I don't want to frighten those in the readership who may be involved in broadcast television, but whenever I start watching a lot of TV what that tells me is that I need a new MMO.
There's all kinds of good television; television isn't bad, and it's getting better. But when I divert this kind of leisure time to it it means there's nothing in the roster pushing back. I stopped playing Skyrim; not because it isn't good, but because I'm not likely to play a game like this a second time through, and the mod scene is engaged in daily acts of mastery. I'll come back in a couple months, when the game - already considered the year's best - appends a sequel's worth of content free of charge.
I mention Skyrim because, as a "single player MMO," it would have been a tremendous soak for all this wrung-out time. I need "solution," something for other games to float into and out of: a default. I've just installed Star Wars, even though my guts told me to wait a month, because the adventure tales from Gabe and Kara and Scott began to tantalize for real. We made a comic out of one of them, even.
Like getting a puppy, an MMO can be a big responsibility. Ultimately, that responsibility consumes all the oxygen, and these game start to feel less like gleaming starships and more like space-coffins. I intend to outrun that as long as I can.
The server problems we experienced earlier this week, the "wages" of Gabriel's most recent indiscretions, resulted in traffic well beyond any projected model. This surprised me, because thirteen years into this infernal ritual I would have thought that everybody knew about the shit we get into around here. Apparently not, because concurrency was a multiple of our ordinary readership. And then they stayed, for some reason. I will never understand this stuff.
If you want to see data that describes the path of a digital infection, some latter-day epidemiology, Robert has some graphs and commentary here.
(CW)TB out.
