Sorry I forgot to write yesterday. Well, I didn't forget so much as didn't have the energy to; I've been sleeping like absolute crap of late, and so after I finished work yesterday I pretty much collapsed straight into bed and didn't do anything else for the rest of the evening. I'm feeling slightly better this evening, but not by a lot. At least I'm here, though!
I'm feeling mildly frustrated with some of my friends right now. For ages during lockdown we've been saying that we should play some stuff online, and lots of suggestions have been put forward, but none have come to fruition. The closest we've come to actual agreement is Minecraft, which we all enjoyed playing together a few years back, and I'd certainly be up for playing again.
The trouble is, the one who would be running the server is absolutely, stubbornly insistent that he won't play vanilla, unmodded Minecraft, and to make matters worse the modpack he insists on using features over 200 mods, requires more than 8GB of RAM to even load up and even then takes more than ten minutes to even load the game application from an SSD, then another five minutes to actually load from the menu screen into a world. And to make matters worse, some irritating bug somewhere in the whole hideous process means that you can't join a multiplayer game without first joining and then leaving a single-player game, which means a grand total of about 20-25 minutes just getting the game started.
The attraction for me with how we used to play Minecraft was the fact that you could boot it up in a matter of seconds, log into the server and just hang out, explore, see what everyone had been up to, and if nothing in particular was going on or you realised you weren't really in the mood, you hadn't really wasted any time.
With all this mod bullshit, it wastes nearly half an hour just getting the damn thing up and running — and when you're in there it's needlessly overcomplicated with all the stuff that's been added. I also strongly suspect that the member of our group who has the weakest PC specs — who is also one of the people most enthusiastic about playing Minecraft again — won't even be able to start the damn thing up at all due to a lack of available RAM.
I get that the friend who has been setting all this up has gone to a lot of effort to get the game running the way he wants it to run, but the fact he simply won't see how much frustration it's causing others — and how it fundamentally misses the point of what we actually want to get out of these play sessions — is winding me up something rotten at the minute. I don't care how he plays in his own free time, but when it comes to something we all do together, to be perfectly honest I'd much rather just have some sort of "lowest common denominator" arrangement.
I'm probably just grumpy from lack of sleep. And I'm sure we'll have a good time once it's all up and running properly — if that ever happens. But it's frustrating me a ton right now — particularly as getting this group to do anything is like pulling teeth at the best of times, let alone in the middle of lockdown.
Anyway. Time to detach from the Internet and go play some Atelier, I think.
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