Monthly Archives: July 2015

July 2015 in Review

The Site

The site got its 25,000th comment back in June, which I mentioned on Twitter at the 24,999 mark, and then totally forgot to follow up on.

This just in, the comment count on my blog sits at 24,999. Who will roll the odometer on this?

— Wilhelm Arcturus (@wilhelm2451) June 15, 2015

So now, a month later than anticipated (if only by me), I can declare that the 25,000th comment was left by Silverangel of Kitty Kitty Boom Boom who left a tangential comment about the size qualities of .gif files on a post about 64-bit gaming!

But that is the way blogging frequently is. You can write 2,000+ words on a topic, include one sentence about a some unrelated item, and THAT sentence will be what gets a comment. I find this phenomena hilarious, though I must also admit I am frequently that person as well, making the essentially off-topic comments on a post because something catches my eye.

Anyway, there is no prize for this, just a hastily created achievement unlocked graphic.

Because achievements!

Of course I saved in .gif format.

One Year Ago

There was a site put up by eBay about game return on investment. Unsurprisingly, it indicated that used games are a deal in that regard, so you should go buy some on eBay.

There was the passing of yet another Steam Summer Sale.

SOE forgot to pay their domain name registration. Meanwhile, Landmark was available for a deep discount after the Steam Summer Sale, leading to speculation about its future.

SuperData Research was listing out the Top Subscription MMOs while not defining what they really meant by the term.

Anarchy Online introduced a PLEX-like currency, GRACE.

The community manager for LOTRO was busy telling raiders and PvMP players that they weren’t getting any new content because they added up to less than 10% of the player population.

I finished up Pokemon Y on the 3DS.

In my attempt at the loremaster achievement in WoW I ran through Desolace, Feralas, and Thousand Needles one week, Felwood and Un’goro Crater the next. Then it was Winterspring, Swamp of Sorrows, and the Blasted Lands, the Cape of Stranglethorn, and the final bit of the Eastern Kingdoms. I was on a roll.

in EVE Online we were commuting to Delve, where maybe there was going to be a war, and chasing Brave Newbies around (then getting pipe bombed) when there wasn’t anything going on. That was back when we owned Delve. Fights went on sporadically for a while and many a Rupture was sacrificed simply try a fresh doctrine. So many Ruptures. Apocs did better.

Meanwhile the Crius expansion hit New Eden, making industry better… it did get better, right?

In EverQuest, on the Fippy Darkpaw Time Locked Progression server, the vote to unlock the Underfoot expansion failed, making it the second expansion ever to get voted down, the first being Gates of Discord nearly two years before.

With that I was wondering what other MMOs might go for the retro nostalgia server thing. Not WoW, that is for sure.

I was also on about housing in MMOs, what has really worked for me and what has fallen flat and why. This included some projection as to what garrisons might end up being in WoW.

Our epic game of Civilization V saw expansionism and direct conflict with the Aztec empire.

Five Years Ago

The late Paul the octopus created the largest page view day ever in the history of the blog, later to be surpassed by Cats playing Patty Cake and Alamo.

I was told I write like Cory Doctorow… or maybe Ian Flemming.

My daughter was Banned from Club Penguin. Tears were shed, lessons were learned.

EverQuest II Extended, the free to play EverQuest II, was announced. I wondered whether trying to play it without paying at all would be a challenge in and of itself. Meanwhile, there was some evidence that EQII accounts had value. That stunning news no doubt got them going on the authenticator they announced at Fan Faire this year.

I completed 100 levels in The Agency: Covert Ops. I was unemployed, what can I say?

StarCraft II launched. I still haven’t bought a copy. I’ll wait for the battle chest in a couple of years. It isn’t like I am going to be very good at it this time around. I was barely adequate at the original.

Hulkageddon III ended, and it even had a video wrap-up. And then PLEX was made transportable in space. I wonder if they waited for Hulkageddon to be over for that?

In another Summer hiatus season, the instance group started another run at LOTRO. This time it was Bung who was out, having the dual issues of moving and having a new baby to care for. Those of us in Middle-earth hung out with old friends. That put off deciding who my main character was, by letting me roll another one!

Blizzard gave up on some of their RealID plans thanks to much public kvetching. Shortly there after, the ESRB came out against Real ID as being bad for consumer security while proving they too were bad for consumer security.

Blizzard revamped Parental Controls again. As much as I have griped about them, they are better than any comparable controls I have seen, even in games that offer that as a feature.

World of Warcraft Magazine issue #2 showed up. Issue #4 would arrive 9 months later. No word on issue #5 as of now.

And, finally, somebody was trying to make yet another flying car that failed to live up to our expectations. Have none of these scientists ever seen The Jetsons?

New Linking Sites

The following blogs have linked this site in their blogrolls, for which they have my thanks.

Please take a moment to visit them in return.

Most Viewed Posts in July

Search Terms of the Month

angles of attack audiobook torrent
[Don’t be that person]

when will flying drop in wod july 2015
[I’d say you answered your own question]

amateur money porno
[I think that is one of those “pick two” situations]

empires and allies zynga scew up
[Yes indeed!]

eve online horrible
[Well, yes, but it is shared adversity experience]

EVE Online

Fozzie sov came and New Eden began to burn… or sizzle… or whatever it is that happens when you turn on an Entosis Link module. Pulsating within a little green circle? Anyway, there are a lot of systems in play according to Timer Board. (400+ as of the moment I am writing this.)

Reavers have been out hitting distant regions to test the new system while Pure Blind has been an ongoing fight due to the fact that almost nobody in The Imperium lives there. Still not sure if the sov changes are better or are simply going to make more alliances collapse in exhaustion.

EverQuest II

The Time Locked Expansion servers opened up, and I rolled up on the PvE flavor, Stormhold. So far, so good. It isn’t the old days, but it is different enough from the Live servers to be an experience unto itself. There is a lesson in this.

Anyway, I have a level 11 SK in Freeport, am having a good time, and am looking for a guild, since there is no way I am going to create one myself.

Minecraft

Minecraft remains a thing I have been playing. There is, as I mentioned, a certain peacefulness to the game. My daughter stopped playing and now only watches me over my should now and again, until it becomes too frustrating to bear, then she has to walk away. I don’t do things the right way. That is what it is like being 13.

War Thunder

This sort of slipped off of my rotation. I think Minecraft and EverQuest II ate up the bit of time that I had been devoting to the game. Also, I was motivate by the daily prize thing for a bit, as at Day 25 there was a possibility of getting something useful. Instead I got a gambling token thing that was pretty much no value. My gut response was a bit negative.

World of Warcraft

I haven’t logged in since the week that the 6.2 patch went live, so I should probably take WoW off of my “Games I Play” list and move it to “Games I Watch.” There hasn’t been any frustration or a wave of “I’m so sick of this game!” or anything, just zero motivation to log in.

Coming Up

Activision-Blizzard results for Q2 2015 will be announced on August 4th, followed by the next WoW expansion on August 6th. The subscription numbers they report will likely determine whether or not Blizzard felt they needed some immediate good news and/or a distraction in August rather than waiting for BlizzCon.

And it is a good thing that is coming, because next month is also Blagaust and we’ll need stuff to post about, and those two dates will be grist for the blogging mill! We can’t count on Derek Smart to keep us entertained all the time!

Meanwhile, a friend at work has been talking about Diablo III, so I started poking my nose into that a bit. We’ll see if it goes anywhere in August.

And then I have some new projects coming up at work, my daughter goes back to school in the middle of the month, and I have been summoned for Jury duty as well, so it might end up being a tough month for posts.

Minecraft and the Accumulation of Material

I am beginning to see why Notch chose the name Minecraft.

At least in survival mode, I spend some time building or exploring or farming or whatever, but I spend more time mining than anything else. There is something of a Zen serenity to it, just digging away under ground. I can put on an audio book, head down to the mine and swing that pick axe for hours and feel content.

Of course, that generates a lot of raw material.

That is a lot of harvested stone…

My castle began spawning more and more chests as I stored away piles of cobblestone and other materials. Of course I had to store it away, all of it can be used as raw material for some future building project. I’m not even sure how you can get rid of things in the game, aside from dumping them in lava.

As I accumulated, I began to think about starting a new building project. I had been out exploring a bit more and decided that this time I would head due east, into the sunrise, start a new camp, and build a newer, bigger castle complex, leaving the old one behind for now.

Back view of the castle at sunset

So I loaded up on cobblestone and started building the eastward road. Building was the optimal term, as to the immediate east of my castle, over a single ridge, was a wide, low valley. So I essentially built a cobblestone bridge across the valley, two blocks wide so I wouldn’t fall off, with regular side pedestals for torches. For a while I was expending cobblestone at quite a rate.

And then I hit the next set of hills and my road building turned into tunneling and cobblestone and dirt began to accumulate again. And as I dug further and further, it became more and more annoying to run back home, or at least back to one of my shelters along the route. So I decided that it shouldn’t just be a road, but a railroad. And so another mine cart track project was born.

Riding into the sunset

When I started that I was worried that I would run out of gold bars for making powered track to keep my mine cart rolling. However, the resource that quickly began to dwindle was iron. For every powered track your mine cart can roll over a flat track somewhere between 27 and 32 blocks before it starts to slow. Or so I have read, given that you launch your cart with three closely spaces powered track segments to get the cart up to full speed.

I thought I had a lot of iron, and then I started building rails.

Eventually I hit a mountain plateau area just as I was getting very, very low on iron. I decided to stop there, make a new base camp, and then start building… and mining.

My new compound

I rode back to the castle, put together a mine cart with a chest, filled it with cobblestone and my last bits of iron, and pushed it onto the powered rails… only to watch it slow down and stop halfway to the next powered segment. That 27 to 32 estimate only seems to apply to carts you’re riding in, not cargo mine carts.

So I got into a mine cart of my own, launched down the track, and basically pushed the other cart down the line.

There I unloaded, built a bit of a perimeter, hung out the usual array of torches, then used my remaining iron to build tools to go mining. A new mine was born, and I dug down to level 12 and began pushing shafts off in search of minerals… primarily iron.

However, things were not going well. There was a lot of lava where I hit level 12, which meant working around hot zones. Meanwhile, I wasn’t finding much iron at all. I did start finding some emeralds, which I had never run into in the wild before, but iron was scarce. I started using cobblestone picks to dig, saving my remaining iron versions for times when I might need it.

Feeling like I needed some better plan, I went to Google to search for where the best level was to mine for iron ore. The consensus seemed to be that for straight up shaft based mining, level 12-16 was still the sweet spot. Just dig three high shafts every third block and you’ll find a lot of stuff.

But there was an alternate suggestion. If you did not want to dig a mine, caves were offered up as an alternative, less work option for iron. You can spot the ore and only have to dig selectively rather than burrowing constantly, and wearing out your tools in the process.

And, as it turned out, caves were something I had access to in abundance. As I was digging my way down to level 12 I had to cross a wide underground cavern. So I can up digging at level 12 and began exploring that… and by exploring I mean looking for veins of ore and putting torches everywhere.

Down in the cavern

You can see my cobblestone bridge across the cavern at the very top of that screen shot, with the torch on it.

And, sure enough I was able to spot quite a bit of iron ore on the walls of the main cavern as well as its many side passages. My iron crises seemed to slacken for the time being. Of course, being in an open cavern meant dealing with friends.

Another zombie coming at me

Zombies seemed to pour out of the darkness at me from time to time, in groups of four or more, accompanied by the occasional sniper skeleton. And I could hear more zombies through the walls. Sound is really an important thing in Minecraft. There are a lot of games I can play with the sound off, but Minecraft isn’t one of them.

I also spotted some moss covered stone on one side of the cave. I remembered seeing something about that, and at least it was something different, so I started digging my way up to harvest that… and as I did I opened up a room full of zombies. They came pouring of of the room and I had to run away and build a wall in order to catch my breath and heal up.

Fortunately, they seemed to get hung up in the various water obstacles in the cavern, so I was able to work my way back, slaughtering them as I went. Eventually I worked my way back into the room, put up torches, and found myself confronted with a monster spawner.

I wasn’t sure what to do with it, and it looked ready to unleash some more zombies, so I hit it with my pick… and it went poof. I was left in a room with a green moss floor and a chest.

The chest on the mossy floor

I looted the chest, which had an enchantment book, a saddle, and a music disc along with some raw materials. So my first encounter with a number of things.

Enchanted book

From there I kept searching for ore, and managed to build up a stockpile of iron. I should be able to mine for a while.

So I surveyed my new area, which felt so far away from our original camp. It was on a hill, with snowy peaks to one side, a forest across a wide river on another, and swamp visible in the distance. More biomes to explore.

The lake in my front yard

And then I decided to see exactly how far I had gone. Minecraft keeps all sorts of stats on what you have done in a given world, another reason to love the game. Among the stats is the distance you have traveled by mine cart.

Some distances… it is the falling that will get you

So I got my mine cart out on the track, noted down the number in the stats, then road it all the way back to my original castle and looked at the number again, then did some subtraction… then put the numbers in the right order and did some subtraction again… and ended up with 0.91 km.

910 meters. A little over half a mile. About a 10 minute walk at a modestly determined pace.

And my rail line to the village from last time is only 460 meters, or roughly half the distance.

It is a big world and I have barely been anywhere at all in it.

But there happens to be a village off in the distance from my new base.

Roof lines in the haze

So I will have to head there soon.

Next WoW Expansion to be Announced August 6th, Just After Subscriber Numbers Get Released…

Blizzard has announced that they will be doing a big reveal of the next expansion for World of Warcraft at Games at Gamescom on August 6th.

Mana for a slow news day…

So maybe August won’t be such a slow news month after all. That will give people plenty to talk about, analyze, and project their wishes and dreams upon.

The venue is a bit odd. Not to dis Gamescom, but this sort of thing is usually reserved for a BlizzCon keynote speech, when all the faithful are focused on their game of choice and it can serve as a lead-in to a whole range of panels to dig deeper into the details.

But really, it isn’t the venue we should be thinking about, it is the date. Aside from an unfortunate correlation with a 70th anniversary (who will complain that Blizzard is upstaging that on purpose?) and my parent’s wedding anniversary (go ahead and upstage that, please!), the date seems set to come in just after we get the Activision-Blizzard quarterly results for the second quarter of 2015 and, most importantly, the WoW subscription numbers that will come with it. That hits on August 4th according to the investor relations site.

For the first quarter of 2015 the subscription numbers were down to 7.1 million. Now there is a rush to get the next expansion announced early in August, a slow news month, well before BlizzCon, and just after the quarterly report?

I love me a good conspiracy theory, and this one has all the makings of such.

Is Blizzard trying to drum up some good news and sugarplum visions of the future to offset bad news on subscriber front? Is this Blizzard in a panic or not?

What do you think the subscription numbers will come in at? Stable at 7 million? 6.5 million? 6 million? 5 million? Less? More? Here, have a poll!

[Added after the post went live.]

I guess we know what the WoW panels at BlizzCon will be focused on at least.

Never Enough Jump Clones

This past weekend I finished up Advanced Infomorph Psychology, a good 20 day skill that got me my 10th jump clone in EVE Online.

I love me some jump clones, that is for sure.

That means I can be flying around in space in one clone and then, upon docking up, “jump” to and occupy any of those 10 clones I have sitting around in other stations. It is a handy way to get around New Eden.

Yes, there is that 19 hour wait between jumps. (Of course I trained up that skill as well! A 24 hour wait was too much, but 19, or even 20 hours, is just about right.) But that means I can jump at the end of the evening and have the timer set for another jump by the start of the next.

And what do I do with all of those jump clones?

Well, I keep one at the coalition staging system so I can jump there to join fleets.

I keep another one at our alliance staging system in case I want to join a TNT fleet operation. That would require me to log into TNT Jabber, something I have been very lax about lately, but I could if I wanted. I just tend to be deployed out with Reavers, so what goes on at the alliance level is generally pretty far away.

I have a clone in the system I now rat in down in Tribute, about a dozen jumps from the alliance staging system.

There is one in Jita, so I can jump there, buy things, and have them shipped out to null sec, or partake in the many great opportunities being tastefully advertised in local.

I have another one tucked up in Amarr space in one of the university stations that sells skills, in case I need to buy yet another skill. (Current count: 307) That clone also has a set of +4 attribute implants, since attributes are still a thing for the moment. So even if I don’t need a new skill, I often just jump to that clone if I won’t be on for a couple days to boost skill training speed.

I have another one in the Amarr Navy Logistics station one jump from Amarr, which happens to be a station where I can install jump clones, having worked my way up to an 8+ standing with both the Amarr and Caldari Navies back in the day.

Then there is one down in Delve, with a ship, that was pre-positioned back during a Reaver deployment in case we got called upon to go assist Pizza with something. Not sure I need that one any more. Pizza still holds NOL-M9 down there, where the clone is, but not a lot else.

I have a clone in Fountain, in 4-EP12, along with a Caracal and a pile of ammunition. I’d fly the Caracal out on a whim, but there is too much stuff in the station for it to carry. So I keep the clone there to keep the ammo listed on the market. Anybody need 200K rounds of Antimatter Charge L (from the Baltec fleet era) or 184K rounds of Scourge torpedoes (same era, but siege bomber fleet doctrine)?

And, finally, I have a jump clone in B-R5RB that has been sitting in that station, along with Dominix I was flying, since the great battle down there about a year and a half back.

I was one of those little dots chasing that Avatar titan

I keep that one for sentimental reasons. I nearly collected the ship back when The Initiative held the system and we deployed down there to help them back in January, but never quite got around to it. Now the system is in hostile hands and it seems unlikely that we’ll ever own that station again. But stranger things have happened.

So those were my nine clones, sitting around in stations all over New Eden, plus the clone I am currently using.

Now I have one more clone I can place. Of course, I don’t HAVE to go put it anywhere, I could hold it aside for a rainy day or some sudden need. But there happens to be a window of opportunity with the alignment of a couple of events.

The first is that the Reavers happen to be down in Curse to play Entosis Link games with the locals just to see what we can get away with. The other is an “accidental” change to how jump clones work, announced by CCP yesterday.

Apparently they broke the standings requirement for jump clones. Previously, in order to install a jump clone in an NPC controlled station, you had to have a standing of 8.0 or greater with that corporation. As I mentioned above, I worked for quite a while on Amarr and Caldari Navy missions way back in the day in order to be able to install jump clones at need in high sec.

Now though, according to CCP:

Before the release, minimum standings of +8.0 were required with an NPC corporation in order for a pilot to be able to install a jump clone in their stations. This is no longer the case, and capsuleers can freely create jump clones in whichever NPC station they choose to do so.

So jump clones installation for everybody. Go use it quick before CCP makes up its collective mind about whether or not to “fix” this. They seem to content to let it stand, but it is also summer and the vacation mindset might be influencing their view. They might sober up or the cold might set in again and put them in a more stern state of mind.

I might have been angry about having ground all those missions if I had just finished them last week, but I did that seven years ago and can barely remember how long it took. It does seem to put paid to organizations that were allowing people to make jump clones, and there is the remaining question about what use are standings now.

Anyway, that means I ought to be able to install that tenth clone down in Curse in one of the NPC stations with cloning services. And then, at some future date, late on a week night, I can fly out, one by one, the ships I left behind from that deployment to Curse we had nearly two years ago. Not that there is anything of great value there. Just a couple of Harpies, a Burst, and a Ferox along with some ammo and fittings.

I think I will do the same with that jump clone down in Delve. I’ve always been the good soldier and pre-deployed ships and clones where told. The problem is that I appear to be in the minority on that front, and so every operation needs to start out of the coalition staging system in Deklein. And since the destination is always a secret when we set out, we end up flying for an hour and wind up five jumps from my jump clone and doctrine ship, which continue to gather dust.

Mordus Angels Sovereignty in Pure Blind

Last night we were out and about in the south attacking a few constellations and getting a few kills against TEST and friends in the process.

I hope Senpai will notice me

The nice thing about flying in a smaller fleet is that you get the kill mail a lot more frequently than you do when you are out with 250 of your close friends.

Anyway, while we were out it was announced on coms that Mordus Angels had finally wrested some sovereignty from The Imperium after diligently attacking various points in Pure Blind since the day Fozzie sov went live. They took ION-FG from FCON.

The loss…

This was FCON’s, or Fidelas Constans’ (Latin for “Reliably Bad”), only holding in Pure Blind, a lone system without a station, some distance from their main territory up in the Branch region, but just eight jumps from the Mordus Angels staging system 5ZXX-K.

Still, a victory for Mordus Angels. They are now, if not actually on the sov map, at least listed on the changes with the other big alliances.

Top of the list no less!

Now of course the question is, what happens next? Mordus Angels has a grip on a system without a station in a region where The Imperium has been hunting them for the last two weeks. Their own hold on the system was attacked once somebody woke up and saw that the system had fallen. And it is a pretty safe bet that a large Imperium fleet will drop on that constellation when the timer runs down and the system becomes vulnerable. The count down is already up on Timer Board.

So, Fozzie sov working as designed or not?

A smaller alliance (~1200 pilots) was able to take sovereignty from a larger alliance (~4x their size) and a giant coalition (~40K pilots). They system is working! We ran out and did the same thing to Darkness a little while back, way down in Querious, and we’re doing the same thing in another region down south as well.

On the flip side, there is no chance they will be able to hold that system. Sneaking in and taking a system is very different than holding it. Holding a system requires you to stand up to the attacker. We lost our gain down in Querious and I don’t suspect we will hold anything else down south. We just don’t live there. But we can make the people who do live there run around chasing us.

Sovereignty that is easier take… remains easier to take, and has the potential to turn into a new sort of sov grind where, instead of ongoing fights over the old structures with huge fleets until one side is exhausted, it will be ongoing defense fleets to drive off interlopers until one side is exhausted. It is just easier for a smaller force to tire out a larger one now. But the smaller one still can’t hold a system until the other side gives up.

I suspected that when Fozzie sov hit, we would be a while hitting the new equilibrium in null sec, the inevitable stable state that is generally reached some point after a change to the game. The changes are only two weeks old at this point, so nearly 280 systems in play is probably to be expected. But what will it look like in a month or two when exhaustion does set in?

Addendum: And the story ended about as expected.

Not for Attribution

Posted as part of Blog Banter #65.

Attributes. They are an ingrained feature of our role playing games. I am sure they were around long before Dungeons & Dragons, but that was the starting point for many of us when it came to the concept.

It was an attempt to quantify the essentially unquantifiable. Sure, Strength seems easy enough to translate to numbers I suppose… in Tunnels & Trolls you could carry ten pounds of whatever for every point of strength you had… and maybe Intelligence as a general measure, if you believe in IQ tests I suppose. But Constitution or Dexterity, that gets a little trickier. Charisma? I think that delves into the human psyche too deeply to be represented by the result of a 3d6 roll, and what constitutes Wisdom in any case?

Still, we rolled with it… ha ha… because it was what we had and at least numbers were solid, which gave some of us the thin edge of the wedge from which to launch an ongoing career in rules lawyering.

And while the whole idea did not begin with Dungeons & Dragons, it seemed to multiply from there and soon some set of attributes that guided ability and access to classes or roles or whatever seemed to be in about in force. There were variations, and sometimes even multi-tiered systems where basic attributes allowed one to derive secondary abilities or stats.

So it went, and when role playing games came to computers, attributes were not far behind. After all, numbers are what computers do best. So the tradition of “rolling up” a character carried on in electronic form.

The actual importance of stats in various games varied. I remember writing up a character rolling script and letting it run for hours in TorilMUD, so important were your starting stats in the game. And, just to make things a bit more tricky, the stats were obscured. You couldn’t see the actual numbers, just a description that indicated the range they might fall into.

Do I take Heroic strength?

Heroic strength sounds great for a warrior, but the hierarchy of importance for all characters in the game put constitution first, as that influenced hit point gain as you leveled. At level 20 the game relented and actually showed you the stats.

A Barbarian warrior of mine… 484 years old!

You’ll see by the table above that I was content with merely “good” strength, because +str gear was very common, but insisted on”mighty” dexterity (affected hitroll) and agility (gave an armor class bonus), while holding out for “heroic” constitution. Plus there was a hold dynamic of how racial stats, where 90 str for a barbarian was equal to 100 str for a human and so forth.

The attributes were important, but there was a shadow of the future in that. I let strength slide a bit because I knew warrior gear would eventually include some +str bonuses as I got into higher levels, so that attribute would be rounded up eventually.

As late as the launch of EverQuest we were at least pretending that base stats mattered. I remember going in and tinkering with the points allocated to attributes with my first few characters because gear with attribute bonuses were not all that common.

But somehow in the five and a half years between the launch of EverQuest and the launches of World of Warcraft and EverQuest II, gear changed. Rare now is the piece of gear that drops that does not have some attribute bonus to it. Within two score of levels, your base attributes start to seem insignificant compared to your gear bonuses, and at the highest levels… in WoW, at least before the great stat squish… individual pieces of gear start being worth more than your initial attributes.

Back when EverQuest II removed weight as a concept in the game… you would no longer be weighed down by carrying too much coin or too many banker’s boxes… I pegged the change as being related to the inflation of basic attributes through gear. Your average character’s strength grew so much through gear progression that weight essentially lost its meaning anyway, so the whole concept only had impact on low level alts and new players that hadn’t progressed far enough. Why punish new players with something most of your player base doesn’t even think about, having essentially geared their way past it?

All of which, some 700+ words later, brings us to EVE Online.

EVE Online, now past its 11th anniversary, was created during the age of attributes, when we still seemed believed such things were essential, almost literally a requirement, for a role playing game. And so, EVE Online characters have attributes. You can see them in my character sheet, which I have grabbed from the Neocom iOS app:

Wilhelm Arcturus

There are all my current essentials. Down to almost 2 billion ISK, my training queue is over two years long, being largely made up of level V skills at this point, I’m down in the Curse region in a Tengu, and at the very bottom are my character attributes.

My attributes are flat. I leveled them out over a year ago because I was going to train up a series of skill that would be all over the map and so favoring one attribute over another would potentially help me on one skill only to hurt me on another. So I figured making them all about the same would even out the hills and valleys.

Because here is the strange thing about EVE Online attributes; unlike World of Warcraft or EverQuest or TorilMUD or Tunnels & Trolls or Dungeons & Dragons, those attributes at the bottom of that screen capture have absolutely no direct impact on how my character performs in the game.

Having greater perception won’t make my guns track any faster, having more willpower won’t make my missiles fly any faster, having immense intelligence won’t make my shields hold out a moment longer, and having all the charisma in the world won’t let me talk my way past CONCORD once I shoot at somebody in high sec space. None of those matter once I undock from a station.

Yes, sure, they matter indirectly before I undock. Those attributes affect how fast a given skill trains on a character. That impacts what ship I undock with and what modules I may have mounted on it, but when I actually undock that is all history and does not affect the here and now. You undock with the ship you can fit now, not the ship you may wish to fit at some later date.

So this month’s Blog Banter, number 65 in an ongoing series, asks the question:

Does Eve need attributes? It’s been discussed a lot recently. Unlike other MMO’s your characters attributes don’t make a difference in day-to-day gameplay. They simply set how fast you train a skill. Is it time to remove attributes from the game or totally revamp their purpose? Do they add a level of complexity to the game that is not needed? If you really need to use a 3rd party application to get the most from it should it be in the game? Should they be repurposed with each attribute adding a modifier to your ship? Are attributes a relic from the past or are they an important part of Eve – You make your decision and deal with the consequences?

My gut response is “No.” They should go the way of learning skills, now five years gone from the game. They are an excess complication that does not add anything to game play.

But I am not so sure when I think about it further.

Yes, I have spent a bunch of time fussing about attributes. You only get a neural remap once per year, which lets you adjust your attributes, so I have set out training plans in EVE Mon and tried for an optimized configuration. But the next training plan that I don’t interrupt almost immediately with some new skill I suddenly feel I need will be the first. I often can’t go a month without changing it up, so asking me to commit to a year is impossible.

And then there are implants.

CCP maps out the anger and resentment nodes in the capsuleer brain

CCP mapped out the anger and resentment nodes in the capsuleer brain

You can boost your attributes… and thus speed up your skill training… by inserting implants. I have a clone with a set of +4 implants in high sec and when I know I am going to be off for a few days I will jump to that clone to boost my training. But implants cost ISK, and good ones cost a lot of ISK, and when your ship gets blown up and you get podded, those implants go with it. A set of implants can be worth more than the ship you lost… a lot more… if you get podded.

So balancing against my gut feeling is a sense that there is a certain amount of strategic planning and depth that goes with attributes. You can optimize them, if you’re willing to commit for a year, to get ahead faster in an area of training you wish to focus on. Or you can flatten them out if you want to play a more conservative game.

Likewise you can speed up your training as long as you don’t mind flying around with millions of ISK plugged into your pod. Losing your pod without implants is essentially free, but you start plugging some in and, as noted, you’re head can quickly become more valuable than your ship.

So while attributes cease to have any direct impact once we undock… our choices are made when we hit that button, and the skills we have are what we have… I am going to fall on the side of attributes being, if not strictly necessary, at least very much a part of the makeup of the game. The planning and commitment aspect of the training queue along with the risk versus reward part of the implants are, for lack of a better term, very EVE Online.

Of course, that also sounds a lot like “but we’ve always done it this way!” something I wouldn’t condone. They cause us to make choices… are they interesting choices or not is more the question I suppose.

So I will say that I would rather keep attributes than just eliminate them wholesale. But if somebody can come up with a plan for an alternate use for attributes or how to make them more relevant to the every day capsuleer experience, or the choices surrounding them more interesting (for whatever definition of “interesting” you prefer), I am all ears.

Meanwhile, others have added their opinions to the mix. You can find the Blog Banter #65 launch post over at Sand, Cider, and Spaceships, the new host for Blog Banter, along with these other posts on the topic:

Cloaky Bastard – Useless Attributes
Inner Sanctum of the Ninveah – Attribution
Eveoganda – My Brain Hurts
Notes from New Eden – At Rebukes
Torchwood Archives – Attributes and Skills
A Missioneer in EVE – Numb Bears
Sand, Cider and Spaceships – Useful Attributes
Target Caller – Easiest One Ever
Low Sec Lifestyle – What Is Interesting?
Jakob’s Eve Checklist – Attribution Needed?
Morphisat’s Blot – Attributes

Finding Nostalgia on the Isle of Refuge

I jumped onto the Stormhold server in EverQuest II once I was home from vacation last week, and from the look of things I was clearly not alone. The Isle of Refuge was a popular spot, spawning multiple copies to handle those also seeking a fresh server in post-cataclysm Norrath.

That is a lot of colonies of the Queen

I haven’t made it off the isle yet, but reports indicate that Qeynos and Freeport and Antonica and the Commonlands and the Frostfang Sea are likewise seeing multiple versions spawn.

Holy cow, Stormhold server! 4 instances of Freeport and Commonlands. Amazing! #eq2 @everquestii pic.twitter.com/kAQrKgECMi

— Holly Longdale (@TheWindstalker) July 26, 2015

Okay, Frostfang Sea isn’t really a nostalgia destination, but the housing is very nice. I will probably end up using the base housing there rather than the box-like apartments in Qeynos or Freeport when it comes times to shack up.

Anyway, I jumped in and rolled up what for me is the default EverQuest II character, a barbarian berserker, and started off on the isle. But I wasn’t really feeling it. Too many berserkers on too many servers I suspected. I decided that for the full nostalgia effect I might have to go back and roll a templar, which was my first character class back in 2004.

Nostalgia on Wayne! Nostalgia on Garth!

I went down that path, taking the boat ride and starting off on the isle again, but still wasn’t feeling it. The lure of a plate wearing healer wasn’t enough.

Then, thinking on Bhagpuss’ post and his choice of a Shadowknight (almost wrote “Death knight” there) made me wander off in that direction. I rolled up a SK, which made me realize that I couldn’t remember ever going to the Freeport version of the Isle of Refuge before.

The boat ride is the same, though the Freeport Captain Varlos seems to have some person space issues.

Dude, I’m not even that close to you

I had also never rolled up an SK before either. There are a number of classes in the game I have never played, no doubt in part because the game launched with 24 playable classes (and only 4 character slots), and while I tend to avoid cloth wearing casters as a general rule, not playing an SK seemed to be a long missed opportunity.

So off I went with that, finding that both the class and the quest chain on the isle were giving me a new experience.

Still trying to figure out where that bee was hiding the chest he dropped…

That gave me the impetus to run through most of the the isle. I had no recollection of any of the isle, so I wonder if my one Freeport character took the option to just skip the isle and head straight to town with a boost to level 5, which was something you could do at one point. I think. Maybe?

Anyway, it was all new and fun and such, but it wasn’t really nostalgia, being new stuff and all. Or was it? Does having a new experience in an old context count?

So I started thinking about how things played out in 2004 and what was missing from the mix today that was going on back when the game launched.

And one big change from the original context is a guild. Back in 2004 I showed up in the game with a whole set of players from TorilMUD that joined up with an EverQuest guild to form our own guild early on.

Our guild on Crushbone… I left for a bit then came back… Pretty quiet now…

As such, the early days of EverQuest II were very much a group event, as we spent a lot of time together exploring the world and figuring out the game. In fact, I’d say that the game, such as it was back in November of 2004, was likely only tolerable in a group environment where we could work through and figure things out together.

So maybe the Freeport side of the world, which I have never really spent much time with, is the right choice as there will be some sense of newness to go along with the long familiar context of the game. But I am clearly going to have to find somebody else to play with, which means finding a regular group or guild, something I always find difficult. Without that I will likely play for a bit, taper off, then stop. Something to work on. Anybody on the Freeport side of things?

Meanwhile, I might roll up a couple more likely characters. Surprisingly I still have a couple of character slots left and, honestly, a few characters I could delete and never miss if push came to shove. My main motivation would be to get that 16-slot bag.

In the Daybreak Store

I went off to find that bag as soon as I ran into the old school problem of running out of bag space almost immediately because I dared to work on my harvesting skills a bit. That bag has been a savior.

Project: Gorgon Kickstarter – Third Time’s a Charm?

Project:Gorgon is back for a third try at funding through Kickstarter.

I have found fault in the past with various aspects of how Project: Gorgon kickstarters have been handled, with little build up, low press coverage due to almost no follow up, and the name of the game itself. Also, Eric Heimburg?

And this time around is no exception. Why, for example, would you want to launch a kickstarter campaign at 9pm Pacific time (midnight Eastern time) on a Friday night? Who does that? 9am Tuesday morning yes, 9pm Friday night no.

Still, the campaign seems better situated this time around. The first time out Eric Heimburg asked for $55K and got $14K in pledges. The second time around he went for $100K and got $23K in pledges.

This time though he is asking for a mere $20K. That should be attainable, right?

Meanwhile the game is already green lit on Steam, people have been able to play early versions of the game for a couple of years now as it has progressed (go straight to the site and download it), and despite the rather depressing cave-focused starting area, the whole thing opens up into a beautiful world.

The Kickstarter itself is focused on raising funds in order to contract out some work on guilds, guild halls, and mounts.

Backing the project can get you a number of perks from Steam beta access to thanks in the credits to a mount with special saddle bags allowing you to carry more items, and titles up to that of Archduke, which will allow you to name and help design a small city in the game.

The Kickstarter runs until Sunday, August 23 2015 at 9:00pm… another bad end time, he should have waited until Tuesday… and is already past the 20% funding mark, so is looking good on that front. Maybe the third time, with a low goal, will be a charm. Of course, if he goes past that too soon, he’ll have to start in on stretch goals.

The project itself is now slated to ship in December of 2016.

Return of the Isle of Refuge

As mentioned in my previous post this morning, I was away for the week so the posts that went up on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday were written well in advance of their going live. So my Tuesday post about the EverQuest II time locked expansion servers going live was working on the information I had at the time and lacked any immediate action on my part.

So I was pretty surprised to find upon my return that Daybreak had pulled a fast one and had actually put the Isle of Refuge back into the game for these servers. I logged in and made a character… a barbarian berserker, which is my default EQII character choice most days of the week… and found myself, as Bhagpuss put it, on the boat and on my way to the isle.

Where are we headed Captain Varlos?

In fact, when you create a character you are back to the two original choices. No Frostfang Sea or Darklight Wood options were displayed.

You have your choice between two identical islands…

I ran through the boat ride and landed on the Isle of Refuge, but stopped there. It did appear that, if the whole retro isle experience wasn’t your thing, you could leave immediately as opposed to after you finished up the main quest chain.

The servers themselves seemed pretty busy for a Thursday night.

PvE seemed to be beating out PvP for the time being, and enough people were rolling in then that I ended up in Queen’s Colony 3 on the PvE side of the house.

I will have to devote some time to playing this weekend to see how the retro experience stacks up to my memories.

And there is an incentive to get into the game sooner rather than later. Daybreak is offering a 16 slot bag to those who log in before August 7.

Subscribers Only

Given that you start out with a single 4 slot bag… where will I store all my stuff… that seems like a good thing.

Now to decide which trade skill to pick up.

Quote of the Day – The End of Smed?

Daybreak Games confirms that John Smedley will be taking some time off from the company for the near-term and transitioning to a different role to be determined. Upon finalization of his plans, further communication will be provided.

RadarX, EverQuest II forums

l go away for a few days and this happens. While I was down at Pismo Beach watching the beach bunnies and avoiding the horde of German tourists… seriously, they were everywhere… only to come back home and find that Smed is out as the boss at Daybreak.

The Daybreak era Smed

There is plenty of speculation about why he is out, where he will end up, and how it may or may not relates to his run-in with Lizard Squad and the deletion of his Twitter account.

Smed was, of course, a pillar of the MMO development community who helped make EverQuest possible. He was also a staple of “Quote of the Day” posts here and not universally loved, having run SOE and Daybreak through various controversial periods including the NGE, the transition to free to play, the current era of early access sales, and the sale of SOE to Columbus Nova Prime. While he has fans both inside and out of Daybreak, not everybody will be sad to see him step down.

But that just brings us to the next question; who will replace him at the helm?

Smed was at least a gamer through and through. Russel Shanks, another long time member of the Daybreak team is stepping up for now, but it is not clear to me if that is a permanent move of not. So the next person running Daybreak may not be cut from the same gamer mold. And while Smed stepping down may have had something to do with his online conflict coming home to roost at Daybreak, it could be about something else as well… something like money even.

Having worked for a company that was acquired by an investment group in the past, I can tell you that I was often reminded of that scene from Goodfellas:

Now the guy’s got Paulie as a partner. Any problems, he goes to Paulie. Trouble with the bill? He can go to Paulie. Trouble with the cops, deliveries, Tommy, he can call Paulie. But now the guy’s gotta come up with Paulie’s money every week, no matter what. Business bad? Fuck you, pay me. Oh, you had a fire? Fuck you, pay me. Place got hit by lightning, huh? Fuck you, pay me.

This may be simply the first round of, “Fuck you, pay me.” Or it could be something else.

What will Daybreak be without John Smedley?

The Ancient Gaming Noob

Veni, Vidi, Scripsi