February 2024 in Review

The Site

WordPress.com always wants to make sure I have something to write about in this section every month.  This time around I am back on about email subscriptions.

Last month I was complaining that they were only getting delievered to my inbox every other day.  This month… that stopped completely.  No email delivered with my posts any day of the week.  This coincided with WP.com removing a bunch of the email section of the subscription UI they put in a while back that looked like they wanted to take on Substack.  They have clearly changed their mind or are covering up some failure.

Anyway, if you are still getting email updates from here, WP.com clearly thinks you are special.

Also mentioned last month was the RSS feed issue, where WP.com is updating the feed only every few days.  I see this from other sites that use WP as their host, like Game Developer.  I will see nothing in Feedly for three or four days from them, then suddenly there will be 35 posts.

If that sort of burst behavior doesn’t bother you, carry on.  If it does, you can use the Feedburner RSS feed, though recommending a Google solution to a problem feels like herasy these days.  How have they not shut down Feedburner yet?  It must drive ad revenue in some way.

WP.com has also gotten extremely finicky about being able to leave comments without having a WP.com account.  It seems that you either need to be completely logged in or be willing to leave a full anonymous comment, with no in between.  Thanks a lot WP.

Finally, the wierd direct source bursts of traffic continued this month, though it has grown more erratic and seems to be tapering off somewhat.

The Direct traffic line so far this year

Basically, if it wasn’t there I would be getting about 500 page views a day, 300 of which would be from Google search.  But with that direct traffic the daily views run between 550 and 1,300.  That makes direct traffic the top source so far this year.

Traffic sources so far in 2024

I don’t know what it means, but it does seem to be driving ad revenue.  Go money.

Also, I strongly recommend you use Ad Block when visiting here.  I want the bots to pay my hosting, not you.  I currently use uBlock Origin for my own ad blocking needs.

One Year Ago

We were in Vegas during the Pro Bowl, those that was pretty much on accident.  We didn’t go see it or anything.

Meta was trying to get a younger demographic into Horizon Worlds.  I was also still on Twitter, though the alternatives were ramping up.

At Enad Global 7, the Q4 2022 financials celebrated the start of the My Singing Monsters hype bubble.

I was going on about some of the barriers in the way of going back to play old MMORPGs.  I was also pondering what Twitch drops do for games.

Activision Blizzard Q4 2022 financials were out and, while Dragonflight did well, it clearly did not break any records.   They were also trying to drum up pre-sales for Diablo IV.  Would that mean that season 28 would be the last season for Diablo III?  Probably.  Meanwhile, Mike Ybarra was pleading poverty or some absolute BS.

I was already on about the whole Cataclysm Classic question.  It would not be announced until BlizzCon later in the year.  I was also wondering when the peak era for crafting was in WoW.

In Wrath Classic we were working on the Lunar Festival achievements, since those were now available.  We all achieved the title of The Elder.  I was also going pretty heavy on the Wrath Classic dailies.  We ran off and did Violet Hold and Gundrak.

CCP was finally putting their Microsoft Excel plugin in to beta testing.  There was also the January 2023 MER to go over and a PLEX for Good campaign for earthquake relief in Turkey which raised $26K.

I did a Friday Bullet Points post about EVE Online that covered the Photon UI, pink SKINs, Imperium War Bonds, and the company financials.  I also started looking at ship destruction in New Eden and I hit 260 million skill points on my main.

At the CSM17 winter summit there was a dubious proposal about improving PvE.

Actually in game, the collapse of the FI.RE coalition ended up with the South East Agreement in null sec.

I had something about the postcards in Pokemon Go.  What are they ever there for?

And WordPress.com changed out the WordPress app out for the JetPack app, though aside from a color change, I couldn’t tell you why.

Five Years Ago

Epic Games had announced their digital storefront the previous December (2019), but we were finally getting a deeper look at their strategy for taking on Steam.  One word: Exclusives.  (Some of which were already up for sale on Steam, then withdrawn, making as many people angry as happy.)

Over at Activision-Blizzard they announced record annual revenues for 2018, then laid off 8% of their staff.  I suppose, in hindsight, they predicted 2019 correctly, but laying people off while execs get bonuses is never a good look.

Daybreak gave us some details about their planned special rules EverQuest II PvP server.  On the same front, the plans for the EverQuest anniversary servers sounded a bit muddled.  They gave us a revised plan for all servers before the month was out.

Meanwhile, the PlanetSide Arena launch, pushed back to March, was pushed out again, this time until “summer,” with a planned simultaneous Playstation 4 launch given as a reason.

I also wondered what EverQuest III should even look like, were it a possibility.  I doubt that it is, but it is fun to speculate.

All of that aside, with the approach of the EverQuest 20th anniversary I started logging in to play a bit with a fresh character.  I started on Vox, a standard rules server, with an eye on the tutorial.  I ran through the revolt in Glooming Deep.

On the LOTRO Legendary server I was wrapping up in Eriador.  It was time to start considering Moria.

I was also rolling back into WoW and Battle for Azeroth for a bit.  It was a change up from LOTRO.

On the EVE Online front it was announced there would be no alliance tournament for 2019.  The February update brought us some fixes and the Guardians Gala event.  CCP was also talking about letting people buy skills straight from the character sheet.  There was also talk of a new launcher coming.

I wrote something about the time zones of New Eden, it being a world spanning, 24 hour game.

Burn Jita was back again, kicking off with explosions as usual.

I wrote a bit about the city of Waterdeep, the heart of TorilMUD.

Twitch offered me a free trial in Final Fantasy XIV, but I couldn’t get it to work.

I was on about there being no good expansions again.

And there was word of a smaller Switch, the end of the Wii Shop Channel, eports was stomping its feet and demanding to be taken seriously, and the Olympics rejecting esports all wrapped up in a Friday bullet points post.

Ten Years Ago

A lot of people got their panties in a twist about Steam tags.  It was the literal end of civilization as we knew it… for about 30 minutes.

EA handed over the running of Camelot Unchained and Ultima Online to Broadsword.

I spent some time with Warcraft III attempting to discover the pre-history of WoW.

There was Diablo III version 2.0, and the changes looked promising.

On the World of Warcraft front, we were still talking about Warlords of Draenor.  Pre-orders were announced an there was a rumor that the expansion would cost $60, which seemed a bit steep.  Also, insta-90s looked to be coming as a cash shop item.  Would all of that stem the tide on subscription decline?

Meanwhile, I finished the last of the LFR raids, witnessing the downfall of Garrosh Hellscream.  For all of the complaints about LFR, I enjoyed my raid tourism.  The instance group did Grim Batol, then made the jump to Pandaria before returning with slightly better equipment for Heroic Deadmines.

I was wondering why PvP seemed to be a requirement for all MMOs.

I got into The Edler Scrolls Online beta and declared it Skyrim-like enough for me, then never played it again.

Brad McQuaid’s Pantheon: Further Falling of the Fallen Kickstarter campaign was winding down, doomed to failure.  There was talk about what would happen next.  Plan B anybody?

I ran another EVE Online screen shot contest to give away some items from the Second Decade Collector’s Edition which I scored for free… after having bought it for myself.  And then there was the monument and drone assist and campaign medals and the repercussions of B-R5RB to talk about.

I wondered what was going to happen with people being given free reign in Landmark.

And, finally, it was the end for Flappy Bird.  I grabbed that from GameIndustry.biz and their look back to February 2014.

Fifteen Years Ago

My 8800GT video card died.  That was the second one to go.

I had been looking at my dis-used GAX Online account and wondered what gamer social networking needed to be viable.  Since then, GAX Online has shut down.

PLEX showed up in EVE Online fifteen years ago.  It doesn’t seem like it has been around for that long.  And then there was the whole Goonswarm disbandment of Band of Brothers, and act that effectively ended the Great War, and which made the BBC news.  This led to talk of how much control players should have over their destiny.

In game I got the mining foreman mindlink as a storyline mission drop, I upgraded to a Raven Navy Isssue, and finally bought the freighter for which I had been training, and got some ships blown up in the Worlds Collide mission… again. There was EVE Vegas, which was just a player run meet up at that point.

I was still active in Lord of the Rings Online, playing characters on the Nimrodel server.  Looking for a class on which to affix the Reynaldo Fabulous name, I put up a poll on the subject.  While Minstrel won the poll, Reynaldo ended up being a hunter with a fabulous hat.  And when I wasn’t fooling around with alts, I was leveling up my captain who made it all the way to Rivendell at one point.

While over in Azeroth, it was revealed that my mom plays WoW.  I wondered at how active Westfall seems to be most of the time.  But the answer to that seems to be the Deadmines, which I ran my mom and daughter through. (No dungeon finder back then!)  There was a little pet drama with my daughter who wanted a raptor.  I also managed my first exalted status with a faction in WoW, the Kalu’ak in Northrend.  I wanted that fishing pole.

On the Wii, we had Wii Music, which was crap, and LEGO Batman, which suffered a bit from being yet another variation in the successful LEGO video game franchise.

And then there was the usual blog war shenanigans as somebody was still looking to blame WoW and WoW players for Warhammer Online’s failure to meets its subscriber goals.  I think we’re all over that now, right?  Warhammer did what it did on its own faults and merits in a market that was well known before they shipped.

And Darkfall finally launched and began its short life as… whatever it was.  I didn’t play it.

Twenty Years Ago

The aptly named Gates of Discord expansion for EverQuest launched.  While Smed called its bug-ridden launch “SOE’s worst mistake in five years” it did see the game to its subscription peak of 550K and introduced instancing as the default dungeon mode, something WoW would make a genre default soon enough.

The creator of the original Castle Wolfenstein game from 1981, Silas Warner,  passed away at the age of 54.  I played that game a lot back on my Apple II.  Also, that seems young now.

Twenty-Five Years Ago

Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri, arguably one of the best entries in the Civilization series, ships.  My only nit-pick is that it ran full screen at pre-set resolutions so, unlike its predecessor Civilization II, if you play it today it either has to be in a small window or distorted full screen on your likely much-bigger-than-1999 monitor.

Star Wars: X-Wing Alliance also launched, one of the better Star Wars titles.  But Star Wars was never plagued by bad titles the way Star Trek has been over the years

Most Viewed Posts in February

1. Just a Lockpicking Minute…
2. Twitter and the Unleashing of the Great Blue Hope
3. The New System Purge of Video Games
4. Timing those Lucky Eggs for Friendship Milestones in Pokemon Go
5. Bonemass and Mountain Fever in Valheim
6. Stock Options and the IPO
7. Moving in to a New Computer Once More
8. Sailing into a Lightly Modded Valheim
9. EverQuest Starting Points – What Can I Even Say About Qeynos?
10. Quote of the Day – The Fourth A stands for… what now?
11. Quote of the Day – But Think of the Shareholder Value!
12. A Look into January 2024 Destruction in EVE Online

Once again, the direct traffic surge favored recent posts, so there were only two carry overs from last month.  The Lucky Eggs post is a Google search favorite, which is what keeps it on the list.

Search Terms of the Month

“wagering-agreement-meaning-in-nepali”
[I guess I keep this going by posting it]

“aveo-enterprise-agreement”
[Oh now what is this?]

battle of m2-xfe titans lost by corporation
[How about by alliance? I can do by alliance]

poe daily game like wordle
[There are many…]

“civ5-research-agreement-worth-it”
[Still yes…]

gay game
[Not my bag, but don’t let me stop you…]

gay game pc
[Still not much help here]

game java sex gay
[Does being in Java change anything?]

геи игры
[Saying it in Russian doesn’t go anywhere either]

Game Time from ManicTime

The numbers this month pretty much confirm what I probably could have told you based on my gut; I spent a lot of time playing Valheim, to the exclusion of other titles.

• Valheim – 89.63%
• EVE Online – 5.08%
• EverQuest – 3.40%
• Forza Horizon 4 – 1.13%
• Wreckfest – 0.50%
• WoW Classic – 0.26%

The biggest change was WoW Classic, which had been topping the list for months.  I clearly took a month off from Azeroth.

EVE Online

I did get in and go on a few fleets this past month.  I did not spend a lot of time playing in New Eden, but I kept my PI farm going.  That is my sole source of revenue these days, though with the demand for mechanical parts, which among other things are required for fuel blocks, PI is worth about a billion ISK a month to me.  That and SRP is what keeps me solvent.

EverQuest

I am not so much playing EverQuest as touring.  I have been and out for my posting series for the 25th anniversary.  A nostalgia tour of my own.  The visuals stimulate memories which I then take and turn into rambling, semi-coherent posts.  The touring will continue until my writing style improves… or I get bored… or we get past the anniversaries.  The $1,500 Fippy Fest 2024 in-person ticket price certainly did not endear me to Darkpaw.

Pokemon Go

My wife and I are very close to hitting level 45… or we would be if we had finished up that last task.  You have to defeat 50 Team Rocket Go bosses to get to 45, and I stand at 25 defeated and my wife at 20.  We still have some remedial work to do on that front.  It could take a bit.  But at least we can still earn xp towards level 46 while we do it.

• Level: 44 (75% of the way to 45 in xp, 3 of 4 level tasks complete)
• Pokedex status: 818 (+3) caught, 832 (+3) seen
• Vivillon Evolutions obtained: 15 of 20
• Pokemon I want: Three specific Scatterbugs; Sandstorm, Icy Snow, and Meadow
• Current buddy: Arctibax

Valheim

Whether or not Valheim was the right choice, it was the choice I jumped into in February.  I have pretty much taked a break from WoW all month to play Valheim, where there is always something to do.  We are currently in the mountains mining silver and search for the next boss.  I’ve geared up enough that I have ventured into the plains a few times and lived to tell the tale.  The mistlands await and maybe the Ashlands will be done before we burn out… so to speak.

WoW Classic

A very quiet month.  I did spend a little time in Wrath Classic working on my rogue, who is up to level 72 now.  Season of Discovery hasn’t held much interest for me since we got past Westfall.  That is kind part of the nostalgia barrier I guess.  Happy memories of Westfall and a bit after that.

Zwift

I managed to get on the bike every weekend this month.  Color that a win.  Meanwhile, the lower level curve meant I racked up three more undeserved levels.  Still no glowing neon tire sets available to me yet.

• Level – 24 (+3)
• Distanced cycled – 1,879 miles (+59 miles)
• Elevation climbed – 69,829 (+1,909 feet)
  
• Calories burned – 57,294 (+1,609)

Coming Up

Apparently one aspect of getting old is constantly asking things like “Is it March already? How did that happen?” aloud to your aging friends and family, who all declare their mystification as well.

So yeah, March.

That means that we will hit the EverQuest 25th anniversary on the 16th.  Expect a post.  Also, I will likely carry on with my own series of starting points posts.  A few more zones and then a couple about getting places.  I will have to run from Qeynos to Freeport.

You can expect some more Valheim I am sure.  Not done there yet.  At least not until we get to the mistlands… though reading up on that, things will get more complicated there.  Something about magic and a mana-like player resource.  We’ll see.  We still have the mountains to finish and the plains to conquor.

I will have to cast an eye towards WoW at some point.  Things are going on.  Cataclysm Classic looms.  Descisions will need to be made.

And then whatever news the wind might bring I suppose. I guess we already know that Microsoft is laying more people off in March.  We’ll have to see who else carries on with this trend.

Tickets Available Today for EverQuest Fippy Fest 2024

Fippy Fest is coming!

Celebrating the Year of Darkpaw

Wait, what is Fippy Fest?

On Saturday, June 15th 2024, Enad Global 7… erm… Daybreak… no, not quite right… Darkpaw Games, the Enad Global 7 studio under the Daybreak Games… and I snicker every time I say that aloud as it sounds like “they break games” when I do… which is responsible for the two EverQuest titles, is holding a live online event to celebrate EverQuest, EverQuest II, which is part of the Year of Darkpaw events for the respective 25th and 20th anniversaries of the two titles this year.

Sorry, I may have gotten carried away and that last sentence somehow became a paragraph.

Sure, Blizzard can woo away Holly Longdale and borrow heavily from the EverQuest nostalgia playbook, but two can play at that game!

So Darkpaw is going to have an online Fanfest come June, their own version of BlizzConline I suppose, called Fippy Fest.

From the sound of it general access will be free and you will be able to watch the panels and such, but if you opt-in for paid access you will be able to aske questions live during the event as well as getting in-game items to commemorate the event.

But wait, there’s more.

For a few special individuals there will be tickets available to attend the event in person down in San Diego.  The number of tickets available for those wanting to attend live hasn’t been declared, the company has only said the following:

We are keeping the in-person event small and intimate as we delve back into the realm of in-person events.

This might be the first in-person Fanfest-like event since the end of the SOE days.  It has been at least a decade.  (There was some other “fans invited” event at their offices a few years back, but it felt a little more ad hoc.)

Depending how small they are keeping the in-person side of things, these tickets might be more exclusive than any BlizzCon ticket.

Anyway, tickets go on sale at 6pm Pacific time today.  No pricing has been announced yet.

In addition to Fippy Fest, Darkpaw has announced that they will be attending Pax East in March as well.  They are getting out there to celebrate the Year of Darkpaw.

Here is the link to purchase tickets:

• Fippy Fest Tickets

Sticker shock warning.  Digital tickets come in a variety of flavors with different rewards:

• Fan – $50
• Booster – $100
• Patron – $150
• VIP – $250

You do have to pick whether or not you want rewards for EverQuest or EverQuest II.

But if you want to attend in person the ticket will run you $1,500. over at Everbrite.

How badly do you want to go to this event?

Get the fuck out of here.  I mean, the digital event prices seem a bit steep, even if they are somewhat volentary.  You are paying to be able to ask questions live and for some in-game items.  But the price for in person… you really have to love Norrath if you’re going to put out that amount.

But, I am sure someone will pay it.

Related links, each title featuring its own item rewards:

• Daybreak – Introducing Fippy Fest 2024! (EverQuest version)
• Daybreak – Introducing Fippy Fest 2024! (EverQuest II version)
• Daybreak – Introducing Fippy Fest 2024 – Forum Thread (EverQuest version)
• Daybreak – Introducing Fippy Fest 2024 – Forum Thread (EverQuest II version)
• The EverQuest Show – Episode 24: PAX East and Fippy Fest

Valheim and the Stacking Incident

I have on my list of things to write about the effect of the mods we have chosen for our current run through Valheim, how they have worked out and how they have changed our play style.  There have been some obvious impacts.

I wrote about the six we initially chose a while back, but we added a seventh to the list, and I want to write about that one today because it had a rather poor impact on our game this past weekend.

The new addon was mtnewton-ItemStacks-1.2.0, which does two things.

First, it allows you to have bigger stacks of things… which I guess is kind of obvious by the name.  By default it allows you to have stacks 10x the size of the Valheim defaults.  So if you could only have a stack of 100 arrows before, you can now have a stack of 1,000.  If ore was limited to 30 in a stack, it is now 300.  If wood was 50 before, it is 500 now.

You get the idea.  It looks like this,

Bigger stacks of things

The reason we wanted this was because inventory management… and base storage management… is a royal pain the the ass in Valheim.  We burn through wood by the thousands of units at times, so we needed stacks and stacks of chests.  Food was always overflowing our storage as well.

And Potshot had built a big storage room for our main base, with a nice curve to it so that you could stand in the middle and access all the chests.  But once we got into smelting tin and copper and scrap iron, the chests began to overflow and it was either build a whole adjunct set of storage that we would need to manage or find a mod that allowed bigger stacks.  Since we were already on the mod train, that won out.

Our storage space

The other thing this mod does is allow the weight of items to be reduced and, by default, with the mod installed, things weigh just 10% of their default game weight.

Now this balances out in a way.  If you could carry a stack of 30 scrap iron before, you can now carry a stack of 300 scrap iron.  Your stack carrying ability remains the same, even if you are hauling 10x the count.

I was a bit dubious about this aspect of the mod.  It felt like we might be crossing the line from quality of life improvements… which bigger stack definately fell into… and into down right cheating, or at least going easy mode to the point of removing too much of the edge from the game.

You can configure the stacking and weight reduction.  It could be changed to 20x stacks or half weight rather than 10% weight, the latter being something I tried to set.  However, the client doesn’t pay attention to how the server side gets configured.  The client side config wins in any conflict.  So I left that alone.

And, we got used to the weigh reduction pretty quickly.  It mostly meant fewer trips back and forth, which is a pretty nice QoL improvement, while we still had to ship ore and metal manually because it cannot go through portals.  There is a mod for that, but we haven’t gone there.

This past weekend Bung got back online after being busy and away for the last few weeks, and I got on with him and explained where we stood in the game, encouraging him to go pick up some of our raw material so he would get the new recipes, starting with the chest where we kept our refined metal.

He then went over to the workbench and forge to check out the recipes while I peeked in the chest just to remind myself how much refined metal we had built up.  It should have been a lot, but when I opened up the chest there was very little metal.

Then I realized that every stack he picked up and been reduced to the default stack size of 30.  He did not have the new mod and, in the conflict between the server and the client, the client won.  Default Valheim says those metal stacks should include no more than 30 pieces so it simply deleted anything in excess of 30.  I was very quickly saying, “Oh shit!”

Stacks after I consolidated the remaining iron and silver

There had been almost 700 units of iron and 500 of silver in there along with a lot more bronze, tin, and copper.

I asked if he had seen the mod in the pinned list on our Discord.  He had not, which was reasonable.  You have to go look at it and we had added that mod while he had been away.  It wasn’t an obvious change and I had not considered the consequences of somebody showing up without it installed.  It is one of those mods that doesn’t prevent you from logging in, the way OdinShip does.

So we had our first mod-inflicted issue.

He went and got that downloaded and I started looking into what else he had touched.  Fortunately, he had stopped at that chest to investigate new recipes.

So we decided to put in some work getting new raw metals back to base, starting with a visit to the swamp.  This was a bit of an issue because he was still wearing black forest level gear… troll hide leather… and the swamp… the swamp can be a tough place.  A dragur one-shotted him literally two steps out of our swamp base.

That didn’t go well

He grabbed some fully upgrade bronze kit that we had in the backup gear chests and came out in that.

We did get into a couple of crypts after that and were able to load up on scrap iron.

Down in the crypt

Then we sailed that back to our main base.  But scap iron wasn’t in short supply.  I actually later found a couple stacks of 300 raw scrap iron in another chest that we just had not processed yet.  Silver though… that we were now very short on.  But getting us up into the mountains… he would need more than bronze.

Fortunately, I had made an extra wolf hide cape the day before… one of my more common mistakes is going to upgrade something and accidently making another one… so he was able to grab that.  Then I gave him my fully upgraded iron gear because we had just enough silver to make the first tier of the wolf armor, which has the same armor protect stats.

Then we ran back to the swamp and killed Bonemass to get another wishbone for him.  Also, we now have a Bonemass trophy to hang on the wall.

Finally, we headed up to the mountain outpost that Potshot put together and went to work excavating a silver node, doing the routine where you dig it out until it is floating in mid-air, then hitting it a few times until it fractures and all the silver lands on the ground in one big jackpot.  Lots of fun.

However, the game had some plans for us.  As we were almost done with that, we got the “you are being hunter” message, which is the mountains wolf event.  This is a tough one to deal with, as a swarm of wolves will mess you up pretty quick.

We thought for a bit we might be safe.  We were down in the mining pit with no ramp down, so the wolves couldn’t get to us.  But then they began pushing against each other at the end of the pit until the ones up front started spilling down into the pit where we fought for a while before succumbing to the wolf mass.

This is why we keep meads of frost protection back at the base.

We ate some food, got a mead each, then took the portal back to the base.  Running back it seemed that the event was over, so I jumped back into the pit… only to be reminded that the wolves don’t necessarily despawn.  There were five in there waiting for me, so I was soon back at base eating food and getting another frost resist mead.

The wolves couldn’t get out of the pit and all our gear was down in the pit.  So we grabbed a couple of finewood bows that Potshot had hung on the wall as decoration, grabbed some arrows out of the supply chest, then went back to the mountains and stood on the edge of the pit and shot the wolves.  Problem solved.

Dealing with the wolf menace

We were then able to pop the silver vein and haul it back to the mountain base for later transport down the mountainside to our small dock in order to sail it back to be smelted.

Silver is actually considerably heavier than iron, tin, or copper, so has ended up being the first point we hit where we couldn’t just load up and carry about all we wanted.  So even with weight being down to 10% of default, there are still limits.

Anyway, we have the three of us now up to date, have recovered a bit on the silver front, and are now live in the mountains

A mountain vista

We have a couple of items on our list still.  We need some drake trophies in order to upgrade to the mountains level wolf armor set head piece.  We need more silver.  And we have to find where Moder, the next boss, spawns.

Quote of the Day – The Fourth A stands for… what now?

It’s a very big game, and we feel people will really see how how vast and complete that game is. It’s a really full, triple… quadruple-A game, that will deliver in the long run.

-Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot, justifying Skull and Bones’ $70 price point

What to say about Skull and Bones?

I wasn’t even going to do this as a quote of the day.  This quote was back at the beginning of the month, Skull and Bones feels like it is mainly a console title, and while I kept seeing it advertised on Twitter (that UbiSoft gives Elon money is another issue), it was never going to be something I would play.

To start with, it is a UbiSoft title and they have been on my blacklist for a couple of decades now for simply being complete shits.  I will buy EA titles, but screw UbiSoft and there customer hating policies.  Never is a long time, but I am willing to give it a shot in their case.

Skull and Bones – An original something

Furthermore, we all know, back in the logical parts of our brains, that AAA game prices (there are no AAAA games, knock that shit off before it infects the damn industry) being stuck at $60 for 20 years was not tenable in the real world where the price of nearly everything else has consistantly gone up.  So charging $70 isn’t a sin in my book, because if they don’t do that, then it will just be DLC and a cash shop and season passes… wait, they’ll do that even if they do raise the price.  That ship has sailed.  Nevermind I guess.

But the whole thing came up as part of the price discussion when an investor rep asked why the game couldn’t have been free to play and just loaded on more of the extras, since free will generally draw a bigger audience.  Anybody with some history knows how much UbiSoft hates the idea of anybody getting anything for free.  My early hate was fed by their draconian copy protection measures, which literally punished people who paid and encouraged pirating.

Finally, Yves Guillemot saying something dumb and annoying is barely news.  He is the arrogant face of a company that consistantly tries to prove it sees its customers as the enemy, or such is my extremely biased view.  I will repeat, every time I mention UbiSoft, that I hold a grudge.

But then I though about my new year’s prediction about UbiSoft finding some way to piss me off in 2024 and I asked myself, “Did this quote make me say ‘Fuck that guy!’ when I saw it?”

And yes, yes it did in fact make me say “Fuck that guy!” when I saw it.  It wasn’t a full throated utterance, but it rose to the point of muttered vocalization, and I am going to say that counts.  So I figured I had best document that quote so I can find it come December when I score my predictions.

Then, as icing on the cake as I wrote this I went to go check the review scores on MetaCritic, just to see how the alleged AAAA game was faring.  It is hard to tell.  I mean, on most days, when the review score range is locked in at 75-100 because gaming sites want ad revenue from the big names, seeing a score of 60 would be a pretty hard blow.

The PS5 has the most reviews, so I chose that

60 is better than 40 or 20, but it also smacks of “how low can we go before Yves bans our site from ads forever more?”  I am not completely unsympathetic to that reasoning.  Game sites gotta survive too.

Then again, maybe this is the new quadruple A grading scale?  Maybe a 60 is good?

Certainly the user reviews made reference to the AAAA quote from the CEO.

Skull and Bones apparently took a decade to make, costs somewhere in the region of $200 million over that time, and there was Yves painting a big target on its back, giving people an excuse to shit all over it and the price because it is also a full on live service cash grab.

Never change UbiSoft, never change.

Also, 10 points for Hufflepuff!

The Contested Seat

I am going to write about politics, but in a somewhat flippant and detatched way, merely because I am seeing a rare event, a congressional race without an incumbent.  I am keeping it somewhat vague because I don’t care enough to get that invested, part of which means not using any actual names to avoid any Google search attention.  But if you’re dying for names, it is all happening in what is currenly the California 16th congressional district.  Google will spill the beans.

The current district map from Wikipedia

For background, I live in what is a safe congressional district for one party, which makes it like most congressional districts nation wide.  My disctrict happens to be safe for Democrats, but there are also safe Republican seats in the state.  This isn’t even a matter of gerrymandering so much as even when you do bipartisan districting, the two parties will horse trade to maximize the number of safe seats.  They’re incentivized to do that as to be in constant competation costs money and they’d rather save that for other races.

It hasn’t always been a safe seat.  In my lifetime it has been held by Republicans.  But since 1992 it has been held by the same person, so I have essentially had the same congressional representative for more than 30 years.  Redistricting has changed the number of the district and the boundaries defining it multiple times, and I have moved five times in that time frame, but somehow I always end up with the same representative.  She must like me or something… stop following me around!

I do not hate her, but she is like any other politician and has never failed to disappointment me at some fundamental level at least once per term.  I have written her a couple of dozen cranky emails about policy issues and vote and never recieved anything but an automated response… but I got an automated response, which put her ahead of our past state senators.

Like any successful politician, she was mostly focused on what would get her elected by claiming credit beyond the scope a normal person might find tenable.  Anything that happened in her disctrict was always something “we” did even if she had no part in it.  Pretty typical stuff; sounds good on a flyer, often irksome if you are paying attention.

I took my daughter to an event where she and our state assembly representative were speaking and had her watch how they behaved back stage.  They and their entorages treated everybody with mild-to-active disdain, made sure everybody knew they were the important people, and paid no mind to the things they disrputed or got in the way of.  We had been watching Veep together and it was pretty much a Selena Meyer skit.  Politicians being politicians.  This is the behavior we reward and there is a school of thought that every district gets the candidate they deserve in the end.

Anyway, she is finally retiring, which means that there will not an incumbent who will automatically be re-elected.  We have to make a choice now as to who is likely to represent us for possibly the next 20-30 years, which is the way this sort of thing seems to go.  Everybody hates congress, but everybody loves their incumbent rep.

This means that for the first time since the election of President Clinton, I cannot tell you who will win this congressional election because, with a safe seat, the incumbent always wins unless they have done something very dumb or have moved on to better things, like being US senator fo the state. (We’re electing a couple of those this year too, but that isn’t as interesting to me.)

Which leads me to a set of choices.  This is California, where we have had the “jungle” primary system since 2010 where all candidates for the office are on the ballot together in the primary, regardless of party affiliation, and the top two finishers face each other in the main election in November.  Who do I have to pick from?  There were eleven options on my ballot, which I have ranked below in order of how likely I think it is they will make it to the November run-off.

I have included my gut insight on what they are running on, if anything, and the pros and cons of that approach.  This is not deep political analysis.  Also, I cannot begin to care enough to endorse one of them and, having already mailed in my vote, and I will only say that it went to somebody unlikely to win. (Oh, and campaign money numbers from Ballotpedia.)

So who is on the list?

The Big City Mayor

Okay, San Jose isn’t a “big city,” even if it is the tenth most populous in the US.  It is more like mini-LA, in that it has large population based on an aggressive land annexation campaign back in the 50s and 60s.  When you say “the city” here, you mean San Francisco (which actually has a smaller population, but feels like an actual city because it is packed into a 7 mile by 7 mile square), but it is the closest thing to a big city Silicon Valley has.

Anyway, the former mayor of SJ is running and is touting all of his accomplishments, some of which seem dubious or unproveable.  How can you tell he reduced homelessness by exactly 11%?  And wasn’t that during Covid?  More important, he is running on executive branch accomplishments for a legislative job, and I am not sure those translate well… but that assumes voters know the difference between executive and legislative roles.  That would not be a safe bet.

Campaign funds: $2,206,228

Pros: Has lots of endorsements, lots of money, is well known (at least compared to this group, I couldn’t tell you who the current mayor of SJ is), and is spending a lot on flyers and ads (his ad is playing in Overwolf in the background as I write this), and has a record to run on with accomplishments to brag about

Cons: San Jose is short staffed and still in a budget crisis after his time there (I could swear I saw an officer still rolling in a Crown Vic not that long ago) which could be a red flag to some, endorsements are from some conservative groups, the district includes a lot of places outside of SJ (though maybe that is a plus for him), we tend look down on the city and its dysfunction out here in the more affluent suburbs, and he comes off sounding like a pre-MAGA Republican running as a Democrat which, while a smart play in a district with a lot of rich people, will still alienate some Dems

Chances for the November ballot: 80%

The Party Ladder Climber

A former city council person in my own little suburb and our current state assembly representative.  However, we have term limits for state offices in California, which means every two terms the music starts and everybody has to get up and find a new seat when it stops.  Term limits are a failure in my opinion as the party favorites just change roles and rarely ever have to go away.  If they can’t get elected somewhere they get a commision appointment to keep thim on hold until they can.

Such is our assembly rep.  Fully bought into and adopted as part of the Jerry Brown party machine that runs California currently, if the party endorsed non-incumbent candidates in primaries, he would get the nod.

He was also at the event above with my daughter where his staff demanded a last minute change in the speaking order so he could go first, so managed to win the “most self-important and uncaring” award for that event.  Also, once stole credit for something my wife did when sitting in the mayor’s role, so I have a personal grudge.

Campaign funds: $1,369,552

Pros: Absolutely the party machine candidate, has name recognition, and if he gets past the primary he will get the party endorsement which will assure him the seat and he’ll be there for the next 30 years

Con: Absolutely a career politicion primarily interested on furthering his career and it shows when he speaks

Chances for the November ballot: 60%

The Eternal Challenger

A recurring challenger to the retriring incumbent, he has run against her for the last few elections.  Represents a very wealthy suburb city next to my own which is so NIMBY they don’t allow sidewalks or street lights.  His campaigns tend to be running against the status quo, which is not such a big draw without an incumbent.  Despite his rhetoric, come across as a conservative due to being on the city council of said wealthy suburb.

Campaign funds: $289,503

Pros: Has some name recognition, has made it past the primary multiple times, has pulled as much as 36% of the final vote against an incumbent in a safe disctrict, better than Republicans running as Republicans, who have struggled to break the 25% mark

Cons: Follwing his past pattern of promising everything to everybody which has never won in the past, also we’re playing for real this year, so he isn’t going to get the anti-incumbent protest vote

Chances for the November ballot: 30%

The Marine

I know this person was in the US Marines because his flyers feature a picture of him in his dress blues.  His actual candidate bio says he is currently an entrepenuer and runs his own cyber security firm along with a lot of things he believes in, which all sound good, but is still an unknown.  Has the largest campaign war chest in the race, even bigger than the mayor

Campaign funds: $2,792,923

Pros: Has most campaign money in the race, ctually spending it on mailers, says a lot of the “right” things for our district, and we shouldn’t underestimate the power of voter ignorance

Cons: Saying the right things is the lowest political bar possible, otherwise has no public record to run on, flyers are very much a “throw everything against the wall and maybe something will stick” approach

Chances for the November ballot: 25%

The Shallow Duo

Not one but TWO members of the Palo Alto city council are running in the election, and I am unfairly lumping them together because they are from what we call “Shallow Alto,” where they pretend to be very concerned about many things, until actually asked to do something, at which point the NIMBY wall is erected.  The closest the city gets to caring about the poor is subsidizing housing for teachers, and that is only because good schools keep the property values high. (And then they send their kids to private school.)

Campaign funds: $610,860 (combined)

Pros: Palo Alto does represent a wealthy demographic in the valley… though they are really on the peninsula and in the 650 area code… and one of the two might break out I suppose

Cons: The pair of them together haven’t raised even half of the funds of the top three, so no ads, no visibility, and the two of them are likely to split whatever demographic they represent

Chances for the November ballot: 15%

The Two Republicans

There are always a couple.  One is running on the “Congress is broken, I’ll fix it!” line in the election guide, which is particularly ironic given that Republicans in congress are currently the ones least interested in doing anything like work.  The other wouldn’t pay the money… and you have to pay by the word to have a statement in the election guide… so showed such low commitment to the effort that they cannot be taken seriously.

Campaign funds: $15,080 for one, $0 for the other

Pros: Somebody will always vote based on part affiliation alone… the guy up the street with the Trump flag is probably on board

Cons: Money?  Are these two even Republicans?  Shouldn’t these two be rich or have Larry Ellison backing them?  I suspect the mayor got all the conservative money

Chances for the November ballot: 2%

The Non-Starters

And then there are three more Democrats who haven’t sent out flyers… at least not to my address… and who haven’t stood out at all in any way I can identify without having to read copy straight from their campaigns.  I have to keep looking at my voter guide to even tell them apart.  People only get one vote and these three are not putting in the effort.

Campaign funds: $1,549,250 (combined)

Pros: The primary isn’t until March 5, so technically there is still time left for a surge, some popular messaging between them, combined they have more money than most other candidates

Cons: Divided they have second tier war chests plus early voting has been open for days now and I mailed in my ballot last Tuesday, so it is too late really

Chances for the November ballot: Less than 1%

So my expectation is that the top two on the list will end up being the pair on the ballot in November and we will see a tug of war between money and the state Democratic machine over influence, and the machine always wins… except when it doesn’t.  But I still think the machine will pull it off it, even if they couldn’t keep Feinstein from running in her last election. (She had her own constituency and was heavily supported by Hollywood, for whom she carried water during her time in the senate.)

However, if the mayor makes it in and the climber doesn’t, then it will be a money campaign to buy the seat November.

Anyway, I supposed I can grade myself on my assessment in two weeks.

Stock Options and the IPO

I have been saving this post for this day because it is a special day, the anniversary of my experiencing the Silicon Valley dream; the IPO!  Been there, done that, and literally got the T-shirt.  What else can I say?  Well, a lot of things it seems.

My wife ironed it a bit

30 years ago today Global Village went public and was availble for trading on the NASDAQ exchange under the GVIL ticker.

Everybody who worked at Global Village on that day got one of those T-shirts.  Mine has been sitting in a frame for more than 20 years now.  It used to be on the wall in my office at work, back when I was important enough to warrant an office, and it has sat in my home office since then.

Stock options and going public are the things that Silicon Valley dreams are made of… though being bought out by Google used to come pretty close on that front.  There are legendary tales of invididuals who got in early, worked hard with the promise of their stock options being worth something some day, and who were able to retire when the magic moment hit. (And equally legendary tales of people who gave up their shares only to later find that they have abandoned riches.)

There is a long standing story of old hands at Microsoft with stickers on their badge reading “FYIFV,” which stood for “fuck you, I’m fully vested” meaning that they could take the money and run any time they pleased.

I know people who have hung around Apple for ages who are worth millions due to stock options they were given over the years, especially options handed out at very low valuations during the bad days between Scully and the return of Steve Jobs.

My story is perhaps less dramatic.  It is certainlty less lucrative.

When I started in tech support at Global Village in 1992 I made $28K annually, was given 2,500 options valued at 25 cents each, that being the estimated value of shares when I was hired, and the choice of a better computer if I opted to sit in an interior cube versus a window cube.

And you only need to look out the window if your computer is slow, right?

As with most people, my stock options vested over time.  For some reason they decided to set the vesting period for five years, so after working there a year 500 shares would be available for me to purchase at the initial valuation.  I would then accrue more shares on a monthly basis until I hit five years, at which point I would be fully vested.

Most places considered four years enough, but somebody at GV got five years in the head.  Later, when I moved on to Big Island I complained to Rick that I was going to have to leave behind more than 500 shares of stock because I wouldn’t be fully vested until mid-1997.  The stock still had value then.  By 1997 it has lost much of it.

As I worked my way out of support and upstairs into engineering, the company was harnessing its success and building towards going public.  One of the things that happened was the VCs started putting people in place to run the company, people who would follow their instructions for preparing the company for an IPO.

Our CEOI was one of the marketing executives from Apple who were on the PowerBook project, and the CFO… I forget where he was from, though I recall he later left in disgrace due to some ethical lapse.

But that wouldn’t make him alone in the board room I guess.

We needed two things to go public back then.  The first was that we had to have two successful product lines.  We already had the Macintosh modem market sewn up pretty well.  But modems were all viewed as a single product line.  That was where the OneWorld network fax, modem, remote access server line came in.

The Global Village OneWorld

It didn’t have to be super successful, it just had to prove that we had two product lines.

Then we had to show a continuous pattern of growth.  This meant that every quarter had to exceed the past quarter for revenue.  That mean cutting off some quarters early when we had made enough revenue in order to carry it forward into the next.

This was, of course, unethical and probably unlawful.  But our CEO told us they were doing it at a company meeting, so it isn’t like they were hiding it.

And, of course, we had to be profitable.  But that was no problem.  The Mac modem market was lucrative, the PowerBook segment especially.

This all changed not too far down the line.  The rules changed when the VCs decided they wanted to cash out on Netscape about a year and a half later.  Netscape didn’t need to make money or have a long term plan, they went public on hype and a pomise that there must be SOMETHING of value in the company because we were all using the Netscape Natigator browser… you were supposed to pay for it, but almost nobody did… and a company that had something on damn near everybody’s computer had to be wise and powerful.

It set the pattern for the dotcom boom, the idea that you just had to have a lot of users, that butts in seats, as it was called, was more important that making a profit or having a business plan that made any sense.

I happened to live at an apartment at Whisman and Middlefield Road, at one end of the series of buildings that would soon have the Netscape name on them.  They, somewhat ironically, even had the old Cisco Systems building on Middlefield, a company that was the target model for many startups in the 90s.

As sure as Marc Andreesen provided the spark that made Netscape possible, he also provided most of the very dumb ideas that kept it from being anything beyond a brief flash in the pan.  If Steve Case, head of AOL, hadn’t been a sucker, hadn’t believed the hype, he might have saved himself the effort of dismantling the failure that was Netscape rather than buying it in 1998.  Instead he bailed out Andreesen and made him even richer.  Case was smart enough to only buy Netscape with AOL stock, and he managed to turn around and sell AOL to Time Warner in 2000, so he wasn’t a complete chump.

Anyway, if you see me dismissing Marc Andreesen as somebody who was simply in the right place at the right time, I submit as evidence pretty much everything he has done since the Netscape IPO… and doubly so that he and his current firm are all in on crypto, though they clearly want to be the scammer in that equation, the rent seeking landlord, the house that wins no matter what happens.

But I digress.

So the day came, February 24, 1994, and Global Village went public.  GVIL was listed on NASDAQ.  I think the CEO got to ring the opening bell on Wall Street that day.  We were all going to be rich!

Right?  RIGHT?

Well, no.  Or maybe.  I certainly was not.

The stock opened up at $8 a share.  If I had been able to exercise and sell ALL my shares on that date, it would have been worth $20,000.  That wasn’t going to buy me a house, much less let me retire, even in 1994.  But it could have been a down payment on a nice condo.

Except, of couse, I couldn’t sell all of my shares on that day.  I had only hit about a year and a half of vesting, so I only had some shares available.  791 I think.

But still, if I could sell those, it would still net me more than $6K after fees and such.

I could not, however, sell ANY shares because when a company does an IPO employee shares are generally locked out from being sold for a period of time in order to let the VCs and other favored investors cash out in the initial frenzy.  We had to wait six months.

And in six months, after the big cash out, the stock was down to $5 a share.  That was even less interesting than $8 a share.  But our time was not done yet.

The inetrnet was becoming a thing.  While I disdained Netscape just a few paragraphs back, a company with no plan and no proven track record that went public on hype alone, the hype was not reserved for Netscape alone.

The market itself was rising.  We were past the post Cold War recession, the peace dividend was a thing, Bill Clinton was president, and the internet in general and the World Wide Web in particular were suddenly the most interesting thing for Wall Street.  We all wanted to get online, to the point that I wrote about the great dial tone drought a while back.  Netscape was a symptom, not a cause of the hype, and any company that was involved with getting online was suddenly viewed with a great fondness beyond anything Lord British ever felt.  (If anybody gets that call back reference I will be amazed.)

Among the beneficiaries was GVIL, which was pulled out of its $5 doldrums and began to rise with the internet tide.  It passed $8, then $12, then $16 a share.  Maybe we would be rich!

The price peaked just past $21 a share at one point.  I remember this vividly as I had my shares with a broker and the day it hit that I put in a sell order.  I could have sold at market, which would have just gotten me the money.  That was in early 96 I think, which would have given me nearly 2,000 shares to play with.  That many shares at $20… well, again, I wasn’t going to be rich, but that was a down payment on a real house or maybe a new car paid for in cash, with money set aside for the taxes on the sale.

But I did not put in the sell order at market price.  I put it in at $22 a share to eke out just a little bit more cash.  And it never got there.  I then chased the price down the drain for the next two years.  I would set a sell order at a price… because it wasn’t in constant decline, it would bounce back up a bit, before settling down to a lower plateau than before… hoping to catch an uptick, only to have the price drop, never to return.

It fell through $18, $12, $10, $8, $5 and was mucking about around $4 a share, at which point I was hardly paying attention.  The modem market had collapsed… modems were becoming a commodity and Apple was at its nadir, that period when it was bouncing around between $12 and $18 a share, when Michael Dell was quipping about the company just giving them investors their money back and calling it a day… and Global Village sold off its modem business and its name.

San Jose Mercury News – April 1, 1998

By that point Big Island was in its own spiral and I was a Cypress Research and had an offer from a company called Edify, that would change my path into enterprise software.

The company became One World, and its stock ticker changed to OWLD.  Lots of grandious promises were made and hamfisted attempts to create a pump and dump scam out of the stock were rife in the Yahoo finance forum for the stock.

I sold most of my stock before it turned to OWLD at somewhere around $3 a share.  I went from a new BMW to a new PC in value.  And I didn’t even sell all of it.  Before the pre-IPO I had exercised my first vesting of shares.  I have a stock certificate for 500 shares of Global Village in a drawer with my name on them.

Exercising shares before the IPO was a dumb thing to do, and I blame my youthful ignorance and enthusiasm for this lapse.  When you buy shares like that, before the IPO, they become directly registered shares.  You may have heard reference to directly registered shares as part of the dumbassery around the GameStop stock bubble, where the amateur investors, the “apes,” built up a whole fantasy around direct restistered shares. (If you haven’t heard about that, Folding Ideas has an excellent video about the whole thing.  Worth watching, or at least listening to.)

The reality is that such shares are just a pain in the ass to sell because you have to do transactions through physical mail, with all the delay that incurs, to do anything with them.  By the time I wanted to do something with them, the stock was already sinking.

Meanwhile, the company stayed in steady decline.  OWLD would fall below $1 a share, with delisting threatened, before the company folded up shop in 1999.

It could have been worse.  The story was one of the early hires held onto their 25,000 shares until the place went out of business.  They believed in the company, and emotional investment in something like a tech company is never a good idea.

But I did learn my lesson.  When I took my vested Edify options… a merger caused them all to vest early, which changed the ticker to SONE, a company we’ll get to later… and sold them because my wife and I wanted to buy a house. I set a sell order at market value and cashed them all out at $130 a share.  The stock closed over $131, and touched close to $134 before the bell that day, at what was the absolute peak of the dotcom boom.  It was literally the bubble just before it burst.  I was a bit disappointed that I had sold below the days high and wondered if I had called in too early, if the next day would see the market climb even higher.

It did not.  The next day the stock fell to $128.  And it fell a bit more the day after that, and more every day for many days to come.  I had the good fortune and amazing luck to have sold at just a couple of bucks below its ultimate peak price point.  We bought the house and, as it turns out, buying real estate in Silicon Valley in 2000 had a better return than most investments.

Nobody has ever offered me stock options again.  It stopped being as much of a thing after the dotcom bubble.  Taxes and accounting laws were tightened up and the executives decided that only they deserved stock options for all of their hard work.

I closed my brokerage accounts and have not since invested directly in any stock, avoiding anything like the stock purchase plans that some companies have offered now and then, where twice a year they buy stock for you with money they have held back from your paycheck at the market price less a discount for being in the program… usually 15%.

And at every buy date the stock in question would spike up, much more than the 15% discount, and then fall back the next day, ensuring that the whole thing was a screw job for those who bought in on it.

I have money in a 401k for retirement, in an index fund.  But investing in stock as an individual retail customer with an eye towards increasing your money… that is just gambling.  And, as with any form of gambling, the house wins and the individuals lose.  The index fund is only allowed to “win” because somebody on Wall Street earns their bonus based on that.  You’re allowed to win a bit while they win big… though somehow they win big even when you lose.

I’d like to say it wasn’t always like that.  But then I think about the 1920s and the great depression that the market caused while people like Joe Kennedy got rich.  Even in the calm periods, where the market seemed focused on dividends and stability, the house always won in the end.

The story so far:

• Hanging on the Telephone
• Calling the Mall
• Finding Friends with the Popcorn Lady
• Jenny and the FCC
• What Your Area Code Used to Say About Your Location
• I Get a Modem then Start a BBS
• Tech Support at the Village
• Dominating the PowerBook Modem Market
• The Death of eWorld
• The Great Dial Tone Drought of 96
• When the Modem Business Ran Out at the Village
• The Village Attempts to Move Beyond Modems
• Anecdotes from the Village
• Usenet Newsgroups Part I – I find some Usenet Archives on CD-ROM
• Usenet Newsgroups Part II – What is on that CD and Why Your Hard Drive isn’t a Database
• Usenet Newsgroups Part III – Founding, Fame, Influence, and Foreshadowing
• From the Village to the Island
• YoYo Mechanic
• The Great Failure of Residential ISDN in the US Market
• Set Adrift from the Island

• Thinking on Enterprise Software

 

Friday Bullet Points with EVE Online Summits, Patches, Kickstarters, and Treaties

Once again I have some bullet points about New Eden related topics on Friday.  The EVE Online login server was down earlier today (I had half a dozen updates in my email from the EVE Status alerts page) but things seem to be up and running, so off we go to the bullet points.

• The Expiration of the Null Sec South Eastern Agreement

A year back, with the collapse of the FI.RE coalition and their retreat clockwise through null sec, where many of the parties landed in the now defunct B2 coalition (though a few kept on going clockwise and passed into alliance with Fraternity and PanFam), there was a question as to what would become of the power vacuum left in the southeast of null sec.

That led to the South Eastern Agreement, in with the major null sec coalitions pledged not to attack, take space, or put allies into that area with the idea of letting new non-bloc aligned organizations get a footing in null sec.  The agreement was set to last for one year, a timeline that ran out last week.  Some details:

• • Reddit – The South Eastern Agreement Details
  • TAGN – Southeastern Null Sec Declared Open to Non-Bloc Alliances
  • Reddit – The Coming End of the Agreement
  • NEP – The South Eastern Agreement’s Final Days in Eve Online

The agreement was not renewed mostly because neither side in the current bi-polar bloc structure of null sec felt it was in their interest.  Pandemic Horde attacked, took space, and put allies into the are during the agreement, letting everybody know they could not be trusted, and the Imperium had no interest in protecting the space or being the enforcer, especially since PH seemed keen to provoke a war out of the situation so they could get their allies to assist.  So the agreement ended.

Did it do any good?  Maybe.  Some groups lived there in fairly relative peace.  Now, however, unless they are well out of the line of fire, they are likely going to have to pick sides or be ground down in the ongoing PH attacks on the Imperium down there.

• A Successful EVE Online Kickstarter

The War for New Eden Kickstarter campaign ended earlier this week as well, with the project successfully funded, bringing up the success/failure ratio for EVE Online related campaigns a bit.

EVE Strategy Board Game

The campaign closed out with a number considerably over their initial goal.

The final totals for the campaign

If you are just hearing about this and feel like you have missed out, you can still put in a post-campaign pledge at the War for New Eden web site.  Some links for those interested:

• • War for New Eden Kickstarter Campaign
  • War for New Eden web site
  • Kicktraq details for the campaign

Now, of course, the question is when are backers going to get this rather large board game with so many pieces and board segments?  The promise is by Christmas, but I will be surprised it that happens, even with 10 months to go.  We shall see.

And what were the other EVE Online Kickstarter campaigns?  There are a number of failed ones including the EVE Online Control Panel, a spiffy bit of hardware, and the badly mishandled Fountain War Book campaign.

And the successes?  Andrew Groen’s Empires of EVE Vol. 1 and Vol. 2.

• Havoc Patch Notes

CCP did a fairly big update that included the return of LP trading and a balance pass through a several ship classes.

Honestly, this felt like something that would have been a dev blog in the old days, but they just stuck it in the February patch notes and rolled on.

There are changes to command ships, marauders, entropic disintigrators, and rapid light missile launchers at the top of the list, along with a host of smaller items.  You will, for example, now be able to pre-heat modules while still cloaked and invulnerable after a gate jump, so you’ll be ready to rock when you break invuln and decloak.

You can find all the updates in the patch notes for February 20th here.

There is also a write up over at TNG about it.

• CSM 18 Winter Summit

I haven’t thought about the CSM since the last election, but they are still at work and went to Iceland for the winter summit.  CCP Swift posted the summit agenda back at the end of January, and we have been getting some updates and peeks into what happened over on Reddit, including the following posts:

• CSM 18 Summit Presentation – Industry Overview 2024
• CSM 18 Summit Presentation: Faction Warfare and Low Sec Iteration Non-NDA
• CSM Summit Updates (Dark Shines, INIT.)
• A little CSM update.
• Another CSM Update, Post Summit

Since the EVE Online news ecosystem has pretty much collapsed I am not sure how much else we’ll hear about the summit.  CCP has run hot and cold on minutes of the meetings over the years, so maybe we’ll get something, or maybe we won’t.

Anyway, it is Friday, the weekend is at hand, and it is going to be warm and sunny here in Silicon Valley, all the better to dry us out after the most recent atmospheric river pass.

Some Co-op Crafting Survival Game FOMO

This whole round of suvival game focus started for me because the makers of No Man’s Sky, Hello Games, announced their coming title, Light No Fire.  The promise of that got me worked up on the genre once more.

Light no Fire… not in 2024 at least

That led to me looking into some possible Valheim alternatives… Valheim being my current gold standard for open world, co-op suvival titles… during the Steam Winter Sale.  I actually bought some things and played them!

But none of them quite scratched the right itch and while I got more suggestions, eventually I just wanted to play something, so we kicked off a new Valheim world.  Done and done, right?

Of course, the day I put down the credit card to rent a server for 30 days and roll up a fresh world one of the possible alternative candidates, Conan Exiles, goes on sale for half off.  I wasn’t willing to experiment for $40, but for $20 I might have.

But I was committed and wanted to play something, though I wasn’t so invested in Valheim that I couldn’t have been derailed… but nothing quite caused me to be so moved.

First up was Palworld, or Pokemon with Guns, which by reasonable measures… dollah dollah bills… has been a huge success and has sold millions of copies.   This seemed to be right up my alley, to the point that G-Portal even had server rentals for it right away.  This featured on a number of blogs I followed.

I thought about jumping into this… but wasn’t quite convinced.  Close, but not quite there.

Then there was Enshrounded, which is also on my Steam wishlist and which also tickled the shared world co-op aspect of my desires, and which was also featured on G-Portal server rentals, and which had also grabbed the interest of some other bloggers.  It sounded good and I thought about grabbing it, yet another early access title.  But I haven’t so far.

And then this week Nightengale landed on Steam, once again in the suvival co-op crafting genre, and once again grabbing a few people I know, including a couple of the bloggers in the neighborhood. (Belghast was on about it yesterday, as was Bhagpuss.)  It is in early access and might need some work, but it did catch my eye.  Private servers are not a thing it seems, instead you can share your part of their world with just your friends if I read things correctly… which also means when thier servers are down you’re not playing.

I am sure there was also something else out there that popped up… Last Epoch maybe, or was it some other title… I don’t remember all of them.  But it did feel like the universe had decided to mock me a bit for my desire for a Valheim-like co-op experience by throwing all of these new and tempting options at me after I committed to the Valheim.

Then again, I am happy playing Valhelm right now.  It has an ease about it that can soak up hours of time,  We have been moving through the opening biomes at a quick pace, but that has been helped along by mods and familiarity, which isn’t a bad thing.  I suspect that we will slow down a bit at the plains, and that the mistlands will take us long enough to conquor that the ashlands will have finally arrived by the time we finish off that boss, which will give us another biome to master.

So I feel the temptation of these other titles, the fear of missing out if I am not there at the beginning the way I was for Valheim.

On the other hand, if those titles are any good, they’ll be there waiting for us.  And I also know that the last three years has seen Valheim improve a great deal.  As the song says, fools rush in… and sometimes they get the best seats, and other times they pay the price for being too early on the scene.

Don’t Put the Obliterator next to your Base Buildings in Valheim

It is always fun to find new thing in Valheim when returning.

I was up at the trader to sell off some of the plunder from the crypts out in the swamp that had been collecting back at base when I noticed her had a Thunder stone for sale… cheap.  I couldn’t remember what a Thunderston did or if it was new or had been around.

For sale now though

So I bought one, wondering if it would unlock a new recipie.  And it did.  It unlocked something called the Obliterator, which I dearly hoped was what I thought it was.  I headed right back to base to see what it did.

With the Thunder stone I had all the ingredients to hand, so I started looking around as to where I could build it.  I ran all over the inside of our main base looking for a location, but it seemed to be a tall item, so eventually I headed outside.

The second place I ended up building it was out in a clear patch of land next to our main base building, where a generated structure had been when the world was first generated.

The Obliterator it a container with copper pipes running all around it and what appears to be a tall copper mast antenna sticking up into the sky, which is what kept me from building it inside.  You can open it up and put things in it, then there is a lever on the side you can pull when you have closed it up again.

Pull lever to make things happen

And when you pull the lever, thunder booms and lightning descends and strikes the mast, covering it with electric power, and a message shows up saying that the items were obliterated.

What happened? Items obliterated!

Now, this actually solves a problem in Valheim, which is what to do with stuff you no longer want.  You can decontruct building materials, but things like armor or weapons, they just hang around taking up chest space.  And they don’t even stack, so it is annoying, and once you upgrade your armor a couple of times you are never going to go back to the cloth rags again.

So being able to get rid of stuff is a good thing.  Enter the Obliterator.  Better than sailing out to the ocean and dumping stuff overboard… and dumping stuff overboard didn’t always work because some items float and you can end up picking them up by accident later.

And, if you put enough stuff in the Obliterator, Odin gives you something.

What is Odin’s bounty?

It is just coal, but coal is always useful.  The ration of coal to items is pretty bad, according to the wiki, so you wouldn’t want to give up your kiln in favor of the Obliterator.  But getting a bit of coal for a pile of garbage isn’t bad.  I didn’t mind just being able to destroy thing.

You will notice that I am standing back from the Obliterator because when the lightning hits it does some AOE damage to things with its immediate vicinity.

And that was how we ended up with a hole in the side of the base, because the FIRST place I built it was right next to the wall.

Well, that can be mended

I suppose I should be glad that I didn’t find a place inside where the ceiling was high enough to build it.

Bonemass and Mountain Fever in Valheim

I guess all replays of a game that is centered on progression will inevitably be quicker.  The learning curve and (some of) the mistakes have been marked out or made already and you often know what the next upgrade brings and that drives you to move forward.  So it has been going for me.

Look, starting out last week, all I wanted was some obsidian so we could get the next workbench upgrade.  Obsidian means going to the mountains, but it is just the mountains.  The mountain biomes are already close by, easier to get to than the swamp. C’mon, I’ll zip in, pick some up, and zip right out again.  I just wanted to get my troll hide armor that last upgrade.  I put that on to go hunt and harvest because I am fast and stealthy in it.

I just needed to brew up some frost resist meads… and I’ll barely need those, practically a waste to comsume one for such a tiny mission… and I’ll be set.

The wolves in the mountains though, they had different ideas.

Wolves say “No!”

This led to a series of events that caused me to have to go and clear up death markers on my game map as they were becoming rather too frequent and obscuring some terrain.

Upgraded bronze kit sufficient to tank The Elder is not up to the task in the mountains.  Also, you cannot mine obsidian with a bronze pick, something I was reminded of when I was up in the mountains… but the sound of a bronze pick hitting obsidian, that is still loud enough to alert the local wolves and send them your way.  Another death.

At one point I was in a situation where I had a few corpses to recover and the naked run just wasn’t cutting it.  I decided I needed to gear up to get this done, so I raided our strategic iron supply, the pile of iron we had been slowly building up, and forged myself a set of upgraded iron armor set, along with iron mace and iron pickaxe.  I drained our iron reserves dry, but I got up there and got my stuff back… killed a few wolves… and grabbed some obsidian.

Mission accomplished I guess.

Then I spent the balance of last week binge mining armor, breaking into crypts to clear them out… iron gear made the dragur easier to deal with… and hauling scrap iron home to be refined.  I managed to get 900 iron back over the week, though we’ll get to the dynamics of that in another post.  There is a mod aspect to that.

Along the way, as I pillaged the swamps, I finally found some turnip seeds growing.  Those too went back to base to be cultivated until we built up a supply of seeds sufficient to maintain production in support of upgraded food.  Also, you need some turnips to make the spice rack upgrade for the cauldron to get upgraded food.  So all good there.

Turnip Seeds in the swamp

Turnip seeds are kind of tough to find because, unlike carrot seeds in the black forest, there isn’t as much ground suitible for them to spawn on… or so goes the theory online.  Seems reasonable.

Now I was upgeared and up gunned… or up bowed, having made the huntsman’s bow… and those wolves in the mountains were not such a terror.  But I needed frost resist meads to hang out in the mountains, lest I freeze.  The way around that is silver, which you need for the wolf hide cape, which gives you cold resistence.  But silver is only found in the mountains and it is mostly buried which means you need the wishbone to find it.

I did try to find some opportunistic silver.  You can find veins above ground now and then.  The world generation algorithm allows for that… or is imperfect, depending on how you look at it.  But exploration, while getting me more wolf hides, did not turn up any free silver.  William Jennigs Bryan wept.

That meant we needed wishbones, which meant killing Bonemass, the swamp boss.

Bonemass’s location had been revealed to us previously and I had taken a side trip to put up a portal by his spawn point.  To get ready to fight him I came up with a plan.  Usually, if there are a few of us, we build a few platforms and snipe away at him, mostly out of range.

However, one of the other aspects of this run at Valheim is that it has become mostly a Potshot and I venture.  That is fine.  We’re perhaps a little more into it than Ula or Bung, so it might be a pleasant break for them.

But with two of us, just arrows seemed like it might take a while.  Also, we had a limited amount of the most potant arrows against Bonemass, frost arrows.  While in the mountains I had killed a few drakes, enough to put together 200 frost arrows.  That would keep one person going through the fight, but somebody else would need to be on the ground.

First things first, I went out to the swamp and started on a platform.  This was hindered a bit at one point when an event happened, I got the message about the ground shaking, and trolls showed up and started smashing everything.  I guess I hit the threshold of structures that made the area constitute a base.  They took some effort to deal with as kiting in the swamp is tough as you’re always wet and have to wade through deep water if you don’t have a clear path.

Swamp Troll Getting His

I managed to fend them off, then went back to rebuilding, putting together a covered gallery for the sniper role.

A vantage point in the trees

That was just above the summoning are, which I had cleared out and leveled with the hoe.

The area of the coming fight

I was a bit worried about line of sight from the perch.  It seemed okay, but you only really know once the fight is on and the big bad is rolling around.

View from the shooting gallery

That all setup, Potshot and I got out there and setup, him in the perch loaded with most of our frost arrows and me down on the ground in the iron armor, upgraded as fully as possible, with a few frost arrows for some ranged attacks, but mostly planning to get stuck in with the iron mace, blunt and cold being the two weaknesses of Bonemass.

Once unleashed… summoning bosses now just requires one of whatever item calls them it seems, in this case a withered bone… I gulped down a poison resist mead and tried to get in there and pound on him when I could.

Bonesmass Unleashed

He summons blobs, which were one-shottable, and brings forth a big old cloud of poison, which you want to get away from even on a poison resist mead, and he does a couple of big attacks that you want your shield up for.  The trick of being on the ground with him is knowing when to get in close and beat on him and when to run away.

I did try laying back to hit him with frost arrows but, while they did damage and Potshot was consistantly ticking away at him, it was the mace that really made his health bar move.  So I got in close when I could, managed not to die, and took a health mead when I mis-timed a block or didn’t dance away in time, and we brought him down.

We returned to the main base to hang up the trophy on the henge and unlock his abilities, which are decent combat resists.

Bonemass on his hook

I still prefer Eikthyr for the running away potential, but Bonemass isn’t bad.

We also picked up a wishbone each, which we equipped.  Then I went through to a portal near some mountains and ran up to a ruin I saw previously that looked like it would make the core of a decent base and build a workbench and a portal.  Potshot joined me up there and, frost resist meads running, we found a silver vein not too far off and mined out our first silver.

Then we ran it down the mountain to bring it back to base.

At least running downhill is quick

The refining of silver has begun.  First items produced were wolf hide capes for the cold resist.

We still need a bunch of iron, and have plenty of crypts in the swamp mapped out, but now I can explore the mountains as well.