[2022] What happened this year to Rayque?

Another year's end, another summary.

This year marks the 12th summary on this blog. As always, the Rayque3 Staff wishes you a great 2023!

To me, 2022 hasn't seen much of a change compared to last year. It's been another busy and expensive year where most of my time was spent on my LEGO projects, or work on our Youtube/blog. Work has been piling up; mainly in the form of unfinished blogposts. Those that come to mind: the Xenoblade DE article and MapleStory's Destiny revamp.

Truth is, work on these blogposts have consumed my daily life for months on end*. After working on and off on the DE article for about one-and-a-half year, I parked it to work seven months on our Multirandomness video. After that, I've started writing the Destiny blogpost. By the time that blogpost is published, a total of two-and-a-half years have gone by; and I'm not getting that back. That made me reconsider to scale down the amount of time I spend on my blog.

Moving forward, I'm going to put the Xenoblade article on ice. After publishing the Destiny blogpost, I'm going to take a break from writing long blogposts. Because as it currently is, the amount of time I've spent on these things has gotten out of hand, and it's been detrimental to my health. Knowing myself, I'll probably continue and finish the article at some point in the future, but it's clear to me that I'm currently in no shape to do so right now.

*This is also why the amount of new blogpost has considerably decreased since 2020.

With that out of the way, let's get to those statistics of 2022.

[EMS] Level 266!

[Lego] And down the 12V rabbit hole I go...

Legends say that Rayque is still pressing these two buttons, to this very day...

They don't make 'm like these anymore, as they would say. Old but gold, I guess.

If you are familiar with my preferences in LEGO products, I'm always interested in their niche offerings. That can range into themes like Bionicle or Galidor, set designs that are remarkable and boundary pushing, or toy peripherals where LEGO develops an entire new system that ends up with a short shelf life because it failed to sell enough copies. 

Having experienced pretty much every track or pipe system that LEGO has produced, including trains from DUPLO, 4,5V and the Monorail, their modern roller coaster sets, all generations of pneumatics and even solar panels - I was bound to inevitable go down the rabbit hole of what is LEGO's most ambitious train system: 12V track, the Gray Era.

Basically, during the golden age of railway modelling, LEGO sought to participate in an over-saturated market with their own expansions to their already existing 4,5V train system. Unfortunately, this was during the 1970 to 1980s, so LEGO was still a small toy company at the time. Expensive LEGO sets that do not have a broad appeal, contain many specialized parts that are exclusive to these few add-on sets, released almost forty years too early, and was also only available in Europe. The perfect recipe to create a niche line-up of sets, and that's everything I could ever ask for.

While my earliest hands-on experience with 12V as a system was when I was a child, I've never really owned any of the 12V sets until today. And in typical Rayque fashion, my entry set to the 12V system isn't even a train, but one of the track peripherals that LEGO offered to expand your layout. You see, what makes 12V stand out from LEGO's other train systems is that the emphasis of 12V isn't on the trains themselves, but the ability to add all kinds of gimmicks to your track, such as the set that I bought: #7866, from 1983. And personally, as an engineer and LEGO enthusiast, I'm far more interested in the inner workings of these add-ons and its system, rather than the set designs themselves.

The 12V system has a good selection of add-ons, including railroad switches, some street lights, a switch to turn off specific sections of track so that trains that drive over it will stop, and even a module that allows you to separate your wagons from each other. All of these modules are connected to a separate two-button controller, which you can stack onto each other to build a large keyboard, so that you can control your train layout from a distance. It's simple and charming, yet an effective system that was ahead of its time. LEGO has never truly recreated something similar since.

And with good reason, because 12V didn't sell well enough. Not to mention that all of these electric components and specialized pieces are very delicate; handle them with care. LEGO has tried many other train systems after 12V, for them to realize that keeping it to simple plastic railroad sets tends to sell better. While I'm not planning to go bankrupt now by purchasing more add-ons for a future LEGO project, I will continue my 12V scavenger hunt another day.

Now certainly, with modern LEGO peripherals such as Mindstorms, you could build far more advanced custom add-ons to your tracks. But where's the fun in that? If you really want to do it right, build a dedicated 12V layout, then use Mindstorms to automate it all. Now that would be cool thing to see. So many things to build and collect, so little time...

That's it for today - I'll see you guys again next post!

[EMS] Level 265!

Ding! A level up, just two months after my last one. And not just any level up; it's that all-important Level 265 milestone that unlocks Burning Cernium and the next 5th Job skill, Crest of the Solar! That was earlier than expected...

The currently ongoing Midnight Carnival, which is the successor to the Celestial Festival, is one of those grind-heavy events where you have to grind an hour a day to get your event rewards. Since one of these rewards are Grandis symbols, I thought it was the perfect opportunity to aim for 265 while also capitalizing on those valuable rewards.

Now, here's an interesting conundrum: the Crest of the Solar blogpost can now be written, but I still haven't published my Destiny revamp blogpost. I've decided to prioritize the Destiny blogpost over Crest of the Solar, and publish that one first. You see, I've finally been able to continue my work on this blogpost earlier this week and I've been able to comfortably add chunks on a daily basis. I had to bench my LEGO projects to get there, though.

However, I don't think I'll be able to have it finished before the end of November, simply because I realized that after wrapping up the 2nd Job section, it was already well over 6000 words. To give you an idea, this blogpost has just over 8000. Woops. So uhm, yeah. Work on that Destiny blogpost is going to take a while. But at least I've now figured out how to approach and structure it, as that took me a couple of tries.

Now, if you don't mind, I'm going to grab some lunch now and complete Burning Cernium after that.

That's it for today - I'll see you guys again next post!

[EMS] 15 years of Rayque!

Farewell Abrup, as you won't be here for next year's anniversary.

Fifteen years already, huh? I kinda lost track of it a couple of years ago, so my blog helps me to remember.

Been busy with several LEGO projects (yes, deliberate word choice) and working through my backlog from the past two months (you can blame Xenoblade 3 and Gunvolt 3 releasing on the same week for that), but I should be able to get back to writing about the Destiny revamp in October. When you read it, you'll probably understand why writing it took me longer than usual.

Anyway, the past year for EMS (and MapleStory in general) has been interesting, to say the least. With the absurd amount of quality of life improvements being dumped on a frequent basis (with some being long-overdue), the game's certainly moving in the right direction, but it's still not quite where it should go. Sounds familiar.

Because of the mixed reception for the Destiny and Ignition revamps, Nexon has pretty much dropped their initial long-term plan to have every (outdated) class modernized. What concerns me the most about this, is that this would theoretically mean that Nexon's not going to rework every class from the ground up to have skeleton animation.

I'm not going to give a thorough technical explanation, as that would require another blogpost of itself, but the gist of it is that not reworking every class from the ground up will bring a very awkward inconsistency between modernized and old fashioned characters. At one side you'll have all of the classes released since Kinesis, with Adventures and Knights of Cygnus, that run skeleton animation for pretty much everything. Flashy skills with complicated animations and behavior, but more importantly: smooth(er) gameplay. On the other, you have everyone else without, with classes such as Mechanic, Kaiser, Luminous, Mercedes and Evan being a couple of examples that needs skeleton animation the most. Due to their archaic and sluggish gameplay, they struggle to keep up with the game's increasing demand for finer mobility, precise movement and quick responses. Newer skill mechanics such as built-in ammunition (introduced with Pink Bean's Blazing Yo-yo), or something as intricate as secondary cooldowns (introduced with Kain) are heavy on the game client, so they can only really be used in conjunction with skeleton animation, which old classes then can't have for their non-5th Job skills until these are reworked from the ground up.

Thus, the unchanged classes from the early 2010s are showing their age, and Nexon's eventually going to hit that physical ceiling where numerical changes to attack speed and skill damage will no longer suffice. That is why they introduced skeleton animation and the 64 bit client, and that is why they started with reworking classes from the ground up... until they stopped with Knights of Cygnus. Whether if Nexon will change their mind has yet to be seen, but I hope that they will reconsider it once they have the appropiate staff for it (which they currently do not). They kinda have to at some point, considering that the current producer of KMS, Wonki (yes, that one), has declared that Maple is going to continue for the next 30 to 40 years. At that point, why would you ever choose any of the unchanged 32 bit classes over an up-to-date, modernized 64 bit class, moving forward?

Revamps and MapleStory's doomsday of 2079 predating the Maverick outbreak of 2095 aside, Housing's pretty good. I haven't unlocked everything just yet, but I might consider to write an in-depth blogpost (similar to Monster Life, or any of my other informational blogposts) at some point, since there's interesting stuff to write about. Definitely more fun to write about than whatever I'm trying to do with that Destiny revamp blogpost, or that Xenoblade article...

Shame that the first chapter of Monad's going to be removed soon, but that's been on the chopping block ever since they removed Captain Vaga several years ago. All things considered, a four year run aint bad for such a bunch of spaghetti coding. Not to mention that Monad's story is going to continue regardless, since World Tours have been integral to the main plot for almost two decades now. And to all of you recent loremasters out there: everything is canon, and always has been. If you don't believe it, you just haven't figured it out yet and have a lot to catch up with.

Cheers everyone. Dammit, I should've bought ice cream. But that's it for today - I'll see you guys again next post!