November 2023 in Review

The Site

It has a been an odd month for the blog.  I mean, sure, WP.com had to have its usual moment of stupidity.  They made comments use the horrible block editor for about a day, which broke so many things that they actually rolled that change back.  Still, I see their intent and they will no doubt come back to that idea and kill off the few comments I get here by making the feature unusable eventually.

But the odd bit was that I suddenly started getting a lot more traffic.  Like, something on the order of 2.5x traffic in November when compared to August, the last “normal” month, and I don’t know why or where it is coming from.  And Google Analytics is no damn help.

I mean, it tells me something.  Back in August traffic acquisition was in the fixed ratio that it has been in for years.

August 2023 Traffic Sources

Organic Search, which is search engines, which means 90% of it is from Google, was the top source of traffic.  It always has been over the life of the blog.  Traffic for most sites depend on Google’s blessings.

Direct is next, a distant second, and has in the past been something I generally assumed were regular readers who have me as a favorite or a bookmark to visit.

Organic Social is social media and you can usually spot where something gets a bit of traction on Facebook or Twitter or Reddit… those are the only social media sites which ever send me any real traffic, and it is Reddit most of the time at that.

Then there is Referral, which means I was linked somewhere that isn’t a recognized social media site.  You can see a little spike at the start of the month where an old post about voxels was linked in a forum post over at Hacker News.

Finally, there is Unassigned, which means Google doesn’t know or care.

That is the usual pattern, the ebb and flow of traffic here for the last decade, since Google changed how image search worked.

In September Direct saw a bit of a rise, then in October it saw a sharp spike that coincided with yet another post about Twitter.  And then came November with a roller coaster ride of Direct traffic showing up off and on.

November 2023 Traffic Sources

There you see Organic Search tracing about its usual line across the chart.  No real changes there, steady and consistent.

You can also see a couple of bumps from Organic Social.  I think the one on the 25th was somebody yet again linking my post about “Alamo teechs u 2 play DURID!” to Reddit.

And then there is Direct which is COMPLETELY OFF THE HOOK.  I mean, what the hell?  Not that I don’t appreciate the traffic (it made November my best ad revenue month ever by about 3x… please use Ad Block if you’re not a bot, I want bots to pay my hosting bill), but there are spikes in there big enough that they had to change the scale of the chart compared to August.

As usual, I am going to remind people that web traffic stats are garbage when it comes to details, but useful for trends.  But still, why all of that Direct traffic?  That is about 58% of my total traffic for the month pretty much out of nowhere and, according to my understanding, that I wasn’t linked anywhere, just one day more than a thousand people had me bookmarked and decided to pay me a visit or something.  Of course, it is always possible that Google Analytics is wrong and maybe this is all… I don’t know, traffic from Mastodon? (Haha, no, but maybe something else.)

Looking at other tools I have, the operating system ratio seems to have skewed very heavily in favor of Android devices, pushing that beyond 57% of my traffic.  A year ago, the last time I posted that chart, Windows 10 was over 62% of my traffic.

The net result here is that November was the most active month for traffic since April of 2016.

Strange times.  But the web is a strange place.

One Year Ago

Elon Musk had owned Twitter for just a week and things seemed to be going to hell already.

The Uprising expansion was coming for EVE Online and CCP was introducing the new ships a week ahead of its launch.  The October MER was there for a baseline to see how strong Uprising would hit.  The launch came and we got all the updates promised.  The expansion era had returned to EVE Online, bringing with it a spike in players.

For WoW Classic I posted my rankings of the Outland zones. Everybody loves Nagrand.

However, by that point the group was well into Northrend and taking a peek into The Nexus.  Our return visit saw us defeat the final boss.  Then it was time for Azjol Nerub, which we made harder than it had to be.  We also made our way to Dalaran and joined in on Pilgrim’s Bounty.

My deathknight was on his own path through Northrend, hitting all the quests.

There was also a run back to Outland to back fill some enchanting and some harvesting needs.

Overall Blizz was trying to get WoW players to subscribe for a year at a time.  They also had a good Q3 2022 financial report.

And Q4 2022 was looking good as the Dragonflight expansion landed at the end of the month for WoW.

PlanetSide 2 was trying to set another Guinness Book record for its 20th anniversary.

For EverQuest II’s eighteenth birthday I was thinking about housing.  The Renewal of Ro expansion landed for EQII later in the month.

LOTRO had its Before the Shadows mini-expansion go live.

In a Friday Bullet Points post I covered Crowfall going offline, the boost in New World players with the Brimstone Sands update, the anniversary mount in EverQuest II, WoW’s character stories on Twitter for its 18th anniversary, and CCP opening up retroactive recruiting bonuses so you could get a million skill points for just clicking a recruit a friend link even if you had been playing for years.

Then in a second Friday Bullet Points post I followed up on some of the Twitter woes, Blizzard and NetEase parting ways, the announcement of EVE Online Fanfest 2023, CCP embracing the MAU metric, Enad Global 7’s Q3 2022 financials, the Pokemon Violet and Scarlet launch, and the preview of the Mistlands biome in Valheim.

Then on Black Friday I posted another Friday Bullet Points post focused on EVE Online that reviewed a Team Security update, Permaband arriving on Spotify, Progodlegedn joining the Imperium, Alliance Tournament XVIII, some faction warfare stuff, Photon UI updates, planned overview changes, and Black Friday sales on Omega time.

The Mistlands biome was soon available for testing in Valheim.

Finally, my wife and I decided rewatch all of the Star Trek movies.  In November we managed Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, and Star Trek IV The Voyage Home.

Then, just for good measure, I reviewed All Quiet on the Western Front and how it deviated from the core theme of the book and previous film adaptations.  It still looked pretty cool though.

Five Years Ago

It was the end of days for WildStar.

I commemorated TorilMUD for having survived for 25 years, and did a post about the Castle Drulak zone on Evermeet.

I was looking back at the decade old VirginWorlds podcast dedicated to the Star Wars: The Old Republic announcement.

BlizzCon was on its way and I was projecting what we might see.  What we actually got… well, Diablo Immortal didn’t play well with fans, but we heard a lot about WoW Classic.  I went over why I felt fan expectations for Blizz are hopeless, but nobody listens.

I had finally schlepped my way to level 120 in Battle for Azeroth and collected my WoW 14th anniversary gifts.

In EVE Online, there was the very pretty Crimson Harvest event.  I was also showing off the swag I got from EVE Vegas. There was also an op out to Geminate to tangle with Pandemic Horde.

But mostly there was the Onslaught expansion, which landed mid-month and reduced the once mighty POS to just so many bubbles in space, though they still haven’t pulled them from the game five years later.  There were also daily login rewards and the activity tracker.

Project Nova, shown at EVE Vegas, had been postponed.

Daybreak was announcing The Burning Lands expansion for EverQuest while the Chaos Descending expansion launched for EverQuest II on my anniversary with the game, though I bid the game farewell for a while.

But the month was really focused on Lord of the Rings Online and its Legendary Server.  I wondered what we might see on the eve of its launch.  The server itself was overwhelmed pretty quickly and there were problems with its login queue.  A second server was announced almost right away.

After fiddling around with ways to beat the queue I was able to get in and start a new character.  There were some quirks of the game to come to grips with, like the lack of tin.  But I made it to the Lone Lands before the month was out, working on the many deeds there.

Ten Years Ago

TorilMUD, measured through its lineage via Sojourn MUD, hit the 20 year mark.  So I was playing that before there was any sort of Warcraft.

Time was running out on Warhammer Online, but they were going to give people a last chance to see the place… for free.  A pity I couldn’t get my account to work.

There was a scathing quote of the day about what “social gaming” had come to mean.

The Tears of Veeshan expansion launched in EverQuest II while we said farewell to EverQuest: Macintosh Edition.  Meanwhile, EverQuest veteran Aradune was back in play talking about a new MMO he had planned.

As for SOE, they were also being called out for selling Founder’s Packs for EverQuest Next or Landmark or whatever.  I was also wondering about the alleged new combat might imply that latency was no longer an issue.

The Rubicon expansion for EVE Online went live, complete with lots of stats.  The update did not save us from the node crash at E-YJ8G.  Big fleet battles, with thousand of drones in play, were taxing the servers beyond their limits.  Meanwhile, there was the Long Guy Fawkes Day… another node crash, but only after 6 hours of crushing TiDi… and we were headed back to Curse again.

EVE Online community site EVE Bloggers found a new home at last.

BlizzCon rolled around and I was speculating about what they might announce.  The actual big news generated much excitement for WoW players with the Warlords of Draenor announcement, though few thought it would take a year for them to ship it.  There was a silly moment where they declared something impossible.

I was already back and binging on the WoW, but the rest of the instance group came back as well after the announcement… and we basically did what we should have done a few years back, we got out the old group and picked up where we left off.

I was dropping bombs in War Thunder.

I wondered why we couldn’t just turn off achievements.

There was also a moment of Apple II nostalgia.

I was having problems with the LOTRO patcher… again.

And, after having read Timothy Zahn’s Heir to the Empire at its 20th anniversary, I got around to reading the other two books in the series.  The title of that post is a spoiler.

Fifteen Years Ago

We were all excited about expansions.

For EverQuest II, there was The Shadow Odyssey that showed up around the four year anniversary and which gave us the bear mount.  If you bought retail you also got the pewter bear which went on to feature in so many Tipa cartoons and my own parody thereof.

In EVE Online, the Quantum Rise expansion was available, granting those of us in New Eden certificates, among other things.

While it wasn’t out yet, Turbine was warming people up for the Mines of Moria expansion for Lord of the Rings Online.  It sounded great.  It just took me forever to get there.  At least I got the T-shirt… erm… the cloak.

And then there was a little thing called Wrath of the Lich King.  Yeah, that.  Sort of a big deal for some, setting sales records at the time.

The instance group did its last Outland instance (well, the last one at level) and then began poking our noses into Northrend to start the grand tour of the new expansion.  We even got into the first instance.  We also took a shot at the Headless Horseman.  To this day I still don’t have his mount. (In retail… got it in Wrath Classic!)

On the flip side, Warhammer Online passed from regular play rotation.  We left, never to return.

Finally, I was keeping the nostalgia ball rolling with a look back at how information used to be regarded back in the days of MUDs, a notable MUD NPC, hitting level cap in TorilMUD, a question about Anarchy Online, and a hazy recollection of a GEnie game called Stellar Warrior.

Twenty Years Ago

The Frontiers expansion for the PlayStation 2 based EverQuest Online Adventures launched.

Twenty Five Years Ago

In a trifecta month, Half-Life, StarCraft: Brood War, and Starsiege: Tribes all launched.

The Sega Dreamcast launched in Japan.  It would not arrive in the US until 9/9/99, an important day in my own life.

Thirty Years Ago

Sojourn MUD goes live, the start of a series of rebirths that live on today in TorilMUD.  The actual launch date is lost to time, but I have evidence I started playing right after its post-test pwipe back in November 1993.

Forty Years Ago

MegaWars I launches on CompuServe… somewhere around this time in 1983… maybe?  A port of DecWar, which itself was a version of War, which in turn was a two player version of the original Star Trek computer game.  Bill Louden got Kesmai to scrub the Star Trek references and clean the game up for commercial release.  MegaWars I was later rewritten and expanded by Kesmai into the four empire title Stellar Warrior, which was launched on GEnie after Bill Louden moved over to try and create a CompuServe competitor built on GE’s computing network, which was largely idle outside of business hours.  I played and have written about Stellar Warrior here on the blog.

Most Viewed Posts in November

One of the side effects of this traffic surge has been that it has been focused on recent posts, so a bunch of the old standards that wind up here every month are missing.  Only the Pokemon Go one about lucky eggs made the cut.  We’ll see if the rest return next month.

1. Collapse in the North: B2 Joins the Imperium after 18 Months Under Attack
2. Sixty Years Ago Today
3. Usenet Newsgroups Part I – I find some Usenet Archives on CD-ROM
4. WoW Classic Season of Discovery and the Classic Plus Dream
5. EVE Online Down the Rabbit Hole – Watching the Six Hour Documentary
6. Timing those Lucky Eggs for Friendship Milestones in Pokemon Go
7. Action in Cloud Ring at W-4NUU
8. The Village Attempts to Move Beyond Modems
9. False Memories and the Halls of Reflection
10. Summing Up Hallow’s End on the Day of the Dead
11. Guristas Assault Player Fortizar in Alsavoinon
12. A Brief Timeline of the Imperium

Search Terms of the Month

teen rating.top
[I think this blog might be M for mature]

wow classic: cataclysm classic
[Coming soon-ish]

does soulstone work in hc wow
[No, there is no soulstone exception]

chatgpt warthunder gameplay
[Do I want to know?]

h1z1 battle royale
[That is one of its names… can’t remember if it is the current name]

“wagering-agreement-meaning-in-nepali”
[Why does this keep coming up?]

Game Time by ManicTime

EVE Online topped the list for the first time in ages, another sign that we might be about done with Wrath Classic.

• EVE Online – 59.32%
• WoW Classic – 39.30%
• World of Warcraft – 0.91%
• LOTRO – 0.48%

EVE Online

The Havoc expansion landed and the user numbers were up and, as you can see from the ManicTime numbers above, I spent a much greater percentage of my time playing EVE Online.  I spent most of it doing null sec things and have yet to see any of the Havoc content beyond having visited Zarzakh back before CCP let people use warp disruptor bubbles there.  New Eden is a big place and the Havoc changes are focused on a pretty small slice of it.

Pokemon Go

Still playing.  I need to do a post to catch up on how we’ve done with the new features in the app.  I already have something in my drafts with the title “stop trying to make routes a thing” or some such.  The 1.5x friendship level bonus is going away today, which will make getting to 45 all that much slower.

• Level: 44 (47% of the way to 45 in xp, 2 of 4 tasks complete)
• Pokedex status: 812 (+8) caught, 825 (+6) seen
• Vivillon Evolutions obtained: 15 of 20
• Pokemon I want: Three specific Scatterbugs; Sandstorm, Icy Snow, and Meadow
• Current buddy: Smolive

WoW Classic

The end is in sight for our Northrend adventures.  Things are spinning down, we’ve done most of the things we set out to do, and once we can all get together again and finish off the Halls of Reflection dungeon, we will have about completed our nostalgia tour.

Zwift

Due to a electrical panel issue, the back room of our house is now without power.  That was, of course, the place where we had room for the exercise bike to sit.  It is also the room where we had Thanksgiving dinner, though we do that mid-afternoon and the room has skylights, but anything after sun down is in the dark or lit by battery powered candles.

Our panel needs to be replaced, but that takes permits from the city and the cooperation of PG&E, the main utility for Northern California, which means I hope we can get this fixed some time in January.  This is a real issue and not just an excuse to skip exercising over the holidays… stop bringing up extension cords and other solutions… we just have to wait this out.

Coming Up

Later today WoW Classic: Season of Discovery launches.  I will probably try that this evening.  We’ll see how crazy it is and if I just go back and finish leveling up my rogue in Wrath Classic.

The EverQuest Laurion’s Song expansion will also be showing up soon, not that I am at all likely to buy it or play the game again, but with nearly 25 years of history and 30 expansions at this point, it is worth taking note of.

December is the month that comes with a standard range of summing up the year posts, both based on my own assessments and the stats that various companies will inevitably throw at me.  You can expect the usual suspects to show up about books, highs and lows, where I spent my time on Twitch, and how many bananas in distance I scrolled on Reddit.

It is also the season for a host of holiday traditions, from in-game events to the Steam Winter Sale.  There will be some indulging in all of that I am sure.

And… maybe I’ll have some time off to play something new.  It could happen.

The Scope Covers the Jay Amazingness heist and the Pirate Faction Structure Attacks

Alton Haveri is back with another report for The Scope in New Eden, this time covering the betrayal of the  Imperium by Jay Amazingness and his defection to Pandemic Legion with the ISK and items he stole.

There is, of course, speculation as to why Jay betrayed his long time comrades and moved to rival alliance Pandemic Legion and questions as to whether he acted on his own initiative or if his friends in PL planted the idea and supported its execution in order to strike out at the Imperium.

Pandemic Legion and Goons have a long and complicated history, and were at one point strong allies in the war against Band of Brothers and its successor, the IT Alliance.  That started to fall apart after the disaster at Y-2ANO when IT Alliance destroyed PL’s capital fleet and displaced them from the Fountain Region.

Since then PL has become more and more of a foe of Goons and, later, the Imperium and there is always the persistent story that PL still wants revenge for the savage losses it faced at the hands of Goons and the Russians at the battle of B-R5RB over a decade back where PL lost 25% of its titans.

While PL has been overshadowed in recent years by its fellow PanFam alliance Pandemic Horde, it apparently still has… the coolest station environment?

Jay in the Pandemic Legion lounge

I can already tell this will lead to another round of requests for the return of the captain’s quarters.  EVE Vanguard will get you walking on planets, isn’t that enough?

The video also covers the results of the attacks on the player owned Upwell structures that were anchored “too close” to the ancient Jovian stargates that now bring capsuleers to Zarzakh.

A Guristas Gila aligned out as explosions rock the Fort

I previously covered the initial attacks on the Fortizar in Alsavoinon that was owned by The Initiative. It turned out that INIT was not actually unanchoring the Fortizar, the just renamed it, appending “[UNANCHORING]” to the name, in an attempt to fool the pirates.

Meanwhile, somebody over on Reddit has transcribed all the items that scrolled by on the chyron during the video, which I have copied below.

• Republic Fleet Confirms Vard Prototype Stellar Transmuter was Scouted by Angels but No Attempt to Capture Facility Made by Pirates
• CONCORD Assembly System Security Subcommittee Fast Tracks Applications for Status Changes by Repubic and Federation
• Mordu’s Legion Increases Recruiting Efforts as Demand for Security and Military Contract Services Increases due to Insurgencies
• Looters and Black Marketeers Reportedly Rounded Up and Shot by RSS on Several Planets in Hed Constellation
• Empress Catiz I Authorizes Creation of Several Dozen New Fiefs in Ardishapur Demesne as Lord Arim Ardishapur Seeks to Ennoble Ammatar Loyalists
• Aftermath of Imperium Cloning Sabotage Reverberates Through Markets as Volatility in Cloning Sector Markets Due to Investor Panic
• Khumatar Allek Berialsh Appointed as Republic System Governor of Hek by Order of Sanmatar Maleatu Shakor with Mandate to Secure System
• Guristas Insurgents Preparing New Assault on Asakai System Following Raids Across Aokinen and Kurala Constellations
• Kor-Azor Police Guards Intercept Cargo of Proscribed Luxury Goods Escorted by Royal Uhlan Frigates Through Kor-Azor Region
• Minmatar Republic Command Reports Vital Facilities on Vard Planets Remained Secure Despite Angel Cartel Commando Landings
• Refugees from Militia Warzones Hit by Insurgencies and Border Warfare by Empires Straining Resettlement Capacity Warns CONCORD Assembly
• Angel Cartel Insurgents Operating Out of Bosboger Terrorize Alakgur IV Following Raids on Dammalin Industrial Colonies
• President Celes Aguard Authorizes Further Emergency Appropriations to Increase System Defenses and Garrisons in Federal Branch Capitals
• Underworld Rumors of Arkombine Warclone Organization Breaking with ORE and Mordu’s Legion Spread on GalNet Conspiracy GroupNets
• CONCORD and EDENCOM Officials Holding Discussions on Further Planetary Fortification and Structure Defenses with Upwell Consortium
• Wiyrkomi Corporation Denies Excessive Reponse and Harsh Reprisals by Peace Corps Troops in Uchomida Industrial Colonies
• Imperial Navy Resupplies Garrisons in Remaining Fortified Bases Across Eugidi as Militia Warfare Rages in Constellation
• Sporadic Unrest on Intaki Prime as Nationalist and Religious Militants Opposed to Federation Military Presence Clash with Federal Marines
• Genolution and Cromeaux Inc. Call for Cloning Industry Security Summit as Upwell Consortium Joins Efforts to Allay Investor Fears
• Private Military Companies See Surge in Demand for Low Security and Border Colony Defense Contracts as Pirate Raids Expand
• Director Lars en Ramon of Upwell Consortium’s Department of Friendship and Mutual Assistance Refuses to Comment on Arkombine Rumors
• Caldari State Peacekeepers to Investigate Allegations of Massacre at Wiyrkomi-Seituoda Heavy Industries Colony on Uchomida III

I have said this before I am sure, but I will say it again; The Scope is one of my favorite aspects of the EVE Online ecosystem in that it often takes player actions and fits them into the overall lore of the game in a way that just doesn’t happen in many other titles.

EverQuest II Launches the Ballads of Zimara Expansion

We are in the midst of the Daybreak MMO expansion season.  We saw the LOTRO Corsairs of Umbar expansion go live earlier this month and the EverQuest Laurion’s Song expansion will be coming up soon, but today it is the turn of EverQuest II which is launching the Ballads of Zimara expansion today.

This is the 20th EverQuest II expansion (not counting adventure packs sold separately) since the game’s launch in November of 2004.

Ballads of Zimara

From the expansion page:

Following several calamitous impact events near shoreside communities on Norrath, involving magic-steeped stone and steel careening into the land and sea below, Norrath’s exceptional adventurers and artisans find themselves swept up in a raging struggle for survival in the skies far above! Splendor Sky Aerie, the hooluk’s secluded nest lands within the Overrealm, are under threat by a mysterious force, bringing discord to the once idyllic community of wise aviaks.

Securing peace for them will mean venturing where few have ever dared – Zimara Breadth, within the deteriorating Plane of Sky! Here, the legendary Djinn Sovereign struggles to keep his empire from physically being lost to unknowable planar forces, while those who would oppose him are crushed through violence, destruction, and enslavement carried out by his ruthless army, an army made up of djinn of all sorts, including something never seen before.

These metallic djinns may just hold the clue to his downfall though, when the figure tied to their creation within the Aether Wroughtlands is revealed to be a captive, held deep within Vaashkaani, Alcazar of Zimara. The opulent palace is both throne and dungeon!

But is freeing the captive in our future? Can the Djinn Sovereign be defeated? And what of his vast army of maedjinn? The answers are found within the Ballads of Zimara!

There is also a launch trailer for those who would rather watch than read.

The new expansion features a mix of the usual things long term fans of the game have come to expect.

• Adventure level cap increase to 130
  • New signature adventure quests
  • New adventure quests
• Tradeskill level cap increase to 130
  • New signature tradeskill quests
• New achievements
• New collections
• New Heroic Zones
• New Raid Zones
• New lands
  • Splendor Sky Aerie
  • Zimara Breadth
  • Aether Wroughtlands
  • Vaashkaani, Alcazar of Zimara

You are able to purchase the expansion in the usual array of editions.

• Standard Edition – $35
• Collector’s Edition – $70
• Premium Edition – $140
• Family and Friends – $250

The standard edition, while it leaves out a lot of the extras, is generally worth the price to play through the new content.  I have felt pretty good about the cost to play just to do the signature quest lines for tradeskills and adventure levels in the past.

• EverQuest II – Ballads of Zimara
  • Daybreak – Expansion Launch Announcement
  • Daybreak – Update Notes for the expansion
  • Daybreak – EQII Producer’s Letter
  • Daybreak – Ballads of Zimara Expansion page
  • Daybreak – Ballads of Zimara Pre-Order Page
  • Daybreak – Forum post about Crafting updates
  • EverQuest News – Ballads of Zimara
  • Inventory Full – It’s Back To The Overrealm With EverQuest II’s New Expansion
  • Inventory Full – One for the Cheap Seats Please
  • MMO Bomb – Everquest II Launches Its 20th Expansion Ballads Of Zimara
  • Massively OP – 19-year-old EverQuest II’s 20th expansion, Ballads of Zimara, launches today
  • Game Rant – EQ2 and Making a Good Expansion

My Last Character out of Vanilla in Wrath Classic

Cataclysm is coming.  We had that confirmed at BlizzCon.  But it will be a while yet.  They would only commit to some time in the first half of 2024 for its launch, though I cannot imagine them waiting past March or so.

In the mean time Wrath Classic runs down the clock as people finish up the final raids… I guess we still have Ruby Sanctum coming, but that was more filler back in the day than a major landmark, so I suspect it will be the same this time around… for the last true classic nostalgia push.

We will have WoW Classic: Season of Discovery to distract us for a bit starting tomorrow, but for me Wrath Classic has about run its course.  My play time distribution will likely reflect that in tomorrow’s month in review post.

We’re not done yet.  The group still has to finish the Halls of Reflection instance, though the main problem there is finding enough free time during the holidays to get the group together.

But I feel like I have met my individual objectives, such that they were, in Northrend.  More than my base level objectives, certainly.  I will do an accounting at some point, but good times were had.

And, in this end cycle of the expansion, this denouement of the Lich King, I decided I wanted one more taste, one more quick tour of Azeroth an all that will soon be left behind.  So I got out Chad.

Roll on brother Chad

Those who missed or forgot the early history of our run through WoW Classic may not recall my human rogue, Chadwicke, or Chad for short.  I suppose it has been more than four years since we first stepped into WoW Classic.  In the original group mix he was DPS while Earl was tanking.  He got left behind with the pandemic reshuffle that saw Earl’s assignment to Japan extend into a long term commitment due to the country not allowing anybody else in.  So Chad was out around level 32 and Viniki, my gnome warrior, stepped in to tank for us through into Outland.

With the Joyous Journeys XP buff running from now until whenever Cata lands, I figured it would be a smooth enough ride through Azeroth.

Can be turned off by your local inn keeper

But just to keep myself from having to worry about gear I used some of my Argent Tournament earnings to pick up a few heirloom items.  The heirloom sword and dagger would assure Chad was always hitting as hard as possible, while the chest and shoulder pieces kept his armor on pace and gave him another 20% XP bonus.

So he had a nice smooth run, finishing off Stranglethorn Vale, then romping through Searing Gorge, a bit of the Hinterlands, Tanaris, Felwood, and the Plaguelands before hitting level 60.

There we go, level 60

I thought about hitting Outland at 58, but then decided to stick it out in Azeroth until 60 before I went through the portal.

But I didn’t wait long after 60

The reason for waiting was that I really didn’t want to slog around in Outland on the ground.  Since the pre-patch for Wrath Classic, basic flying has been available at level 60.  So it was through the portal and to Honor Hold to pick up flying.

Flying learned

Since mounts and pets are shared across characters now, I didn’t even have to buy a flying mount, just the skill.  I had been using the Headless Horseman’s mount for ground travel already, so I held onto it for flight as well.  So many years waiting for that mount, I am going to use it until I am sick of the sight of it.

Chad has since blazed through Hellfire Peninsula and it at level 65 in Zangarmarsh.  I figure when he hits 66, which should be soon, then it is off to Nagrand.

Not much sun in Zangarmarsh there Chad

It has been a low effort tour, but a tour it has been, a breeze through some of the old locations and the original quests, a reminder of the old world with just a taste of what it was like.

My goal is to get Chad to 80, to round things out in Wrath Classic with six characters at the level cap.  I know we have the whole Season of Discovery thing showing up tomorrow, but I still have plenty of time to get there even if we do end up hooked on the new concept.

With six possible characters going into Cata Classic, I wonder how many will come out on the other side for Mists of Pandaria?

Getting Home From the North

The map in the north is settling down since the announcement that B2 Coalition was done fighting up there.

Those groups formerly in the B2 Coalition have mostly moved south or made their peace with the new overlord in the north.  The new Phoenix Coalition, made up of Synergy of Steel, Banderlogs Alliance, Razor Alliance, and Game Theory, will remain in the northeast, having signed an agreement with PandaFam declaring they will not assist the Imperium in any way, including allowing the Imperium access to their structures.  A version of the treaty with suggested edits was posted to Reddit if you want the details.

The Initiative has pushed its border up out of Fountain and into the bottom of Cloud Ring to give itself some buffer and to better be able to sortie into the north for fun.  The coalition map shows where things are currently.

Null Sec Coalitions – Nov 27, 2023

The new members of the Imperium have abandoned their sovereignty and remaining assets up there.  The last remaining bit of space in Pure Blind are being taken.  Move ops have continued south, but no doubt some stuff was left behind as we retreated back down to the southwest of null sec.

The first structure to go in the wake of our departure was the Brave Keepstar that we had been staging out of in DO6H-Q up in Fade, which was blown up mid-month.  The first move ops were to get us from there to the Imperium Keepstar at 6RCQ-V in Cloud Ring.

The staging Keepstar in DO6H-Q

In one of my classic “not paying attention because I was in a hurry” moves I managed to get my ships out, but left my Tech Fleet pod with Amulets sitting in the clone bay in that Keepstar.  I was logged in when we got the warning that the clone bay would be offline shortly due to the structure being reinforced and thought to myself, “Sure glad I got everything of MINE out of there!”

Then I checked, just to be sure and saw my second most expensive pod still parked there.  Doh!

I quickly clone jumped into the pod and, seeing that things were mostly quiet, took an Ibis out of the station and a couple of jumps to an Astrahus that had yet to be reinforced.  I let it sit there until late in the evening, then slipped into an NPC station in Pure Blind.  From there I had an alt on a second account fly up in a shuttle then scout my pod back to 1DQ1-A, where it got home well ahead of my ships.

Why yes, I do have SKINs for shuttles and I use them

Luck was with me too, because it managed to survive the Wrath of Jay when he pulled the clone bay module before downtime before fleeing the Imperium for Pandemic Legion.  That clone would have been home by then no matter which route it had taken, so at least I didn’t rush it into harms way I suppose.

And I forgot to check on an alt, so when the Keepstar did get blown up some items went to asset safety all the same.

Stuff was left behind

I am sure there will be some people camping that low sec station when the timer runs down and the asset safety items are delivered.  Fortunately, judging by the character this was on, it is probably a couple of tech I logi cruisers I left behind.  Nothing expensive.

From 6RCQ-V the next round of moves in Cloud Ring were a single jump to F7C-H0 and the next Keepstar in the chain.  This one had been transferred over to The Initiative who, as noted above, have expanded their frontier into Cloud Ring.

We lingered there for several days while waiting for as many as possible to make the move.  Then the first move op back to Delve was announced.  However, the first step of that move op was to go back to 6RCQ-V to cover the Keepstar there, which was being unanchored.  Capitals and sub caps gathered around to cover the operation.

Sitting on the Keepstar, waiting for the moment

There is no external timer for an unanchor, so we sat around watching the structure… or more likely, were tabbed out of the game and doing something else… until the time came and the structure went away, folded up in a nice little box… or, at least a box much smaller than the structure.

Bubbles up on the spot

There is a whole process for taking down a big structure, and the end includes having a freighter on hand to haul off the smaller than it was, but still sizable box that a Keepstar comes in.

Pandemic Horde had some bombers in the system as well as some interdictors and they swooped in to disrupt the proceedings.  I was looking away when a big explosion lit up the capital ships.

They killed Kenny!

They managed to blow up the freighter… and the Keepstar did not drop from the wreck.

The freighter kill

That is probably the fastest way to kill a Keepstar, though you don’t get a nice kill mail for the structure.

The quantum core dropped, but those have a 100% chance of dropping and we were able to recover that.  But to add insult to injury, while a bunch of PH ships were bubbled up and less than 100km away, well within the engagement range of the Tempest Fleet Issue fit we were using, all attempts to target them were thwarted with a message about them being the 172km reach of our guns.

The fickle nature of “server weather” was rolling against us.

After that was cleared up, we sat around for a while, then moved back towards home, taking the well trod path through Fountain home to Delve.  I’ve been up and down this route many times in the last dozen years.

From our staging to home

It was a slow drive down because we had to cover the capitals and super capitals, but it isn’t that many jumps all the same.

Down in the south the new alliances in the Imperium are taking up new homes.  Brave is moving into Querious, IGC into Period Basis, and so on.  There is a lot of space in the southeast.

Will it remain quiet?  PandaFam has shown a willingness to try to put itself up on our frontiers, dropping structures as they did at W-4NUU a week back.  They have said they want to come get us, either through Cloud Ring in the north or via Catch in the south.  There is rarely anything like peace for long, even if there isn’t a big war going on.

Getting Ready for EVE Vanguard with the New EVE Online Launcher

EVE Vanguard, CCP’s latest run at a first person shooter based in, and connected directly to, New Eden, is coming.  There is supposed to be some intro event coming up next month if I recall right.

EVE Vanguard – Coming Soon

One of the final steps to take in getting ready for its arrival is grabbing the new launcher, which will be a requirement for playing EVE Vanguard… not that we’ll have an option to keep the old launcher.  This is why it will be mandatory soon.  In fact, it will be required next week, on December 7th.

The new launcher has been rattling around in beta since April, and I saw a bit of write up on it over at TNG previously, but I decided to take the plunge myself over the holiday weekend.  Something to write about for a Monday morning post-turkey article I suppose.

I have it now and… it feels like it takes up more screen area than the old one  It also presents your individual characters from each account rather than just being the account name.

The new launcher unveiled

One thing I noticed was that it did not delete the old launcher on install, so I was able to get that up in order to compare the two.

The old launcher, still hanging out

Both of those images are reduced down to the 600 pixel wide restriction of my blog’s theme, so it can be difficult to get a sense of the size difference.  What is odd to be is that while the new launcher, as I noted, feels like it takes up much more space, it is actually pretty close in size to the old one.

Expanding the images above, the old launcher comes in at 1660 pixels wide by 864 pixels tall, while the new launcher is 1683 pixels wide by 963 pixels tall.  That makes the new launcher about 110% the size of the old one, which isn’t much of a change.  So I suppose it is the way the information is laid out that is making it feel like it is taking up more space.

Or maybe I just feel like the space isn’t being used as effectively?

The old launcher devoted more space to ads and news about the game… though it also had more blank space.  But the change with the new layout feels a bit off to me.  I hate to be the one advocating for ads taking up more space, but the launcher is one of the more reliable sources of information for players, a location we all pass through when entering the game, unlike other information sources such as Twitter, the EVE Discord server, the forums, or r/eve.

I want to like the new launcher putting more emphasis on the characters, and perhaps it is something I will get used to, but my project managers senses start tingling when news and information about a product gets lower priority.

And maybe I would be more convinced if the character information being presented was a little more useful.  My corporation and alliance are data points I am unlikely to forget overnight, while my CONCORD security standing isn’t something I think about very often at all.  That seems like a lot of real estate dedicated to things I probably don’t care about because I don’t expect them to change very often.

And the fact that security status is just tossed up there with an icon you might or might not know off hand… I only know what it is because I happen to know my sec status is 5.00, so I put that together quickly enough… maybe I do think about my sec status more than I guessed… but has no tool tip to tell you what it is if you mouse over it.  You either know what it is or you’re out of luck.

Nit picky I suppose, but I guess they were pressed for what else to put up there.  It might be nice if I could pick something else… maybe my current skill in training, ISK balance, character location, current ship… I am just thinking about all the things you see when you do a character select with the old launcher.

What you see on character select currently

Oddly enough, the ONE thing you don’t see in that line up is your sec status, so I am curious about how that suddenly became a contender for important data to be displayed in the launcher.  Hell, I just noticed that in the old character picker you even get the little war dec icon that you can mouse over and see all the active war declarations against your corp/alliance.  Even that tops sec status in my book.

But I guess there is an argument to be made that something is better than nothing, which is what the previous launcher offered.  But I am not buying the statement that the launcher is more immersive when it tells me something I already know.

Oh, and you don’t get to see all of that data from the old character select.  Because the new launcher allows you to select the character you wish to log in with, you end up bypassing the old post-login character select.

Sort of.

The launcher sends you to that screen and you still briefly land there on your way into the game, but it just shows the one character you selected.  The new launcher is no doubt handing the client a token of some sort to indicate your selection and carrying on as before as thought you had done it the previous way.

And they kind of had to do it that way because they still needed to be able to support the ability to log out of a character and log back in with another without having to go back to the bad old days of having to quit the client before being able to sign back in.  And when you log out a character from the game to swap to another, you land back and the three character select screen above as before.

It is a bit of a kludge, but probably considerably easier that re-architecting the login process in such a way to support all the required states without using the old ones.  It works.

The one thing that does go away, however, it the login reward UI, a staple of the process of every first daily login, where you get to redeem the daily login reward plus any current login campaign they happen to be running.

You can, and have been able to for quite some time, claim the login rewards from within the game.  But the button for that, while highlighted in orange, is much less obtrusive than the reward screen that previously popped up with the old UI on the character select screen.  So you go from something like this in your face:

The login rewards for last years holiday

To something like this down in the lower left of your screen.

Down in the corner with the tool tip

I do wonder if CCP will notice a decline in those claiming login rewards, though I might weight that possibility more heavily than others because of my 34″ wide screen monitor, which places that little alert just out of my peripheral vision, a situation not helped by the placement of my Blue Snowball II microphone, which covers that corner of my screen.

The one thing you do not escape, when logging in with an alpha account, is the big warning dialog about how much better omega is.  That pops up mid-login and stays up into the game.  But a lot of titles do that when they offer a subscription option.  At least they don’t do the Daybreak trick and open a tab in your default browser when you log out of an alpha account to tell you once more all the many benefits of omega.  (Fortunately, nobody from CCP has read my blog since 2013, so they won’t get that idea from me!)

Of course, the big new coming feature for the launcher is the ability to launch and log into EVE Vanguard, the integrated first person shooter that will start seeing its first players at some point in December.

It was necessary to integrate EVE Vanguard directly into the EVE Online launcher because CCP is dead set on linking the two titles together, so your EVE Online account login with also be your EVE Vanguard login as well.  The two will be as one in a way that even DUST 514 was not.  I have expressed my own skepticism about this already, but that isn’t going to change anything, save eventually either proving my thoughts wrong or queuing up yet another “I told you so” post some time down the road.

We shall see.  But I am set.  The launcher is installed.  I suspect that the December 7th patch will remove the old one.  Then it will just be the wait until EVE Vanguard is a thing and we get to see what it is all about.

Addendum: You can get to the old character select screen rather than logging directly into the game with the selected character by changing the launch setting in the launcher.

Launch setting options

For those of us with characters logged off out in hostile space, the order to go to the login screen but not into space is still something we can do.

You will find that option under account settings and you need to set it for each account individually.

Usenet Newsgroups Part I – I find some Usenet Archives on CD-ROM

I am once again skirting a bit on the edge of the telephone related subjects as well as taking a bit of a divergence from, what had been for a few posts, something of a tale about my career.  But some of it takes place in parallel with my time at Global Village and it is telephone related in that the internet was dial-up for most of us back then.

I am also divert a bit because I am still formulating how to really tell the tale of the next two positions…  but mostly because I found some stuff in a box in the garage while we were getting ready for Thanksgiving.

And what I found were some old CD-ROMs containing archives of Usenet news groups from the early 90s.  Strange times!

A 31 year old data time capsule

This is probably going to be a three-parter because even as I was writing this I kept coming up with additional things to add.  So this will be the intro.

Usenet was, in its own archaic way, something of the precursor of social media.  It was open to anyone (or anyone with the technical means and knowledge) to participate in.  It was divided up into nine top level groups (after the great renaming of 85/86), eight of which faced some form of moderation and the ninth, ALT, which was the wild west of Usenet, where anything was possible.

The primary Usenet groups

ALT did not, in fact, stand for Anarchists, Lunatics and Terrorists, it just seemed that way.

And there were many other locally created groups that had limited distribution.

It was, in many ways, an ideal that many today wish social media today would move towards.  There was no central authority.  It was a distributed network, so did not depend on any one server or organization, but was dispersed among servers all over the internet.  I am sure some fans of the Fediverse and nodding to themselves in a self-congratulatory way even now.

Moderation was generally light, though it varied from news group to news group.  Generally people were good and the only problems were generally the incoming freshman class in the autumn because that was primary source of new users.  They got yelled at for being uncouth in the moderated forums, with snotty self-righteous group moderators telling those that breached expected decorum that they needed to read the FAQ for the group, which was generally published to the group on the first of the month.

In other words, typical forum behavior where those who were there first believe that has given then the inalienable right to project their ideal social conventions on a bunch of strangers who show up later.  They are the insiders and you need to obey and study them if you want to be accepted into the group.

That is a situation that works well with a small, controlled audience.  The forums for a popular video game or Mastodon before Elon Musk bought Twitter, are examples of that, where a few loud and persistent voices can wield influence and shape norms by simply shouting down anybody who falls out of line.  There is always an audience for authoritarians, as we can see these days in real world politics.

As I believe I have mentioned in the past, I was yelled at on Usenet back in 1988 merely for having a cup.portal.com address, that being the product of a commercial company selling access to the sacred groups which were meant to be free of such crass commercial endeavors.  Only those with a legitimate reason were supposed to be allowed access… merely being a student at a university with some level of internet access being the primary legitimate path for most.

Later, when news groups were opened to online services like AOL (the September that never ended), and later when people started getting dial-up internet, many groups were simply overrun by people who were not willing to fall in line because some petty martinet got mad at you for using all caps and demanded you read the FAQ.  A popular revolution overthrows petty tyrants.

Usenet itself was a very big deal by the mid-90s and then, while it still exists, was pretty much destroyed when it came to usefulness by the time Y2K came around.

One aspect of the whole venture was that Usenet was distributed, which meant that you were somewhat dependent on your local admin subscribing to and keeping some back archive of the newsgroups which interested you.

Granted, text doesn’t take up much space, but this was also a completely different era when it came to computer storage.  Back in 1985 in Back to the Future, when Doc Brown shouts about the Flux Capacitor needing 1.21 gigawatts of power, the prefix “giga” (however you chose to pronounce it) wasn’t part of the every day vernacular the way it is today.  Today I have a 5 terabyte physical hard drive sitting on a shelf that I use to back up my computer.  SIX TERABYTES just sitting on a shelf, extra, used just for backups.  And I bought it on a whim because it was cheap in order to replace the 2.1 terabyte unit I had been using.  I have multi-gigabyte micro SD drives sitting around that make the nail on my little toe seem large.

We have come so far that hard drive space, which is something I used to fret about, isn’t something I think about more than once or twice a year.  But back in the day…

At a time when hard drive space looked like it might get to a cost level of a dollar per megabyte of storage (I remember it being a big deal when those Quantum 240MB drives dropped to just over $200 around 1993/94) and many server admins were working on academic budgets (the trend of universities supporting sports and administration staff over anything helpful to academics was already in full swing), even those who were enthusiastic for newsgroups, had to make some hard choices.

The first to go was alt, or at least alt.binaries.  The latter was where files encoded as text could be shared to newsgroups.  There was some concern about software piracy, but mostly it was porn.  The internet was for porn long before there was a musical declaring it.

But it was often just easier to set the local archive to expire after a set time frame.  When Usenet was an exclusive club that did not like outsiders, those dates could be generous.  I remember in the late 80s running out of things to read on Usenet during the summer.

As its popularity increased, the amount of text increased, and the need to trim became a little more pressing.  But when you start deleting stuff, even banal re-litigation of tired old arguments around the presence of pointed ears on elves in the Tolkien universe, people start to freak out.

There was, at that time, no Internet Archive, though there soon would be.  So people took it upon themselves to archive all the groups… except the binaries, because porn and copyright issues… and store it on CD-ROM.

CD-ROM was the first large capacity, semi-permenant, cross platform, removable storage medium available for computers.  At 640-700MB of capacity, it was huge in an era when 20MB hard drives were still around, 40MB drives just started to become a standard, and 80MB drives were an extra-cost option.

Yes, they were slow.  The default 1x drive speed was 150,000bps.  Faster that a 2400bps modem, but comically slow when compare to hard drives, where we were already in an ongoing pissing match between manufacturers about access and transfer speeds.  But the CD-ROM’s ability to hold a mass of data was unmatched at the time.

A company called Sterling Software which was mostly known for development tools (and which was later acquired by Computer Associates, the one time leader in zombie software extortion… the Gamigo of enterprise software packages, if you get that reference… and which was later scooped up by Broadcom) started packaging up CD-ROMs of newsgroups and selling them.

This, of course, made people angry, as commerce always does.  The purity of the platform was being sullied and angry people added statements to their .sig files explicitly refusing permission for any commercial reproduction of their posts that they otherwise flung for free on the internet where they were being read and archived with any notice of what these sorts of things.

The feeling is always that SOMEBODY is getting rich off of your incredibly inane prattle, which is naturally utter bollocks.  The only value 99.9% of individuals add is bulk, mere heft to the size count of the archive.  This is why I don’t get worked up when my own site gets scraped because I’m already giving it away for free.

Anyway, despite the protestations about greed, Sterling wasn’t making bank on these CDs because the subscription price was reasonable enough that I signed up for about 18 months.  I unsubscribed when I was getting 3-4 CD-ROMs a month in the mail and they started stacking up, unopened, because it turns out what somebody said on the internet approximately six months ago isn’t all that compelling.

I am not sure why I subscribed to it, beyond it seemed like a neat idea and I and about 10 degrees off in my life from becoming Jason Scott and trying to archive and save everything.  I am just too lazy to devote my life to it, so what you get are posts like this where I try to preserve snapshots in my memory before I forget them.

I was an active Usenet user and I used to dial into my ISP multiple times a day to pick up the latest messages using a UUCP reader called uAccess that would download everything to my local computer so I could read them at my leisure.

uAccess from ICE Engineering

I do not know what became of ICE Engineering.  That, by the way, is two floppies.  I put the version 1.5 floppy behind the version 1.6 floppy to show the company name and info. (I also found a box of floppies in the same banker’s box as the Usenet CDs.)

Anyway, I subscribed just as Usenet was on its major upswing, just before the September that never ended, before the crowds would wash away all attempts by the old guard to enforce their social mores by mere self-important declarations.  (There is a theme in my life of being both against chaos and against petty authority.)

The CD-ROMs, as noted, began to pile up rapidly.  The sample disk I have been using, which is the image at the top of this post, covers October 27, 1992 through November 5, 1992 inclusive, which is just ten days of newsgroup activity MINUS the binaries groups.

I made some vague, hand waving statements about drive space up above, so the question probably comes down to how much space did a mere ten days take on that CD-ROM?

I popped it into my optical drive… because I still have a PC with an optical drive… it may be aimed at DVDs and BluRay disks, but it is still capable of reading an ISO 9660 CD-ROM… when it wakes up and decides it is still alive… and took a look at the properties for the disk.

602 MB of Usenet text

Two weeks of Usenet newsgroups… again, no binaries groups… ate up a little over 600MB of drive space.  That is kind of a lot of data.  Enough to be a concern for the system admin keeping an eye on drive space.  Enough for somebody to set things to expire rather more quickly than you might expect.

The next question is, of course, what the hell is on that disk that is taking up 600MB of drive space?

That will be the topic for the next post, and I am not just doing that to leave you hanging.  Our daughter is home for the weekend and I want to spend some time with her before cranking out another 2,000 words.

Also, I want to spend some time exploring the contents of the disk and maybe see if I can find a compatible Usenet news reader that can work with the data.  It is currently in the format it would be on the server, with all the messages as individual files in the spool directory.

So if you have suggestions about a reader that might work, leave me a comment below.  I could open them all with Notepad++, but I do not really want to do that.

I will end by saying that while, at one point, I had 40-50 of these disks, during a move I tossed most of them in the trash… all of them still sealed in their CD cases.  I did keep a dozen of them, ranging from late 1992 into 1993.  I wouldn’t fret over the lost ones.  The Internet Archive probably grabbed most of those messages anyway.

Next time, we see what is there to be seen.

The tales so far:

• Hanging on the Telephone
• Calling the Mall
• Finding Friends with the Popcorn Lady
• Jenny and the FCC
• What Your Area Code Used to Say About Your Location
• I Get a Modem then Start a BBS
• Tech Support at the Village
• Dominating the PowerBook Modem Market
• The Death of eWorld
• The Great Dial Tone Drought of 96
• When the Modem Business Ran Out at the Village
• The Village Attempts to Move Beyond Modems
• Anecdotes from the Village

After Two Years of Neglect CCP Gives Up on the EVE Portal App

I have had in my drafts folder for a few months a post comparing the relative merits and deficiencies of the the available apps that let you keep track of your EVE Online characters while not logged into the game.

Honestly, I could only find three to really look into these days.

There is EVEMon, a venerable old app, the original offline tool for making training plans and keeping an eye on your skill progress.

There there is the Neocom II app, a tablet and phone app that also does a fair job of keeping you up to take on what you’re characters are up to while you’re not logged in.

Both of those are third party apps that do a lot but which have tended to fall behind on support and features.  Both of them are behind on skills and in-game items.  EVEMon just omits things it doesn’t recognize, while Neocom breaks if you have a market transaction for something outside of its supported knowledge.

And then there was the EVE Portal app, which was much less ambitious on the features front.  You couldn’t make skill plans or check up on your planetary industry or play with ship or structure fittings.

EVE Portal

But what it did do, it did in a solid way.  You could not only monitor your skill queue, but actually update it from the app.

Skill queue EVE Portal App

You could also buy and sell PLEX from it, which seemed to be the driving force behind the app.

PLEX Trading on you Phone

Anyway, its primary perceived advantage was that CCP was maintaining the app so it wouldn’t depend on the community to keep it going.  Of course, that perception was faulty.  The app itself had its problems even when it was running well enough to do its thing.  If you didn’t use it for a few days it often came back asking you to re-add your characters.

Time to go log my character in yet again

That stopped being a problem in the last few month because the app simply stopped working.  No need to re-establish the connection to your characters when the app won’t even load.

The app just doesn’t work

I have tapped “retry” enough times in the last few months to have suspected what was going to come to pass.  The optimist might expect to see the app fixed.  Those with a knowledge of CCP were not surprised by the inevitable conclusion to the app.

This past week CCP announced on the forums that support for the EVE Portal app was over.  The app was declared dead.  From the forums:

As users of the EVE Portal app have noticed and pointed out in recent months the reliability of the app has been steadily declining. When problems arose, we deployed fixes which proved to be only temporary as new issues manifested. After a thorough technical review, we have concluded that the EVE Portal app does not have a robust enough foundation for its ongoing maintenance or further development.

After careful consideration, we have decided that the prudent course of action is to deprecate the app, effective immediately. Support for EVE Portal has now officially ceased, we have started the process of shutting down the technical infrastructure and the app is being removed from the app stores.

We know that many players appreciated the convenience the app provided, allowing them to manage their characters, skill queues and EVE mail from their mobile devices, and so this is disappointing news. We share your disappointment and would like to extend our thanks to everyone who used the app.

The decision to sunset EVE Portal is not an easy one but having worked hard to fix ongoing issues without success, we are confident that it is the correct one.

Are you really sunsetting an app that wasn’t working anyway?

I mean, on the one hand I know CCP is a relatively small company for its ambitions and that it needs to focus on its core product.  That means letting some things go from time to time.

On the other hand, why keep diverting resources from the core of the one successful product the company has produced in the last 20 years if they are going to simply abandon every venture?  There are unkind comparisons to be made with companies like Google and EA, companies that shut down apps all the time.

Also, CCP’s utter dependence on its community to provide what have come to seem like basic support functions… like a useful map… continues to astound.  Those hard working souls who do it for the love of the game may get tired or move on some day, and what does CCP do if zKillboard or DOTLAN EVE Maps shut down?  That was understandable when EVE Online was fresh and new and the company was scrambling to keep ahead of players.  But after more than 20 years it feels like owning a bit of the ecosystem would be worth the effort to protect the one money making title they have.

Then, on the gripping hand, I wonder how hard the app was to maintain?  I’ve shipped more complex mobile apps than that in the last year. (Though, I will admit, I didn’t use something like the Unreal engine for our apps.)  Did the person who built it leave the company?  Did the firm they contracted it out to want money to keep the app up to date?  Was it just not selling enough PLEX to be worth the effort?  The notes for the app show that they haven’t touched the client end for quite a while.

This is where the “Two Years of Neglect” statement originates

Anyway, another CCP created tool bites the dust… and now I only have two apps to compare, unless there is another similar tool that does what EVEMon and Neocom II attempt to do.  Anything?

The closest I can come up with is Pyfa, which is ship fitting focused… but at least it is always up to date.

Related

• CCP Forums – EVE Portal Discontinued Announcement
• Reddit – EVE Portal App discontinued thread
• CCP Forums – EVEMon Thread
• Apple Store – Neocom II App page
• GitHub – Pyfa: Python Fitting App

Enad Global 7 Q3 2023 Financial Show LOTRO, PlanetSide 2, and My Singing Monsters in Decline

When last I wrote about Enad Global 7 it was a discussion of their Capital Markets Day presentation in Stockholm back in September that, among other things, suggested that a new EverQuest title might be in the cards… for 2028.

Enad Global 7

That naturally made more than a few nerds very happy and I speculated about what a new “hardcore” EverQuest… and a revived H1Z1 Just Survive, which was also on the agenda… might look like.  The fact that LOTRO would not be getting its remaster was less favorable news as it strongly suggests that the talk of a console version has been set aside and it leaves the LOTRO dev team still unable to address how bad the game looks on 4K monitors.  I suspect we will get that new version of EverQuest before LOTRO supports 4K by any reasonable definition.

Now we get to see how EG7 did over the summer as their Q3 2023 financials landed on their investor relations page.

Overall EG7 put in a decent performance over what is often a slower period for some companies, the long summer run up to the Q4 expansions.

EG7 Q3 2023 – Overall Earnings – Slide 8

The quarterly earnings took a dip in Q2 and did not bounce back to Q1 levels in Q3, but were still significantly higher than a year ago.  The LTM view, which stands for “Last Twelve Months” which shows the previous 12 months revenue from then end date of each quarter (a metric used to, depending upon your point of view, either normalize and show consistent revenue numbers or to hide a bad quarter now and then) shows a stately progression of increasing numbers over the last five quarters.

All of those numbers are in Swedish Krona.  The exchange rate with the US Dollar is a little less than 10 Krona to the Dollar, so you can just move a decimal place to approximate the dollar amount of these numbers.  So 517 million Krona is bout 51 million US Dollars.

What doesn’t get captured in the presentation anywhere is that a lot of this growth has come on the back of Big Blue Bubble’s My Singing Monsters title, which back in Q4 2022 saw explosive growth due to it trending on social media.

That… uh… bubble has been shrinking some every quarter since.  The presentation cover that, along with some softness in a couple of the Daybreak titles.

For Big Blue Bubble they highlighted:

• Another great quarter
• MSM trending down as expected
• Still 157% higher Net Revenues than 3Q22

While for Daybreak the highlights were:

• Softer than expected results YTD
  • About 15% lower YTD Net Revenue compared to last year
• DCUO and LOTRO have performed under expectations
  • Already on going efforts to stabilize and reverse trends
  • DCUO ready for the latest gen consoles shortly
  • LOTRO expansion just released with solid performance
• EQ and MTGO with solid performance
  • Exciting plans for EQ and EQ2’s 25 th and 20 th anniversary in 2024

They have some mitigating news to offset the lower than expected revenue, and there is certainly some evidence that expansions do boost revenue for titles like LOTRO, something I explored previously, but that boost is nowhere as much as I thought it might be.  Subscription dollars, which mean bringing people into the game and keeping them engaged, is really expansions deliver.

Gross revenue for Daybreak titles with expansions marked

I would really like to be able to dig into the details of how subscription dollars are measured or allocated because there is just a single subscription for some of those titles (DCUO, EQ, EQ2, and PS2) while the others have independent revenue streams (LOTRO, DDO, and MTGO).

Anyway, so Daybreak and BBB declined some in revenue in Q3

Daybreak and BBB revenue charts – page 9

Interestingly, the difference between the two is how margins behaved with this minor decline.  Daybreak, running resource heavy live service titles saw margins move down with revenue.  There is clearly a level of overhead below which margins go negative.

Meanwhile, BBB’s earnings, and thus margins, actually went up even though revenue went down.  That is a nice gig if you can get it.

Those numbers are further emphasized by the contribution chart that was on the top of the same page of the presentation as the revenue chart above.

Studio Contributions – page 9

Overall, the quarterly earnings were up a bit from Q2, but still down from the two quarters before that, though for explicable reasons.  And Q4 is here where the company reasonably expects there to be a boost in revenues to to expansions and updates.

Not so bad.

However, there is one message in the middle of all of this that I find mildly disturbing.

Back in May I posted about a capital management group doing what capital management groups do, demanding that the company give as much profit back to investors no matter the long term cost to the company.

At the Capital Markets Day in Stockholm I mentioned at the top of the post it was mentioned that EG7 was looking to commit as much as half of their net profit to satisfying the wolves of Wall Street, whose constant demands for more have ruined more than a few otherwise viable companies.  (For example, Hertz’s bankruptcy during the pandemic was largely due to them funneling most of their profits into stock buy-backs to satiate demands from Wall Street.)

That vow is repeated in the interim report in the comments from still-just-acting CEO Ji Ham.

In addition to the investment plans in our long-term growth, we also communicated a shareholder capital return program. Subject to shareholder approval, the size of the capital return program is expected to be up to 50% of net profit annually. It will consist of a combination of dividends and/or share buyback. Based on the full year 2023 profit expectations, the estimated amount to be distributed in 2024 is approximately SEK 100 million, of which a minimum of SEK 40 million will be distributed as dividends.

I am not in any way suggesting that a company should not pay dividends or otherwise reward shareholders when the company is doing well, though stock buy back programs to satisfy institutional investors are an attempt to simulate the “forever growing” market ideal that can push off reality for only so long.  That is a hangover from the first dotcom era when companies essentially promised infinite stock price growth in lieu of dividends.  Now tech companies pay dividends yet still have to keep the stock price climbing.

I am not even going to complain about how this directly enriches Ji Ham and the other board members.  That ship sailed in the back half of the 80s when it was decided CEOs shouldn’t get a big salary, but should be compensated with stock so that the company’s performance would enrich them.  That was the start of the now obscene pay gap between blood sucking leeches like Bobby Kotick, who arguably contributed nothing to the profits of Activision Blizzard in the last 15 years, yet was compensated more than the annual value of exports for many smaller nations (see what playing Tradle every day does), and the employees.

I am, however, going to point out how the employees who do the actual work, who make the whole operation viable, get no benefit from any of this.  We have seen companies like Activision Blizzard invoke the family metaphor while treating the workers like replaceable cogs in the machine, to be discarded the moment doing so might support the stock price.

And, of course, it is the employees who bear the brunt when companies become more focused on the stock price, when the company gives away too much when times are good, failing to ensure the company has the resources to weather a downturn.

Anyway, I am not going to turn this into the Communist Manifesto or a call for revolution.  This is just my reflection on the state of Silicon Valley and Wall Street after 40 years of in person experience.

We’ll have to see how the stock buy backs and dividends impact EG7’s plans to ship some new products.  Certainly Daybreak’s record of exactly ZERO new products since it took over from Sony Online Entertainment is not encouraging.

Related:

• EG7 – Investor Relations Page
• EG7 – Q3 2023 Investor Presentation
• EG7 – Q3 2023 Interim Financial Report
• Massively OP – Daybreak’s MMO revenues dip ahead of Q4 expansion deluge

Another Pilgrim’s Bounty in Wrath Classic

It is the Thanksgiving holiday in the US today, and day of chaos or peace, depending on what your plans and standing with your family is.  It is also the adjacent Pilgrim’s Bounty holiday in World of Warcraft.  The tables are out and set and the bounty is ready to be cooked up and served.

The tables outside of Ironforge

The problem is that we went and did all the achievements and got the title for the holiday last year, and there isn’t anything new on the list to make it worth doing it again.  It isn’t that some of the holiday events lack charm.  I generally enjoy some of them.  But I am not such a completionist that I need to check all the boxes on my main and alts alike.  I don’t want to have to try and find another dwarf rogue again.

So now that we’re around the calendar and back to the same events, a bit of the edge is off.

However, there is one aspect of Pilgrim’s Bounty that keeps it green, and that is the fact that it is essentially an amnesty, a get out of the effort free card, for trying to level up cooking on an alt… at least up into Outland, which can be a bit of a trial.

And, as it so happens, I have one more alt working their way through the old, vanilla world before Cataclysm lands and changes it all.  It will likely be, if not the final time for through, then final time for the foreseeable future.  I enjoyed that WoW Classic run through the original content, but the actual solo leveling path… with its big gaps between about levels 35 and 45… not so much.  I am not saying J. Allen Brack was right or anything, but classic did remind me of the pain those middle levels could be.  There was no problem if you had a group to run dungeons with, but my alts took some effort.

So it is cooking amnesty, and a bit of bonus xp, for another alt.  I just have to get him up 350 cooking and he can pick up Northrend recipes, if he gets that far.  I suspect he will.  It feels like it might be a while before we get Cataclysm Classic, and whether or not WoW Classic: Season of Discovery will be something worth the commitment remains to be seen.

Anyway, I will be cooking with an alt this weekend.  Not today though.  Today we have a house full of people for Thanksgiving, and only my daughter and I know or care at all about World of Warcraft out of the whole group.