055 words.)

Live shot of players navigating the gaming industry in 2018. Bhagpuss has a post referencing, among other things, the deplorable state of Early Access game releases right now, seen in such recent launch disasters as Fallout 76 (not technically early access but, seriously, it was) and Atlas (which as I write this hasn’t been out more than a day and has already been review-bombed to death on Steam). I have nothing to add to his observations except that yes, I agree. (610 words.)

I’m playing RimWorld in pretty much every spare moment of every day right now. This game is just amazing. If MMORPGs had even a tenth of this much interesting gameplay elements, maybe they wouldn’t be dying out. :) Note: I don’t really think MMORPGs are dying out. They’re just evolving into the game equivalent of Marvel summer blockbusters: Designed by focus groups to appeal to the broadest possible audience, which often doesn’t include MMORPG players of the 90s, who are clearly in the minority of gamer audiences these days. (1279 words.)

The rest of the world has already played and finished with RimWorld, which I think has been in Early Access for quite some time, but I just started playing it. I happened to see Sean Sands from Gamers With Jobs playing it on their YouTube channel and thought it looked amazing, so I picked it up. I didn’t even wait for a sale, because I wanted to jump into it while I was interested. (354 words.)

Last vlog for NaNoWriMo 2018, unless I record one more epilogue a bit later to show how I reorganized my Scrivener project. Validating 50,247 words. Lack of editing. Thoughts on what to do next. Reflecting on the month. There are in fact 31 vlog videos, which you can find in this NaNoWriMo 2018 Playlist on YouTube. All the ups and downs of writing for 30 days. (66 words.)

This should be a hoot. Because I didn’t play any games in November. As I mentioned last time, I spent November recovering from back pain and avoided the PC computer chair like the plague while I worked on rebuilding my upper back muscles with torturous stretches and exercises. Lord of the Rings Online, 1 hour. I played my level 62 hobbit Hunter in Mines of Moria for an hour. I did not advance any levels in the allegedly super fast leveling curve that everyone says LotRO has. (249 words.)

I don’t normally do month-in-review posts, but since I was largely absent this month, I figured I should do one for a change. I’ve spent most of November trying to recover from back pain. The first day of the month it got really bad, then it got better, then it got really bad again, and now it’s getting better again. I’ve been taking a muscle relaxant called baclofen every day this month, and last week I started going to physical therapy to try to loosen things up. (765 words.)

Exactly one hundred years ago today, World War I ended with the signing of the Armistice. I’m posting this at 11:00 my time, though of course the actual Armistice was signed in France, so I’m probably four or five hours late. My grandfather was a part of the American Expeditionary Force along with a million others, went through basic training, shipped over to France, and arrived just in time for the last offensive in the war, the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, which began on September 26, 1918. (1013 words.)

Lord of the Rings Online opened their Legendary Server the other day. It’s another of what has become known in the industry as a “progression” server, although I feel like they’re stretching that definition in this case. (Then again, nobody has ever defined what a “progression” server is, except Daybreak. Or maybe it started with SOE, I don’t remember.) In this case “progression” seems to mean a new server with a level cap of 50 and nothing else, which to me is the bare minimum of effort. (1099 words.)

It’s interesting to watch view statistics when you upload a series of videos to YouTube. You might think, as I do, that if you say, “I’m going to upload a series of videos to YouTube, one every day, and here’s the first one,” that people would know and understand how to find and watch the complete series if they’re interested, and you’ll get similar view statistics on each video. But you’d be wrong. (194 words.)

Random WoW image from the media library because I can't be bothered to find one that makes sense for this post. This will be what I hope is a quick blog post about BlizzCon, largely inspired by peer pressure more than any real interest. In fact, the main reason this post didn’t get deleted was I needed a vehicle to say that I’m trying to reserve most of my writing energy this month for NaNoWriMo. (563 words.)