Hello, my lovelies, I'm Ginny O., the Author with No Last Name. I'm an indie scifi and fantasy author who mainly writes about happy werewolves. My channel is my place to have bookshelf side chats about things I care about from books I'm reading, writer advice, industry news, and yes, werewolves.
Find my books on Amazon: www.amazon.com/author/ginnyo Review Guidelines are on my website: ginny0.wordpress.com/
This seems more of a summary of someone's 30 year old book rather than what to consider while trying to build one's own world culture. Kind of rambling.
Alas, I didn't have a script. And what to think about in building your own culture was parts 1 to 3. Lackey's Valedmaar books do this very well and they were, hmm, yes, published 30 years ago. I also tried to think about History and in the short term American history and how all the cultures here did their thing. This is just stuff to think about. It's not required. Some authors like worldbuilding more than others.
I believe it's a combination of them remaking the map and them trying to sort out their spaghetti code. On top of a severe misunderstanding of why their old events were so charming as I don't think the new CEO really gets it. (only mild sarcasm)
Well our new style characters can't even drink tea nor eat cake. Now we are collecting things on Hollow Woods 🤔 this year Cloud thing was bazaar and new disco I don't really like it. New horses again yippeeee.
I think people also forget they invested a lot of money in meaningless things. Sure if one points them out one by one it sounds like it's nothing, but once you see the big picture, it's quite obvious they didnt know how to manage their money, specially during Covid when it was booming. If they claim their team is small, then there was no need to invest in an animated series, huge custom figurines of their characters and a custom tree for their office, expensive horse saddles to hang in the office, even the toy horses they show so much in their videos. Lets not forget that remaking the Dark Riders, also took a lot of resources, unnecessarily, when they needed a visual update not a complete Fortnite revamp. They took the money and instead of choosing to prioritize the game they had, they spent it on stuff that wasnt necessary in the big picture That extra money could have gone to a good team of 3d modelers to update all the NPCs in the game for example, so the story could progress with a relative similar visual style. Update, not change them. It could have gone to making sure all tack works on all horse breeds since they throw those out like out cakes. Could have gone to coders and programmers to work on the back end of the coding and update it slowly. Lots could have been done to avoid the situation they are in now, it's a hole of their own making
SSO's information itself too is scattered and they put up stuff and take down stuff. So, when people want verification of things like this (like the office and so on), unless the wayback machine has it or you have screenshots, there's no "proof" so they'll discount it. And many, many of the players are young and have no idea what goes into making a game. I also notice a trend at times of very positive comments around "new content" that makes me feel the devs or PR team are masquerading as regular players. A studio of around 300 (before layoffs) is not small. They're closer to 250 now, the studio is weighted towards marketing and PR people. But because they don't have a credits list (given the revolving door, how can they) people just believe it instead of going to different sites that can tell them "oh this many say they work at Star Stable in this database." (LinkedIn and there's a Gaming version of that type of site.) But yes, this comes down to CEO priorities and they have been scewed for a very long time for short term gain.
@@ginnyo.9283 I noticed those comments too, which increased after they made it harder for people like CCreations to show spoilers of horses and coats too. Its probably easier to control the narrative from their own accounts than trying to spam another creators account to defend themselves And I agree, the team is not small, that's been their main excuse for years, but when 50% of them are working in either horse models, horse coats and tack recolors (another thing I don't see mentioned a lot, because how can you have just 4-5 different saddle models in the whole game, you just recolor their textures over and over again and call it good work is beyond me) while the other 20% are handling the social account posts and controlling comments, the rest is probably just sitting on their ass. Even their new missions like the new Valedale area, it's just the same system they used for the Halloween event and Christmas battle pass. It's incredibly easy to just repeat and making it "longer" than before just by making the whisps souls or snowflakes numbers more ridiculous. Its not gameplay, its an activity to numb players and increase the play time artificially so they can act like it's something impressive and tell the higher ups that players are enjoying their work to save themselves for a few more months. The battle pass is no different, just more artificial bulk playable hours, and I've said in other videos, but also a step towards making star accounts lose their allowance so they can force that decision in, by making it sound nice like, "oh we took the weekly allowance out, but now you have 300-500 waiting for you at the end of the battle pass every month!" And young players will accept it because it sounds like it's more than the usual 100 weekly, forgetting the the battle pass is a grind fest that you can probably only unlock if you treat the game like a daily chore. Not to mention it won't work for older players. They claim you get exp in the pass by doing missions, catching collectables and doing championships. End game and older players have no missions to do, I personally don't have any collectibles besides the druid horse, so they would have to... repeat races and championships and grind those out for 2-3 hours a day? How is that supposed to be enjoyable for anyone
@@ErisFrance0 If it feels lazy it is because it is lazy, and notice the design quality of the tack and gear is going down even as the "quality" of the textures is going up. (As a fashion designer, the new clothes make me bored.) What gets me the most about those comments is the hyping of the new story and how good it is. I am also an author. The new story is not good to be polite. I agree, Grind isn't game play. I hate it. It's boring. There is a brain type that likes it. But they do it super fast and throw it off for everyone else.. It is, yes, as you said, there to artificially inflate server time for the sole reason of driving purchases. The longer you're in the game, the higher chance you'll buy something. It's all psychological and manipulative. The original games were visual novel fetch quests and that's fine, it's great. The Seasonal Games are really relaxing. They had a very good base to build on and add 'minigames' and lots of story, and then they went 'oh noes, the server times, add collections' 'quests are hard!' and 'people get on for festivals, focus on that' and then 'wait why are they only getting on for festivals and not the other 8 months of the year. add more grind! Grind is easy to program!" Now, they are adding a battle pass. And the small % of players who like grind will do it, and the rest will nope out of the game entirely. They can't afford that but that's what is going to happen. This is a last ditch effort which, I hate being a debbie downer, is going to fail b/c people want quests, map areas, and bug fixes. Period. Everything else is icing. I've been pushed out, so I'll just play the Seasonal Games. They're better mechanically anyways.
11:23 YOU ARE SO SPOT ON! When square Enix failed its mmorpg they started over. I also loved reading your recent thread on Reddit it was really insightful for me. Thank you for making such quality content!
You're welcome! So glad you enjoyed my reddit comments! Right. When Yoshi-P saw FFXIV was a failure (due to taking shortcuts) he took the blame and started over including making a massive plan with an excel sheet time budget of how long it would take. I know this is the outlier and should not be counted given how many MMOs have failed (for so many reasons). Square pumped in another 125 million USD on top of the 400 million USD they had put into FFXIV 1.0 to make 2.0. MMOs are the most costly game to make and require the most amount of planning. SSO should have been another single player game. And if SS 2.0 ever came around, that's what I'd make it. (A massive one by Star Stable terms, but still single player.)
@@ginnyo.9283 I definitely agree. FFXIV now is one of the most popular games now online and I’m really happy of where it’s going. For SSO I definitely agree as well, It should’ve never been made into an MMORPG. I kind of feel it doenst do much to lend itself to the genre and honestly its current financial system I feel really stifles the games potential as well! Thank you so much for responding to me!
It's a first draft of a game that could be really great. They had the time. They had the people, and they did have the money at times. And I think you're right, unless something turns around fast on corporate's end it will end. We don't need boycott's now, they did the work for us basically.
Great video. I'm also a huge library fan. Support local libraries 😀 Interesting selection of books in the video - and nothing wrong with not always reading new books. The City of Ember looks great, and I wish our library network had it.
Reading older books is great too! I'm super lucky to have 30 libraries to draw from and 2 are really big. If your library has access to WorldCat maybe you can get City of Ember through that? Or your librarian, if they have the funds, might buy it on request.
100% agree with you. I’m a Old(tm) and I remember when we would print fics off geocities or similar to read offline back when we only had one computer per household, or even when some people would post their favorite fics on their own personal hosted website to archive (and many fics have been saved from digital degrade this way) but SELLING a fic binding is COMPLETELY different. I’m actually appalled at the gall of someone to do that, and disappointed in the fans who buy them. I think ficbinding for fun and single copy personal use could be a really neat community and hobby, but some people had to go and ruin it.
Exactly! And this is how we could end up without nice things (fanfic) at all. This Old (tm) remembers convos in DBZ Vegebul Yahoo Groups about "you identity is not anon as you think" and I've lived my fandom life around that, I could be doxed at any time. So, act accordingly and don't ruin things for everyone else!
I ALSO HAVE DEADLY EDUCATION SITTING ON MY COFFEE TABLE TO READ. This is hysterical. You have the two books I recommended and one that got recommended to me. XD
I think that mentioning lack of/poor editing in a review is valid. A story can be great, but reading it is a nightmare due to lack of editing. But I'm with you. A bad review on a published book might encourage me TO read it, depending on the reasoning in the review. Just dropping stars with no explanation isn't very helpful, but I am guilty of occasionally doing that, too.
A "bad" review (say three stars or less) with well articulated reasons of "I didn't click with me because X,Y, and Z" might actually help a book find its audience! So many five star reviews I read sound mostly like a summary of the book, plus "great book" or written by "professional" reviewers which doesn't tell me anything I want to know! I don't want to know if it's a story about an abstract construct, I want to know if the story delivers on being a story! I absolve you of the only leaving stars. Sometimes, you just don't know what to say!
Thanks for talking about this. Very few people seem to not understand that this company isn't your friend. There is honesty such a fine line between plagiarism and one's own work these days. That SSO should be giving at least credit to these items/ideas which the community has and not be taking months to years to implement them. The more I research into this topic the more I understand why star stable's community always carries such a weird vibe towards me. It has so many lays so content. This, and the A/B Testing only feel like a tiny piece of what's going on within this place, it's so densely laid and covered with algorithms picking that it feel almost impossible to break into it. Thank you so much for talking about this topic. It's a hard thing to come to the realization of, but we all need to understand it.
You're welcome. I do have 2 videos recorded but not posted, one almost 2 hours and one half an hour just about SSO's bad Corporate practices. I'm sitting on them as I wait and see if the boycott gets momentum. Now that SSE has been caught using AI art, it's imperative to realize, they've bought into the tech bro koolaid.
I clicked on this video thinking "Oh, that's great! Then they might be listening to us. What could be wrong with it?" but after watching it I must admit that I had no knowledge about the legality of this and I honestly have never even thought about it but everything you said made a lot of sense to me. All I can really say is that I agree! I think some ideas might not be "worth" hiring for, like small changes, but there should be some kind of "payment", shouldn't it? Especially when it's about magic horse coats. The amount of money they probably make through those must be incredible! I mean, keep in mind that they almost always only come around once a year with special festivities or the rotation of the magic horses traveling with Gary Goldtooth. So people usually go crazy for them! FOMO is a real thing especially for the younger people playing the game. So some kind of payment for a design or idea should be paid and if the person is that good they should be hired if possible. I don't know what you think about paying the people with Star Coins tho... This is where I wanted to ask you a question. Many years ago SSO released the first magic horses (on the old icelandic model) and I remember there being a competition for the players to design these horses and the winners would get their designed horse in the game. What do you think about this since my thoughts are torn. If it is a contest and the reward being a horse is clear, do you think it is okay or what do you think about this?
Paying people with Star Coins isn't okay. It's another form of exploitation. A free horse as a reward isn't okay. A horse is worth what, 30 bucks. Is an artist's work WORTH only 30 bucks? (When you know SSO is going to make thousands off of it.) Especially since these artists can't live off of "exposure" or "star coins." Star Stable can/could afford to hire great artists in their community and to license their coats into the game. Contests are just PR and considered really bad in the art community since most of the time they're done by people who can afford to pay someone to do it. I think the magic iceys were a survey thing on IG sort of like the live stream pony. But that presents a different um, legal issue. (AKA all the fan art everyone was creating BEFORE the horses came out and putting SSE into a bad spot.) Look, sometimes a lot of "small" changes over time equal into big changes. When you notice the 'small changes' piling up, it certainly can make someone feel cynical about contributing to the community especially if they love the game and are okay with working for SSE. But now they feel taken advantage of by SSE and that can sour the creative community. And those small things, like art style, color and proportion, are what are driving their core audience away. They may seem small, but they're really important.
@@polarbearart You're welcome. Like I said in the video, I really do want all of you to be able to have fun. Except with SSE watching, fun might have to be in private vetted groups. It's not a good situation.
We gotta admit, if it werent for the clubs and discord socials AND Insta for the photolovers and roleplayers, it would be ZERO interest for the game. With a chat all pornwords are allowed but not regular words like potatochips are banned, its not functional. The game DEPENDS on other platforms. There is little actual gameplay quests, for the original games plan (which is what most of us oldies hangs around for), they CHANGE soulriders and all the storylines to make it a different game (which is fine but give the game a different name 🙄) but they know it would not survive because its no originality in what they do. And this is the biggest problem i think. Same as when they steal players ideas, the team has no originality. Whats left is these timekill races and grinding, and usually thats not enough to keep players. Its literally throwing money out the window as you get nothing back but overexpencive items and horses that they keep rollin out bc they r getting desperate after loosing so many players. I mean even the grinding «reward» is rewards you need to PAY to get at the end anyway. Kinda looses its point of being a reward 😂 and hardcore fans think its free and says we have to be grateful that we get the chance of buying items 😅 its redicilous.
It is! Different choices could have been made. I've done my fanfic edit. I've been rolling the concept back to Scifi recently. It can work. The art COULD be consistent and gameplay could be fun. But here we are! I feel the saddest for the players who were here since SSL and the way the story has been butchered. Now with GM Bee at a new company, I have no idea what SSE is going to do gameplay wise.
Im an ssl 😬 its super sad the entire thing! Just have to wait and see. I hope someone see the potencial and buys it and makes it back to a game not a timekill
It's not coincidence I'm seeing this after my fanwork got stolen (in a different fandom (I refuse to make anything for free for greed stable online🫡)) is it?
Wow, I haven't thought about SSE taking ideas from that perspective. You always speak facts. Work should be rewarded, not stolen due to lack of vision. The one they have still feels pretty soulless to me. My heart aches because theorists & creators beloved by the community weren't hired, despite they know and understand SSO's lore and can connect it better than probably anyone in the world. Plus, they also were incredibly passionate and know what's important for the player base. I'm mad, I can't even imagine how much it would make the game more popular and better. Sorry for being somewhat toxic. The game is still lovely, and I understand the company has technical and staff limitations. But scriptwriting still can be better and it'd probably improve their finances. I just can't get over SSO not using this great opportunity that, as it seems, could benefit everyone
It's good to have empathy and be mad about this. This is something to be mad about and being mad isn't 'toxic' when the anger is justified. The fact the C-suite of SSE refuses to hire an actual narrative team and worldbuilding team (whether they hire from their fandom or not) is incredibly short sighted. They keep firing the people who the fans love like Ellie, the comic artist, and Helena, the author, who if given the opportunity to put story into the game itself, could have turned it around. There was an entire team they fired who had been working on content years ago. Random people inserting random stuff into the game only makes a mess. The proof is in the game, they have no vision and haven't since Marcus Bjorkang left. Buzzwords and trends can't make a game good. And taking from their fans without credit and without payment will only run the fans away to an IP who does have a vision and doesn't steal. Giving people jobs is good no matter how you slice it, and if they can't afford to pay for the ideas they steal from people, they can't afford to have a game. End of story.
SSO has admitted a looong time ago that they do watch their players' content. In 2015-2016 when MV edits, MEPs and Collabs were popular on SSO, their team even uploaded creators' videos on their platform as a shoutout. My firends back then also made it there (who were underage btw by the time) and I was so proud of them haha. Now I see how weird this actually is
Watching your SSO videos feels kinda nostalgic in a good way. I think the winter update would be much better for me if we were able to earn more horse XP. For example, through snowflakes, fireworks and doing winter races twice a day.
Note/Disclaimer: This video was recorded before Christmas and the lack of a SC code in the Advent Tree. Due to SSO's manipulative policies over the past few years, I fully support the SSO community boycotting buying SC and any other peaceful protests they do. As always, the developers at SSE are NOT responsible for Corporate decisions, including the social media and PR team. Please, while on official SSO media comment sections, be polite! All these decisions are made by the CEO, CFO, and CMO and Nordisk Films. Not even the Production Manager often has as much say as you'd think. Keep up the energy. Unite! Bless!
I grew up on the Redwall books. I think I was in 2nd grade. My primary school principal let me borrow hers (fancy hardcovers!). I've since gotten my own and am reading them with my kids. <3
Nice video! You could be more at ease, since the advice is sound :) In particular the part of not comparing oneself to authors with experience when writing one's first draft, when I was in that spot the traditional "your first draft is going to suck" didn't really hit (even though it turned out quite true) I didn't have the notion of being so green, and that kept me stuck in perfectionism and misevaluation of the quality of my writing, when I could have been trying different things, had I known. That being said, the most important thing about a first first draft is probably to have fun with it ;) Even if there are more experienced people out there, doubt shouldn't get in your way when drafting _your_ story. ~subscribed, take care
Then they changed it. If you notice in the video when I was on the page, it wasn't there. Since I created the video several people have reached out to Get the Gallop to ask. And thankfully, Get the Gallop has added the wax to the page. Yay! Go them.
@@Sakushishii yep! I'm glad they did. And it's not 100% on Get the Gallop. SSE and No Ordinary Scent should have included it in the marketing materials. Get the Gallop is just a redbubble for horse stuff. I still think if you have any migraine or allergy or asthma issues, be careful buying this candle only because I've had so many people tell me they're getting sick. But knowing the wax is a good step.
Thank you for making this video! I never read the SSO blogs, and maybe I should. I would have missed this information. Thank you for showing us how to look up the details of our graphics cards and see if our laptop or computer will still be able to play Star Stable.
You're welcome. Hey, if you don't read the blog posts it's okay. A LOT of information most people care about (like the characters) is stuff they are rehashing quite a bit. (They are making a LOT of promises with no dates to keep them. So the excuse of, 'it's too hard, our tech is bad' will fly later if they can't.) Unless you love behind the scenes stuff, it's not always necessary... and then there are months like THIS, where they are "revealing" important technical stuff and doing it halfway. Those posts, I go over. In fact, their information is scattered over so many IG posts, livestreams, and stuff that if I didn't have people in my discord keeping me up to date, I'd miss things too. It's very frustrating. If I think it's important, I will do videos. (I just can't dedicate an entire channel to... SSO. It's impossible.)
@ginnyo.9283 It's good we are looking out for each other's backs and updating each other. And I agree dedicating an entire channel to SSO would be a head mess. Thanks for the important video posts when it is necessary.
I hope you don't mind my mentioning this, but I asked you on Tumbr for your views on my habit of rejecting ideas I have when I read them in stories - I fear labelling myself a plagiarist! This is why I tend to avoid contemporary fiction. BTW, I'm no longer on Tumblr.
@ginnyo.9283 I didn't read the post as I'm now off Tumblr., but even so, I thank you. Re. some of your advice on RU-vid: I feel less hampered by doubts about writing thanks to your RU-vid advice. Now, I'm more open to ideas without resorting to my usual habit of shooting them down before they even get off the ground! I know this will raise a smile, but I was even quite hung up about the act of writing: now I just allow my ideas to flow...I don't care about my fountain pens and handwriting as the CONTENT means much more.
@@Addwrite that's really good to hear. Maybe the answer will help someone else over on tumblr. The short answers were yes, and yes. But to give you a longer answer, I'm sorry, it will be a couple weeks. You can try to read my tumblr, the post should be public, but I dunno if they've instituted the "only logged users" thing or not. (I don't think so.) ginnyzero tumblr com with the dots. near the top.
@@ginnyo.9283I just temporarily signed in to Tumblr to read your post. I agree. Re. the sex and violence aversion, I think I really should be more inclusive in my reading and stop hiding behind the ornate tweeness of early fiction. I might try my favourite online bookstore and consider some up to date stuff.
Ginny, thank you so much for this information! I subscribe to dozens of SSO creators, and even tho a few mentioned the change of Open GL, you are the only one to let us know how to actually check our own computers! This was especially reassuring to me (player since 2014), as I was one of the unfortunate victims of the Great Unannounced Change of October 5, 2016 - and was worried it would happen to me again. On that date, SSO changed from Direct X9 to Open Gl 3.0. (Yeah, I have no idea what those mean.) But the result was SSO turned weird, kaleidoscopic, neon colors, and I went from 30 fps to TWO frames per second! (I had to borrow another person’s computer when temporary character XP quests appeared. This lasted for 15 months until I got a new laptop for Christmas 2017.) As much as I love SSO, I have never been so angry/annoyed/upset with them. Not for improving their game (they had no choice, it was forced on them by Microsoft), but for not giving us several months heads-up notice, as this was a major change for them which they must have known for at least a year. As you suggested, I typed in my computer name and numbers (and added: icecat) and it showed that I have Open Gl 4.4. So now I can rest easy. No more dreading the change-over. Again, THANKS! (Really enjoy your vids!)
You're welcome! I was worried too because my laptop is a midline one from like 2016. You and others like you are exactly the reason I made this video. Please share it around if you like so others can find out!
You're welcome! I don't want this announcement to cause panic. Especially, when most people have no idea what OpenGL is, what it does, or how to find out what version they have. It's nice they told us in advance this time, but that still doesn't help kids find out how to know they can still PLAY.
it is really since they write shitty scripts. The show runners and studios don't help. They all suck and hope everybody ends up eating dog food in cardboard box on hollywood blvd.
there's internal conflict (man vs. himself,) and external conflict (man vs. everything else.) Genre stories rely on external. "Literature" relies more in internal and upmarket uses a mix of both. In short stories when you have less words, the 'conflict' might not be as high stakes or as obvious as in longer form stories. sometimes in short stories, the conflict has technically already been resolved and they're relaying the aftermath. Short stories are a different beast than long form. (And I'm not very good at keeping things short.)
