January 2024 in Review

The Site

To celebrated the new year I finally decided to enable threaded comments on the blog.  If nothing else, I figured it would probably increase the number of comments because I will reply to several comments on a post individually rather than doing one of those comments with “@” responses.  My cunning plan revealed.

And, it worked.  There were a lot more comments this month, even if my individual replies to comments are inflating the number.  January saw each post average 5 comments, while in 2023 that number was down around 2.7 comments per post.  I wonder if that trend will continue.

Meanwhile, the “direct traffic” boom continues, though I still cannot explain where it is really coming from or what it actually means.

Direct landings on the blog in January

The low points generally seem to fall on a Friday… but not always.  Nor can I explain the spikes.  So, a continuing welcome direct people… or bots… or whatever.  Web traffic stats are always a dubious commodity.

Of course, there are always problems.  This month I once again feel compelled to bring up email subscriptions.  After a period of time when email didn’t seem to be working, there was a short period where everything seemed fine… and then this crap.

Even days only FFS

I have my personal “I’m obsessed and need to check all the things” email subscription set to send me a daily digest every morning.  Only, in January, WP.com decided to send it to me every OTHER morning, even dates only.

I could live with that I suppose, except that the content of those email updates DO NOT include the missed days.  If you were getting that you would assume I was posting every other day rather than every day.

It is maddening.  But I cannot tell if it is just me or if everybody is missing content on odd numbered days.  Then again, WP.com thinks there are only 52 email subscribers, having “lost” a couple hundred a while back, so I don’t know what to believe some days.

Meanwhile, I have also been trying to track down a problem with my posts showing up in a big bunch in Feedly.  For some reason Feedly will show nothing for a week, then all my posts for the last few days will show up in one big blast.  Is anybody else seeing that?

There are two RSS feed URLs for the blog:

WP.com – tagn.wordpress.com/feed/

Feedburner – feeds.feedburner.com/TheAncientGamingNoob

I figured one of them must be messed up and that it was time to warn everybody that they should use the other.  But then Bhagpuss mentioned the Feedly thing as well in a comment on Monday and he uses the same URL for Feedly, where my posts are delayed, and for his Blogger side bar feed, which puts them up without any delay.  So maybe it is just Feedly that is screwed up?

However, Feedly only seems to be screwed up for the WP.com feed and not the Feedburner feed.  So I guess you should switch if you’re seeing that problem.  Or not.

Use whichever one works for you I guess.  I certainly can’t tell you what is going on.  Bhagpuss is also an email subscriber and he doesn’t have the even numbered days issue, so what chance do I have in figuring this out?

One Year Ago

The year started out with the usual round of predictions… in question form this time.

I also summed up what I played in 2022, complete with charts.  There was also my Steam Replay for 2022 along with the end of the Steam Winter Sale and all the Steam Awards and stats.  And then Pokemon Go reviewed 2022… though it was a bit lame.

Google Stadia shut down… but you could turn the controller into a regular BlueTooth game pad.

I was starting off the play LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga.

There was the start of the Vivillon hunt in Pokemon Go.

Daybreak put out 2023 roadmaps for EverQuest and EverQuest II.  EQ in particular was going to introduce a new UI engine.  Then a roadmap came out for LOTRO with no mention of consoles or UI updates.

In Wrath Classic I was exalted with the Kalu’ak and it was the end of the Feast of Winter Veil., we took a peek into Violet Hold,

I also did a Friday Bullet Points post about the latest reward mount and pet, the coming of the lunar festival, The next Wrath Classic phase, and World of Warcraft shutting down in China.

I was trying to sum up where EVE Online stood as it rolled on towards its 20th anniversary.  I also took my last look at the New Eden economy, preferring to move to destruction for 2023.  We were also wondering about EVE Online and China.

Actually in game there was a brawl in Period Basis, Pandemic Horde was coming after FI.RE coalition which quickly caused FI.RE to collapse, we were shooting PH’s Fortizar in Pochven, we blew up a Keepstar, the Imperium began buying back WWB war bonds, and I was trying to refill my wallet.

In a Friday bullet points post I covered the new Rifter model, some SKINs for 1 PLEX each, the Capsuleer Chronicles in hardcover, and Goons as Pokemon cards.

There was a bit of holiday binge watching to sum up.  Also, after watching all of the Star Trek films, I did a bit of ranking and summing up there as well.

And, finally, Bing decided it didn’t hate me anymore.

Five Years Ago

Yes, there were predictions, because there are always predictions.  There was also the usual rosy “maybe I’ll play something new” post about the upcoming year.  And just to round out the usual start of the year trifecta, another Steam winter sale passed into history.

I was wondering what the EverQuest 20th anniversary might bring.  It did look like expansions might still be on the menu for both EQ and EQII.

But PlanetSide Arena, slated for late January beta, had that date pushed back to March.

Blizzard finally fixed the crafting quests in Darkmoon Faire, which had been broken since the pe-launch update before Battle for Azeroth.

In EVE Online I was wondering if Circle of Two was dead, or just mostly dead.  I also went on a bit about the PAP link economy.

We got some updated asteroid visuals with the January update.  Also, people were sending messages to CCP in Jita.  I’m not sure they allow container spam anymore.

Actually in New Eden I was out in Geminate with Liberty Squad.  We shot a POS and I wondered if it would be my last. (Answer: no) We messed with somebody’s moon chunk and shot structures in TKE.

On the LOTRO Legendary server I went down to Goblin Town before I had heading off to Angmar.  The legendary quest line sent me around Angmar and then told me the truth about Sara Oakheart, though it never explained why she was so damn slow.  Then I was riding down the long roads in Forochel before finally ending up at the ring forges in Eregion.

I was playing a bit of RimWorld, where setbacks can be a thing.

SuperData’s 2018 review report pointed towards a mobile focused future.

And I started using ManicTime to track game play time, listing the first stats in the January in Review post.

Ten Years Ago

Do I need to say more than B-R5RB?  That was, at the time, the biggest single battle in the history of EVE Online when it came to total ISK destroys, most of it in the form of 75 titans blowing up.  Lots of big numbers in that fight.  It made it to lots of non-gaming news sites.  And I was there.  I am on six titan kill mails to prove it.  The whole thing was a hell of an event after the crash at HED-GPearlier in the month.

That about spelled the end of N3 in the southeast as the Russians rolled in with CFC support.  My joke about the power blocs seemed to be true.  What could possibly go wrong?

Meanwhile, Blog Banter 52 was focused on the EVE Online community.  All sunshine and lollipops there, right?  Otherwise it was a pretty slow month in New Eden for me.

Speaking of bloodbaths, SOE announced they were going to close four titles, Free Realms, Wizardry Online, Star Wars: Clone Wars Adventures, and Vanguard: Rise of the Saga.  Meanwhile Planet Side went 100% free to play.

Then there was how Hearthstone was going to inspire SOE to update Legends of Norrath, because SOE has been cast in the role of follower for a while now.  Never happened, but for a brief moment there was hope.

There was the question of when “Next” was, specifically EverQuest Next.  Things had gotten quiet already.

At least SOE made subscriptions cheaper, though not before pissing off their subscribers first.  SOE being SOE.

And then there was Lord of the Rings Online, which announced there would be no expansion in 2014… or raids or dungeons… which left people kind of wondering what was going to happen.  You want to know when people started to doubt the future of the game?  This was the moment.  I did point out that Turbine was not the only entity that tried to tackle Tolkien’s work, only to be brought up short at Helm’s Deep.  In the end my guess would be that the crisis at Turbine was Infinite Crisis, and that fell flat.

There was the Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen kickstarter.  Brad McQuaid was back, asking for too much money and promising too many features.  We know how that works out.  Even SOE closing his last title couldn’t push his pledge totals up to what he wanted.

Then there was World of Warcraft.  People were wondering what classes to boost to level 90. and what the so-called stat squish was really going to mean.  They also, in hindsight, pretty clearly broadcasted the Warlords of Draenor ship date, only few believed it.

Our own group was still running through the Cataclysm expansion, catching up from our year or so away from the game in places like Deepholm and the Vortex Pinnacle.  I was also lusting for living steel and making friends with the Netherwing at last.

What else?  Oh yeah, EA decided that maybe SimCity should be a SimCity game.  I was wondering if level cap upgrades were an aberration.  There was some naming policy shenanigans.  And there was my yearly MMO outlook for the year as well as the usual predictions.

GamesIndustry.biz also has some February 2014 highlights if you are interested.

Fifteen Years Ago

I was in a Middle-earth mood.  I had rolled up some new characters on the same server as a few notable podcasters and then started trying to catch up to them.  The small and friendly community in LOTRO helped out, so I was able to do the Great Barrow with a pickup group and not feel the need to drink heavily afterward.  Of course, I sometimes feel the need to stir the pot.  And then there was the whole icon thing.

I also mentioned something that involved punching Amy Tan that seemed to go down well.  According to Google, this was the only site it tracks that has ever used the exact phrase “punch Amy Tan.”  I think it is still pretty much a TAGN unique.

In WoW the instance group was working its way up to Ingvar the Plunderer.  This was the height of our “we suck” phase.  Meanwhile Blizz was busy patching in improvements.

While in EVE there was a bit of mission running plus I hit a monetary milestone and 30 million skill points.

I went looking for KartRider and found that after beta Nexon apparently folded up that tent and  called it a day, at least here in the US.

I noticed that the optical drive on our Wii started making a lot of noise.  It still makes noise ten years later, but it also still works, even if Nintendo has turned off almost everything related to it.

There was that whole controversy about Wikipedia deleting entries on MUDs and MUD history.  That lead to the creation of MUD History Wiki over on Wikia.  Many MUDs are still alive and well, and sites like the MUD Connector seem to still thrive.

I pointed to a post over at Massively that showed the top selling games for October of 2008 were almost all a couple years old or more.

Ensemble Studios, who created the Age of Empires series, shut down.  But their games live on, with Age of Empires II remaining popular on Steam.

I hit the 1,000 post mark, which was cause for yet another milestone post and some reflection. (I’m closing in on the 7,000 mark a now.)

Oh, and I predicted a whole bunch of crap that mostly failed to materialize.  But that never stops me from trying again.

And, like everybody else, I had a laundry list for the new President. He totally failed on all fronts!  In hindsight, it was an era of ideals.

Twenty Years Ago

Pokemon FireRed & LeafGreen, the first of many remakes of older Pokemon titles, launched in Japan, but would not arrive in the US until September.  Remember when the split launch dates were also a thing?

Forty Years Ago

Apple announced the original Macintosh.  At the time I had just bought my first Apple II computer, so wasn’t all that interested in the Macintosh.  I would end up buying a Mac SE in just about four years later.

Fifty Years Ago

Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, through their company Tactical Studies Rules, Inc., published Dungeons & Dragons: Rules for Fantastic Medieval Wargames Campaigns Playable with Paper and Pencil and Miniature Figures, which, when not causing a satanic panic now and then, continues to wield an outsized influence on the future of role playing games.

Most Viewed Posts in January

Again, the strange direct traffic thing that comes and goes meant that 11 of the posts below were things I posted this month, and at least one from this week.  I had been in a pattern of Google search keeping at least half a dozen old posts on this list every month.

1. Getting into the EverQuest 2024 Roadmap
2. Rogue Out of Nagrand and into Borean Tundra in Wrath Classic
3. Timing those Lucky Eggs for Friendship Milestones in Pokemon Go
4. The Lord of the Rings Online 2024 Roadmap
5. What did I Play in 2023 and how does 2024 look?
6. Zwift Goes with Welfare Levels to Keep Casuals Like Me Engaged
7. Harpy Riot vs. Van Cleef
8. A Modest Bond Proposal
9. Set Adrift from the Island
10. Sailing into a Lightly Modded Valheim
11. Answering Gaming Questions with AI: Bots Rank The Wrath of the Lich King Zones
12. Feeling Like a Clown in Retail WoW

Search Terms of the Month

“wagering-agreement-meaning-in-nepali”
[I’m in some sort of positive feedback loop with this term]

цитадель eve online обломки
[If you blow them up, that is what you get]

war games world records
[Does EVE Online count?]

“aveo-enterprise-agreement”
[That can’t mean the place I worked for]

“civ5-research-agreement-worth-it”
[Sure, why not?]

Game Time by ManicTime

Something of a bonus month for the sheer number of titles player, with ManicTime recording a full dozen different game.

• WoW Classic – 48.80%
• Valheim – 34.23%
• EVE Online – 6.33%
• EverQuest – 2.78%
• Wreckfest – 1.54%
• Lethal Company – 1.51%
• The Front – 1.43%
• Space Engineers – 1.38%
• Astro Colony – 0.73%
• Rust – 0.54%
• Sons of the Forest – 0.45%
• World of Warcraft – 0.30%

A good portion of those I played at the end of or right after the Steam Winter Sale when I was on a bit of a tear to find something that would fill that Valheim slot in my play.  And while I don’t haven’t much negative to say about them… save for Rust, which simply refused to run… neither did they capture me.  There are a couple I played enough that I should do a quick “first take” post about them.  But most were just… okay.

EVE Online

I did play some EVE Online this month.  I even went on a couple of fleets and managed to prove my participation by getting on a few kill mails.  That said, I wasn’t all that engaged.  There was probably a bit of burn out from binging on the Winter Nexus event… which I finished three times… and a not a lot of huge events going on in null sec.

EverQuest

Along with my new game obsession early in the month, I also got myself a bit worked up about EverQuest, what with the 25th anniversary coming up.  We’ll get into that more in the coming month, but I logged in and pottered around and fiddled with the Overseer and toured a bit… a lot of things that don’t add up to actually playing the game the way it should be played, but I am not sure that will ever be me again.

Pokemon Go

My wife and I did go out and park over by the post office during a weekend event because it is within raiding range of four gyms that get frequented by roving raiders at such times, so we got in some decent points for us.  But it was fairly quiet other than that.  Things like a Porygon event don’t thrill all that much.

• Level: 44 (75% of the way to 45 in xp, 3 of 4 level tasks complete)
• Pokedex status: 815 (+3) caught, 829 (+4) seen
• Vivillon Evolutions obtained: 15 of 20
• Pokemon I want: Three specific Scatterbugs; Sandstorm, Icy Snow, and Meadow
• Current buddy: Larvesta

Valheim

Yeah, so after exploring alternatives, we’re just back to playing Valheim again.  But it is good and, as noted yesterday, we’re mixing it up a bit with some mods.  Three of us are off to the races again.  Will it stick?  We shall see.

WoW Classic

WoW is waning a bit for the moment, mostly because we’ve been at it for such a stretch and I felt like maybe it was time for a bit of a break.  At least until Cataclysm Classic arrives.  We did play some, doing Wailing Caverns and some of Shadowfang Keep, and I did get another character into Wrath Classic, but that may taper off some next month.

Wreckfest

NOT part of my research into Valheim-like alternatives, but something I stumbled onto because G-Portal lets you host your own server… which made me look into it.  Kind of a cool driving game with an emphasis on demolition derby antics.  Crashing on purpose isn’t much easier than avoiding crashing on accident, but it is more cathartic when you get it right, whether in a beat up old car on on a riding mower, both of which are options.

Zwift

Back in the saddle with the new year and trying to maintain some amount of exercise for health.  It is tough when you work from home because there are days when I never leave the house.  As noted in a post earlier this month, I didn’t go crazy and suddenly peddle my way into two new levels, they’re just handing them out to posers like me much more readily.

• Level – 21 (+2)
• Distanced cycled – 1,820 miles (+58 miles)
• Elevation climbed – 67,920 (+1,332 feet)
  
• Calories burned – 55,685 (+1,527)

Coming Up

It is February, which means Mardi Gras, Valentine’s Day, and my wife’s birthday… though it is a bit awkward I suppose that Valentine’s Day is on the first day of Lent.  Can you get a romance exception to that?  I mean, it is SAINT freaking Valentine’s day, right?  Probably not.

2024 has a couple oddities along those lines, such as Orthodox Easter falling on Cinco de Mayo.  Going to be a fun spread over at our Greek friend’s place.

Anyway, it is going to be a busy month.  I even have to travel for work, something I try to avoid but have to do a couple of times a year.  That is the price for being otherwise full time work from home.

Expect some more Valheim stuff for sure, and coverage of EVE Online and WoW Classic.  And likely a return to the telephone tales once I find my muse for the next chapter.

Sailing into a Lightly Modded Valheim

I have a long, complicated, and mixed relationship with mods for games.

On the whole I like the idea of mods and how they can expand on and improve a game.  But I had all the usual problems with incompatible mods, mods where the author walks away and the next big game update breaks the mod forever, to having them simply mess up games and corrupting saves so badly that you simply have to wipe everything and reinstall from scratch.

Getting older and more conservative about games… this month will be a wild exception to my usual patter of the last seventeen years here were I mostly play the same damn games I was playing when I started the blog… has made me even more leery about mods.

If you read any of the Minecraft posts back in the day, you will recall that I pretty much did all of that mod-free.

That said, when it felt like we were going to go back to Valheim I was thinking of mods as a possible way to change things up, to keep things from being the same basic progression as last time around.  And then Potshot suggested mods as a possibility and a couple people in Discord messaged me about mods and then there was a comment about mods here on the blog… so we’re going to do some mods.

But which mods?

After some reading and some picking and choosing we ended up, currently, with the following mods:

• BepInExPack_Valheim v5.4.2202 by denikson
• TargetPortal v1.1.16 by Smoothbrain
• EquipmentAndQuickSlots v2.1.13 by RandyKnapp
• Azumatt-AzuCraftyBoxes-1.2.7
• OdinShip v0.4.1 by Marlthon

I ended up using Thunderstore for mods as they also have a mod manager and that is another aspect of this whole thing.  They have a manager that works in the Overwolf framework, which I already use for WoW addons because they absorbed Curse Forge from Amazon, and a standalone manager if you’re not into that.

Their manager handles the client side of things.  As long as you remember to press the right button, everything is fine.

Press the Modded button

If you have setup a profile correctly… easy enough to do, though the UI feedback is minimal… you should see that your mods have loaded on the opening screen.

Mods have launched

If you are playing solo at home, you’re done.  All your mods are fine.  This setup is all you need,, so long as you press the right button.

In the mod manager, default profile, just press the button

If you’re playing on a hosted server though, that also needs to have the mods installed.

Fortunately, G-Portal (and some other hosts) have some key mods available for automatic install.  So I was able to go to the admin panel for our server and turn on BepInEx.

G-Portal mod choices

BepInEx is a framework that other mods use and which allows for easy mod management once it is installed and you’re restarted your server.  It creates its own directory set which includes a plugins folder where you drop the .dll files for your mods and a config folder where their configuration files get generated.

I use WinSCP for FTP and like file transfer tasks, basically out of habit because it reminds me of an old Mac FTP client I used to use and because you can configure it to correctly set files when you’re moving between Windows and Linux a lot, something I was doing daily at my last job.  Also it has a free version and has a bunch of other little features I use.

WinSCP and the plugins directory

Basically, it took about 90 minutes from me deciding I was going to add a few mods to having them actually working, much of which was simply trying to figure out what a particular instruction meant because it was ambiguous (always a problem in technical documentation where the writer often has a lot of context in their head that you do not) or because it was left completely unsaid… like “click the modded button” to launch with mods.

Then I took what I had learned and pasted some instructions into our Discord at 23:30 and went to bed… because you should always start trying to figure out technical things right when you want to go to bed.  Sleepiness compels me to do things like update my motherboard bios.

Of course, I missed a couple of gotchas and both Potshot and Bung had to go on their own voyage of discovery to get the mods running, but eventually all three of us were good.

So what did we get with these first mods?

Equipment And Quick Slots was an easy one to choose as it frees up some inventory space by giving your equipment its own slots to live in, getting them out of your bag.  It also gives you three additional quick slots mapped to Z, V, and B.

The additional slots

That is eight things out of my bag, which is eight more stacks of things I can hold.  The only catch is that V is mapped by default to auto-pickup items, something I rarely use so I remapped that to another key.

Azu Crafty Boxes is one that allows you to build/craft by pulling from storage box inventory if it is within a set range.  Since our storage room backs up to our forge and workbench and such, there is no need to go rooting through boxes to find the items you need.  And you can feed the kiln and the furnace in bulk.

Crafty containers in action

That is very handy, though you have to be careful about what it is pulling, and sometimes it is finicky about what it will pull, and when you have items in your inventory it will pull those first… mostly.  Mistakes have been made with this.  Minor ones.  And I am waiting for the day when somebody realizes they fed all of our fine wood into the kiln, but we’ll burn that bridge when we get to it. (I built some piles of fine wood because it won’t deconstruct those.)

Target Portal we are just getting to the point of using, but what it does is break the whole “paired portal” paradigm of the game.  Instead, when you use a portal it puts up a map and you pick which portal you want to jump to.  Like the US airline industry, we have gone from a hub-and-spoke layout that requires multiple jumps to direct flights.  This will make things like using portals when scouting much easier.

Finally there is Odin Ship, which was one of the first ones we wanted to get.  It was also the most problematic for me.  First of all, there are TWO versions of it, Odin Ship and Odin Ship+, the latter which requires you to pay in order to use it on a hosted server.  The former also requires payment in order to use all the ships, but some ships are available for free.  I wasn’t going to pay for anything up front before I knew it worked and I had grabbed Odin Ship+ on my first pass before I got deep into the change log and found it was pay to play.

Odin Ship was also the one mod we had picked that, if you didn’t launch your client with it, you couldn’t log into the server.  The other ones you could stumble in with no mods and still play.  If you didn’t have Odin Ship you got the incompatible version error.

Boats or go home!

That and the fact that you seem to need to launch with that mod a couple of times before it picks up and works caused a bit of heartburn.  Each of us had to fiddle with things before it would let us in.

But this was also the mod with the biggest immediate benefit.  Odin Ship adds additional boats to your build options, including a very nice and inexpensive small boat with four cargo slots and a sail that scratches the itch that the Karve, the best default exploration boat in the game, generally takes care of.

The small boat coming back to dock

Having that available instead of the raft as a quick, low resource boat is a game changer.  There are other boats available as well, including a pair of rowboats that also include some storage, but I am at a loss as to why you would use either when this boat is available.  The small boat is as fast against the wind… and every trip is against the wind and least some of the time… and so much faster when you do get some wind.

There are also some cosmetic items available with Odin Ship, including this marlin I put at the end of our dock.

I’ll pretend I caught it

So that is our mod journey so far on our third run at Valheim.  It is successful so far.  We’re still looking into other mods, but these are the ones that seemed best to start.

The Battle of B-R5RB a Decade Down the Road

If you go to zKillboard and look at my top all time stats page you will see that it features along the top six titans.  Those were the six titan kill mails I managed to get on during the battle of B-R5RB.

The expensive six

I can’t claim to have done much in the way of damage.  I was motoring along in a Dominix battleship armed only with energy neutralizers in order to drain the capacitors of these titans in so as to speed along their destruction.  And I was but one of a cloud of Domis allowed into the battle as there was a fear that too many people in system might crash the node and save the hostile titans from destruction.  We were told not to launch any drones.

My Dominix in the middle of things

I took an absolute multitude of screen shots during the battle, thinking it likely I would never see so many titans squaring off ever again.

Unfortunately, the hard drive that had all those screen shots… and pretty much all of my screen shots from 2011 to about the end of 2014…. died and was never recovered, so all I have is what I posted on the blog in the days after the battle.  But, I did post a lot of them.  And there were others posting and even a host of videos.

It is strange to see so many 4:3 screen shots.  I’ve grown so used to 16:9 these days.

That battle kicked off ten years ago this past weekend and when it was done it was the pinnacle of destruction in EVE Online, a benchmark that stood for years.  Other battles would garner larger numbers, including the infamous “million dollar battle,” which did not meet its price target, but which did get 6,142 capsuleers in system for the fight.

It was a crazy time and some people who should have known better made some regrettable declarations about war being over in null sec as Pandemic Legion, NCdot, and their allies could never recover to sufficiently catch up after such a loss, comparing it to the battle of Leyte Gulf in WWII. (Reminder: As soon as somebody starts in on a WWII analogy about EVE Online you should shout “bullshit.”)

And the news about the battle was everywhere.  The Associated Press picked up the story and put it out on the wire so that my home town paper published it.  Let me pull out the links from my own post about the battle:

• The Mittani.com outlines the fight
• EVE News 24 with Monday, Bloody Monday
• Screen shots from early in the fight (sent by Aleph Gideon, thanks!)
• The screen shot I used for my blog banner
• Kirith Kodachi – It Was Only a Matter of Time
• Polygon Reports
• PC Games Reports
• My local paper picks up the story (and focuses on the specious money aspect… same AP story that Yahoo picked up)
• EVE-Kill on the load
• A quick look at the ISK war
• Jester on Explaining B-R to Your Uncle
• Gevlon and The Dawn of the Capitals
• Serpentine has some screen shots
• Stabs with the consequences
• The International Business Times escalates the price war, claims battle cost $750K
• Kirith Kodachi interviews a Nulli Secunda pilot about the battle
• The B-R5RB Infographic
• My initial post about the battle
• CCP explains it all

And then, of course, we have the battles at M2-XFE during World War Bee and past records for destruction were eclipsed.  That war, with almost all of null sec engaged, with PAPI following Vily in his war of extermination, brought their weight to bear on the Imperium and, with numbers in the favor by at least 3 to 1… screwed it up and lost.

But as a war it reset the benchmark for destruction, setting or renewing Guinness World Records for EVE Online with its scope.

Largest Battles by ISK Destroyed

The obsession for doing things by the alleged cost in dollars, for which headline writers clamor, means that there was also a chart for that as well.

Largest battles by USD destroyed

The gap between M2-XFE and B-R5RB is a lot tighter when we get to dollars because the price of a titan in 2014 was a lot higher.  My zKillboard stats up at the top put the six kills I was on all over 400 billion ISK each.

Those two charts compared display the sometimes paradoxical nature of what has been called “mudflation.”

B-R5RB is close to M2-XFE in real world currency value because the amount of ISK it costs to buy PLEX in game has gone up over time.

PLEX price at introduction

PLEX in Jita, as I write this, is at 5 million ISK per.  That 300 million PLEX price in that ancient screen shot is before the 500 for one split, so the comparable price is about 600,000 per post-split price.

So the real world value of ISK was simply higher in 2014.

But EVE Online has its own strange twist.  The in-game ISK value lost is also skewed due to changes in the economy .  B-R5RB saw an astonishing for the time 75 titans destroyed.

M2-XFE as measured on that chart saw 257 titans destroyed, so a ratio of about 3.5 to 1.  But the ISK lost ratio is under 3 to 1 in part because, in game, titans got cheaper.  If I look at titan kills for the later battle zKillboard values them all under 100 billion.  While the 400 billion ISK mark for zKillboard for the earlier battle seems inflated… likely by the rarity of titan kills and titan market transactions in general… those titans cost more to build, acquire, and train into.

B-R5RB titans were harder to replace than M2-XFE titans… the latter having problems merely due to the scale of the losses rather than the cost.  The market for titans is predictable and when there is a surge in demand they become like toilet paper during the pandemic.

Anyway, there is a lot more that could be said when comparing those two events, but I am going to go off in another direction.

When starting off playing EVE Online in the summer of 2006 it was already a game that produced stories of amazing things that simply didn’t happen in other online games.  I did not join for that reason alone, but it was an influence, and it seems likely something that influences many other people who try the game out.  There is always a spike in new accounts and new player creation when an event like B-R5RB makes the news cycle.

And there is always some disappointment when you find out that it isn’t something that happens regularly, or even on a predictable schedule.  B-R5RB was completely a happenstance occurrence, an event that should not have come about if somebody had pressed the right button in the UI (or, to hear that person tell it, if the UI had correctly processed their button press).

So I went a good seven years… during which several in-game events made headlines… before I was actually involved with something on that scale.  I have changed, the game has changed, and players have come and gone, my memories of that day have faded, and my actual influence on the battle was microscopic… but I WAS THERE!

In being a part of such a storied event you feel like you’re now part of the history of the game… and it is a bit addictive.

Many will tell you that the actual mechanics of being in such a battle, with time dilation unable to hold back the crushing lag as you sit there for 5-10 minutes waiting for a module to activate, frustrated that things just won’t work, is not at all fun or engaging game play.

But EVE Online, even when it is working well, isn’t generally fun or engaging.  It is a lot of tedium, and all the more so because the payout for the effort is so very unpredictable.  I’ve been in many form-ups for what could have been an epic battle, only to stand down or have the other side stand down, or to have the game decide that the server is going to stand down, such that I can’t predict what is going to be that next big event any more accurately than the horoscope in the paper.

However, for many of us, EVE Online transcends that tedium and uncertainty.  Every ping COULD be the next big event, every undock could be the start of something epic, every time you log in it could be the beginning of the next exciting chapter in the ongoing story of New Eden.

Because I am always keen to continue to see and be a part of the history of the game I’ve managed to show up at ten of those “largest battles” on the charts above, and a few more news making events along the way.  Being a part of the story, even as a very small cog in a very large machine, is absolutely part of the draw of the game.

Related:

• CNN – CNN Marks the 10th Anniversary

Answering Gaming Questions with AI – Ranking ALL the EverQuest Expansions

We are in the run up to the EverQuest 25th anniversary in March and I thought maybe I should turn the dubious power of the AI bots onto the topic of Norrath and its many expansions.  There are, after all, 30 expansions in the bag for EverQuest.  That is too many for me to possibly rank, much less even write a simple declarative sentence about.

AIs thinking about video game questions… drawn by an AI

But the AI bots, with their access to the sum of all internet knowledge, they should be able to do this sort of thing.  I mean, there is a whole Wikipedia page devoted to the name, date, and basic details of all 30 expansions.  That is such a gimme that asking about expansions feels like too low of a bar.

So I decided to throw a bit of the subjective in there.  How about you smarty pants AIs tell me what the the best expansions were.  So I put to them this question:

What are the five best EverQuest expansions?

And then I looked on in horror at what they produced.

First up, in the usual order of things, was Bing AI.

Hello, this is Bing. I can help you find some information about EverQuest expansions. 😊

EverQuest is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game that was first released in 1999 and has since had 28 expansions¹. The best expansions are subjective, but based on some web sources, here are some possible candidates:

• Echoes of Faydwer (2006): This expansion was praised for its overland content for all levels, its introduction of the Fae race, and its revival of the classic EQ lore and zones²³.
• Rise of Kunark (2007): This expansion featured the epic class quests, the Sarnak race, and the return of the legendary continent of Kunark²³.
• The Planes of Power (2002): This expansion opened up the planes of existence, where players could explore the realms of the gods and face challenging raid encounters¹⁴.
• The Shadow Odyssey (2008): This expansion offered a peak of raid design, with memorable bosses like Munzok and Yekesha, as well as a variety of dungeons and quests²³.
• Ruins of Kunark (2000): This expansion was the first for EverQuest and added a whole new continent, new races, new classes, and new gameplay mechanics¹⁵.

Of course, these are not the only good expansions for EverQuest, and different players may have different preferences and opinions. You can find more information about EverQuest expansions on the web¹⁴. I hope this helps! 😊

Sweet Mary mother of God, what are you even going on about here Bing?  To start with, there are 30 expansions.  I know I only have 20 fingers and toes, but I can still get to 30 without any additional digits to tick things off with.

And three of those you listed are EverQuest II expansions.  I realize that many view EverQuest II as a mistake, but still, you ought to be able to distinguish the two.

Finally, why is every reference you linked just a pointer to the Daybreak forums?  Like, WTF Bing?

I guess +10 points for getting Ruins of Kunark in there, arguably the best MMORPG expansion ever, the template for all future expansions, and an expansion that arrived at just the right time with just the right content to keep the EverQuest hype train running.  But then minus a million points for three expansions that weren’t even part of this game.

Grade: F

After that fiasco, it was time to see if Google Bard could offer a palate cleanser, hitting it with the same question.

Choosing the “best” EverQuest expansions is definitely subjective and depends on what aspect of the game you value most. Here are five expansions that are often considered among the best, with some reasons why:

1. The Ruins of Kunark: Introduced in 1999, Kunark brought several groundbreaking features and solidified EverQuest as a major force in the MMO world. It included:

• Epic zones: Challenging, non-linear zones like Cazic-Thule and Sebilis offered new adventures and tough new raids.
• Races and classes: New playable races like the Iksar and Frogloks along with Bard and Beastlord classes added variety and fresh playstyles.
• Itemization: More powerful weapons and armor, including the iconic Skysword, kept gear progression interesting.

The Velious Trials: Released in 2000, Velious expanded on the foundation laid by Kunark and offered:

• Raids: Some of the most iconic and challenging raids in EverQuest history, like Plane of Hate and Plane of Fear, tested guilds to their limits.
• Lore and atmosphere: Beautiful zones like Solusek’s Eye and Kael Drakkel had distinct aesthetics and rich lore.
• Group content: Challenging group dungeons like Kedge Keep and City of Mist kept things exciting for smaller parties.

3. Legacy of Lunaris: This 2001 expansion took players to the moon Luclin, offering:

• Advanced soloing: New zones and mechanics catered to solo players, making the game more accessible.
• Epic encounters: Signature encounters like the Sleeper and Lord Ykesha provided epic challenges for guilds.
• Crafting and tradeskills: Enhanced systems for crafting and other secondary skills added depth and player agency.

4. Gates of Discord: Released in 2002, Gates of Discord introduced:

• Mercenaries: Hireable NPCs offered assistance for solo or small group play.
• Dungeon zones: Numerous, themed dungeons like Throne of Stone and Halls of Honor provided variety and loot.
• Level cap increase: Raised the level cap to 70, giving players new goals and abilities to master.

5. Shadows of Luclin: This 2003 expansion built upon the success of Gates of Discord with:

• Instanced zones: Introduced instanced dungeon encounters like Befallen and Dreadlands, offering unique challenges and rewards.
• Class balance: Significant revisions to many classes aimed to address imbalances and promote more diverse group compositions.
• New areas: Explorable zones like The Overthere and Timorous Deep expanded the world and offered fresh landscapes.

It’s important to note that other expansions also have their passionate fans and unique strengths. This list is merely a starting point to explore the rich history of EverQuest expansions and find your own personal favorites.

Ultimately, the “best” EverQuest expansions are the ones that bring you the most enjoyment and memories from your time playing the game. Happy adventuring!

On the one hand, I am digging the new Bard look for responses.  It has improved noticeably over the last year.

On the other hand, WTF is going on here?  I mean, maybe I can excuse The Velious Trials as a mistake with The Scars of Velious here, but Legacy of Lunaris?  Now you’re just making stuff up again?  Was that a game update maybe?  I don’t think so.  Google search doesn’t think so, and one would think that Bard would be on board with that.

And I would say it was a bold move to put the Gates of Discord expansion on the list given even Smed called it, “SOE’s worst mistake in five years,” but the date is off by two years, the level cap was 65, and mercenaries didn’t come in until Seeds of Destruction in 2008.

Literally, these are all verifiable facts available from multiple sources.

Grade: D-

Then it was the turn of ChatGPT.

Determining the “best” EverQuest expansions is subjective and can vary based on personal preferences. However, some expansions are often regarded highly by players for introducing significant content and features. As of my last knowledge update in January 2022, here are five expansions that were well-received:

1. Planes of Power (2002): Introduced new planes, increased level cap, and added features like player housing.
2. The Shadows of Luclin (2001): Brought a new playable race, the Vah Shir, and expanded the game world to the moon Luclin.
3. Ruins of Kunark (2000): EverQuest’s first expansion, featuring a new continent, Kunark, and new races and classes.
4. Legacy of Ykesha (2003): This expansion continued the story from the Shadows of Luclin and introduced new zones and content.
5. The Scars of Velious (2000): Added a new continent, Velious, along with dragon-related content and a focus on faction-based gameplay.

Keep in mind that there may have been new expansions released after my last update, and the player preferences might have evolved. It’s always a good idea to check more recent sources for the latest information on EverQuest expansions.

Simple, to the point, actually names real expansions.  I will give ChatGPT that.  The list does seem biased towards the first few expansions… I am sure many will approve of that bias, but still, has the team done NOTHING good since 2003?

Also, while I could abide some tension between Planes of Power and Ruins of Kunark as the BEST expansion, Kunark in third place is fighting words in my book… but at least it didn’t make up expansions or put Gates of Discord on the list.

In the end believable and defensible, though some of the facts in there are… well… wrong.  Player housing did not come in until House of Thule in 2010.  Kunark introduced one new race, not new races.  Did Ykesha really follow the Luclin story line? I don’t know, but it sure as hell didn’t add new zones, even if it did change Grobb.

Grade: B-

That all felt a bit light and unsatisfying.  Bing AI couldn’t even stick to the right game, Google Bard was just making up expansions, and ChatGP was playing a conservative game, but still failed on simple facts.

I decided to turn around and decided to ask the AIs to stack rank ALL 30 expansions.  Let’s just get all the AI ignorance… no, not ignorance, because that implies they actually have some intelligence I suppose… let’s get all their large language model guessing game flaws about EverQuest expansions out in the open!

First up was Bing AI again, which steadfastly stuck to its story of there being only 28 expansions.  But what else would it get wrong?

That’s a tough question, as different players may have different preferences and opinions about EverQuest expansions. However, based on some web sources, I can try to rank them according to their popularity, content, and quality. Here is my attempt:

1. Echoes of Faydwer (2006): Praised for its overland content, Fae race, and classic EQ lore¹².
2. Rise of Kunark (2007): Featured epic class quests, Sarnak race, and the return of Kunark¹².
3. The Planes of Power (2002): Opened up the planes of existence, where players could explore the realms of the gods³ .
4. The Shadow Odyssey (2008): Offered a peak of raid design, with memorable bosses and a variety of dungeons¹².
5. Ruins of Kunark (2000): The first expansion, added a new continent, races, classes, and mechanics³⁴.
6. The Serpent’s Spine (2006): Introduced the Drakkin race, the Crescent Reach zone, and the Heroic Adventure system³ .
7. Lost Dungeons of Norrath (2003): Added instanced dungeons, adventure points, and new loot³ .
8. Gates of Discord (2004): Expanded the world with the continent of Taelosia, added the Berserker class, and increased the level cap to 65³ .
9. Seeds of Destruction (2008): Introduced mercenaries, time travel, and the end of the Age of War³¹.
10. Omens of War (2004): Added the Muramite Proving Grounds, new spells and disciplines, and the epic 2.0 quests³ .
11. The Legacy of Ykesha (2003): The first downloadable expansion, added the Froglok race, the inventory slot system, and the Tribute feature³ .
12. Dragons of Norrath (2005): Revamped the old world zones, added the Guild Hall and Guild Tribute, and improved the graphics³ .
13. The Scars of Velious (2000): The second expansion, added the continent of Velious, three new races, and new armor sets³⁴.
14. Secrets of Faydwer (2007): Added the continent of Faydwer, the Gnome and Goblin races, and the Steamfont Mountains zone³ .
15. Underfoot (2009): Added the realm of Brell Serilis, the Achievement system, and the extended target window³ .
16. House of Thule (2010): Added the House of Thule, the Housing system, and the Mercenary Alternate Advancement³ .
17. Veil of Alaris (2011): Added the continent of Alaris, the Guild Hall portal system, and the Hero’s Journey achievements³ .
18. Rain of Fear (2012): Added the Shard’s Landing zone, the Collector’s and Hero’s satchels, and the Aggro Meter³ .
19. Call of the Forsaken (2013): Added the continent of Norrath, the Heroic Character feature, and the Shared Bank slots³ .
20. The Darkened Sea (2014): Added the Buried Sea, the Mount Key Ring, and the Hero’s Forge armor³ .
21. The Broken Mirror (2015): Added the Plane of Health, the Illusion Key Ring, and the new Spell Rank system³ .
22. Empires of Kunark (2016): Added the continent of Kunark, the Overseer system, and the Familiar Key Ring³ .
23. Ring of Scale (2017): Added the continent of Kunark, the Dragon race, and the new Chase Item system³ .
24. The Burning Lands (2018): Added the Plane of Fire, the Luck stat, and the new Mercenary equipment³ .
25. Torment of Velious (2019): Added the continent of Velious, the Coldain race, and the new Overseer quests³ .
26. Claws of Veeshan (2020): Added the continent of Velious, the Dragon’s Hoard, and the new Dragon’s Bite spells³ .
27. Prophecy of Ro (2006): Added the Plane of Magic, the Trap and Destructible Object systems, and the new Spheres of Influence³ .
28. Depths of Darkhollow (2005): Added the Plane of Growth, the Monster Mission and Spirit Shroud systems, and the new Evolution items³ .

This ranking is based on my own analysis of the web sources, and it is not meant to be definitive or authoritative. You may have a different ranking based on your own experience and preferences. You can find more information about EverQuest expansions on the web³ . I hope this helps! 😊

I literally asked it to rank ALL THIRTY and what did I get?  As I said, it seemed determined to stick to its story about there being only 28 expansions.

It also cannot help but include afew of EQII expansions in there again.

But, for the most part, it seemed to at least get about 25 of the 30 expansions listed and named correctly, with dates that lined up.  And it did link out to some sources that were more than just an empty pointed to the Daybreak forums.

Overall, not great, but an improvement of sorts.  Getting three wrong when you are only giving five responses is an F, but getting five wrong out of thirty… that at least gets it into passing grade territory.

And then I  started looking into some of the alleged details and… Jesus wept.  At least it got housing and mercenaries right.

Grade: D

Google Bard Chimed in with its listing and… we’re back to Bard on drugs I think.

Ranking all 30 EverQuest expansions is truly a colossal task with subjectivity playing a huge role. Different players value different aspects of the game, so what appeals to one may be a total turnoff for another. However, I can offer a tiered ranking based on a combination of various factors, including community opinion, impact on the game, quality of content, and innovation:

**S Tier (Top 5):**

1. **The Ruins of Kunark:** Groundbreaking features, epic zones, new races/classes, and iconic items cemented EverQuest’s dominance.
2. **The Velious Trials:** Legendary raids, stunning zones, challenging group content, and rich lore solidified the EverQuest experience.
3. **Legacy of Lunaris:** Advanced soloing, epic encounters, improved crafting, and the moon!
4. **Gates of Discord:** Mercenaries, varied dungeon zones, level cap increase, and class balancing breathed new life into the game.
5. **Shadows of Luclin:** Instanced zones, significant class reworks, stunning new areas, and further content diversification.

**A Tier (Next 5):**

6. **The Planes of Power:** Massive zone with unique mechanics, challenging raids, and diverse environments.
7. **Lost Dungeons of Norrath:** Procedural generation for endless replayability, diverse dungeons, and exciting loot mechanics.
8. **Omens of War:** Class revamps, new zones, introduction of deities, and the first contested zones sparked player interaction.
9. **Dragons of Norrath:** New dragons, challenging encounters, focus on group content, and introduction of mercenaries.
10. **Depths of Darkhollow:** Unique underwater zone, challenging encounters, focus on gear progression, and introduction of transmutation.

**B Tier (Middle 10):**

11. **Prophecy of Ro:** Introduction of mercenaries, level cap increase, interesting zone design, and focus on storytelling.
12. **The Serpent’s Spine:** Focus on group content, introduction of Heroic encounters, improved character customization, and new zones.
13. **The Buried Sea:** Exploration-focused expansion with beautiful zones, hidden content, and introduction of mounts.
14. **Secrets of Faydwer:** Diverse and magical zones, focus on solo content, introduction of Prestige classes, and improved tradeskills.
15. **Seeds of Destruction:** Unique zone mechanics, focus on lore and storytelling, introduction of Heritage armor, and new raids.
16. **Underfoot:** Deep underground adventure, focus on challenging content, introduction of epic encounters, and improved tradeskills.
17. **House of Thule:** Challenging dungeons, focus on group content, introduction of heroic instances, and improved epic encounters.
18. **Veil of Alaris:** Stunning zones, focus on solo content, introduction of illusion crafting, and improved prestige classes.

**C Tier (Next 5):**

19. **Rain of Fear:** Focus on combat and challenge, new zones, raids, and dungeons, along with improved epic encounters.
20. **Call of the Forsaken:** Focus on lore and storytelling, new zones, introduction of prestige classes, and improved tradeskills.
21. **The Darkened Sea:** New pirate-themed zone, introduction of player housing, and focus on casual content.
22. **The Broken Mirror:** Introduction of player-made dungeons, focus on group content, and challenging new zones.
23. **Empires of Kunark:** Focus on solo content, new zones, lore-driven story, and introduction of alternate advancement.

**D Tier (Bottom 5):**

24. **Ring of Scale:** Smaller expansion with focus on group content, introduced new zone and raids, but felt relatively uninspired.
25. **The Burning Lands:** Focus on PvP content, new zone, improved battlegrounds, and introduction of mercenaries. However, PvP wasn’t a major draw for most players.
26. **Torment of Thalnos:** Introduced level cap increase, new zone, raids, and challenges, but felt like a step back in quality compared to previous expansions.
27. **Claws of Veeshan:** Introduced level cap increase, new zone, raids, and challenges, but still felt lacking in content and innovation.
28. **Chains of Fayth:** Introduced level cap increase, new zone, raids, and challenges, but the zone design and story were generally received poorly.
29. **Rise of Kunark:** Introduced level cap increase, new zone, raids, and challenges, but again felt uninspired and lacking in excitement.
30. **The Threat of Faydwer:** Introduced level cap increase, new zone, raids, and challenges, but many players saw it as a disappointing finale to the EverQuest franchise.

This ranking is meant to be a starting point for discussion, and you might

As I have said before, I am digging the new Google Bard outlook on life.  I asked it to rank all thirty and it gave me tiers.  I like it!  And that it put Ruins of Kunark at the top puts me on its side.

That said, I would be much more impressed if it hadn’t, you know, simply made up eight of those expansions.  That alone gets it into C- territory.  But then the descriptions of some of those expansions… nobody seems to know that housing was introduced with House of Thule, which is bad because, as an expansion, it literally has HOUSE in the name.

Also on the completely wrong list, when mounts were introduced, heroic instances, the introduction of mercenaries, and probably more… I mean, how do you assess what was introduced with the fake expansions?

Overall, this is a list that probably would look convincing to somebody who never played EverQuest, but anybody at all invested in the title would spot something wrong with the list.

As such, it is EXACTLY what is wrong with AI, its ability to produce authentic sounding yet completely fabricated information.

Grade: F

Then ChatGPT was up once more.  How would it handle the full list?

Ranking all 30 EverQuest expansions can be challenging as opinions on what makes an expansion “best” can vary. Additionally, new expansions may have been released since my last knowledge update in January 2022. Nevertheless, here’s a general ranking based on the reputation and impact of the expansions up to that point:

1. Planes of Power (2002)
2. Shadows of Luclin (2001)
3. Ruins of Kunark (2000)
4. Legacy of Ykesha (2003)
5. Scars of Velious (2000)
6. Gates of Discord (2004)
7. Omens of War (2004)
8. The Serpent’s Spine (2006)
9. The Buried Sea (2007)
10. Prophecy of Ro (2006)
11. House of Thule (2010)
12. Underfoot (2009)
13. Secrets of Faydwer (2007)
14. Depths of Darkhollow (2005)
15. The Burning Lands (2018)
16. Rain of Fear (2012)
17. The Broken Mirror (2015)
18. The Darkened Sea (2014)
19. Call of the Forsaken (2013)
20. Veil of Alaris (2011)
21. Torment of Velious (2019)
22. Empires of Kunark (2016)
23. The Legacy of Ydal (2022)
24. The Plains of Power (2021)
25. Claws of Veeshan (2020)
26. The Blood of Luclin (2019)
27. Terrors of Thalumbra (2015)
28. Ring of Scale (2017)
29. The Scars of Velious (2021)
30. The Burning Lands (2021)

Please note that this ranking is based on historical reception and may not reflect the current state of EverQuest expansions. It’s advisable to check more recent player reviews and opinions for the latest rankings.

So, it seems that January 2022 is its end point for knowledge now… but rather than limit itself to the 28 expansions that came out before then, it got right in there and… made shit up?  Or repeated Scars of Velious twice?  I mean, I was thinking maybe it mistook that for the Torment of Velious expansion, but I see that on the list too.

Again, exactly what is wrong with AI.  It is trying to find a statistically “best” answer to my request, not a factually accurate answer.

I cannot fault it on incorrectly assigning features to the wrong expansion because it decided to just forego that aspect of the ranking.  That is good I suppose in that there are less errors in its response, but bad in that it does not in anyway justify its ranking.

I could, and did, ask it to just list out all 30 expansions in release order and ended up with an accurate list up until the last three, where it gave me:

• The Blood of Luclin (2019)
• The Plains of Power (2021)
• The Scars of Velious (2021)

I have to admit, the “plains” or power amused me.  There is a vast field of power, a grazing ground where one goes to chew power cud or some such.  Maybe the power buffalo wander those plains.

And ChatGPT, unlike Bing AI, is absolutely sure there must be 30 expansions, so my attempts to get it to list out only the expansions it could verify in release date order, freeing it from the count, it still came up with 30.  Over and over, even when I told it the answer was wrong.

I spent a few rounds trying to pin it down, asking it to describe, for example, The Blood of Luclin (2019), wherein it gave a some vague, hand waving, entries, but nothing specific.

As of my last knowledge update in January 2022, “The Blood of Luclin” is an expansion for EverQuest that was released on December 17, 2019. Here are some key features and details about this expansion:

1. Setting: The expansion is set in the moon of Luclin, which has been a significant location in EverQuest lore. Players explore new zones within Luclin and uncover the mysteries and challenges that await them.

2. Level Increase: “The Blood of Luclin” introduced an increase in the level cap, allowing players to advance their characters to higher levels.

3. New Zones: The expansion added new zones for players to explore, each with its own unique environments, creatures, and quests. Exploring these zones is a key part of the expansion’s content.

4. Storyline: EverQuest expansions typically come with a storyline that adds depth to the game’s lore. “The Blood of Luclin” likely had its own narrative, quests, and characters that contributed to the overall EverQuest storyline.

5. Raids and Group Content: Like many EverQuest expansions, “The Blood of Luclin” likely included challenging raids and group content for players to tackle. These encounters often come with powerful bosses and valuable rewards.

6. New Items and Equipment: Expansions often bring new items, weapons, armor, and other equipment for players to obtain. These items are usually tailored to the expansion’s themes and challenges.

Please note that specific details about the expansion, such as the exact zones, quests, and storyline, may vary, and it’s recommended to refer to official EverQuest sources or community resources for the most accurate and up-to-date information. Additionally, since my information only goes up to January 2022, there may have been further developments or expansions released since then.

When your answer includes “likely,” “typically,” and “usually” that often, it is a pretty good sign you don’t know what you’re talking about.

Finally, I told it that The Blood of Luclin (2019) was not an EverQuest expansion and asked it why it told me it was.  Ever eager to please, it agreed to my statement.

I apologize for the error in my response. You are correct, and I appreciate your clarification. “The Blood of Luclin” is not an EverQuest expansion. I must have provided inaccurate information, and I apologize for any confusion.

If you have any more specific questions or if there’s anything else you’d like to know about EverQuest or any other topic, please feel free to ask.

So I tried to convince it that The Ruins of Kunark (April 24, 2000) was also not an expansion.

I apologize for the confusion in my responses. “The Ruins of Kunark” is indeed a legitimate EverQuest expansion, released on April 24, 2000. It was the first expansion for the game and introduced various new features, including a new continent (Kunark), additional races, and classes.

I appreciate your patience and understanding. If you have any more questions or if there’s anything else I can assist you with, please let me know.

So somewhere in its data, it has the right answer.  But the right answer isn’t its objective.  Its objective is the statistically most… whatever answer.  I don’t know.

Anyway, that was an afternoon of fiddling with AIs that left me feeling all that much less sure of the survival of the race when we’re so eager to let AIs give us the most pleasing answer rather than something that has a basis in fact.

Binge Watching into the New Year Once More

The holidays and chilly weather and being at home meant there was ample time to get in an excess of television watching around our house.  My wife described the post-Christmas time after our daughter went back to school early to hang out with friends (more compelling than hanging with the parental units when you have your own apartment) as hibernation.  We probably ate too much, slept too much, and watched too much TV.  But it was nice have that option.

My new TV graphic… AI generated

So this was what we ended up watching… not all of it in that time frame, but around that time frame.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds – Paramount+

We had Paramount+ subscribed for a while and it is the home of all things Star Trek the way Disney+ is the home of all things Star Wars and so we gave this version of Star Trek a shot.

And it is pretty good, which is a tough call because it basically sits directly ahead of Star Trek the original series in the timeline of things, which weighs on it heavily.  The only Star Trek I was ever really all in on was the original series and mostly because there wasn’t a lot of choices for science fiction on TV in my youth and it was in perpetual re-runs.  I like Pike, I like the younger versions of the original series cast, I like knowing where they end up and the hints thrown in around that, and the end of season one made me go back and watch the corresponding original series episode.  Good, worth the effort for original series farts like myself, though it is a bit whimsical at times… not that the original wasn’t.

Halo – Paramount+

We watched this last month and I barely remember anything beyond Pablo Schreiber played Master Chief, which is the only thing I know about Halo, that there is somebody called Master Chief in the game.  He represents the power of The Covenant… who are the bad guys? Or are those aliens the bad guys?  Is there some point here about shades of bad vs good?  Also there is an AI called Cortana, which for a game published by Microsoft seems a bit on the nose.  Basically, the whole thing went in one ear and out the other for me, which isn’t a strong recommendation.

Loki – Season 2 – Disney+

Man, I really liked the first season of Loki.  I as much as called it a Disney attempt to make Umbrella Academy in the MCU, but I was good with that and Tom Hiddleston and Owen Wilson were so able to carry that through.  So I was all set for season two.

And then I guess Disney figured what we really needed was to try and turn the series into Everything, Everywhere, All At Once, right down to grabbing Short Round for the cast, and then turned it into an unwatchable mess of paradox problems.  I am going to admit I only made it through episode four… but I was done with it after episode two but just hung on hoping for it to get better.  It did not.

The Crown – Season 6 – Netflix

We’re into the dull and petty years of the monarchy now.  Elizabeth coming of age was interesting.  Prince Philip in his age of dissatisfaction was mildly interesting.  Princess Margaret was glamorous and always interesting.  But the kids, the boomer royals, what a dull bunch they turned out to be, and they divorced at about the same rate my parents generation did in our family.

This time around we see Diana die, the royal family cope, Charles get remarried, and Kate Middleton’s mom pretty much launch her daughter at Prince William in an unflattering yet tedious crusade to latch on to the royal family.  Nobody came out of this final season looking good. I think the whole series peaked when Elizabeth called Margret Thatcher a cunt. (That never happened, but I wish it had.)

Monarch: Legacy of Monsters – Apple TV+

The TV series background story for what was going on from Kong: Skull Island through to Godzilla vs. Kong with Monarch, the shadowy government connected organization that discovers then covers up the existence of these titanic monsters.  Neat.  Fills in some gaps.  Cool, and convincing, to see Kurt Russel’s younger self played by his son.  Pretty compelling, looks good.  I suppose I am not completely invested, but for a series that answers questions I am not sure anybody was asking, it is pretty good.

Slow Horses – Season 3 – Apple TV+

This show is so well done.  Granted, I am the ideal audience.  I have read the books recently enough that I get a lot of the context, but not so recently that I remember all the details so I can still be surprised as I am reminded how things turn out.  Season three is no exception.  It is also just six episodes long, which is exactly how long it needed to be so you’re left wanting more rather than feeling like they padded things out a bit just to hit a contractual obligation for eight or ten episodes.

The Brothers Sun – Netflix

I am going to unfairly compare this to Slow Horses above when I say that this was a great six to eight episode series… stretched out to ten episodes.  Art is as much what you cut out as what you leave in.  I enjoyed it, the cast was very good, but there were some points after the first three episodes where things began to drag.  But I did have an urge to get churros when it was all said and done.

Loudermilk – Netflix

I like Ron Livingston, I kind of like the setup this show has, and I was hoping it would scratch a bit of the Brockmire itch in me as Sam Loudermilk, a former music journalist and now an acerbic recovering alcoholic substance abuse counselor deals with the world around him without much of a filter.  And it gets there at times.  I laughed.  Just maybe not enough.  We made it through season one and gave it a break, wondering if it gels more in season two of just continues to skirt the edge of genius without quite getting there.

Only Murders in the Building – Season 3 – Hulu

The problem here is that the show has established a pattern so, in order to not simply be a repeat tale, they need to break that pattern to get viewers invested in a new season.  Or that is my theory of the thought process that generated this season’s story arc.  Anyway, things swing between too familiar to feel fresh and too eager to subvert expectations to feel comfortable… I know, a tough path to walk… so it never quite grabbed me.  Good at holding the “whodunnit” reveal yet not great at making you care once you get there.

Hell on Wheels – AMC+

This five season series follows the construction of the transcontinental railroad.  But the legendary figure of Thomas Durant, played by Colm Meany, wasn’t enough to carry things, so they turned one of his historical subordinates into a former confederate officer looking for revenge for the murder of his wife, which leads him to Hell on Wheels, the name of the wild array of camp followers than sprang up around the westward progress of the railroad.

There are actual facts about the building of the railroad included in the series.  There is also a lot of mud, local drama, and made up stuff such that for a good two seasons in the middle I kept asking my wife, “Are they still building a railroad around there somewhere?”  I wasn’t particularly engaged and might have let it drop after season two, but my wife was into the soap opera of camp life so we ended up all the way to the end of season five and the driving of the golden spike. (I have seen that spike in real life up at Stanford University.)

If You Want Valheim, Maybe Just Play Valheim

Sometimes impatience wins out.

I started in during the Steam Winter Sale looking into titles that might scratch the Valheim itch while we were kind of losing a bit of steam ourselves on the WoW Classic front.

I went over some of the options in a post early in the month and got some more suggestions, including some AI generated ideas, and have tried a few out, with Potshot jumping in to try a couple at his end.  And even as we were doing that, more and more titles kept showing up that might fit the need, things like Palworld and Enshrouded and a few others.

It was all getting to be a bit too much and while there wasn’t anything necessarily wrong with the titles I had started investigating… except for RUST, which simply doesn’t run on my machine… none of them were grabbing me in that way that said “We have to play this!”

So, over the weekend, in talking about this with the group, I ended up just renting a Valheim server slot from G-Portal again and there we go, back into Valheim.  (Though I see G-Portal has Palworld hosting options on its list now.)

Valheim on Steam

(An hour after I did that, Conan Exiles went 60% off on Steam.  A day earlier and I might have bought it to try it out.  Oh, and as I am writing this Blizz has killed off their unannounced survival game that might have been in the same genre, but now never will be anything at all.)

One of the reasons I was looking for an alternative was I didn’t have a sense of how fresh Valheim would be on the third run.  We dove headlong in and played the hell out of it when it first showed up out of nowhere about three years back. Then we had a nice run at it during WoW Classic Burning Crusade while we waited for Wrath Classic to arrive.  That too was a good run and enough had changed and been updated that it was still fresh and fun.

Could we manage it a third time?

The gap between the first and second run was enough that a lot had changed with the game.  While the devs hadn’t opened up a new biome yet, they had done a lot of work on fleshing out the core of the game and it was in many ways better, different, more complicated, and more interesting.

Since we last left off, the Mistlands biome appeared in the game… I was able to get a peek at it, but we never really went there… and the Ashlands biome seems close to being released.  That will leave just one biome to complete the set to appease Odin, prove our worth, and win the game.

Winning the game is probable a couple years off at current development pace, but a Viking seeking Valhalla can dream, can’t he?

One of the things I wanted to do before we got into things was to shop for a world seed that would give a nice coastal starting area that we could then branch out from.  So much of the exploration game involves setting sail… and that ends up being some of my favorite bits… that we wanted to avoid what happened last time, where we started in a Meadow biome pretty much surrounded by Black Forest, which meant a lot of effort just getting to set sail.

And there are a lot of seeds out there for Valheim.  If you Google something like “best Valheim world seed” you will get a lot of results.  You can find seeds for all your needs.  But I didn’t want a totally optimized world… there was a seed out there that put biomes with ALL the bosses on a big continent where you also spawned and found the trader… just something to give us a nice initial base of operations.

So it was off to the Valheim world generator page, which will take your seed and show you whatever you want about your world.  I was initially interested in the seed byFBCu5wdG, which had a nice starting location.  But Potshot found that the seed “nextworld” both fit the starting area bill and had the advantage of being memorable, as well as slightly ironic in name.

I grabbed that seed and started a new world with a fresh character locally, then transferred it over to the G-Portal server.

As a sign of how much I did NOT want to look too hard at the map and see all the locations and what not, my glance at the spawn point was so cursory that it stuck in my head as being an isthmus connecting two islands.  So the world was named IsthmusBeThePlace.

It is not an isthmus, although the narrows between the south of our island and the next island are shallow, swimmable even with no swimming skills, and might not be navigable with the full longboat.  But we’ll live with the name.

In setting up the world, before I even had a sense about how much Valheim might have changed, I could see that G-Portal had changed its own config options for worlds.  There are a bunch of new settings and if you have multiple worlds on the server you can just select which one is active without having to manually set names and what not.

There were also some additional difficulty settings.  I put most everything to “normal” just to start with, though there was one exception: Resource Modifier.  I set that to 2.0x.

The resource setting

Most of those settings range between “casual” and “hardcore,” though the raids modifier sets raid frequency (“none” to “much more”), but resources has a multiplier.  You can set it between 0.5x and 3.0x of normal yield.  I chose 2.0x thinking that if I had to chop down half as many trees I might be twice as happy.

I do not mind resource gathering.  Doing that is often one of my self-appointed roles in the game.  But it isn’t always the most fun aspect.  And the setting has direct effect.  Everything drops double amounts of stuff, trees, berries, board, deer.  I shot a two star deer and ended up with a huge pile of meat and hides.  And I am hoping it will help with mining once we get to that.

It does not affect trophies though.  Still just a max of one of those per kill.

That all done, I gave it a try, logging into a fresh new unexplored world.

New green hills

Hugin the raven showed up and started to tell me the usual intro stuff.  I left him on in the options, if only because it has been a while so I am not sure what I have forgotten or what might be new.

The starting area nicely had an abandoned shack nearby that I was able to quickly fix up into a shelter.  A far cry from the first run at the game when I was standing in the dark, in the rain, trying to figure out how to build a shelter and setting myself on fire so often that the channel on our Discord server for the game is called “valheim-on-fire.”

Potshot got on as well and we both set to our usual roles.  He began work on a base for us.

A base near the water

That was actually the second base he made.  The first one he did was down by the crossing to the next island, slightly above water level… which meant that once a storm hit and the swells started the place was swamped.  A lesson re-learned.

A similar situation from our last world

Meanwhile, I went out to explore and gather resources.  I will say that the 2.0x drop rate was as advertised.  I ranged out far enough to find a Black Forest biome to the north of us, so we have a destination once we get settled.

Some Black Forest for later

And then there is that narrow channel to the next island.  We might be able to bridge that at some point… once we get better wood.

It isn’t that far across

So off we go again.  Eikthyr’s altar has already been found and I spotted some copper nodes and a couple of crypts.  I don’t want to speed run this or anything, but I also kind of want to get on to the next tier of crafting and the things it unlocks, especially the Karve, the first real boat.  I’ve already been out on a raft, but the Karve is what opens up the world.

Microsoft Layoffs Target Activision Blizzard Staff

The word was out this morning of 1,900 people being laid off by Microsoft, primarily focused on staff at Activision Blizzard.

XBox plus Activision Blizzard minus about 2,000 people so far

The word from Microsoft’s XBox chief Phil Spencer today:

As part of this process, we have made the painful decision to reduce the size of our gaming workforce by approximately 1,900 roles out of the 22,000 people on our team. The Gaming Leadership Team and I are committed to navigating this process as thoughtfully as possible.

While that may be the wish, the word online is that it is not being handled well, that they announced the number of people to be laid off before getting around to informing individuals who would be affected.

Some bits of news have come out, such as the cancellation of Blizzard’s unannounced survival game that they mentioned back in early 2022.  Also, one time interim co-president who was paid more than his female partner and didn’t squeak about it until after the fact Mike Ybarra has been let go… I mean, he said he as leaving, but I am sure he was pushed.

I wouldn’t cry for him though, at his level he will get a huge exit package.  I mean, he won’t get the $400 million that Bobby Kotick got in severance, but Mike won’t be missing any meals.

So not a great day and my heart goes out to those who have been laid off.  I’ve been there a few times, even working in an allegedly more stable area of the tech industry.

That there were going to be layoffs after the acquisition was inevitable.  There are always some redundancies to punish for the sake of efficiency.  I have never been part of an acquisition… and by my count I’ve been through more than a dozen… that didn’t lay off at least some people from HR, accounting, marketing, and other support groups.

And the fact that Microsoft spent last year laying off people from most of its business groups… Linked In and Microsoft’s other Silicon Valley operations saw a big trim and I know some people who were let go… meant that Activision Blizzard was going to get some additional chopping as well.  That was obvious enough that I predicted it back on January 1st.

But then there is the whole state of the video game industry which is seeing a long, ongoing round of layoffs that saw more than 10,500 game dev staff laid off in 2023 and, out the gate an in just the first month of 2024, the number has been increased by nearly 6,000 additional cuts. (Oh crap, there is another layoff.)

And those cuts are just the big companies that need to announce sizable reductions for legal reasons.  That does not really pick up anything small or privately held.

Those big companies always seem to be places where there were also record profits and huge executive compensation packages.  Want to know why I don’t care for Tim Sweeney?  Because he is a billionaire who tries to position himself as being good for the industry, but who laid off 16% of Epic Games last year while still trying holding onto the Epic Game Store, which he dumps money into out of sheer ego because he can’t stand that Steam makes money off of his products.

100% greed and ego driven.  He has billions, makes wasteful decisions, and the employees suffer so he doesn’t lose any compensation or shareholder value.  There are a lot of reasons not to use the Epic Game Store, but this is pretty high on my list.

And Tim is just one example.  Other companies like Riot and Unity continue to overpay execs while laying off the people who make the games.  (Though at least Unity managed to jettison that pile of garbage posing as a human John Riccitiello eventually… but only after he had completely fucked things up.)

Anyway, I am in danger of getting even more ranty and I am writing this while I eat lunch.

The news is that layoffs are here and they won’t be stopping anytime soon in the video game industry for a host of reasons, but greed and a lack of any foresight or planning are at the top of the list.  But I am sure this won’t come back to haunt anybody going forward.

Today Microsoft XBox division laid off 1,900 people, mostly at Activision Blizzard and I won’t be surprised if this is only the first pass.

Related:

• IGN – Microsoft Lays Off 1,900 Staff From Its Video Game Workforce
• Massively OP – Microsoft lays off ~1900 workers
• In An Age – Blizzard Decimation
• Game Developer – Microsoft follows Activision Blizzard merger with 1,900 layoffs
• Game Developer – Blizzard cancels Odyssey MMO amid Microsoft layoffs
• Game Developer – Blizzard’s Odyssey MMO killed due to ongoing engine woes
• Game Developer – Mike Ybarra exits Blizzard Entertainment after Microsoft layoffs
• Bloomberg – Microsoft Cancels New Blizzard Video Game After Six Years of Development
• Matthew Ball – The Tremendous Yet Troubled State of Gaming in 2024
• Broken Toys – Ludum mortuus est

The War For New Eden Kickstarter Campaign Begins

Announced back in August with little fanfare and few details, and then mentioned in passing at Fanfest 2023, the War for New Eden board game is now live on Kickstarter for you to back.

An EVE Online Strategy Board Game

The campaign itself was asking for €50K as its baseline success metric, something it surpassed in the first hour after going live, so the primary goal has been reached.  There are also stretch goals involved, mapped out to €250K so far.

Now it is just a matter of getting the word out to people who might want an EVE Online based board game… and then figuring out what to order and add, because there is a lot going on in this Kickstarter campaign.

First, there are several different pledge levels.

• Recruit – Minimum €1 – Just to feel good about yourself by pitching in, can buy add-ons
• Capsuleer – €124 early bird, €129 after – Gets you the base game
• Veteran – €214 early bird, €219 after – Gets the base game and all expansions
• Capital/Relic Seeker – €399 – Same as Capsuleer, but the core game is 200% size

Also, some in-game EVE Online packs are being thrown into the mix to sweeten the deal for Capsuleer and above.  And then there are the add-ons, which allow you to buy the expansions, faction collector’s sets, or other items that are board game adjacent, like extra dice or a dice tray.

What do you get for your pledge?  Here are some graphics clipped from the Kickstarter page.  For the core game:

War for New Eden Core Box

The Titan expansion:

War for New Eden Titan expansion

The Havoc expansion:

The War for New Eden Havoc expansion

The Azariel expansion:

War for New Eden Azariel expansion

You get all of these with the Veteran’s pledge, can mix and match them with the Capsuleer, or buy them all ala carte with a Recruit pledge I guess, if that is your thing.

These pledge amounts do not include shipping, which will be an additional cost, ranging from €15 for the core set in central Europe to the usual FU pricing for parts of Asia and Australia where the full set will run you €180.

Details and videos and stretch goals and all sorts of additional information is available on the Kickstarter campaign page.  I am just trying to sum things up in 500 words or less.

The campaign is set to run through until February 21st.

The planned ship date for the game is December 2024.  So while I was wrong on my New Year’s prediction as to when the Kickstarter campaign, I could still be correct about not getting it delivered in time for Christmas.  We shall see.

Related:

• Kickstarter – The War for New Eden Campaign Page
• Kicktraq – Watch the campaign as it progresses
• CCP – EVE: War for New Eden campaign is live
• Massively OP – EVE Online’s board game Kickstarter is live

Follower Dungeons Arrive in Retail WoW

As I am sure I have made abundantly clear since not very far into the Shadowlands expansion, retail WoW doesn’t work for me now and I don’t play it.  I get that it just my opinion.  I am not saying you are not, or should not, be having a good time there.  It is just that I cannot.

Which doesn’t mean I don’t still pay attention to retail WoW.  I even write about it, covering either the large picture like the roadmap or my own personal issues.  So I am paying some attention.

So when the Seeds of Renewal update hit retail WoW as the latest content drop for Dragonflight, I went down the list to see what was being offered.  A lot of it was the stuff you expect, but there was one item on the list that really caught my eye.

Follower dungeons.

Who on this list are the followers?

The opening paragraph from the announcement:

In the Seeds of Renewal, players level 60-70 will have the opportunity to play through Normal difficulty Dragonflight dungeons solo, or with friends, with a little help from a few NPC teammates. You’ll be able to earn appropriate level gear for your specialization within these dungeons the same as you would running through any Normal difficulty dungeon.

You can see how our group, which has four people that have spent the classic era trying to either run dungeons a player short or with one of us (Potshot) playing two characters, might find this an interesting development.

This integrated into the Dungeon Finder in retail now so you just go in and select it as an option.

Lead and they will follow

As you can see, it is only normal mode dungeons… which is fine for me… and it is only for a list of such dungeons in the Dragonflight expansion.

• Ruby Life Pools
• Nokhud Offensive
• Brackenhide Hollow
• Halls of Infusion
• Algeth’ar Academy
• Neltharus
• The Azure Vault
• Uldaman: Legacy of Tyr

And that is fine as well.  This is a trial of a new feature.  I doubt this will tempt me into playing Dragonflight, but it could tilt my interest in The War Within at some future date should the feature be expanded and become a regular part of the game.

The question is, will it succeed?

I haven’t gone to the forums… because I don’t care enough frankly… but I can predict at least some angry responses to this in the same vein you see when anything that was group required content gets a solo option.  It will be along the lines of “OMG you’ve killed dungeons, I’ll never get a group now, I already wait too long for a dungeon to pop as DPS and now I’ll never get a group” and all of that.

I am not moved by any of that because my experience over the last decade with random dungeon finder groups is that, while only a small percentage of them are toxic, almost 99% of them are setup for a speed run to get through the dungeon in the least possible time and nobody wants to wait for you to listen to the dialog or get your quest update or whatever.

This is part of why I was surprised at the outrage about dungeon finder not being in Wrath Classic from day one.  Leaving aside that it wasn’t there on day one and ended up being put in with the same update it was back in the day, or that it reduced game play to standing around in town and queuing for dungeons, even when you wanted to use it dungeon finder was often a very poor way to experience of the game.

So if there is an option for me to slow roll through a dungeon on my own, I am for it.

We will have to wait and see if Blizz carries this forward and… perhaps more importantly, rolls it backward because there are a bunch of dungeons between Cata and current that I have not run because the group wasn’t playing and the dungeon finder experience made it not worth the effort… makes it a feature of the overall game.

I do not expect it to hit classic… at least not the primary classic line of advance that now sit waiting for Cataclysm Classic to arrive… but maybe some day there will be another flavor of special rules server?

Of course, I am tempted to credit this, as with many things, to Holly Longdale, largely because EverQuest and EverQuest II have had mercenaries to assist solo play in game for over a decade now.  But it is probably more complex than that and may be driven by the long standing need in the WoW team to get absolutely everybody into raiding because that is the way and maybe if people get a tease of a normal dungeon they will want to try heroic and then they will have to group up, then they got ’em!

Problems with Aggro Radius in Shadowfang Keep

One of the problems with WoW Classic Season of Discovery is that we’re back doing the vanilla content again, having done it extensively with the original launch of WoW Classic and then having had a brush with it in WoW Classic Hardcore.  And while I have affection for the original content, maybe doing it three times in less than four years is a bit much.

This is the “how can I miss you if you won’t go away?” problem I suppose.

And then the other thing about Season of Discovery is the somewhat random feeling of rune distribution and effectiveness.  Strong classes got stronger, and weak classes… are a little less weak but problems remain.  Paladins are still unfavorable and warrior taunt still has problems keeping up with DPS that has been buffed up it seems.

Part of the problem is that we haven’t found that many runes yet.  As a class you end up with one to four pretty much falling in your lap and then unless you want to devote considerable time and effort into finding runes yourself, you end up over at something like the guide over at WoW Head trying to figure out which runes might be worth the effort and whether or not you have any practical method of obtaining them at your current level or with your group.

Anyway, we kicked off on Sunday with trying to collect a few runes.  My priest Radon was out in Darkshire trying to get the circle of healing rune, which required a drop from a dodgy area for a level 22, but he managed it then went off to pray on it at another location.

Pray here for rune

The only hiccup was that I needed the damn priest meditations and forgot to get them before I ran out, so I had to fly back to Stormwind, get them from a priest alt that Potshot has camped there for just this reason, then fly back out to Darkshire.

And then I found out that it was a glove rune, so I would have to give up penance, which is such a nice emergency heal that I skipped circle of healing in the end.

Then there was another rune in Elwynn Forest, prayer of mending, which I hadn’t done yet because you need another healer of any class… except mages, all that talk of mage healers doesn’t count when it comes to this rune.

This is the “no mages” healing club, sorry…

Fortunately there were a couple of druid alts in the guild who also needed this event for their own rune, so we got everybody out there and collected it.

And then it was a discussion of whether we carry on with the rune hunt… Imogen wanted a warrior rune that looked like a lot of grinding in The Barrens and Shelf was keen on a hunter rune that required us to go back to Wailing Caverns… or do something else.

We chose else… the else being a run out to Shadowfang Keep to see how we might do there.  The post title was probably a hint on that front.  Another run into Wailing Caverns did not really appeal to anybody after last week where we found we had mostly out-leveled a lot of the content, and… why the hell not?

• Imogen – level 21 gnome warrior
• Tiriell – level 21 human warlock
• Tirillon – level 21 human mage
• Shelf – level 22 night elf hunter
• Radon – level 22 dwarf priest

SFK, like a lot of the vanilla dungeons, ramps up in levels as you get deeper into it.  We figured we would be good for the front half and we would see how OP we were when we got in over our heads.

But first we had to get there… which meant remembering where it actually was.

Oh yeah, up past Southshore.  Three of us, including the warlock, flew to Menethil Harbor and started the run that way.

Across the Wetlands at 22… not so bad now…

That was the run up across the Thandol span, through the Arathi Highlands where, in hindsight, we should have picked up that flight point while we were passing though, then into the Hillsbrad Foothills and down to Southshore.  There we grabbed the flight point then summoned the rest of the crew.

Handy dandy Warlock summoning… though it requires 3 people…

[Also, if you need a map of vanilla WoW that has all the landmarks, this one is pretty good.)

Once assembled and when everybody had the flight point… which was quick as the flight master is right there in the picture with us… we began the run across Hillsbrad Foothills to Silverpine Forest where we found Shadowfang Keep nearly as busy outside as the Deadmines and Wailing Caverns.

Here we are!

I guess when the level cap is 25 and you don’t raid, this is the other activity… that and finding those rep drops to unlock access to the vendor runes.

Once inside the instance, the beginnings of it didn’t look too bad.  There is a big iron portcullis you can see through into the first courtyard, where there were just level 19 elites.  That wasn’t going to be a problem.  So in we went, cleared the opening section, and got the guy to open the door.

Just open the door please

The usual question of “how were you locked in a cell when you can just teleport away?” when he left… by teleporting away… came up, but otherwise we were on onto the courtyard and then into the kitchen.

Things seemed almost too smooth… like, the jailer seemed to be either missing to way too easy, and Razorclaw the butcher fell to us in the middle of some trash such that the only reason I know we got him is that the Bloody Apron dropped.  We didn’t actually stop and tee up a boss for a fight until we got to Baron Silverlaine in the dining room.

What do we do with the Baron?

His fight was equally simple.  We seemed to be on a roll.  But as we came out the back of the dining hall and upstairs, things started to get a little more dicey for us.  Getting into the room with Commander Springvale saw us proximity pull the whole room, Commander included, and get stuck in the doors between there and the hall where I had a lot of trouble healing because I was either silenced or somebody was not in line of sight.  We wiped.

Ressing Imogen in the doorway

This wipe was complicated by the fact that I hit Release Spirit instead of Use Soulstone, which meant I appeared as a ghost back at Southshore and had to run all the way back.

Button choice… go with the right choice… the right choice

That at least gave people time for a break to feed cats and other items.

Fortunately we had cleared most of the room, so getting back in there was easy and the Commander coughed up a nice shield for Imogen, even if she would have to wait to use it.

The Commander’s Crest

Passing through there we were up on the ramparts of the keep and the mobs were slowly climbing in level.  While they had started at 19, but the time we were through and up there mobs had climbed into the level 21-23 range, such that we had another wipe in the room with Odo the Blindwatcher (level 24 boss) because in the doorway proved to be just enough aggro radius for Imogen that the whole room came to us.

Dead in the doorway

As with the Commander, we did managed to take down enough stuff that the post wipe clean up was easy, and I remember to use the soulstone this time, so we were up and at them fairly quickly.

We progressed further in, but eventually hit one of the more tricky rooms in the instance, one that loops back on itself and, as such, makes inadvertent proximity pulls very likely if you are not careful… or if you are not high level enough.

Into the twisty bit of the run

You go through that doorway, then make a hairpin turn and go up a ramp that comes back towards you, then another hairpin turn and down a passage, then a similar routine at the far end.  And all around are level 23-24 mobs and the elevation between ramps is small enough that you can proximity pull things on a platform above or below you and the mobs will come running and will bring along any friends along the way and… well, that is what happened.

This is actually the before picture to the one above

We used the soulstone again, it having just reset, and tried to figure out how to get just a few mobs at a time.  But getting up to the ramp to get line of sight on the next group, one that would not bring all and sundry with them, turned out to be too finicky.  To get just far enough around to see up the ramp you aggro the mobs up above you on the platform and they come running with a whole pack of helpers.

We got swamped again, then ran back to try it one more time.  At that point I was getting the yellow warning on my paper doll that my gear was wearing out.  Another try got the same results.  Even as the close group got tagged and was coming for us, I could see the mobs up on the platform turn and start their run through the hairpin turns.  They arrived and stomped us once more.

Hey, we got one!

And that was it for the evening.  We opted to revive at the angel.  My gear went from all yellow on the paper doll to all red.  But that was 24 silver to repair and I had about 22 silver in junk to sell, so about a wash.

The experience was good.  I went from just shy of 23 to past 50% of the way to 24.  And some gear upgrades were obtained.  But we need to be 24 or 25 to get through that turn in the keep.

When we did SFK back in WoW Classic in 2019, we were all at least level 26.