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I'm rather disappointed these days with Pyramid, the one gaming magazine I've consistently subscribed to for years. I started out with the print 'zine that preceded it, then signed up for this one.
The quantity of content dropped a while back. That, I could live with. But it has also become something I don't care to read. I almost expressed that as "the quality has dropped" but it would not be true: it's that they're focussing on things I don't care about, not that they suck (with the exception of the truly hideous comic offering called 'Irregular Webcomic' which seldom fails to be less than atrocious, lacking artistic merit, story merit, or any form of humor that I could find funny).
I used to love reading the GURPS articles, but those are rare and, in any case, I have no desire to spend $75 to get the latest, Fourth Edition books, which would also be a commitment to buying other fourth edition books if I wanted to continue to play in those genres with the new rules. Bluntly, 4E may or may not be an improvement - I have no idea - but the existing 3E was quite playable and 4E is too expensive for me to care if it's an improvement. It won't have new setting. It won't have fundamentally new system - only reworked. I have no desire to own it. And thus, my interest in collecting GURPS books, which has waned over the years as the number of people I knew who played it has, is at an end and has been since GenCon last year.
Pyramid carries non-GURPS articles more and few GURPS articles (amusing to say since there is one this week), and I wish that could redeem them - even though I originally started reading them for the GURPS articles. But the In Nomine material is stretched thing, and the rest of the material mostly fails to interest me, except for the Murphy's Rules comics. I'm not getting a subscription based on a single comic. A lot of each week's articles are a series of columns - Creatures of the Night which I could care less about, Supporting Cast which is hit and miss (and has pretty poor aim for my taste, honestly), Random Thought Table (the editor's column, sometimes rewarding and sometimes not), and the reviews (which I flatly ignore - I am not interested in them).
There's usually a comic or two a week, selected from Murphy's Rules (good), Dork Tower (hit and miss), Irregular Webcomic (miss so badly it shoots itself - consistently). And another article or, at most, two rounds out the average week. The average 'hit' rate is one article I like a month, and two or three comics.
To add to the annoyance, they recently changed their login system to require you to give a password every time you go there instead of letting you save the thing in a cookie. I'm guessing this is for security because they've tied the login for their eBook site to it as well. I don't want security - I want convenience. I'm not paying for things - I'm reading a magazine. And now I have to log in every time.
This is a lot of words about the fact that I won't be renewing a magazine subscription, but I've had a subscription to this thing for something like a decade (counting the print issues as well - online started in 1998). It's sad to realize that, in fact, I should have ditched it a year ago or more. It's frustrating to see it go further and further from anything I want. There have always been reviews (and I've ignored them) and, on the web site version, news (and I've ignored it, mostly). But I checked a couple January 2000 editions to make sure it wasn't just memory painting a rosy picture, and there are almost twice as many articles and two solid comics each week.
And...I still cared about most of what they were writing about then. I don't any more.
The quantity of content dropped a while back. That, I could live with. But it has also become something I don't care to read. I almost expressed that as "the quality has dropped" but it would not be true: it's that they're focussing on things I don't care about, not that they suck (with the exception of the truly hideous comic offering called 'Irregular Webcomic' which seldom fails to be less than atrocious, lacking artistic merit, story merit, or any form of humor that I could find funny).
I used to love reading the GURPS articles, but those are rare and, in any case, I have no desire to spend $75 to get the latest, Fourth Edition books, which would also be a commitment to buying other fourth edition books if I wanted to continue to play in those genres with the new rules. Bluntly, 4E may or may not be an improvement - I have no idea - but the existing 3E was quite playable and 4E is too expensive for me to care if it's an improvement. It won't have new setting. It won't have fundamentally new system - only reworked. I have no desire to own it. And thus, my interest in collecting GURPS books, which has waned over the years as the number of people I knew who played it has, is at an end and has been since GenCon last year.
Pyramid carries non-GURPS articles more and few GURPS articles (amusing to say since there is one this week), and I wish that could redeem them - even though I originally started reading them for the GURPS articles. But the In Nomine material is stretched thing, and the rest of the material mostly fails to interest me, except for the Murphy's Rules comics. I'm not getting a subscription based on a single comic. A lot of each week's articles are a series of columns - Creatures of the Night which I could care less about, Supporting Cast which is hit and miss (and has pretty poor aim for my taste, honestly), Random Thought Table (the editor's column, sometimes rewarding and sometimes not), and the reviews (which I flatly ignore - I am not interested in them).
There's usually a comic or two a week, selected from Murphy's Rules (good), Dork Tower (hit and miss), Irregular Webcomic (miss so badly it shoots itself - consistently). And another article or, at most, two rounds out the average week. The average 'hit' rate is one article I like a month, and two or three comics.
To add to the annoyance, they recently changed their login system to require you to give a password every time you go there instead of letting you save the thing in a cookie. I'm guessing this is for security because they've tied the login for their eBook site to it as well. I don't want security - I want convenience. I'm not paying for things - I'm reading a magazine. And now I have to log in every time.
This is a lot of words about the fact that I won't be renewing a magazine subscription, but I've had a subscription to this thing for something like a decade (counting the print issues as well - online started in 1998). It's sad to realize that, in fact, I should have ditched it a year ago or more. It's frustrating to see it go further and further from anything I want. There have always been reviews (and I've ignored them) and, on the web site version, news (and I've ignored it, mostly). But I checked a couple January 2000 editions to make sure it wasn't just memory painting a rosy picture, and there are almost twice as many articles and two solid comics each week.
And...I still cared about most of what they were writing about then. I don't any more.
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