Entosis Link Modules in Action in Querious

The first night out after the Carnyx expansion and we already using the new Entosis Link module to assail station services down in Querious.  There was a shield timer coming up on our besieged station in ED-L9T, our last little foothold in the region, and we were piling in early in anticipation of a fight.

Foothold in Querious

As we often do, we assembled and flew two systems over, to I1Y-IU, and sat on their station in our Ravens in hopes of being able to pester them as they formed up.  And, as it turned out, somebody remembered to bring along an Entosis Link module.

Nobody mentioned it in coms that I heard, so for the first indication that something was happening was a strange beam… like the Cicadian Seekers scanning beam… emanating from one of the Ravens in the fleet.  Mtak had a tech II version of the module mounted and was hitting their services.

Entonsis Link beam

That go me looking at the station and the station services.

The station services, as noted in one of the update posts for Carnyx, have been moved around the station model so they aren’t all just piled up in a bunch around the undock.  Targeting them I could see the new status indicators.

Station services being hit… also, new icons to confuse everybody for the next few weeks

You can see in the picture above that Mtak had already taken out one of the station service (fitting went first, if I recall right), which is indicated by the red circle.  He was just finishing up the second target on his list (repair maybe?) and you can see how the circle compares to the third service (clones) where, as the link runs, progress is indicated by progress of the marker (and the coloration) around the status circle.  The second set of services is almost out of action.

The whole thing worked as advertised… imaging that… with the first cycle of the link being just a warm up cycle, followed by actual progress on bringing down the service.  While the link was active attempts to apply reps or otherwise assist Mtak were greeted by error messages indicating that such things could not be done with the link running.  As a reminder, the restrictions are:

• While the module is active, your ship is unable to cloak, warp, dock, jump or receive remote assistance. There is no way to get rid of the module penalties early except for losing your ship

And so we knocked out those three services on their station.  It was reported on coms that the absence of cloning services cause a couple of their pilots to get re-rerouted to their original home systems when they tried to suicide/death clone to get to I1Y-IU, but I couldn’t tell you whether that was true or not.  We certainly tried to pod anybody who lost a ship during the subsequent fight on the idea that doing so would keep them from simply docking up and reshipping.

As the timer on our station ran down to about the 30 minute mark, we pulled the Ravens off their station and headed back for ED-L9T to reship to Ishtars.  In the mean time we had been joined by some reinforcements from Deklein which included long time Imperium fleet commanders Reagalan and Lazarus Telraven in one of his alts.  As we landed back on the station grid in I1Y-IU, Pandemic Legion also showed up with some Tengus in order to get in on the fight.  In the short time we were away the hostiles had already started to run their own Entosis Link module in order to restore services in their station.

On the opposing side Darkness undocked their usual T3 fleet, supplemented by fleets from Northern Coalition and Gentleman’s Club, leading to numbers on the field sufficient to trigger time dilation throughout the fight, hitting pretty significant levels when fleets were taking gates between systems.

The fight itself went our way for quite a stretch.  I was dual-boxing, with my alt in an Ishtar and drones assigned to a trigger so I could set him to anchor up and pay attention to repping in my Basilisk.  Logistics was fairly strong, with more than a dozen Basilisks on grid for most of the fight.  I was able to keep up with both accounts for quite a while.  Then NCDot landed on the logi and the fight became a desperate scramble to keep ourselves alive.  We managed to survive mostly intact through that assault, but I knew I had to focus on logi completely at that point, so warped my alt off and sent him back to the station in ED-L9T for the balance of the fight.

After that the chaos of battle was pretty intense, with a lot of locking, repping, and unlocking for the next target.  NCDot managed to land on us again and ripped through the ranks of our Basilisks quite thoroughly this time.  My final act of defiance, my reps already engaged, my armor drones long gone, having already seen the yellow boxes meant for me, and having called for reps that I knew would never come, was to launch the one combat drone I had kept in my drone bay and set it on the nearest Loki in hopes of whoring on at least one kill mail.  Mission accomplished.

The logi having been all but wiped out, Asher wrangled the fleet and pulled it off the field, jumping into LS-V29 where there was one final exchange of fire before they disengaged and headed home to dock up.

The battle report, which was part of Arrendis’ article about the battle over at TMC (he was, as usual, the logi anchor during the fight), showed that we won the ISK war.  However, in being driven off the field we lost the strategic objective and were unable to rep the station in ED-L9T sufficiently to stop Darkness and friends from putting the station into the armor timer.  We are now pretty close to being evicted from our foothold in Querious.

The battle report also showed how much these fights have heated up over time, having gone from maybe 150 pilots total on grid on a good night to in excess of 400 pilots for this fight.  Also, the proximity of home stations meant a lot of people were able to re-ship and re-enter the fight, with ship kills standing at 523.  I died late enough in the fight that, by the time I got back to our supply base, the remaining Basilisks had been snapped up, so I was done for the night.  I filed for reimbursement (which got paid before my alarm clock went off this morning) and then waited for the PAP link before signing off.  (Oddly, neither of my characters, nor my alliance, show up on that battle report.  So it is at least two pilots and one kill shy of accurate.)

Now there is at least one big fight left in ED-L9T, over a station shoot that has to be done the old fashioned way, since the Entosis Link module is only for services with Carnyx.  We will see how many show up for that.

What Future for Turbine after Infinite Crisis?

Unfortunately, as the MOBA market matured around us as we were building the game, we simply couldn’t find enough of an audience.

Floon, Infinite Crisis Art Director, quoted at Massively OP

It is one of those times when I hate to be right.  I was dubious that Turbine had the gravitas to get into the MOBA genre at this late date, and it turns out that they do not.  Turbine announced yesterday that they would be shutting down their entry into the MOBA market, the perhaps all-to-aptly named Infinite Crisis.  The statement on their site was terse.

After much deliberation, we regret to announce the official shutdown of Infinite Crisis. We will end development efforts today and will close the service on August 14, 2015.

The announcement was made all the more poignant as it came on the same day that Blizzard’s champion for the MOBA arena, Heroes of the Storm, officially went live. (And now I don’t have to do a post about that, having mentioned it here.  At least until I earn the pet from it.)

I hate to be right because, while I had no real interest in the game, its abject failure leaves me wondering where Turbine goes now?  As they invested their time and resources in Infinitie Crisis, they left Asheron’s Call and Asheron’s Call 2 on auto-pilot, neither charging to play the titles nor paying much attention to them.  So I doubt there is any more revenue to be had on that front.

Which leaves only two staples in the Turbine bag, Dungeons & Dragons Online and Lord of the Rings Online.

Not that either title is dead, but at least on the LOTRO front it feels like the game is well past its prime.  The producer’s letter for the title early this year felt short on enthusiasm for me.  Expansions were out the door, server merges were going to be a fact of life, and talk of a new data center could be a bright spin on further resource consolidation for all we know.  And then there was the insider insight in to the turmoil at Turbine that no doubt sank a few optimistic spins on how things were going at the studio.

The more recent producer’s letter spun more of the same items (monster play maps, server merges, data centers, a new store) and, while it brought tales of “major content initiatives” for 2015, complete with hints about Minas Tirith, details were sparse.  Dare we speculate on what a “surprising take on the siege of Gondor” will look like from Turbine?

Meanwhile the game has been monetized to about the maximum extent they can likely manage.  The once promising F2P model that Turbine offered, where you could earn the RMT currency in-game, has expanded and consumed all, like the very darkness of Mordor, so that there is a “buy now” button of one sort or another on nearly every dialog in game.

Then there is DDO, whose 2015 producer’s letter was much more upbeat, and which felt better adapted to the F2P market to start with, never having been a “worldly” game but rather more akin to the adventure module model like table top Dungeons & Dragons.  Still, as much post-F2P conversion success as Turbine can claim for the title, a lot of that has to do with how badly it fell over after launch.  Everything is up when you have hit rock bottom.

Those two titles, in whatever shape you wish to claim they are in, look to be all Turbine has for now.  Their investment in a MOBA has yielded naught and in order for them to start working on something new they will have to continue, to a certain extent, to neglect the products that are paying all the bills.

This is practically an every day Silicon Valley dilemma, where a start up gets success on one product, does well enough, but can never get that second success as the first eventually fades.  During that stage there can be a huge amount of tension between groups. One group will want to continue to focus on, enhance, and nurture the first product.  Another group will insist that the main focus must be on finding that second product, because they know the first can’t last forever.

I’ve seen some comments out there from people who, if not cheering the demise of Infinite Crisis, are happily assuming that its fall will mean more resources for LOTRO or DDO.  I suppose Turbine could go that route, hunker down and focus on current products and hope for the best.  However, that seems unlikely, as is spells eventual death for the organization.

To survive in the long term, Turbine will need a “next” product.  But what will it be?  They have shot their bolt with Asheron’s Call by making it free.  Likewise, they played the nostalgia card with Asheron’s Call 2, only to give up and make that one free as well.  Infinite Crisis is behind them.  I don’t know what else they can do with DDO, and LOTRO is likely too mired in F2P for Turbine to play any sort of premium retro-server sort of games, like Daybreak is doing with EverQuest and the Ragefire and Lockjaw servers, in order to boost revenue.

So it feels like they have to make something new.  But in which direction will they go and do they have the resources to go very far?  I have to imagine that, after Infinite Crisis, which was purported to be eating $4 million a month in expenses, their corporate masters at WB may be unlikely to write a check to fund any big new ventures.

Yes, they have an iOS app under way in the form of Batman: Arkham Underworld.   But that sounds almost like contract work, doing a knock-off version of another title just to collect a bit of reflected glory, and is unlikely to save the farm. 

Then there is the Game of Thrones based game, which sounds a bit like an RTS from the minimal description in that Eurogamer article from a couple months back.  But that is way out in the future.  Both entail working with somebody else’s IP… again… as well as sending the company further from its MMORPG roots.

If you were running Turbine, what would you do?  Is it time for them to give up on MMOs?