Monthly Archives: June 2017

June 2017 in Review

The Site

Another month of quiet decline in traffic. I can hardly blame people though, I haven’t been writing about all that much which might generate traffic. But if all I wanted was traffic I would write about World of Warcraft and Pokemon every day… or I’d be angry at EVE Online. That is always a draw.

So not much to say there.

I do have one item that is related to the site, which is why I have never bothered to get a custom domain. Part of that is because I couldn’t get the domain I wanted, tagn.com. Well, not without paying a lot of money in any case. Four letter domains are in demand.

But the other is persistence. At some point I will tire of this and stop blogging. But that won’t mean I will want all of this to disappear into the void. I’d like to be able to find it in another ten or twenty years. But am I going to keep paying for a domain? Maybe not.

The same goes double for self-hosting. While I would like the control, I am way past my interest peak in blogging, so the expense and the effort would be a deterrent.

All of which comes to mind because of Darren. Back in the day he wrote the blog The Common Sense Gamer and did the Shut Up, We’re Talking podcast.

Header from the past…

He hasn’t written regularly in ages, but his RSS is still in my feed. Suddenly, a couple weeks back, after a long, long time of radio silence, there was a post. And then two. And then several. Was Darren back?

No, Darren is still done with all of this. However, he self-hosted and was done enough to let his hosting service lapse. Somebody else scooped up the domain name and started another gaming blog of the same name.

Is not Darren

And so all of my links over to Darren’s blog… mostly about ten dollar horses… are all broken. Ted Nelson was right, this hard coded web address shit sucks. I even mentioned this issue a couple of years back. And so I will endeavor to prevent that by sticking with the address WordPress.com gave me, even though they seem set on making me get a domain of my own.

Meanwhile, I’ll have to find some time to fix those ever-so-important ten dollar horse links. I can at least still find Darren over at the Internet Archive.

Clearly I need a tool to convert links on the site to a given domain to the Internet Archive version, as this is likely to continue to be an issue.

Edit: Turns out Darren did not self-host, so his blog is still available at tcsgamer.blogspot.com. My links remain broken however.

One Year Ago

Daybreak’s Landmark finally went live just a few days short of summer. However, it was the end of the road for PlanetSide and Legends of Norrath.

There was also the launch of the Isle of Refuge free trade server for EverQuest II.

There was a Newbie Blogger Initiative, for which I put up a post.

It was reported that Minecraft had sold more than 100 million copies.

Minecraft put out the Frostburn Update, version 1.10. I was building the last stretches of what would become the 22km rail loop.

I also reflected on a year of playing Minecraft, then added in some statistics.

Blizzard had the Warcraft Movie open. I didn’t like it, nor did that many people outside of China. Meanwhile Blizzard was also explaining that WoW expansions were just going to take time. While WoW Legion was still weeks away, my daughter and I went back to finish up Warlords of Draenor and get ready for the new expansion. Meanwhile the whole Nostalius thing was still simmering.

And I was playing EVE Online. There was the YC118.6 update, which brought us more overview tabs and the Shadow of the Serpent event, among other things. Recurring opportunities, in which you could earn some skill points by undocking and shooting an NPC, were removed after their short run. DX9 was also dead in EVE. And there was Blog Banter 76, which was about FC’s and how vulnerable they should be.

But mostly I was flying in fleets out of Saranen as we kept up the tempo of operations in what would become the final full month of the Casino War. There were just too many posts about that to try and sting them together in a single paragraph narrative, so I will just list them out:

Five Years Ago

I was asking people about voice software again.

I went on about the ridiculous nature of material tiers for MMO crafting.

My daughter finally found a game she liked on the PS3.

I was ranking how I liked to get my gaming news.

The first Civilization V expansion came out offering, among other things, a performance boost to those who paid. Meanwhile, the story about the decade long game of Civ II came to light.

Everything we knew about EverQuest Next was declared obsolete. It wasn’t all that much really.

On the Fippy Darkpaw server, the Gates of Discord expansion was finally unlocked, but not before there was a tie vote.

Turbine announced the Riders of Rohan expansion, the first LOTRO expansion I declined to buy. For somebody still in Moria, it seemed to offer few benefits for its increased price relative to past expansions.

In Rift I hit level 50, which is a special thing in game, and started tinkering with the then new instant adventure option. Trion also announced the Storm Legion expansion, a sign of success for most subscription based MMOs.

In EVE Online I hit 80 million skill points and was playing Lemmings in DBRB’s fleet. We also ganked a Chimera that was scammed into jumping to the VFK beacon. This upset people.

And, finally there was Electronic Arts which, as part of its ongoing mission to be seen as the most arrogant company in gaming, tried to tell people that Origin was the Nordstrom to Steam’s Target level business model, unintentionally insulting Nordstrom, which actually cares about customer service before the fact, not just after it has screwed the pooch yet again. EA says they “get it” but I have my doubts.

Ten Years Ago

I got all Buddhist on the subject on the raiders vs. non-raiders rift. I think what I said could be applied to some current controversies.

I ran down my list of complimentary comment spam.

I did a poll asking which software people used for voice coms. At the time, almost nobody who responded was using game-integrated voice software. Most people were using Ventrilo.

I took a picture of my gaming setup. Still the same keyboard, monitor, and mouse ten years later.

We heard that Pirates of the Burning Sea would not only be published by SOE, but would be available via a Station Access subscription.

We were still playing Lord of the Rings Online. Hitting level 20… not for the last time… I was out at the Forsaken Inn… also not for the last time. The instance group, minus Earl, finished the first epic book… again, not for the last time. And server queues, something common at launch, were starting to disappear after just two months. This was odd, since the last great server queue experience was with WoW, where queues went on for over a year on some servers.

Vanguard, which announced server merges… again, not for the last time… gave rise to a discussion about future proofing games. I held that just making system requirements huge… something that was an issue with Vanguard… was not the same thing. I did wonder what would have happened had WoW had higher system requirements back in 2004.

After letting Blizzard’s announcement of StarCraft II sink in, I put up a post about the original StarCraft back when it was our office game of choice.

Darren was all worked up about crafting being the suck, so I started trying to list out all the things that might be wrong with crafting. Then Tobold suggested the whole “figure out recipes by trial and error” idea and I ran screaming from the room.

I said nice things about “Opinions of the Misinformed.”

Also, the iPhone launched, moving smart phones from curiosity to mainstream.

Most Viewed Posts in June

Search Terms of the Month

ashes of creation next big thing?
[I think there might be a few things before we get there]

rpm jenks speed
[Is that a VR title?]

warcraft marriage achievement unlocked
[Married in the game, or to the game?]

how much better is the hel than other supercarriers for ratting
[Oh man, did you come to the wrong blog!]

how to unlock all songs on rock band 2 wii
[Nothing ever dies]

do parrots in update 1.12 spawn in previously explored jungle biomes?
[I believe you need to explore fresh chunks to find parrots]

EVE Online

The summer of mild discomfort continues as people look for reasons to be angry at CCP, generally revolving around CCP not doing what they say, immediately, without considering the consequences. The ignorant outsider is always a better judge of things than the people who actually know the code… says the ignorant outsider at least.

None of which has impacted me in the least. I go on ops, do a little ratting in my Ishtar, and read about the drama. There were new forums added for the game as well. I got my achievement for doing the tutorial. Other achievements are available. Gamification of gaming forums, oh my.

GuildWars 2

Well, another month and another run at an old MMO peters out. As with Runes of Magic the month before I just stopped logging in. Not because I was hating the game, but I just didn’t feel much draw to keep going. It wasn’t the zones or centaurs or the game mechanics or the personal story so much as it being just another fantasy MMO I was playing solo.

Minecraft

The server carries on and I am sporadically logging on to build things. The 1.12 World of Color update gave me something to look into, but otherwise I have carried on as before.

Meanwhile, after a brief update about the whole Mineserver thing, that has gone back to radio silence. Maybe we’ll hear something new by Christmas?

Pokemon

I am still pottering around a bit in Pokemon Sun, though that is clearly winding down for me. It is probably best to give that a bit of a break given that new titles are coming late this year. I did join in a couple of the online tournaments as a lark, and did as badly as expected. Still, I will have to write up the results of one, as it does point to a pattern.

Pokemon Go

The big gym update hit last week. I am not sure how much of a difference it really makes. I still can’t beat a Blissy that is CP 2800 or higher, and if you can’t beat them then their CP doesn’t degrade and they are fixed in place.

My basic stats this month:

Level: 28 (+0)
Pokedex status: 174 (+8) caught, 197 (+10) seen
Pokemon I want: Gyrados
Current buddy: Magikarp… only 207km more to get enough candies for a Gyrados

Steam Summer Sale

The semi-annual sales event is upon us and I have actually purchased a few titles this time around, breaking the cycle of disinterest that I had shown the last couple of sales.

Coming Up

What is even going on in July worth noting? Remastered StarCraft isn’t until August.

There is the possibility of an EVE Online patch update from CCP. While vacation time for them has started, they usually only skip August completely. We shall see. Further carrier ratting nerfs are expected and the Strategic Cruiser revamp is already on the test server.

The Fantasy Movie League stuff will continue. I am enjoying that… perhaps a bit too much even. I now have the Variety film section in my RSS feed.

Then there is still the desire to find fantasy MMORPG happiness, but where to look? Do I seek out an as-yet unexplored title and risk finding the ever present sameness of the genre? Or is nostalgia what I need, one of the retro servers that Daybreak is offering up? Am I attempting to recapture the unrecapturable he asked, just making up words at this point?

Anyway, another month looms. But there is a holiday on Tuesday, which effectively means a four day weekend for me, so the next real post might have to wait until Wednesday next week.

Tower Repair in Fountain

Before I was done with work on Tuesday a ping had gone out for an op to defend assets from our neighbors to the east. That actually ended up being three fleets worth of people heading out to defend a timer… enough people that nobody showed up to oppose if I heard right.

There was a follow-up ping from Asher indicating that there would be another USTZ fleet going out later for those of us who were busy or lived on the wrong coast. That seemed to mean me, so when that ping showed up later I was ready to go in the coalition staging Keepstar. The call was for Cerberus fleet.

Once we had formed up a good enough composition… with three fleets already out we were not likely to get an ideal form up… we undocked and flew north to meet up with a titan to get a bridge.

Getting in range for the bridge

We were heading into Fountain where The Culture had put three of our towers into a reinforced state. We were there to fly cover and counter The Culture if they showed up to try to finish off the towers once they came out.

Cerbs over the POS shield

There we met up with a couple of force auxiliaries who proceeded into siege mode to repair the tower shields once it had exited reinforcement.

A Lif in the foreground, a Minokawa behind

They went about their slow work while we waited to see if The Culture would respond. Scouts out reported nobody coming our way, so we flew in a lazy formation following Asher in his dirty Phantasm. (It seemed much shinier back in Saranen, though that might not be the same ship.)

Does not use the “clean ship” button

I have been on any number of such operations over the last five years. You go out to the tower and see if there is going to be a fight. If not, you just wait until the tower’s shields are repaired back up to 50%, at which point the tower can be refueled with strontium clathrates, which enables the tower to go into reinforcement mode.

With two faxes and our own logi the tower took a while to get back to 50%. But once there GSOL showed up to get things into shape.

GSOL rides in Rorquals

That was one tower down. However, there were three in the system, all of which had come out of reinforce and needed to be repaired and refueled.

Fortunately a few more faxes ended up joining us so the second and third towers ended up going by much more quickly.

Minokawas join us at the tower

Once the last tower was finished we were set to head home. Nobody showed up to oppose us, so it was more of a “cost of doing business” sort of op. We got our participation credit to show our service to the coalition.

These specific sorts of ops will be coming to an end at some point. All three of these were moon mining towers. Those are fairly passive operations, just needing to be fueled regularly and have the output collected now and again.

Come the winter however, CCP is suppose to implement refineries. Mentioned back in March, these will act as moon mining platforms while will be much more hands on when it comes to harvesting the output. These platforms are supposed blow chunks of moons into orbit where they will need to be harvested by mining ships.

CCP’s image of a moon chunk

At that point it will be an Upwell Consortium structure running the operation, which will no doubt be more akin to the Citadels and Engineering Complexes already available in its mechanics. The somewhat strange mechanics of POS towers will be a thing of the past.

Currently we hold a moon mining towers outside of our home region. We shall see how that works out when moon mining becomes a more active operation.

EverQuest II Opens Up the Fallen Gate Progression Server

Daybreak is back to playing the nostalgia server card again, this time for EverQuest II.

The server was expected to go live at Noon yesterday. However this is Daybreak, so unexpected issues are the order of the day..

The Fallen Gate server launch at Noon PT has been delayed for a bit. We'll update you as we have more information!

— EverQuest II (@everquestii) June 27, 2017

That got extended for a bit.

All servers are coming down for a brief maintenance to address an outstanding issue. Downtime is anticipated to be less than 90 minutes.

— EverQuest II (@everquestii) June 27, 2017

But by late afternoon Daybreak announced that the server was up and people could log in.

This isn’t the first progression server that Daybreak has done for EverQuest II. Back in the summer of 2015 they brought the Stormhold server online, springing the revised Isle of Refuge on us as part of the experience.

Since then there hasn’t been too much news about the server, aside from the expansion unlock votes and its PvP server twin Deathtoll being merged into Stormhold due to a lack of interest. But that is the nature of these sorts of servers; there is often a fuss up front, but they excitement tends to fade over time, especially when they get many expansions out.

So after two years I suppose it is about time for a new one, and so we have the Fallen Gate progression server going live today, named for the dungeon zone that is sort-of the Commonlands version of Stormhold.

Outside Fallen Gate, which has a door that is still standing

As with the Stormhold server, you need a Daybreak All Access subscription to play.

The difference between Fallen Gate and the old Stormhold server appears to be that all races and classes will be available immediately on Fallen Gate and that expansion unlocks will come at regular 12 week intervals rather than being subject to the whims of a vote. Voting just leads to bad feelings, especially if the vote is close.

There is also something of a theme for the server, which is focused on heritage quests. Those quests are a nostalgic nod to the Norrath of the original EverQuest, proving that even 13 years back SOE hadn’t completely lost sight of the link the two games share. You can earn some special achievements by completing such quests.

As usual, there are some incentives to come and play on the server, including a deplorable “mount” you can get if you reach level 10 on the server before July 11. There is also a special Gateway to Adventure Pack you can buy in the cash shop that has a 66-slot bag, speed enhancing Journeyman’s Boots (not the ones from the heritage quest I assume), and some potions to help speed your progress in other ways.

There is an announcement page with the overview as well as a FAQ posted about the server.

My favorite item from the FAQ has to be this:

What will be available for Tradeskills?

Tradeskilling should look similar to the original EverQuest II launch. Apprentices will not be made available until a later date.

I seriously doubt crafting will look anything at all like the interdependent tradeskill chaos that marked the launch of EverQuest II, but the thought of it amuses me.

As keen as I am on such servers being available, I do not think I will be joining in this time. My nostalgia for the Norrath MMOs involves playing with a semi-regular group, so embarking on what would be a solo venture doesn’t have much appeal.

Blogger Fantasy Movie League – Week Four

We are about a third of the way through the 13 week summer Fantasy Movie League, but there are still a host of potential blockbuster movies out there.

This week saw most of our group making the decision between Transformers: About Last Night and Wonder Woman to anchor their picks.

As with last week, it seemed pretty clear who would take the top spot in the box office. Transformers was set to win, but would it win by enough to make it a viable pick. As noted previously, you have eight screens to fill and a $1,000 budget. If you invest most of it in a big movie, it has to pay off. The prices of the week four picks:

Transformers               $560
 Wonder Woman              $286
 Cars 3                    $278
 All Eyez On Me            $104
 The Mummy                 $73
 Pirates                   $58
 47 Meters Down            $55
 Captain Underpants        $45
 Rough Night               $39
 Tubelight                 $34
 Guardians of the Galaxy 2 $32
 Beatriz at Dinner         $17
 Megan Leavy               $16
 It Comes At Night         $13
 The Book of Henry         $11

As the week began, estimates for Transformers were up in the $70 million range, which made it a safe pick. Grab that and a few good cheaper picks to back it up, and you’re set. And then the reviews hit and the early opening numbers came in and estimates fell through the floor, with its weekend pull down at $45 million.

Meanwhile Cars 3 and Wonder Woman were both being estimated at around $27 million. Pick two of those and you beat Transformers for about the same price. It was something of a toss up between Cars 3 and Wonder Woman for me. Wonder Woman was still going strong, but Cars 3 was still the big kids movie and only in its second week.

I decided to go with Cars 3 on three screens. Then I started picking and choosing what the other five picks ought to be. I ended up with this selection.

My selections and how they did

I wasn’t totally sold on this set, but I couldn’t come up with anything better and then I realized it was after 9am on Friday, selections were locked, and I was stuck with it.

9am is the big reveal, when you get to see what everybody else picked. Nobody picked Cars 3 aside from me. Everybody else was down with Transformers and Wonder Woman or else they picked Wonder Woman to fill two or three screens.

The closest mirror to my own picks was Liore, who went with three Wonder Woman, two Captain Underpants, and three Beatriz at Dinner. Given her ringer status in the group, I felt a bit encouraged by at least the shared pattern.

As it turned out, Wonder Woman did about a million dollars more over the weekend than Cars 3. However, my savior was 47 Meters Down, which not only clocked in at $7 million, but which got the nod as the best price/performance pick of the week, boosting my total by $2 million per screen showing it. That was enough to put me at the top of the list for the week.

Wilhelm’s Clockwork Lemon Multiplex – $95,679,946
Dr Liore’s Evil House of Pancakes – $88,567,091
Pasduil’s Popcorn Picturehouse – $87,759,467
Void’s Awesomeplex – $87,244,395
Ocho’s Octoplex – $85,011,942
Moderate Peril’s Sleazy Porno Theatre – $84,410,311
Murf’s Matinee Mania – $81,825,392
Bel’s House of Horrors – $81,603,369
Syl’s Fantasy Galore Panopticum – $80,899,156
Braxwolf’s Waffleplex – $76,460,030
Clockwork’s Cinesplosion – $17,190,425

Clockwork apparently started to pick, filling in two screens, but then didn’t finish, leaving six empty screens. Each empty screen comes with a $2 million penalty, so Wonder Woman and Captain Underpants teaming up were not enough to save the day.

Of course none of us picked the optimum selection, which was Transformers and seven screens of 47 Meters Down.

Week Four’s Optimum Picks

Weekly wins so far:

Liore – 2
Braxwolf – 1
Wilhelm – 1

Liore not taking the week did not do much to shake her from her leading position in the overall season running. At the end of week four the totals are:

Dr Liore’s Evil House of Pancakes – $416,272,621
Wilhelm’s Clockwork Lemon Multiplex – $390,585,663
Pasduil’s Popcorn Picturehouse – $382,306,139
Moderate Peril’s Sleazy Porno Theatre – $371,138,496
Ocho’s Octoplex – $364,953,950
Void’s Awesomeplex – $364,730,70
Braxwolf’s Waffleplex – $358,166,372
Bel’s House of Horrors – $342,072,780
Murf’s Matinee Mania – $325,309,184
Syl’s Fantasy Galore Panopticum – $284,246,625
Clockwork’s Cinesplosion – $270,152,909

I am holding on to second place, but am $26 million behind Liore. That means I need to beat her total by at least $3 million each week for the next nine weeks of the summer season. Or I need a really big score one week… or she needs to go on vacation and forget to do her picks.

And those in the mid-pack need to beat her by double that every week to overtake.

One of the interesting side notes is how well Moderate Peril is doing, holding on to fourth place, all the while doing his picks like he is running an actual theater, showing each movie only once most weeks (he doubled up on a film once) and not min/max optimizing.

Anyway, we are on to week five and the options are:

Despicable Me 3           $840
Transformers              $175
The House                 $198
Cars 3                    $102
Wonder Woman              $131
Baby Driver               $110
47 Meters Down            $36
The Mummy                 $26
Pirates of the Caribbean  $26
All Eyez on Me            $19
Rough Night               $23
Captain Underpants        $19
Guardians of the Galaxy 2 $15
Beguiled                  $32
Beatriz At Dinner         $12

Despicable Me 3 is tracking for a safe $90 million this coming weekend. However, if you pick that, your other seven screens end up pretty weak. Meanwhile, Baby Driver is getting some buzz and the the FML site stats show it is being picked heavily. That might be the sign that those in the know feel it is going to be the optimum pick of the week. So it might be a better plan to pick a lessor anchor film and pile on that. But which title would you pick as an anchor? And how deep do you go with Baby Driver? Six screens? Seven? All eight?

We shall see how the week goes.

Mini Metro

Mini Metro had been on my Steam wish list for a while.

That isn’t saying much. I put lots of things on my wish list to consider buying later, to look into, or just to remind myself that they exist. Titles can linger there for ages, waiting for a something to push me either to buy them or drop them from the list.

Fortunately for me… or the game… or both… Zubon did a write-up about the game which tipped the balance in favor of my grabbing it as soon as the Steam Summer Sale hit. And it is all he said it was, light and simple and elegant in design.

I was a little bit surprised when I first launched the game as it drops you straight into playing. There is no mucking about in any menus or settings, you’re just on what is essentially the playing field playing the game. It is a strategy that works with a game of such a spare interface.

At its heart it is the same game as Train Valley, of which I wrote previously. The player sets up a transit network based on a set of stations which gradually increase over time, servicing a population that has destinations in mind.

Mini Metro sheds all of the non-essentials, paring away money and rewards and switches and collisions, leaving just the necessities. Your passengers are simple shapes who want to travel to a station that matches them in stylized versions of major cities.

Four Lines running through London

You passengers are not picky. If they are circles, they just want to get to one of the likely many circle stations on your map. Other shapes are more rare, some of them being one per map. You draw out and change your transit lines by just dragging them. Your rolling stock are little rectangles that move up and down the line, stopping at stations to pick up or drop off passengers.

There are, of course, constraints. That is what makes it a game really.

There is a limit on the number of transit lines you can have and tunnels for crossing water and trains and carriages to which you have access. When a new week starts up every Sunday you are given a new train and the option to add something else in a binary choice. You might have the option add another line (which will require your train) or a couple of tunnels or a carriage that allows a a train to carry additional passengers, or a special station that loads and unloads passengers more quickly. But the you only get two options each week and you only get to choose one.

And then there are the passengers, who get upset if your transit system leaves them piling up in stations for too long, with grumpy sounds and angry black timer circles forming if they are backed up.

Some unhappy Londoners south of the Thames

Passengers are the ultimate constraint, the one that will end your game. If the timer circle sweeps through the full 360 degrees, your transit system fails and you are done.

Game over man!

Score is measured in how many passengers you have delivered and how long your transit system lasted.

There is a list of maps representing different international metropolitan environments from London to Paris to New York to Shanghai. Each map has a simplified representation of the water obstacles the city presents, tunnels being a key constraint as your system expands. There are also some variations on some of the maps. In Cairo the trains only hold four passengers rather than the six on other maps, while in Osaka you get fast moving bullet trains to help move your population about.

Osaka on the list…

There is a hierarchy of maps and map difficulty, and to unlock the next map you have to deliver a certain number of passengers on your current map. There is also a list of achievements for doing specific things on various maps, if you are looking for additional constraint.

The game reminds me of a software package I used back in college. I took a class, the name of which I have long since forgotten, which was essentially holistic systems analysis. The software, which I wish I still had, let you model processes as water flow, so you could lay out something like the DMV and see where the bottlenecks and the idle locations were. By abstraction, you could see the flow of a system. Mini Metro is like that, even to a real transit planner.

Anyway, the game, which is an inexpensive indy title to start with, is even cheaper with the coming of the Steam Summer Sale. If you like this sort of system management I recommend picking it up. There are even iOS and Android versions of the title in the respective app stores.

SuperData Recombines WoW Again for May Chart

The SuperData Research Top Ten chart for May 2017 is out.

SuperData Research Top 10 – May 2017

The decision as to whether or not to split World of Warcraft into East/West or represent it as a single unit has swung back again. Last month they were split, this month combined again.

The combined WoW number still dropped a notch, falling from 5th to 6th place, while Overwatch moved up a slot to 8th place on the PC chart. The top four spots on the PC chart remain unchanged, while DOTA 2 landed on the charts in the 5th spot. It was last seen on the chart back in February, where it was holding the 10th position… or 9th position when the chart was refactored to combine WoW yet again.

World of Tanks remains behind WoW for yet another month… though I do wonder where it would stand with WoW split into two.

Meanwhile, I am left wondering what the difference between Fantasy Westward Journey Online II and New Westward Journey Online II. I suppose one might just be the original Fantasy Westward Journey. SuperData needs to fix their shit I think.

On the mobile chart Pokemon Go dropped off the list for the first time since launch. The game just deployed a revamp of gyms and added gym raids, so we shall see if that is enough to get it back on the list next month. That Candy Crush Saga returned to the list should give them hope.

Other items from the SuperData report:

U.S. digital slows down but still shows year-over-year growth. U.S. digital revenue is up from April 2016 but down from March 2017. Free-to-play MMO, console and mobile all had high-single-digit revenue growth, more than offsetting slight declines in social and premium PC revenue.

U.S. digital revenue up year-over-year. Gamers spent over $1 billion across all platforms in May, up from April, during what is typically a lackluster point in the year. Growth came primarily from mobile revenue.

Overwatch shows continued growth. Overwatch digital revenues are up from April but down from May 2016, when it launched. Additional Content revenue hit a new high in May on the back of a one-year anniversary event.

Injustice 2 has a solid launch on consoles. We estimate Injustice 2 sold almost 500k digital units on console in May after launching mid-month. This puts it at number four in the top 10 console rankings this month in terms of digital revenue.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 gets another DLC release. Black Ops 3 grew month-over-month and beating out Infinite Warfare. The jump, which vaulted the game past Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, came from the PS4 release of the “Zombie Chronicles” DLC.

Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds has another big month. PUBG had another solid sales month in May with 791,000 units sold, bringing life to date digital sales above 2 million units through May. June looks to be another massive month for the game.

Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Siege breaks into console top 10 for the first time since January 2016, thanks to the continued “Year Two” support from Ubisoft.

The Steam Summer Sale 2017 Arrives

As predicted/expected/hoped, the Steam Summer Sale went live at 17:00 UTC today.

Summer Sale Comes Again

I have been much less ambivalent about the upcoming sale than I have been in past years. I am feeling the itch for a new game or three. So as soon as the sale went live I checked my wishlist and… nothing I added recently is on sale.

Ah well.

This year the activities are driven by quests to obtain sticker by performing various activities. Going through your discover queue is the obvious one, but there are other tasks.

Sticker pack for checking my prefs

Of course, the immediate heavy load on the store meant that such tasks led to errors, but it will smooth out once the rush to find the inevitably comically mis-priced items has died down.

Since my wishlist let down my initial rush of enthusiasm, I’ll have to stalk the store to see what I can find. Or maybe I will buy something I really want at full price. It’s been known to happen.

How are you feeling about Steam this summer?

The Necromancer is Coming

Last year and BlizzCon Blizzard promised two things for Diablo III.

The first was the original Diablo experience mocked up in the Diablo III engine… with Diablo III assets. The Darkening of Tristram event. We got that in January, and while the experience was not very old school Diablo, it was, as I opined, at least some new content to play through in the game.

The second was the return of the necromancer class, which we will get next week in the form of the Rise of the Necromancer DLC.

The necromancer arrives soon

One of the questions unanswered at BlizzCon was how much the necromancer DLC would cost, because it was made clear it wouldn’t be free.

The answer is: $15

Not a bad price for DLC I guess. For your fifteen bucks you get access to the necromancer class, a bunch of cosmetic fluff, two additional stash tabs (PC master race only), and two character slots. (details here)

But no content.

So if you miss the necromancer class from Diablo II and want to see it remastered in Diablo III, this is probably an easy choice. A new class through the current content is likely draw enough for fifteen bucks.

But if you are indifferent to the class… I played it back during Diablo II and it was interesting, but not a class I finished the game with… it is also easy to pass on. I thought Blizz might have a hook in there, something to attract those for whom the class and the fluff aren’t much of a draw.

And I know, I sound like I am expecting too much for that price, though I will point out that Blizz has added whole new areas for free in the past… and there was the Darkening of Tristram event I opened the post with, which was free as well. So a bit of content would not have been wholly out of the question to my mind.

As it stands though, I’ll likely let this slide. But if the necromancer is a must-have for you, look for it on Tuesday!

Is EVE Online a Gankbox?

Syp has been angsty about the “gank culture” of EVE Online this week. He started on Twitter.

Thinks for a second about playing EVE Online.
Looks at the gank culture.
Thinks about something else.

— Syp (@Sypster) June 13, 2017

Then he turned that into a post on Massively OP where he declared EVE Online to have a “gankbox” culture.

I had to go look up “gankbox,” as this was a new term to me. According to Massively OP:

Gankboxes are sandboxes that place such an emphasis on unrestricted free-for-all PvP that ganking comes to dominate the entire game, to the detriment of the rest of the world design.

As somebody coming up on eleven years of playing the game, that does not describe EVE Online to me at all. New Eden is not a place of unrestricted, free-for-all PvP. Sure, out in the wilds of null sec space or in wormholes you can shoot at other players without consequence, but in low security and high security space, where Neville Smit tells me most of New Eden plays, there certainly are restrictions on PvP.

In low sec you have guns on gates and stations that will shoot at people who initiate combat, there are suspect timers and kill rights that make people who shoot you vulnerable to attack even in high sec space, and the whole security status system that can make travel to high sec a dicey proposition if you sec status gets too low.

And that is low sec space, which hosts faction warfare, where people are alleged to be shooting each other all the time.

In high sec space, CONCORD lands on you and blows up your ship if you just start shooting at other people, something that I would call a pretty serious restriction on PvP. Somebody has to declare war on you to shoot you without restriction in high sec, and they can’t do that if you’re still in an NPC corporation.

Which, of course, isn’t to say that people don’t get blown up in high sec space. It happens all the time. I’ve been on both ends of that. I have been blown up traveling the space lanes of high sec. And I have helped blow other people up as part of Burn Jita and Burn Amarr in the past.

An Obelisk freighter goes up

And suicide ganking is a thing in high sec space every day. But it has restrictions and it can be avoided with some care. People engage in it as a for-profit venture, so simply making sure it isn’t profitable to gank you goes a long way to making your journey a success. You can start by getting the hell away from Jita. As the center of commerce in New Eden, it attracts all the bad elements, so the further you go from it, the quieter and safer things tend to become.

But the term “gankbox” seems completely off base. Ganking does not dominate the game. I live in Delve, PvP barely dominates the game. We mostly mine, shoot NPCs, build things, and sell them to each other, as the monthly economic report demonstrates.

I will cop to EVE Online have a bad reputation however. It has provided some cringe worthy moments in gaming. And even I called out the game’s reputation as one of the top five problems I feel the game has.

But a reputation isn’t reality, it is a perception. You aren’t going to get ganked and scammed by Goons the moment you undock into the tutorial in your noob ship. Syp couldn’t have “looked” and the gank culture, because it doesn’t exist as he describes it. He just let one aspect of the game’s reputation color his point of view.

Sure, people get blown up and get mad, as in this classic Reddit post. But you’ll note two things in that thread. The first is the pilot’s disregard for security status, and thus his own safety. Second is that down in the comments he eventually says he is over his moment of frustration. Life in New Eden, and on Reddit, where flaws get magnified 100x.

For all of that though, I will predict that Syp wouldn’t like EVE Online. He seemed to get a bit flustered by RuneScape, which at least follows some recognizable MMORPG conventions. EVE is just plain right-angles to reality confusing if you’re coming from other games in the genre.

Back to my top five problems post, the game’s name, age, and reputation stop people from playing, but it is the the user interface, the complexity of gear, and (my bonus item) the horrible, mis-used, and sometimes arcane terminology common within the game are much more likely to be a real issue than the game’s reputation.

EVE Online is a place where veterans of the game learn about features by accident all the time. I saw this gem just the other day. I don’t have to undock to tinker with overview settings. Who knew? For a new user it can be confusing as hell. And that doesn’t even get into the sandbox nature of the game where, once you’re done with the tutorial, the game leaves you to figure out what you want to do.

All of which is me picking on Syp, which he probably doesn’t deserve. But I would like to see him try the game and reject it for one of it many real flaws rather than running away due to a flaw he thinks it might have. (Also, his posts on Massively OP about EVE might use the games terminology correctly more often.)

When I think of ganking and annoying player behavior, my mind always goes to WoW. I have experienced a lot more direct bad user behavior in Azeroth than in New Eden. But I play EVE and not WoW currently.

To round back to the post topic, do you think EVE Online is a “gankbox” or not?

Addendum: Inventory Full, Endgame Viable, and Contains Moderate Peril all have words on PvP as well.

Blogger Fantasy Movie League – Week Three

In which we really start to see systemic optimization.

Week three of our blogger Fantasy Movie League once again seemed to present two possible paths forward.

The choice seemed to be between Wonder Woman, still going strong at the box office having outperformed last week’s big release, The Mummy, and Cars 3, the new challenger.

It seemed pretty clear that Cars 3 would take the top spot. But FML isn’t about picking the box office winner, but picking eight movies based on a budget, with a bonus available for picking the best price/performance movie of the week. Cars 3 might do better, but would it be worth the price? It would limit what other movies one could pick. And you couldn’t pick Cars 3 AND Wonder Woman.

Cars 3                    $719
Wonder Woman              $478
All Eyez On Me            $327
Rough Night               $243
The Mummy                 $167
47 Meters Down            $105
Captain Underpants        $78
Pirates                   $71
Guardians of the Galaxy 2 $60
It Comes At Night         $34
The Book of Henry         $31
Baywatch                  $29
Megan Leavey              $25
Alien Covenant            $11
Everything, Everything    $10

I decided to take a chance this week.

As often happens, as the week progressed I changed my mind and redid my picks. I do that enough that I would like to be able to save my “shadow” picks just to see how they would have done.

Way back on Tuesday of last week there was a lot of optimism around Rough Night. Initial guesses put it at $16 million for the week, but that surged past $20 million at one point. With Cars 3 pegged at $50 million and Wonder Woman less than that, putting Rough Night up on three screens would likely beat either and still leave me room for decent secondary picks.

I was down with three screens of Rough Night. And then Wednesday rolled around and people who saw previews started talking and reviews started coming out and estimates fell dramatically and ended up being optimistic even then.

So I tinkered around with some other picks. My daughter was determined to pick Wonder Woman and All Eyez on Me, the latter based on what she was seeing on social media, which turned out to be a decent call.

I ended up sticking with my desire to avoid the two leading contenders. So when the week’s picks were finalized on Friday morning, the Blogger league had six people going with Cars 3, found people sticking with Wonder Woman, and me all-in on The Mummy.

My Mummy selection and its yield

The Mummy, on five screens!

My logic was that all The Mummy had to do was 50% of its opening week, not an over-optimistic level of performance to my mind, and it could be the optimum pick for the week.

As it turned out, Tom Cruise couldn’t carry that much water and it fell short of the mark, leaving me in 5th place for the week. However, I was not that far behind the pack as none of us picked the optimum lineup for the week, which was Wonder Woman and seven screens of Pirates of the Caribbean. PotC turned out to be the optimum price/performance choice of the week, rewarding an extra $2 million per showing.

Weekly Top winners

A hell of a way to run a multiplex.

The scores for the week ended up being:

Braxwolf’s Waffleplex – $95,601,042
Pasduil’s Popcorn Picturehouse – $89,038,632
Dr Liore’s Evil House of Pancakes – $88,324,978
Wilhelm’s Clockwork Lemon Multiplex – $87,349,717
Void’s Awesomeplex – $85,782,636
Murf’s Matinee Mania – $80,261,527
Moderate Peril’s Sleazy Porno Theatre – $79,249,812
Ocho’s Octoplex – $76,340,371
Bel’s House of Horrors – $75,251,356
Syl’s Fantasy Galore Panopticum – $74,075,088
Clockwork’s Cinesplosion – $50,587,837

Surprisingly, Liore did not finish on top this week, with Braxwolf taking the top spot.

Wonder Woman was not a panacea this week. While it was the main pick of the top two finishers it was also the anchor of the last place entry. Picking neither Wonder Woman nor Cars 3 got me 4th place.

Weekly wins so far:

Liore – 2
Braxwolf – 1

Liore did not, however, lose much ground by coming in third and remains firmly out in front of the pack. Season totals after week three.

Dr Liore’s Evil House of Pancakes – $327,705,530
Wilhelm’s Clockwork Lemon Multiplex – $294,905,717
Pasduil’s Popcorn Picturehouse – $294,546,672
Moderate Peril’s Sleazy Porno Theatre – $286,728,185
Braxwolf’s Waffleplex – $281,706,342
Ocho’s Octoplex – $279,942,008
Void’s Awesomeplex – $277,486,309
Bel’s House of Horrors – $260,469,411
Clockwork’s Cinesplosion – $252,962,484
Murf’s Matinee Mania – $243,483,792
Syl’s Fantasy Galore Panopticum – $203,347,469

I managed to just hold on to second place, while Braxwolf’s strong finish for the week jumped him up to fifth. The race remains for second place as the gap between first and second place is about the same as the gap between second and eighth place.

Still ten weeks left to go, which leads us to the week four lineup.

Transformers              $560
Wonder Woman              $286
Cars 3                    $278
All Eyez On Me            $104
The Mummy                 $73
Pirates                   $58
47 Meters Down            $55
Captain Underpants        $45
Rough Night               $39
Tubelight                 $34
Guardians of the Galaxy 2 $32
Beatriz at Dinner         $17
Megan Leavy               $16
It Comes At Night         $13
The Book of Henry         $11

Transformers: About Last Night is the big fish in this week’s pond with box office estimates ranging between $60 and $75 million. That is enough to make it the likely anchor for most picks this week I suppose. If you do go with it you then have to back fill with what you hope will be this week’s Pirates of the Caribbean.

But if you avoid Transformers: The Last Goodnight, then you have considerably flexibility to experiment with screen builds… as I will now call them.

You can go all-in on Tupac… All Screenz on Me

So we shall see if this is a transformative week or not.

I will follow my usual practice of picking what I think is a good screen build, then I will look at the box office predictions and see how badly I have likely erred.

The Ancient Gaming Noob

Veni, Vidi, Scripsi