Monthly Archives: September 2023

September 2023 in Review

The Site

In hindsight, I think I should have been putting the year in the title of all of my month in review posts this whole time, and not just starting to do it on the first such post at the start of the 18th year of the blog. But here we are.

It remains to be seen if I will be able to find the energy to go back and re-title the 204 previous month in review posts. It could happen if I am in the right mood. Anyway, it will be that way going forward… if I remember next month.

This month saw the 17th anniversary of the blog. I know, there was a whole post about that. However, I was away when it went live, so didn’t get to inject the WordPress.com achievement.

WordPress gives me a pat on the back

And, speaking of WordPress.com, for no apparent reason one of my email subscriptions to the blog suddenly reactivated itself and started sending me daily updates again. I mentioned this in a post some time back about email and email subscriptions and how WP.com seemed to have purged a huge number of email subscribers. I know they were not simply going into the spam filter for months. I checked on that regularly. But suddenly, back on the 9th of this month, I started getting them again.

So, if you were an email subscriber and similarly found yourself getting updates once more… welcome back I guess! What happened between July 1st and September 8th… I couldn’t tell you because I don’t know.

Also, now that the admin panel shows you the list of email subscribers I can confirm… that my email address from above isn’t even on the list. But Brasse’s email at soe.sony.com is still there. I wonder which bit bucket those emails are landing in… if they are getting sent at all. I should probably just remove that email address from the list, but I am sort of happy that she subscribed in the first place… back in December of 2012.

Finally, WordPress has be messing with comments again. Some testing shows that if you try to leave a comment with an email address that has ever in any way been associated with a WordPress account, it will demand that you sign into the account in order to leave the comment and will not let you proceed until you do.

If that is getting in your way… and you actually read this, which is probably a thin chance… you can just leave an anonymous comment (still an option, still works) and sign your name at the bottom and I’ll go retroactively put it in the name field. I receive few enough comments these days that this isn’t really much of an effort and I’d like WP.com not to actively deter people from leaving a few more.

One Year Ago

There was the annual summing up of Blaugust. Also, the blog turned sixteen.

The completely predictable demise of Google Stadia was finally announced.

I was wondering what it was going to be like with a bunch of 20 year old MMORPGs. It was fun when UO or EQ hit that mark, but soon there will be many more.

EverQuest announced they were finally upgrading their heroic character boost from 85 to 100, though that was still nowhere near the level cap.

LOTRO could only manage a mini-expansion for 2022.

In WoW Classic our group was in Nagrand trying to get ourselves to level 68 in anticipation of the coming of Wrath Classic. One of the benefits of the Wrath pre-patch is that flying mounts were available at level 60. We ended up having to go to the Blades Edge Mountains before we were done. We made it to 68 there, so we were ready for Wrath Classic.

Meanwhile, the pre-Wrath plague zombie event landed. And there was how to adapt to the class changes that came with Wrath… including the introduction of Death Knights. We all made a Death Knight. And achievements and level boosts.

I also reflected on The Burning Crusade Classic, and how it didn’t stick with us… just like the original.

Then it was all eyes on launch day for Wrath Classic. I was on the first boat to Borean Tundra… but others had queues and so many people failed to load when the boat zoned that they had to put in a teleport NPC at the dock. The memories of Captain Placeholder.

We also got a November 28th launch date for WoW Dragonflight.

In EVE Online CCP held GM Week once again, including everybody’s favorite event, the Yulai bot bash. The August 2022 MER was looking a bit flat while the price of PLEX was rising.

CCP also announced the Uprising expansion as part of their return to the “two expansions a year” plan. There were also Faction Warfare updates kicking off.

In New Eden itself, the Imperium was retreating from its over-extended position in the southeast of null sec. Move ops kept going ahead of the collapsing front. Once home we began reaching out to make trouble elsewhere… though The Initiative was making trouble at home.

I wrote a brief history of Goon leadership in EVE Online. I also hit 250 million skill points.

And I wrote another Jury Duty story.

Five Years Ago

I did my post-event summary of Blaugust 2018. Also, the blog turned another year older. It seems to do that almost every year.

Pirates of the Burning Sea was in danger of shutting down. A player group eventually took it over. We’ll have to see how that plays out.

WildStar was no so lucky as NCsoft announced its time was coming to an end. Is there an emulator yet?

Club Penguin Island was done too, though that was the result of Disney being dumb and/or arrogant. We don’t get emulators for mobile apps, do we? Not that there would be much call for it given how CPI was received.

I was cynical about Torchlight Frontiers. But I am that way about a lot of things.

Then there was the crazy Daybreak and NantWorks joint partnership around H1Z1 and maybe EverQuest on your phone. I don’t know. But at least Daybreak could announce an EverQuest II expansion.

I actually played some EverQuest II. I went looking for a path to follow, getting stuck in a waterfall along the way.

I was on CCP about trading their touted “epic” tutorial with a laborious one based around The Agency interface.

That would fade into the back when just days later it was announced that CCP was being acquired by Pearl Abyss, makers of Black Desert Online. That got me going on about what it is like to be acquired as a company, something I’ve been through a bunch of times. I even related it to how a studio called Silicon & Synapse got acquired way back in the day, and they did all right, before wondering about the EVE Online store.

The EVE Online September update saw the end of another asymmetrical ship design.

Meanwhile, actually in New Eden, there was a war on. We had out eyes on that CO2 Keepstar. We blew that up, along with other structures of theirs. Then we were after more structures in Fade and Pure Blind. That led to a day when five Keepstars were blown up. With the war going badly, Dead Coalition bribed us to pack up and go home, ending the war.

Blizzard had a mount for you, if only you would subscribe to WoW for six months. Speaking of mounts, I got my Darkmoon Dirigible mount at last. And Blizz said people would get a demo of WoW Classic as part of BlizzCon, even home viewers.

Over on Kickstarter, the World of Warcraft Diary about creating the game picked up $600K.

I did a piece about the Elder Forest zone on TorilMUD. A great zone and a boon for young elves.

I also had a bit of a time capsule post and a link out to a character name creator.

Ten Years Ago

We heard that Warhammer Online was slated to shut down in December.

We also got the official word that Blizzard would be killing the auction house in Diablo III.

SOE was getting over some of their Station Cash screw ups while launching Dragon’s Prophet.

In general I wasn’t too excited about the expansion outlook on the MMO scene.

In EVE Online the Rubicon expansion went live. Our corp had a little drama as Gaff plotted to overthrow our CEO and created a new corp, Black Sheep Down. As is usual, he was good for the intrigue, but once he became El Supremo, he got bored and stopped playing. Happens after every coup… and there have been a few. We went from being literally the worst corp in TNT to… erm… well, that didn’t change I guess. We did run out to low sec for a fight and I put my alt in the corp to bolster our numbers because there was a minimum height requirement or something.

In general we were finishing up our deployment in Delve cleaning up after the TEST collapse and I hit 110 million skill points. Also, there was the war between evebloggers.com and evebloggers.net.

The instance group, in a hint as to where we were headed, ran a series of WoW dungeon knock-offs in Neverwinter.

And it was time for the usual bout of autumnal nostalgia. This time I returned to Azeroth, which made me ask the question, when is it nostalgia anyway? My daughter and I and a friend had a plan to roll up some new characters on a new server. Whatever it was, it felt like home.

I covered the great resurrection exploit in TorilMUD.

Meanwhile, pseudo-MMO Grand Theft Auto V launched. GameIndustry.biz has a 10 year retrospective of the title.

Fifteen Years Ago

Warhammer Online went live, first with the head start and then for everybody.

As we saw with other MMOs, there were issues coordinating with friends about which server to choose, leading to yet another gripe post about the whole sharded existence we have had to put up with in MMOS. I did wonder if the EverQuest II mechanism of multiple versions of a given zone might be worth it to get everybody on a single server.

The instance group was into WAR (after escaping from Durnhold Keep), though as a group we have some parameters that we had to work within. And the battlegrounds in WAR were not playing out well. And the type of quests that were in PvE led to some talk about which goal was worse.

In Warhammer itself, war were declared on gold sellers and Mythic was being very demonstrative about it. Of course, it did not appear to stem tells from gold seller bots that seemed to sit active for days.

I went on about those tips you see on the loading screen of many MMOs, spurred by a couple less than helpful tips in WAR.

In EVE Online I hit a major ISK milestone. But I was building up ISK because I had my eye on a freighter.

The Empyrean Age 1.1 update was upon us, which included 2 changes designed to reduce the scourge of suicide ganking. And nobody ever complained about that again.

Meanwhile CCP was offering up battleships for sale… model battleship for real cash, not ISK.

But the most important EVE Online event was probably Yahtzee Croshaw’s Zero Punctuation review of EVE Online. Much shoe-on-head wearing and talk about tactical logistical reconfiguration ensued.

In EverQuest II, the Living Legacy promotion was ending.

I was wondering why there wasn’t a World of Warcraft animated series yet. I think that might have been better than the movie we got.

LEGO Batman showed up, as did Wizard 101.

And, finally, the site hit the two year mark.

Twenty Years Ago

Valve released the first version of Steam, mostly to replace the World Opponent Network they bought from Sierra.

SOE released the Lost Dungeons of Norrath expansion for EverQuest, bringing instanced small group content to the game. Their ads specifically mentioned the new “dungeon crawl” experience.

Twenty-five Years Ago

Pokemon Red & Blue for the Nintendo GameBoy and GameBoy Color launched in North America.

NCsoft’s Lineage, probably the most successful of the late 90s MMORPGs, launched in South Korea.

Delta Force launched in the US. I have written about it and voxels and the coming of 3D accelerated video cards in the past.

And Google was founded back in September of 1998 as well. I should acknowledge the site that sends me most of my traffic.

Most Viewed Posts in September

Search Terms of the Month

homefront operation eve
[Those are a thing now, yes]

eve online plex for omega shiet
[it is kind of shiet, right?]

gamer blogs
[No such thing these days]

“see-bew-the-making-and-remaking-of-the-good-friday-agreement-26”
[uh… I’ve got nothing…]

candy crush old episodes
[Maybe on the GameShow channel?]

“wagering-agreement-meaning-in-nepali”
[Is this a Last Crusade reference?]

“the-primary-agreement-ffxiv”
[That you’ll sit still and watch all the cut scenes?]

Game Time by ManicTime

With vacation time away from home, total time played was down considerably. And when I did play something on my PC, it was probably based in Azeroth.

WoW Classic – 90.74%
EVE Online – 8.88%
World of Warcraft – 0.37%

ManicTime does not break out Wrath Classic from Hardcore, so those are the combined hours under WoW Classic. Also, I apparently spent almost an hour in retail WoW, so Blizz can claim another MAU. I think I was comparing the pets and mounts UI and the Dungeon Finder UI with what was on the PTR server for Ice Crown Citadel update for Wrath Classic.

Baldur’s Gate 3

As indicated by the play time chart, Potshot and I played zero Baldur’s Gate 3 in September. But we’re trying to get back to it. We even talked about that recently.

EVE Online

I did go on a couple of ops in September, but otherwise did not commit all that much. I helped blow up a few customs offices in Period Basis. High drama. I also logged in to visit Zarzakh and collect my Twitch drops and to update my planetary industry.

Pokemon Go

We played on the big island of Hawaii and started in on the master ball event. Oh, and I finished up my league matches so was able to advance to level 44 finally. Now I have a new set of tasks on the way to level 45. But the event that boosted xp gains in the first half of the month got me well on my way to that level at least.

Level: 44 (26% of the way to 45 in xp, 1 of 4 tasks complete)
Pokedex status: 801 (+21) caught, 813 (+18) seen
Vivillon Evolutions obtained: 15 of 20
Pokemon I want: Three specific Scatterbugs; Sandstorm, Icy Snow, and Meadow
Current buddy: Magikarp because I need to earn candies for a task

WoW Classic

The month started with the group still running Wintergrasp for honor points and ended with the group doing Brewfest and trying to get a mount to drop from Corin Direbrew. In the middle it was almost all hardcore.

WoW Classic Hardcore

We came, we rolled, we died. Well, Ula and I both died in any case.

A lot of time was spent in hardcore and then I died. Now considering whether I really want to keep doing that.

Zwift

Not a good month for the stationary bicycle. I was traveling for two weekends, and moving furniture on a third, so that is basically two riding sessions.

Level – 19 (+0)
Distanced cycled – 1,743 miles (+17 miles)
Elevation climbed – 66,011 (+384 feet)
Calories burned – 53,599 (+390)

Coming Up

In EVE Online we’ll be in the midst of the build up to the coming Havoc expansion.

Elsewhere we will be seeing the ongoing autumnal holidays carrying on. Brewfest in WoW will give way to Hallow’s End and all that. In EVE Online the Crimson Harvest event will also return.

We will be in the run up to BlizzCon, so there will likely be some hints to drive speculation on that front. There have already been leaks about a possible location from datamining.

It is also the traditional expansion announcement season for EQ, EQII, and LOTRO over at Daybreak.

And there are a few anniversaries of note coming up.

Daybreak Relative Game Revenues in 2023

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Once more into that video, this time to explore one single chart. I am not obsessed, I swear. It was just one of those moments where we got a lot more data than we usually get from game studios, and there was a lot to unpack so I decided to spread it out across a few posts.

Another tip for the video: It seems to default to 360p for me, but you can turn it up to a much sharper resolution to get a nice, crisp look at the visuals. And one of them is this chart, which comes up just after the 30 minute mark in the video.

The blog is going to squish that down to 600px wide, but you can click on it to see it at about double that resolution.

Monthly gross revenue by title

Why do I want to look at this chart? Well, there is a general interest aspect to it, just to look at how the various titles in the Daybreak stable of games contribute towards their overall revenue.

There are not a lot of surprises in that. We had a detailed report with percentages back in December of 2020 when Enad Global 7 was proposing to purchase Daybreak. That gave as an uncharacteristic look into the revenue of the company. You should go read through that post if it is the sort of thing that interests you. But we got some break outs for 2020 revenue through September 30th.

Page 16 – Revenue and Earnings compared YTD through Sep. 30 2020

This pair of charts was one of the more illuminating. What that showed was DC Universe Online was far and away the largest gross revenue generator.

But the surprise bit was that, even with DCUO that far out in front for gross revenue, EverQuest still delivered slightly more net revenue. EBITDA is “earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization” and was/is a bit of a BS metric introduced after the tech Y2K tech bubble to make companies look better by showing profits BEFORE taking those other items into consideration. In the US the SEC makes companies reconcile that against actual net profits if they use it in an earnings statement.

But for our purposes, for the purposes of comparing the profitability of individual titles at Daybreak, it is useful metric for determining the raw net revenue.

Net revenue is what you get after you take out all the costs of getting to the first number. In the case of DCUO, they have to pay for using the IP as well as having to share out cash shop revenue with Steam and the console platforms, who are taking as much as a 30% bite out of whatever users spend on the game.

EverQuest, meanwhile, is a home grown IP, so no payments on that front, and while it is on Steam, so there is a Valve tax on some transactions, most players deal directly with the company. So EverQuest gets to keep a lot more of that gross revenue, enough to make it the profit champion despite starting out at barely half of DCUO’s number.

Likewise, EQ’s gross revenue number is comparable to LOTRO’s, but it delivers double the Middle-earth titles profit.

This is, in part, why the oldest game in Daybreak’s stable is still important and still gets a lot of attention and still gets updates and expansions on a regular basis.

And I am going to assert that profitability is the more important of the two measurements. Having a lot of revenue is always a good thing. You’re nowhere without it. But if you have to spend more than you’re making to get it, then there is a problem.

Roblox, for example, made $2.2 billion in revenue in 2022. That is a pretty huge revenue stream. That is probably about double World of Warcraft’s best year, and WoW was no slouch at its peak (or now, frankly). But Roblox LOST money in 2022. They had to spend more keeping the game going and fighting legal battles and all sorts of other things. Roblox is basically in a business where it is selling dollar bills for 99 cents. That is a gross simplification, but it gets to the point of what their problem is. It is not something make up with volume, as they pitch used to go.

Anyway, what has all that got to do with the chart from the video?

Well, that chart includes all of 2020, so we have the January through September numbers to look at and compare with revenue since then.

Jan through Sep 2020

That segment of the chart is summed up in the Bookings by Game pie chart from that old post. Those are pre-EG7 numbers… and I am kind of curious why they included them, but there they are… which also happened to be the peak of the Covid video game bonanza, when everybody was stuck at home and those of us without a desire to make sourdough starter or re-watch Tiger King, were playing all sorts of online games. Animal Crossing: New Horizons has to have been one of the most well timed video game releases ever.

You can see most everything in the Daybreak portfolio got a bump in March/April of 2020, though it didn’t stick for everything. PlanetSide 2 continued to have a problem holding players.

That period of time has been our lens into which titles are important to Daybreak. The thing is, Covid… well, it didn’t go away, but we pretty much decided to pretend it did, so its influence waned on the video game industry as things went back to what was probably more the normal course of events. So the last twelve months of that chart look somewhat different.

May 2022 through June 2023

DCUO and EQ run a lot closer in the gross revenue department… and DCUO seems somewhat more volatile than EQ over the longer term.

Which isn’t to say that EQ doesn’t have its peaks. but I can explain a lot of those. One of the things I did with that chart was mark it up to show where paid expansions came out for EQ, EQ2, and LOTRO, just to see if they were boosting revenue to the extent I thought they were.

Gross revenue for Daybreak titles with expansions marked

I did also start trying to mark DCUO “episodes,” the name for its content updates. And while a few clearly boosted revenue, some had little impact, and none of them are expansions that need to be purchased, so they are not exactly the same.

But for the other three titles you can clearly see they get revenue bumps with expansions. They just are not nearly as big as I expected. And for EQ especially you can see other bumps in revenue that are likely related to special server launches and the previous expansion going on sale for half price two months before the new one launches.

Which is interesting as it highlights the importance of EQ… once again, the oldest title in Daybreak’s stable and the one that will be celebrating its 25th launch anniversary in just under six months… when it comes to Daybreak’s revenue. It is both cheap to operate and remarkably stable. It has some peaks and valleys, but few changes one would characterize as dramatic.

It… and LOTRO as well… seem to be doing very well as titles catering to their installed base. As I wrote in a post earlier this week, I can understand why EG7 is reluctant to spend a bunch of money on a remaster of LOTRO. As a fairly stable title when it comes to revenue, it seems unlikely that such a big project would pay off in the long run.

I expect that so long as those titles… and all of their remaining titles really… stay steady, that they won’t be going anywhere. They do seem to know something about the stewardship of aging games.

Now what about this new EverQuest title they mentioned as a possibility? Well, that is at least one more post I am going to get out of this video.

Dead in The Barrens at level 16 in WoW Classic Hardcore

3 Replies

Well, it happened. I got myself in just a little too deep and was hit by some respawns and that was that.

I was on a bit early and the rest of the group was not around yet. I was just half a bubble from 16 and had a quest to turn in off to the west, the first of the centaur leader quests. I figured I would just trot over there and turn that in. Easy enough.

I did and that was enough to level me up. I was now 16. Every level makes The Barrens just slightly less dangerous.

The minor quest hub where this turn in happened is right by a point where centaurs are attacking the area. I still had another quest for centaur bracers and from where I was standing I could see plenty of centaurs, so I decided to see if I could get the last five of the fifteen I needed before the rest of the group got on. The drop rate on the bracers is annoyingly low and splitting the drops a few ways leads to an endless grind.

So I stepped forward a bit, got in range of a centaur and hit him with a spell to pull him, got into bear form and started fighting him.

And then two more respawned behind me and joined the one I pulled. I knew I was in for it then. There was no time to waste trying to see if I could just power through these three. It was time to hoof it.

I started headed back towards safety. I hit myself with my insta-cast heal over time and I used my one emergency back up full strength healing potion. All I needed to do was get far enough for them to give up.

Unfortunately, they kept stunning me from behind, slowing me down. I was out of mana and the healing potion’s boost had long since been spent and I had barely made any distance at all. I knew I was done for a good 15 seconds before the final blow landed.

And then I was down and done.

Dead in The Barrens

Potshot had logged in just before I died, so was able to grab a screen shot of my druid Hurmoo on the Deathlog addon list.

There I am down the list

He even got my death location on the map for me… not that there was any question as to where I was. I did not lose my corpse.

That big red death zone in The Barrens

So that was that. Made it to level 16 and that character was done.

I think my biggest disappointment was that I forgot to hit one of the three pre-set macros I had on the right hand hot bar with last words. To die is one thing, but to die without having hit the “Sun’s out, guns out!” macro is really inexcusable. (One of my alternatives was “The nourishment is palatable,” alleged to be the final words of the late and often forgotten US president Millard Fillmore.)

So there I was, on the floor now, dead and done.

This is where the rubber really hits the road for WoW Classic Hardcore. As I noted in my last update, when Ula died in The Barrens at level 14, there was a real discussion about whether or not it was a fun and engaging experience to start over and do all the same content again.

On the plus side, there is a certainly level of efficiency. You start to know the quests and the lay of the land and where the hazards are and which tasks you can group up and do together.

On the other hand… the horde side of the world isn’t a lot more fun than the alliance side. In fact, compared to starting in Stormwind or Ironforge, the Thunder Bluff experience is a whole lot more running around. I think only the nigh elf experience getting to Darnassus and beyond is comparable when it comes to tedium.

The “new experience” of doing the horde side of the game loses it unique appeal pretty quickly when faced with all that trudging back and forth.

Meanwhile, I had a dead level 16 druid. As part of our backup plan, in case we got really fed up with starting over, we had designated an destination server for our dead. When you die in hardcore you get a free transfer to a normal WoW Classic Era server. You access that from the Shop button on the character select screen.

Hey! Free stuff!

You select that, fill out the options, including your destination.

Where shall we go?

I had to go back and take that screen shot after I did Hurmoo because the WoW client doesn’t save screen shots from within the store. Our landing zone is the Mankrik server. Maybe we’ll hang out with his wife in this second life.

But now it is the question of whether or not to start over from scratch or move on.

I have to admit, on dying, I was not at all enthusiastic about re-rolling and starting from scratch again. This was not enhanced by the fact that Potshot and Ula, on their characters, had managed to get up to level 18 or so, meaning I would have some serious catching up to do.

Fortunately, we have Brewfest going on in Wrath Classic as a distraction this week. We are working on the Brewmaster meta achievement and trying to see if Corin Direbrew will drop a mount for us. He’s about as stingy as the headless horseman, but we get a try for each character every day.

So I have some time to stew about getting back on the horse… or cow, as it were… in hardcore.

No Remaster for Lord of the Rings Online

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We thought about this and we ultimately ended up not doing it, we said “Hey, let’s go remaster Lord of the Rings.” Sounded really great.

Then we went through the numbers. When we did that we got to spend like 30 million bucks. I’m like, “Why aren’t we just making a new game?”

Because the return you could get from investing 30 million in a new game versus the return you could get from investing 30 million dollars into an existing game versus finding a good risk-adjusted opportunity in you like it’s dramatically different. So for us it’s not the right use of capital hence the reason why we’re staying away from things like that.

-Ji Ham, Transcript of EG7’s 2023 Capital Markets Day video

There is a transcript of the video. It was auto-generated by speech to text, so has some of the usual artifacts. But it is there for you to view and save off should you so desire.

Yes, I am still farming that video I wrote about last week for blog posts. It is a rich vein of content.

Anyway, that bit of trivia aside, the big surprise at about the 1:50:00 mark in the video is that any plans for a remaster of Lord of the Rings Online have been effectively scrapped.

That probably also includes any plans for a console version of the title as that would absolutely require a remaster to be at all viable. Can you even imagine trying to play the current game with a controller while sitting across the room from your TV? It would never be a marketable option.

Lord of the Rings Online

While this statement does not specifically exclude the idea of there being some updates to the UI… and my experiments with the Lossless Scaling app indicated that the game desperately needs more than just a scaling hack to be viable on monitors approaching 4K resolution… the idea that we’re going to get anything beyond minor tweaks and improvements over time is pretty much done.

the SSG team has 4K on their vague, long term roadmap, but that apparently will never mean any more than band-aids to address the most egregious issues at high resolutions.

This probably means that I will never return to LOTRO in any serious way. Even with the scaling hack, there are still too many things that are too small and cannot be resized to be reasonably visible for me to play the game without it giving me an eyestrain headache.

I know, “Boo hoo, Wilhelm won’t be returning to LORTO!” Who cares?

It makes me a bit sad, but I’ll get over it.

The thing is, I don’t think EG7 is necessarily wrong in that decision.

I mean, I am skeptical that they can make a comparable title for $30 million in 2023 or beyond. And at some point the lack of real, built in, I don’t have to use a hack to make this all fit my monitor in a useful and usable way, solution for large screens is going to become a serious road block for new players.

And, of course, as I pointed out the other day, EG7 seems fine spending an estimated $25 million to remake H1Z1: Just Survive, a title that they previously shut down because it wasn’t seen as valuable enough to maintain. There is, at least superficially, some logic there that does not track.

But the current player base doesn’t seem to care, and can get actively huffy if you suggest that the UI is at all an issue. There is always somebody willing to declare that your problem isn’t valid if it doesn’t affect them. Wait until you all get old as well! You’ll see… or won’t see… or will get headaches trying to see!

All that said, EG7’s decision still makes sense. I cannot fault their overall logic.

At its heart, LOTRO is yesterday’s news. MMORPG’s like LOTRO and WoW and EverQuest have a pretty standard life cycle. There is the launch and the initial growth of the player base, which can last anywhere from two weeks (EverQuest II) to ten years (EVE Online).

After that point, while new users don’t stop showing up… and are in fact required to maintain at least some level of replacement for older players leaving… they no longer join in numbers sufficient to increase the overall population of the game.

After that point, the game is all about the installed base of player. And by “installed base” I mean not just the current subscribers, but also all of those former players for whom the game still holds fond memories. The long term survival of the game depends on farming that installed base, bring in things that make them happy, keep them playing, or can entice them to come back for another run at the title.

For the former, that is content. New expansions, new updates, new classes, new races, new whatever. For LOTRO that means delivering the next bite sized piece of Middle-earth they are contractually allowed to use… and the span of content updates have gone from Moria and all of Rohan and to some things happening off screen during the books or mentioned in the appendix and will eventually get down to things like “that one time, at the Gaffer’s hole at Bag End” in the span of context… and things like river Hobbits and whatever other flavor of dwarf or elf they can interpret from the tales.

That keeps the current active player base engaged, keeps them subscribed, and gets a little cash shop money from them. There is a reason, for example, that EverQuest puts out an expansion every single year like clockwork. It was, as I recall, a bit of a scary move back in the day when they decided to stop doing TWO expansions a year. Could they maintain their player base with just ONE expansion annually?

And even then they generally do a very big mid-year content update related to the current expansion. For the installed base, content is king.

Of course, WoW came along, got an order of magnitude more players inside of a year, and kept growing them for a bit even with an expansion every other year. That might have eased the pressure on the EQ team… though both EQ and WoW teams still know in their bones that they can never get off the expansion treadmill lest the player numbers plummet terminally.

Meanwhile, the team, if it is wise, won’t forget the lapsed players. This is where retro servers, special rules servers, special events, and so on come in. Somebody who previously committed time to your game is much more likely to come back for the right enticement than a random, off the street, never heard of your game before player.

The EverQuest team has been on this for ages. Their first progression server was in 2007, when the game was eight years old. After long resisting the retro vibe, Blizzard finally did WoW Classic and it was a huge success.

Even EVE Online has its occasional retro moments, though it almost always player driven. The 2020-21 World War Bee got a lot of null sec players to come back to the game based on the mere fact that there was a huge war against traditional enemies. That CCP actively killed off the war by choosing that moment to screw up the economy and make capital ships so expensive that nobody wanted to risk them just shows what a strange place New Eden can be.

But it is sort of the exception that proves the rule, the fact that an inactive installed base is a market companies need to tap in order to keep their online title going for decades, and that they piss off that user base at their peril.

The player forum logic, that if only game X implemented feature Z then a bazillion new players would show it is always wrong. If Blizzard spent an expansion building player housing or if CCP went crazy and went back to the bad idea that is walking in stations, it wouldn’t bring in new players in any substantial numbers.

It might bring back old players. In fact, player housing in WoW would be an excellent way to farm the installed base. But new players would remain a trickle, largely friends of people who already play or random individuals who saw something about the game and decided to take a peek. (And who will likely leave, never to return, within two weeks.)

Features like 64-bit support, a not horrible launcher/patcher, and even support for higher resolutions, those don’t really tick the box for any new players. That ship has sailed. Almost no game gets a second chance, and those that do usually blew their first chance so drastically that a popular streamer taking a look at the title can bring a sudden influx of new players. Think Among Us.

So $30 million for a remaster, when that isn’t going to have any realistic chance of bringing in a real surge of new players… that is sensibly seen as a bad move. Better to produce content that keeps the install base engaged with the game.

That doesn’t mean I am happy with the decision. I would love to see the game remastered. Again, to some extent, I think its long term survival depends on it not being a game clearly optimized for 1080p monitors. But that is a medium to long term problem. In the short term, that $30 million wouldn’t move the needle enough to make a difference and would get some institutional shareholder upset about how that money could have been used for dividends or stock buy backs.

Because that is the world we live in.

How players view this… well, that is is another story.

Massively OP – LOTRO’s Cancelled Remaster
Massively OP – LOTRO studio pushes back against maintenance mode claims
Contains Moderate Peril – LOTRO: What You See Is What You Get

A Visit to Zarzakh in the Middle of the Night

EVE Fanfest 2023 – Reactions from the Remote View

Keynote

A much better keynote than last Fanfest. It was a lot less self-congratulatory and a lot more focused on new things coming, things to be excited about, and things that would be talked about later. It probably also helped that they didn’t just raise the subscription price like last time. Also, they didn’t totally over promise the content aspect. Last year was just awkward.

On the video it seemed a little embarrassing that Hilmar and Ratatti and a couple of others had to ask people to cheer to get the responses they expected at times. That looked like a bit of a rebuke on video, but you can’t really tell what the audience is up to. And, at events like this, the audience sometimes has trouble settling down to focus on the presenter rather than chit chatting among themselves because it is cool to be hanging out with friends and fellow players.

There was a decent amount of info in the keynote. Others have gone through it in detail, so I will be lazy and link out to those at the bottom of the post with other related items.

And, of course, you can watch the keynote yourself.

I suppose the highest compliment I can give is to recommend you watch it to get a sense of what was announced at FanFest. Or read the coverage of the keynote at the bottom of the post.

Expansion Announcement

We did get this, and it is a big deal. We will get the expansion on November 14th.

EVE Online Havoc

The primary new content aspect of it is, as with Viridian, focused on Faction Warfare. This time around they are letting players ally with the Guiristas or Angel Cartel to jump in and disrupt the battle zones. The Jovian stargates in Alsavoinon, Turnur, G-0Q86, and H-PA29 now take you to Zarzakh and there is a shipcaster under construction there that will send you to the front lines in Faction Warfare when the expansion launches.

Two expansions focused on Faction Warfare, good for them. But if it becomes three, people will be upset. All other groups get jealous when one group gets too much attention, be it deserved or not.

There are also a bunch of low key, quality of life changes under way, some in response to player feedback on things introduced in Viridian. I am waiting for the dev blogs and patch notes before I get too invested, but it looks like a lot of good stuff.

Again, CCP Ratatti said “automated SRP” and I think expected to be showered with adoration during the presentation. Instead he had to stop and say it again to try and elicit the response he was expecting. It is hard to tell if this just isn’t a feature in huge demand… quite possible, since SRP is kind of a big null sec alliance thing, and not even all of them do it… or if he just doesn’t get cut any slack anymore because he is now and forever the DUST 514 guy who came in, told players he knew better than them what the game needed, then proceeded to screw up the economy for 18 months in pursuit of an impossible goal leading to a precipitous drop in player activity during what I called “the year of disappointment.”

The CSM18 Election Results

We did get the results. I wrote a post about that, which you can read here. As I noted in the post, doing the results in the midst of Fanfest means they didn’t get a lot of focus, but we know who made the cut.

The 18th Council of Stellar Management

And we know who CCP hand picked from the 11-20 positions to fill out the two extra spots. I still have to go back through the VOD to see if they explained their choices. But it doesn’t matter as much as that these are the choices they made I suppose.

EVE Online Board Game

This got some mention, but I came away feeling like the whole thing was much further out than I expected. Somebody has been trying to build up a lot of hype for this on social media and it feels like that was mistakenly premature now.

EVE Strategy Board Game – War For New Eden

The game was available to try at Fanfest, which doesn’t really do much for those of us not there. I also didn’t hear even a tentative date for when the Kickstarter campaign would kick off.

Whatever The First Person is being Called These Days

It is being called EVE Online Vanguard, because that is a name with a glorious history I guess.

EVE Vanguard – Coming Soon

It is a first person shooter, it will somehow be integrated with EVE Online, it has been built with Unreal Engine 5 and Carbon for engine and UI, it is in alpha right now, and current EVE Online Omega subscribers will be able to sign up for a special test even in December which will be called First Strike. There was the idea of “founder” status or whatever mentioned, something special for the early adopters.

This does not excite me at all. I was previously promised orbital bombardment and never got to drop things on FPS players, so I am salty.

I know there are a couple dozen die hard and very vocal DUST 514 veterans out there who really want this, but every game or feature, no matter how bad, is somebody’s favorite thing. There were a lot of problems DUST 514 had to overcome, not the least of which was being on the PlayStation 3. But had it seen a strong enough response, it would have been moved to PlayStation 4 the way DC Universe Online was.

Maybe after 15 years of trying to make a successful FPS, CCP will hit the mark. But I am dubious.

Project Awakening

My desire was to hear nothing about this at all, but with Hilmar speaking I knew that was folly.

Just wake up already

That said, Hilmar was mercifully brief. He reminded us that CCP has been given $40 million to make this title and reiterated the “Not For Tranquility” promise when it came to blockchain technology.

I remain nervous on that front all the same. Despite the absolute collapse of the blockchain, crypto, and NFT market over the last year, most of that being expected due to the whole thing being mostly an outright scam, that somebody thinks this is worth $40 million means that that they will want some return on that, and may demand EVE Online integration at some point. And we know promises from CCP have about a 12 month shelf life after which they are deemed null and void by the company.

The EVE Online Monument

It was unveiled. I saw pictures online from people. It was mentioned a few times during presentations. There are now 765K names inscribed on it and an offhand promise to revisit it for the 30 year anniversary. But there wasn’t a lot about otherwise.

That said, they did update the monument name finder page so you can find where your name is on the monument.

There I am

Clicking on that brings up an image of the panel with all the names. You can find your own name in the mix. They are all sorted alphabetically.

In with the Wilhelms

Honestly, that exceeded my expectations, so I salute the effort.

Random Space Statistics

There were many. I need to go back and review the VODs to dig some out. But if seemed about sufficient.

Else?

What else was there?

There was Project M5, the mobile 4x conquest title, which is now called EVE Galaxy Conquest.

EVE Galaxy Conquest

That will be coming soon on iOS and Android, with a PC client promised for a future date. As somebody put it, we now have “EVE Clash of Corps” to look forward to.

There was some look into the underlying technologies for EVE Online going into its third decade.

Carbon and Quasar

Carbon is the front end technology which anybody playing the game now know because it powers the revamped UI, while Quasar is the backend technology. Also, Hilmar was able to make a joke about moving to Python 3 for the third decade.

Project Discovery, the in-game citizen science mini-game, will be moving in the future to help with cancer research.

Project Discovery

If science can harness our need for ISK and ship SKINS to help cure cancer, so much the better.

It was also announced that PLEX For Good would become a continuous effort that people could donate to at any given time and that players would help guide where the funds would go.

I am a little less excited about this, if only because my experience with human nature is that we tend to respond better to an urgent, current, specific need than enhancing the general good of the world in some general, unspecified way. I am not saying that is healthy, just that it is the way people tend to respond.

Finally, we got the word that ticket sales for the next EVE Fanfest were already on sale… and that it will be in May of 2025. So there will be no EVE Fanfest in 2024.

Tickets on sale now!

Overall, for myself as a remote viewer, I did learn a bunch of new things, so am not disappointed. Expectations were met and occasionally exceeded. But I am waiting for some dev blogs to nail down a lot of details. CCP is usually pretty good with that.

CCP – General Fanfest Summary Post
CCP – EVE Online Monument Page
NEP – Fanfest 2023 Keynote Recap
INN – EVE Fanfest Keynote
TNG – The EVE Fanfest 2023 Keynote Address

The Plan for the Return of H1Z1

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I have mocked and chided EG7 and Daybreak since the acquisition because they have consistently and repeatedly highlighted H1Z1 as one of their most valuable first party properties, something they own the rights to. Not as valuable as EverQuest, which Ji Ham declared as their most valuable, but still always on the list.

And the reason I have been rather dismissive of this is because, for all of that talk, they haven’t done thing one with H1Z1. It was, after all, a big announcement a couple years back that they were working on getting the build system for the app working again.

In fact, I have long harbored a suspicion that the EG7 plan for H1Z1 was to close their eyes tight and wish as hard as they could that H1Z1 would simply miracle itself back to its brief position of market dominance and popularity, which was back in 2015 and 2016, and become the Queen of the Battle Royale genre once more.

I mean, Daybreak tried everything… if you define “everything” as renaming the game every so often and to handing it off to NanWorks for some rando to run, only to have it handed back to them. I mean, there is a whole hour long Death of a Game video about this amazing series of half hearted moves.

The efforts have been underwhelming to say the least.

This shirt is missing at least two additional names…

So imagine my surprise when Ji Ham was up there talking to investors about plans for a new H1Z1 title. We’re they going to finally take a shot and try to regain so very much ground lost to Fortnite and PUBG?

First party game plans

No! They want to bring back the survival part of the game that was split off and renamed Just Survive way back when, then shut down in 2018, making its name especially ironic, it being the only part of the game that did not, in fact, just survive.

But I am totally fine with this. I am certainly more likely to go play Just Survive than the battle royale version of the game, which is technically still available both on PC and PlayStation 4.

The funny bit is that the people watching that video presentation were pretty jazzed about the H1Z1 announcement, but were clearly not aware of the difference between the battle royale and survival halves of the game. The battle royale part was the popular bit and that is, once again, NOT what they’re going after.

It even says at the top of the chart “sandbox suvival” and not “battle royale.”

Is that a good thing or a bad thing that EG7 has decided to return to the sandbox survival, the part of the game that Daybreak, under the very same senior management team, shut down?

One must assume, if they are bringing this up at all, that they have spotted some aspect of the survival game that might be adopted, adapted, or improved in order to make this a title worth investing $25 million into.

It is kind of a strange spot, because elsewhere in the video Ji Ham said they wouldn’t be remastering Lord of the Rings Online after all because it could cost as much as $30 million to do it right, and for that they believe they can get a brand new game… like a new EverQuest title. But I’ll get to that in another post.

That attitude argues that they are not simply going to revive and spiff up Just Survive, that they want a new game with a new angle and new game play out of this. If you won’t bring a current title up to date for that price, you certainly wouldn’t revive a game you shut down for just a few million less.

So maybe it is a good thing. The survival sandbox genre has a lot of players in it, but it always feels like it has a lot of room for growth and experimentation. And, personally, I am much happier with this plan.

I am perhaps not as thrilled with the idea of this being a shared public server concept, the way the original Just Survive ran. That wasn’t bad, but it does get tiresome to have somebody just ganking you on site. I mean, I played it for a bit.

The hunter… in his underwear… and his prey

But I would be a lot more interested in a co-op, PvE, server rental, larger explorable world model. I know, everything can’t be like Valheim in that regard, but some things can be like Valheim in format.

Anyway, it is potentially on the horizon, though I suspect that the launch date of 2026 is optimistic. In fact, given the history of Daybreak, the most likely outcome is that this gets cancelled long before it sees the light of day and we never hear about it again. We shall see.

Introducing Your CSM18 Representatives

2 Replies

The problem with the CSM election results being announced at EVE Fanfest is that they tend to get drowned out in the additional news and excitement. They also, apparently, get announced at 3am my local time. I might alarm clock for a Keepstar fight, but I am not getting up early for the CSM.

So I awoke yesterday morning to find that CSM18 has already been proclaimed. Here is CSM18:

The 18th Council of Stellar Management

The ten elected members won their seats in this order, with incumbents marked with a ** and previously serving members marked with a *.

Kazanir** – Goonswarm Federation – GoonWaffe – 1st round
Alcoholic Satan – Pandemic Horde – A Blessed Bean – 1st round
Luke Anninan** – Fraternity. – Into Oblivion. – 30th round
Angry Mustache** – Goonswarm Federation – KarmaFleet – 32nd round
Storm Delay** – Pandemic Horde – Horde Vanguard. – 33nd round
Mike Azariah* – None – The Scope – 38th round
The Oz – None – Pecunia Infinita – 38th round
Dark Shines – The Initiative. – Void of Eden. – 39th round
Mark Resurrectus** – TURBOFEED OR GLORY – Holey Roamin’ Empire – 39th round
Amelia Duskspace – TRUTH. HONOUR. LIGHT. – DEMONS OF THE HIDDEN MIST – 39th round
Kshal Aideron – The Ancients. – F.U.N. Inc. – CCP Pick
Stitch Kaneland – The Tuskers Co. – The Tuskers. – CCP Pick

In addition, for CSM18 CCP opted to pick two additional members of the council from the 11th to 20th place finalists, which accounts for the last to positions on that list.

Overall, there was quite a boost in voting, with the CSM18 election seeing 47,155 ballots cast. We can compare that to the last few years which were showing downward trend in voter participation.

CSM17 – 30,814 total votes
CSM16 – 38,086 total votes
CSM15 – 36,120 total votes
CSM14 – 32,994 total votes

As for who ended up on the council, only 6 of the 10 elected seats, and 6 of the 12 total seats, when to null sec candidates, down two from CSM17.

And we also saw a null sec incumbent, Pandoralica, fail to make the cut. Though it was perhaps asking too much of even the enlarged and independent alliance that is The Initiative now to get two members elected to the council. Pando and Brisc managed it last time, but Brisc had managed to build his own coalition of supporters independent of his former alliance.

Then there is the order of elimination. The STV voting method goes through a series of rounds and, at the end of each round, the candidate with the lowest vote count is eliminated. With 49 candidates in the election and a target of electing 10 members, there are 39 rounds. This is the round by round elimination record.

“William Chen” with 110.066856 votes
“Melicien Tetro” with 139.937642 votes
“SeriesPro ” with 164.118262 votes
“Dhuras” with 182.707135 votes
“Grima The Mad” with 190.223741 votes
“Sol Weintroub ” with 235.496787 votes
“Styxx ” with 254.256176 votes
“Dario Kaelenter” with 266.851594 votes
“Corporal Fillip” with 284.205175 votes
“Kilyavi Alaailaa” with 291.161414 votes
“Kontan Rekor” with 300.294067 votes
“Cael Caderu” with 300.878212 votes
“Lady Death Strike” with 311.708281 votes
“Rico Shikkoken” with 325.814735 votes
“Yondu Quill” with 334.080011 votes
“Nala Queen” with 341.840275 votes
“Gornilo STrubanov” with 347.596265 votes
“Gabriell Bemenacth” with 360.810012 votes
“Twan Molenaar” with 389.999255 votes
“Gideon Zendikar” with 437.100101 votes
“MILINT ARC Trooper” with 457.408813 votes
“Gustav Mannfred” with 475.992133 votes
“Rots Mijnwerker” with 537.858648 votes
“Drake Iddon” with 550.028593 votes
“RGC Godfather ” with 569.963184 votes
“Lee Adoulin” with 620.430003 votes
“Nuke Michael” with 659.860478 votes
“Larkness” with 691.945369 votes
“Velonad Tyldamere” with 802.444659 votes
“DutchGunner” with 913.547616 votes
“Kshal Aideron” with 1022.668744 votes (picked by CCP)
“Kelmac” with 1052.432071 votes
“Stitch Kaneland” with 1080.453270 votes (picked by CCP)
“White 0rchid” with 1311.775777 votes
“Pandoralica ” with 1705.981681 votes
“Phantomite ” with 1821.824324 votes
“Arhont Sibirskii” with 1941.553601 votes
“Torvald Uruz” with 2220.811269 votes
“Dujek Oneye” with 2916.299582 votes

CCP chose the additional pair of CSM18 members from those eliminated in rounds 30 to 39.

Finally, should sombody leave or be removed from the CSM… this used to happen pretty regularly back in the day… it looks like Dujek Oneye will be the first alternate candidate.

So there we go. CSM18 has been elected. Congratulations to those who made it in.

CCP – Forum post with election results
Reddit – Election Results Thread with ballot totals
Reddit – Candidate’s initial first round vote totals
Reddit – Round by round vote distribution
NEP – Meet Your New Council of Stellar Management
TNG – Fun Facts about the CSM18 Election

The EVE Online Havoc Expansion is Coming November 14th

1 Reply

I am having one of those days where I have too many items I want to write about. I still have a few half finished post related to that EG7 video from earlier this week, and then there is EVE Fanfest, where despite my low expectations, CCP actually delivered some things of interest with some hard dates behind them. You can watch the keynote here.

So, when in doubt, I am going to just take things in bite sized chunks and write probably a few more posts than I need to rather than trying to lump things into a couple of mega-posts. This will probably carry me through the end of the month. We’ll see.

And the first thing on my ranked priority list is the announcement of the next expansion for EVE Online, which is called Havoc.

EVE Online Havoc

I got to watch a bit of the keynote, including the intro to the Havoc expansion. Just before the keynote a message went out in game that the Jovian gates were activating and we got to see the gates go live and jump through to see the new system of Zarzakh.

An active Jovian gate

There was some flying around and we got to see the new station and the damaging effect that hits your ship, applying continuous hull damage, when you fly outside of certain safe bubbles in Zarzakh.

Shield and armor still intact while hull is almost gone

I am sure CCP will explain why they have added this mechanic to the system. We got the lore reason, which has to do with a black hole being nearby, but why they want to hold us to areas around structures was left unstated.

The main thrust of the expansion, however, is to add another faction to the Faction Warfare conflicts. We were shown shipcasters being constructed in Zarzakh. You will be able to join the Guristas/Angel Cartel faction in Zarzakh and drop in on Faction Warfare front line systems to fight against the empires and disrupt the formerly two sided struggle.

Also, there will be an Angel Cartel titan at last.

A glimpse of the new titan

So there will be a race to be the first to get a blueprint, then to build one, then to destroy one.

There is an expansion trailer as well. It doesn’t show much in the way of details. I suspect that we’ll have to wait for panels tomorrow, or more likely dev blogs next month, to get anything concrete.

The one thing that is shown at the end of the trailer is a glimpse of the first person shooter they have been working on since DUST 514 shut down a decade back.

It is called EVE Vanguard and it is supposed to make its appearance sometime on December. I will say, at least it is on PC this time. We’ll see if this gets another niche fan base too small to support it financially… like literally every title besides EVE Online that CCP has produced. But I’ll get to that later.

CCP – Havoc hits EVE Online 14 Nov
Massively OP – The EVE Online FPS is back as EVE Vanguard this December
NEP – Everything We Know About The Havoc Expansion
Massively OP – EVE Online’s Havoc expansion will finally let you side with the pirates

Notes from the Field in WoW Classic Hardcore

2 Replies

Our group carries on with our hardcore experiment, though not without some setbacks.

Hardcore for all your… something… needs

Some tidbits from the experience so far to catch myself up.

Blue Bar and Catching Up

I have been the least diligent of the three of us in playing Hardcore as I have a mild desire to get another character to level 80 in Wrath Classic. Being away for a week seemed like it was going to set me way back with the group.

This was mitigated somewhat by rested experience. A week away gave me a full level of blue bar. I left having just hit level 11 and was able to very quickly jump to level 13 in an evening of focused effort.

I was a little worried about the whole rested xp thing at first because I noticed early on that I wasn’t accumulating any. I had forgotten that you don’t start to accumulate it until you hit level 8 or so. But at level 11 I built up enough to burst ahead two levels pretty quickly.

Some Deaths

However, I really shouldn’t have worried too much about being behind as Ula’s level 14 hunter Moolaloo ended up taking the terminal swim in an oasis pool in The Barrens while I was away.

This led to a re-order and restart of the rest of the group so that when I arrived back from Hawaii and hit level 13 I was actually ahead of the curve rather than being behind.

Alternative Plans

The shock and realization that every death was going to lead not just to a feeling of loss, but also, and more importantly, a need to replay the same content yet again, led Potshot to formulate a possible alternative plan.

When you die in Hardcore you get a free… if somewhat convoluted… way to transfer your character to a normal vanilla WoW Classic server if you’re invested and want to carry on with that character. (Or if you don’t want to do the starter area yet again.)

Potshot’s plan is a set of rules for post Hardcore play to give a scoring system that puts a little of the edge into dying, but which would not require an ongoing need to start from scratch. There will be a blog post about this plan later should we end up deciding we have had enough of starting over from scratch.

Done with Mulgore

Meanwhile, Hurmoo, my tauren druid, was about wrapping things up in the starting zone that is Mulgore. I had done most of the quests and had met at least one of the local named celebrities.

Everybody loves The Rake

That set me up with a quest to head out to The Barrens which, has its own set of famous NPCs.

What was that about your wife?

Diversion into Durotar

If you watch the Deathlog addon, you quickly get a sense that The Barrens is a dangerous place. People die there all the time. After going after a couple of quests out there and having to flee a couple of times due to things like a level 16 hyena wandering in among the level 12 stuff I was stalking, I decided that I might like another level or two, just to be safe.

So I did what I used to do back in the old days and ran over to another starter zone, in this case Durotar, in order to run some still green quests to build up a little more easy xp. Razor Hill had some options for me. There were a couple of quests to run which involved getting deep into areas where respawns behind you could be an issue, even a couple of levels ahead of the curve. I ended up grouping with somebody else with the same plan, an undead warlock named Capers.

But even paired up, we were not safe. We went off to get our quota of quillboar kills and along the way ran into Captain Flat Tusk in the middle of a fight. He is a level 11 elite, maybe not dungeon boss quality, but at least a serious dungeon trash mob, and we had some trouble with him… though that trouble was largely due to the belief that we might be able to handle him.

We committed, got in over our heads, tried to run after I ran out of mana to heal, and… sorry Capers.

Alas, poor Capers

Capers didn’t seem too mad about it. He laughed and said it wasn’t my fault. But there was somebody else going back to start from scratch again.

Meanwhile, between Durotar and a bit more at the Crossroads, I was able to hit level 14.

Class Quest Time

Level 14 is time for the next druid class quest. Not for anything cool, like cat or cheetah form. No, this is for the cure poison spell.

Seems a bit obnoxious to require a class quest for a spell like that, but welcome to vanilla rules. The bitter part is that it isn’t a bit of a haul to get it done. I did the first step with some fellow druids, which involved climbing up a hill.

Class quest stage up there somewhere

The next stage sends me off to some place dangerous looking, so I am waiting for the group to get back together again before I set off on that trek. Fortunately, they’re more diligent than I at hardcore, so were into The Barrens…

The stampede

Then through into Durotar as well to pick up a few extra quests before committing to the land of Chuck Norris jokes.

I also used the opportunity to hit Orgrimar and get the flight point.

The big Horde city on Kalimdor

I was struck by how much it resembled Qeynos back in old EQ… at least the flat, walled front of it.

Being Poor

Really an aside, but I somehow always manage to forget how poor you are when you start off in WoW Classic. I know, there is a whole post here from just four years ago about us scraping our coppers together to get the 5 silver to form a guild, but I have been playing in Northrend at level cap where daily quests had out 20 gold like it was nothing and I don’t have a single character in the expansion that has less than 2K gold in their pocket. I’ve been spoilt, this being the true evil of the Lich King or some such, corrupting us with gold.

Anyway, I have twice not been able to buy all my spells on an even number level up because I’ve been out of cash, and I haven’t even been buying any luxuries, like food or water.

The Ongoing Deathlog

And then there is the server vibe and the insight the Deathlog addon brings. And the comedy. I am still far too amused by some last words.

Oh, there he is now…

I will say that there are a lot more people hitting level 60 now. You get that cheer sound a few times in an evening. But you also see the real tragedy more often as well.

You can always transfer to a non-hardcore server

I did also see the first real persistent case of somebody trying to gain attention by dying repeatedly. I mean sure, there is always somebody dying in a specific place just for a laugh.

Oh yeah, that’s a good one man!

But the other night we had somebody who just kept making orcs with attention getting names and dying over and over and over, likely just because they knew they would show up on the Deathlog display.

Ended up with a few dozen dead level 1 orcs

He seemed to vacillate between semi-suggestive and variations on the name of the president. Not the worst thing in the world, but it did clog up my enjoyment of Deathlog with what seems like a bunch of try hard attempts and 13 year old boy humor.

But that is the way things go with some people. I feel self conscious when everybody can see me, but some people feel the exhilaration of exhibitionism I guess.

The Ancient Gaming Noob

Veni, Vidi, Scripsi

Monthly Archives: September 2023

September 2023 in Review

Daybreak Relative Game Revenues in 2023

Dead in The Barrens at level 16 in WoW Classic Hardcore

No Remaster for Lord of the Rings Online

A Visit to Zarzakh in the Middle of the Night

EVE Fanfest 2023 – Reactions from the Remote View

Keynote

Expansion Announcement

The CSM18 Election Results

EVE Online Board Game

Whatever The First Person is being Called These Days

Project Awakening

The EVE Online Monument

Random Space Statistics

Else?

The Plan for the Return of H1Z1

Introducing Your CSM18 Representatives

The EVE Online Havoc Expansion is Coming November 14th

Notes from the Field in WoW Classic Hardcore