September

I have something of a rarity for you today, dear readers, as I'm not going to attack UESP, its policies, its users or anything else to do with the site. Well... okay, I suppose Bethesda Softworks Inc are a bit connected but it's still a bit of a change.

My reason for this post is Hearthfire, a mod so soporific and shit that even UESP's team of panting sycophants can't write anything enthusiastic about it. Oops - I'm not supposed to be attacking UESP today. So let's say "Well done Legoless for writing a post without letting on that the entire Elder Scrolls community has collectively shouted 'What the FUCK?' at their monitors having seen the latest shit-awful garbage that Bethesda has vomited up."

There is no fucking way I'm linking to the announcement trailer, so any of you that haven't already watched it can see it off the UESP notice above. So you have some chance of catching your jaw before it falls off, I'll spoil the trailer by saying the new mod is about buying a plot of land, designing and decorating your own home, moving your spouse there and then adopting children. No this isn't your friendly Uncle Tiber pissing about. That is what the new mod is about.

Seriously.

Let's pause for a moment and reflect on the TES series. Not the games in it - the series itself. TES stands for "The Elder Scrolls" and if it's "about" anything it's "about" those tiny frozen fragments of reality called the Elder Scrolls. They let you see into the past, change the past, change the present and generally fuck with the entire fabric of space and time. In the latest incarnation of the series, we have dragons, vampires, werewolves and zombies draugr as enemies, along with swords, sorcery and stealth.

So let me ask the towering intellects at Bethesda this:

What the FUCK are you doing releasing a fucking SIMS mod?

Seriously?

Backtrack once again. This time we're going back to Morrowind. And no, I'm not one of those tedious fucks that populate message boards moaning that Morrowind was great and everything since then has been worse. No, I'm going back there because that's when DLC started.

For Morrowind, Bethesda released several free DLCs and they were largely examples rather than genuine new content, although the free Helm of Tohan mod was pretty good. The real effort went into Tribunal and Bloodmoon, which weren't free and which added so much stuff that UESP required a whole new namespace for each of them. In Tribunal - and there are about to be spoilers - it turned out that one of the three "living gods" of Morrowind had gone mad, killing one of the others, and was plotting to kill the third. The story involved competing factions, new enemies and you ended up fighting a fucking god! Bloodmoon wasn't quite as dramatic but gave us a whole new island with new monsters, and you ended up fighting a fucking daedric prince! (sort of)

With Oblivion, although there was the awful Horse Armor mod we had the excellent Knights of the Nine, which was almost big enough for its own namespace but gave a superb buildup towards the final showdown with a ... hmm... not sure how to describe it, but it was pretty cool. Then there was Shivering Isles, which was equally awesome and led again to a fight with a daedric prince. The other DLC wasn't brilliant but gave good homes to members of the four basic classes, and added a few interesting items.

With Skyrim we get Dawnguard, which has a pretty good storyline and some interesting characters, but which was summed up by one correspondent of mine as "meh". And now we have Hearthfire.

For a start, it's supposed to be a clever double name, what with Hearthfire corresponding to September in our calendar (dullards who just got the title of this blog post really need to learn more) and also referring in a sad, sappy way to hearth and home. Then we get the blatant lie. It is NOT going to let you design your own home. You'll get to pick and choose between some pre-built stuff because that's the way Bethesda's modding system works.

But the worst thing. The very worst thing is that this piece of shit is going to cost hundreds of Microsoft points on XBox and related amounts of cash elsewhere... and you're all going to fucking buy it because you're all fanbois of the worst kind.

Once you're able to "design" and "build" your own house, I suggest you download the My Little Pony mod because that's what you deserve.

A Year Too Late

If I really cared any more I could get depressed at the poor standard of admin on UESP these days. A good example is this post from TheRealLurlock expressing concern at the block settings he's been using on IPs. In a nutshell, Lurlock tells us that he doesn't know what he's doing and it's taken him months to say anything. Yeah, that's the kind of admin a site needs.

There's a reply from Lonely and Desperate saying the same thing, although the diff for that one is lost thanks to Daveh being incompetent. Lastly we have Whining Little Bitch doing his usual trick of replacing actual thought by copying stuff from Wikipedia. He suggests limiting the length of blocks to a year or less.

I thought this sounded a bit familiar and remembered this discussion started by rpeh on 1 May 2011. It seems I've got a better memory than Lonely and Desperate because he took part in the discussion but obviously doesn't remember anything. Rpeh's reason for starting the discussion was exactly what it's taken the other dullards 15 months to realise: that just because someone vandalises a page from a given IP address, it isn't always going to belong to a vandal.

The original proposals didn't go anywhere because LaD is an idiot and some other user I'd forgotten was also an idiot, and has done the square root of fuck all in recent times. While rpeh's suggestion to unblock every single indefinitely blocked IP address was a stupid suggestion that would have led to days of pure spam, the basic idea of not perma-blocking any IPs in the future was a good one. It's a shame it took so long for the others to get there.

Once... Twice... Three times a loser

Well the third attempt at upgrading the wiki ended not simply in failure, but destruction. This time, Daveh the Incompetent managed to wipe out half a day's worth of edits in addition to being unable to upgrade the software.

At this point you have to ask: do you really want this guy in charge of the site, paid or otherwise? If you're going to plaster the site with adverts and spend the money on getting someone to maintain the site, how about hiring someone who can do the job?

Before someone makes the inevitable claim that I'm fluffing for Nephele, rpeh or someone else, I mean someone from outside the site. There is a world beyond UESP, after all.

Gold Medal for being rubbish

Once again Daveh tries and fails to upgrade UESP's MediaWiki software. This is an obvious and transparant attempt to get support for his idea that he should be appointed editor-in-chief for life. Judging by the responses to the last thread, you sheep are happy to let him milk you for all you're worth.

Your work = Daveh's pay

With this post, Daveh finally announces his long-term strategy for UESP. I'll save you the reading: basically, he wants you all to write pages so that he can spend time watching TV and playing video games.

In a TL;DR post, the salient point is embedded at number 7 of 8 and means that UESP's revenues would be used to pay Daveh to do the stuff he should have done months ago if he wanted to keep any kind of credibility.

The fact is that a permanent staff member was discussed years ago between Nephele and rpeh and they agreed (yes, they used to agree) that the post would end up being a kind of super admin and that while they both kind of wanted the role there were too many problems around it.

Daveh, typically, bypassed any sort of discussion.

The fact is that Daveh isn't interested in the community. He's bored with his job and wants to spend hs time profitting from YOUR contributions to UESP to make a living.

The trouble is... I don't expect any of you to speak up and tell him "no".

One and the Same

An email reminded me of this post from last year. As the email said:

"Ratwar has recently started contributing again...
Elliot hasn't been on in a short while..."

Quite...

Nothing to Say

I deliberately held off on this for a while but it's been ten weeks since Lonely and Desperate made a post about the state of the UESP blog. An editor named ThuumofReason asked "Wasn't rpeh in charge of it?", which prompted L&D to ask if rpeh's permissions had been removed, to which the Queen of Trolls makes a short (by her standards) reply, indicating that she had added L&D to the list of admins.

That was all back in mid-April.

Since then there's been one anaemic post from Daveh the Incompetent... and that's it.

I would never have believed it but kicking rpeh out has killed the UESP community. Another tick on the list of reasons why Daveh made a stupid decision.