Monthly Archives: April 2024

The Cataclysm Classic Pre-Patch has Arrived

April 2024 in Review

The Site

A while back WP.com introduced Blaze, a paid ad program that allows you to promote your blog. Back when it first showed up they gave me a $50 credit and I tried it… and it was not worth the cash. 65 clicks into my promoted post seemed like a joke for that much money.

Then they sent out surveys and talked about how they were making it better. So when they gave me another $50 credit this month I decided to try it again. This time I chose my post about Balatro, which I though was maybe a bit more mainstream for a video game ad.

And this time they are telling me the ad pulled in almost 500 clicks. A serious improvement… if it is true. The problem is that if I go into the WP.com stats and look at how many clicks that post received during the run of the ad, it is actually closer to 250.

Still an improvement… but the stats on my admin page show clicks from all sources, just not the ad, and while traffic often dies off after a day or two, it can still carry on for weeks in little drips and drabs. So there is no saying that all of those 250 were from the ad.

In the end, even if it was a great improvement and added another 25 to 50 views a day over a ten day campaign, would you spend $50 of your own money for that result? I wouldn’t.

Meanwhile, just because I need an excuse to put an image in here somewhere, the surges of direct traffic continue to pop up now and again.

Direct traffic as a source in April 2024

However, these surges are a lot less regular than they were back in November and December. Search engine traffic… which means Google 99% of the time, remain steady.

Also, WTF is going on with the Google Analytics site? Have they just broken it on Firefox to be dicks?

Finally, the Flag Counter widget informs me that somebody from a new country visited the blog in April. Welcome random person from Palau! I hope you found something interesting!

First new county in a few years

Palau, a trust territory of the United States in the wake of the second world war, is an independent island nation, but has two ZIP codes assigned to it and is still served by the US Postal Service.

One Year Ago

I did what I believed to be my final post specifically covering April Fools at Blizzard, Blizz having gone pretty cool on the whole thing since around 2017. We’ll see if this pans out.

The Fellowship and Fire update came to New World, bringing with is seasons and season passes.

LOTRO offered a limited time level 140 boost, which was the cap at the time. I bought one and went through the process of using it.

Niantic was going after remote raiding in Pokemon Go.

Honest Game Trailers took on the Civilization Series, which aligned nicely with my own brief retrospective on the games. I did my own round up of the series, with some ranking. All versions I looked at were playable in some form. I even went and played Civilization VI. I am still not a fan.

In Wrath Classic the group was culling Stratholme with Arthas. I also had some minor gripes about Wrath Classic. We also had the Activision Blizzard Q1 2023 financials.

I wrote about five EVE Online maps that were better than the two in-game maps the game offers. Spoiler: fifth place was a multi-way tie, so it was way more than five. Meanwhile, somebody did a video of the 2007 to 2022 null sec influence map… which was one of the maps on my list.

Meanwhile, as we drew closer to the EVE 20th anniversary, CCP was refurbing the EVE monument, which included the ability to get your character name on the plaques if you missed that at the ten year anniversary. They also outlined the road to Alliance Tournament XIX.

I also did a Friday Bullet Points post about EVE Online that covered the new launcher beta, another in-game theft, a reminder about the monument thing, Fraternity Keepstars, and the MER. Oh, and they also announced that EVE Anywhere was going away. Cloud Computing was sooo 2016.

In the game, the Imperium and B2 coalitions managed to win the armor time against Fraternity’s Keepstar in X47L-Q, a battle than ran through down time, so we all got kicked and had to log back in again to resume the fight. Having lost the armor timer, Fraternity and its allies did not contest the final timer and the Keepstar was destroyed. The Imperium then dialed-back operations in Pure Blind.

I also looked into March 2023 destruction in the game.

Then there was the a16z Project Awakening that CCP was going on about. I was not a fan. Since Pearl Abyss was all in on this blockchain scam nonsense, I wondered who should have bought CCP back in 2018.

I was wondering what Atari… or the company that owned the Atari name… was actually in the business of doing.

I was also kind of wondering what the Metaverse Standards Forum was doing… another working group for a nonsense idea.

I did another Friday Bullet Points post, this time about the Worldle-verse, where Wordle itself hit puzzle 666, Spotify was shutting down Heardle, a DOS version of Wordle, a WoW focused version of Wordle, and Digits from the NYT which they have since shut down.

I was fiddling with AI bots, asking what the difference between an MMO and an MMORPG was, why there were so many fantasy MMORPS, and how to find a warm ocean in Minecraft.

And over on Twitter, which was still Twitter then, Elon’s threat to take away blue checkmarks for verified users and make them only available for sale failed to appear on the appointed day… except for the New York Times, which Elon felt was spreading the “woke mind virus” or some BS. “Woke” quickly came to mean “something I don’t like” when used by Elon. The unpaid for blue checks eventually were taken away in the back half of the month. The blue check mark went from “this celeb or whoever is who they say they are” to “This bozo paid $8.”

Five Years Ago

April Fools, once a grand tradition at Blizzard, was pretty sparse.

Google Plus went away.

The Minecraft Village & Pillage update landed.

CCP loudly announced the removal and banning of CSM13 member Brisc Rubal. And then in what I described as the “nightmare scenario,” CCP hedged, promising to investigate further. And then they exonerated Brisc and restored him apologizing for all the trouble. A disastrous example of “measure once, cut twice” by CCP. And Brisc didn’t get his reputation back. I still see people who think he must have been guilty and somehow worked a deal or threatened to sue in order to get CCP to back down.

CCP also announced the CSM14 election timeline. Brisc opted to stay away from that. And the April update brought capital nerfs, especially for the Rorqual. Hilmar was starting on something about player retention. And CCP unveiled the Katia Sai monument in Saisio.

Actually out in space myself in EVE Online, I was flying with Liberty Squad as we visited The Spire for a fight over a Sotiyo as well as busting some other structures and setting some timers. There was also an op from Delve to Lonetrek and another Reavers Race.

NantWorks handed H1Z1… or Z1 Battle Royale… back to Daybreak, having failed to make a go of the challenge of reviving the game.

I reviewed a bit of the coverage the EverQuest 20th anniversary got. There was also some changes to the Selo progression server, which reflected on what players wanted versus what Daybreak was offering.

I was also playing World of Warcraft, binging on pet battles and catching some new pets. We got some news about the approaching update, which would unlock flying in Battle for Azeroth. That promoted me to get the first part of the pathfinder achievement done. I also got my first alt to level 120, though he hadn’t even been to Zandalar or Kul’Tiras. Pet battles will do ya.

And I came up with a guide to criticizing games you do not like.

Ten Years Ago

Spacewar! for the PDP-1 was up via emulation on the internet archive.

The Elder Scrolls Online launched, hitting its planned April 4th date. I did not play.

I was diving in to Pokemon X & Y, having returned to Pokemon at last.

The strategy group played a game of Civilization V that ended with a win via nuclear terror.

The Kickstarter campaign for the book A History of the Great Empires of EVE Online kicked off. We were also watching Pantheon: Rise of the Something was splutter along after failing its Kickstarter campaign.

In EVE Online proper there was Burn Jita 3, which seemed like less of a thing the third time out. There was a video. Then there was the CSM9 vote. At least there were only 36 candidates on the ballot.

In null sec we were shooting Black Legion things, because that is what we did in the CFC. I was just happy to be using lasers, those skills having been trained up amongst my 120 million skill points. There were also some posts about being space famous and an attempt at in-game blackmail.

But on the broader CCP front, World of Darkness was officially cancelled.

On the iPad I was playing Hearthstone and QuizUp… for about a week.

Turbine announced that Beornings were coming to Lord of the Rings Online.

SOE gave me a key for seven days of Landmark, so I went and tried it out. SOE also announced H1Z1 and began their love affair with Reddit and got their new All Access plan running. While on the old school front, Dave Georgeson said SOE never plans to shut down EverQuest.

Warlords of Draenor was still a long ways away. But Blizzard was doing well on other fronts. The instance group finished up Zul’gurub. And there was the usual April Fools stuff.

Over at GamesIndustry.biz they have a round up of what was going in April of 2014.

Fifteen Years Ago

Dave Arneson passed away. He was, with Gary Gygax, the co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons, that so-influential gaming system that has shaped how we view fantasy swords and sorcery games for over 30 years now. There would be no World of Warcraft as it is today without Dungeons & Dragons.

We also saw the launch of SOE’s Free Realms, which stuttered a bit on day one. Soon though they had millions of people signed up for the game, but since it was free to play, not a common thing at the time, that was no indication of revenue. My daughter tried to sign up four times, so that was at least four out of the millions. SOE was advertising the game heavily on Cartoon Network. But FR did not run on MacOS, and my daughter was running on an iMac at the time. I knew she has signed up because her email used to get routed to me.

In EVE Online I was mulling over the Apocrypha expansion and configuring up a Cerebus to try out as a mission runner. I was also doing invention to make tech II missiles, which meant data cores and research agents and such, and pondering the idea that maybe using your skills should increase your skill points or something.

As usual, there was much ado about World of Warcraft.

PETA was planning some event in WoW. I had trouble believing it wasn’t a joke.
In a blinding flash of the obvious, Nielsen reported that a lot of guys play WoW.
There was Noblegarden, or Blizzard Easter, and its egg collecting frenzy.
There was my daughter and I trying to swim to Silvermoon to find a pet for her hunter.
I couldn’t find a copy of The Burning Crusade at Fry’s.
After hitting level 30 my daughter, my mom, and I were all riding around together on our night elf cat mounts.
And the instance group, after a hiatus, got back together, did a warm up run in the Shadow Labyrinth, then went on to finally collect the head of Ingvar the Plunderer. After that it was on to The Nexus.

I was sniggering like a pre-teen about Cornhole. Also, there was something about Honest Scrap that was a meme, back when memes weren’t just pop culture references.

I was looking back on two years of the Wii and the games we played on it.

On the TV we were apparently watching Castle and Dollhouse.

And then there were new comers as we brought home two wee kittens.

Twenty Years Ago

City of Heroes launched in the US. Closed down by NCsoft in 2012, the game lives on with a privately run server called City of Heroes Rebirth, built on the original code base.

Lineage II launched in North America. This successor to the Lineage never reached the original’s popularity, but hung on to its own user base.

Thirty Five Years Ago

The Nintendo Game Boy launched in Japan. Perhaps the definitive hand held console for a generation, it lasted from the Tetris era into the original Pokemon series of games.

Most Viewed Posts in April

Search Terms of the Month

eve origin of the northern coalition
[Pretty sure it started in the north…]

zombie heat gay game
[Look man, just leave me out of this…]

“ttc-collective-agreement-2020”
[Widely criticized, now just a PanFam thing]

is jetpack replaced wordpress app
[Sort of…]

valheim how much iron do i need for the entire game
[All of it. Seriously, later biomes use it.]

how to get edencom lp
[Run Edencom missions?]

Game Time from ManicTime

In the end, April was pretty evenly divided. I came in on Conan Exiles and out on Wrath Classic really.

Conan Exiles – 29.56%
WoW Classic – 23.75%
Balatro – 21.81%
Valheim – 13.00%
EVE Online – 5.50%
EverQuest – 6.39%

Balatro

A deck building rogue-like poker based card game. That ate up some time. I’ve kind of hit a wall on getting past 80K points in a single hand to be a boss blind. The cards have failed me there a few times.

Conan Exiles

We were all-in on this at the start of the month. Many hours were invested. We explored, found horses, did our first dungeon… then it kind of faded. It didn’t help that GPortal’s LA data center, where our server is hosted, was down for a full weekend this month. That’ll break your stride.

EVE Online

I did undock and go on a couple of fleets this month. I left my mark on zKillboard to at least provide proof of life. But I haven’t been all that invested. The interesting ops have been running in early EU time, which is the only time PanFam and Fraternity will show up.

EverQuest

I continue to explore some of the old places still there in Norrath, with erratic tales of the old days based on foggy memories and rose colored glasses. Not done with this yet.

Pokemon Go

Just a few more Team Rocket leaders to go to unlock level 45 for my with and I. At least we still earn xp as we try to knock down that one final objective, so we’ll be a few million points into that level once we finish the task.

Level: 44 (138% of the way to 45 in xp, 3 of 4 level tasks complete)
Pokedex status: 822 (+1) caught, 836 (+2) seen
Vivillon Evolutions obtained: 15 of 20
Pokemon I want: Three specific Scatterbugs; Sandstorm, Icy Snow, and Meadow
Current buddy: Zygarde

Valheim

We had a slow down in Valheim as Conan Exiles became a focus for several weeks. Also, the Mistlands were a bit too oppressive. Now that I have banished the mist… at least on my client… I am going to see if we can unlock some of the resources of the biome as the Ashlands loom.

WoW Classic

We started off the month having spent weeks away from the game. But the coming of Cataclysm Classic awakened the desire to carry on… at least in Potshot and I. I spent time working on one last alt who is already level 79 as I write this. I will have some options going into a revamped Azeroth late in May.

Zwift

Zwift gave up on its bonus experience for weekly usage streaks, so my unearned advancement up the level path has slowed down. Not that levels mean much, aside from cosmetic unlocks, and I am many levels from anything interesting. But still I get on and ride.

Level – 27 (+1)
Distanced cycled – 1,973 miles (+35 miles)
Elevation climbed – 72,198 (+1,457 feet)
Calories burned – 59,692 (+1,075)

Coming Up

I wrote a post about a number of things coming up on the WoW front in May. Probably the most on point is the coming of Cataclysm Classic. The pre-patch lands today and the expansion on May 20th. The will no doubt generate some sort of assessment of Wrath Classic and a bit of history about Cata.

It is also the Capsuleer Day celebration in EVE Online. I’ll get to that, but it looks like that day, the game’s 21st anniversary this year, will be celebrated all month long.

I also strongly suspect that we’ll get the Ashlands update for Valheim in May. They are close.

I have to travel quite a bit more than usual in May, so my posting streak is at risk of being broken… not that such a streak has any real meaning. But it is a thing.

Thoughts on the Coming EverQuest II Anashti Sul Time Locked Expansion Server

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In this “Year of Darkpaw” and all things Norrath, I haven’t spent much time writing about EverQuest II, the younger sibling of the EverQuest duo. But it is part of the year with its 20th anniversary landing in November.

As part of the celebration on the EQII side of the house, there has been a planned special server on the roadmap since the start of the year, with June as a launch target. We got a bit more info about the server in the April Producer’s Letter, which said it was going to take us back to 2006.

Anashti Sul – We’ll get to her in a bit

And while just being told that doesn’t feel like much, it is actually kind of a big statement. Also, you might note, 2006 isn’t “20 years ago” so they are jumping ahead a bit in the life of the game. As I noted at the time on the post over at Massively OP, 2006 means no going back to the original crafting and some of the other ideas that did not pan out very well at launch.

I am sure there are still a few purists out there who will bemoan the fact that we won’t be going back to four level combines to produce finished items and having to get crafting materials from two or three other professions to get anything done. Having lived through it, I know the highs and the lows of that system. In the end though, the reason cooking was so popular was you didn’t need to depend on anybody else. As like as not trying to go back to that with the current client would be prohibitively expensive… and for a very short term benefit.

This server will unlock expansions fast enough that the first two years out of a 20 year progression will go by fast and we’d be to the current crafting system in no time. So best not to bother if it is going away in any case.

As Bhagpuss said at one point, we’re going back to the era when Scott Hartsman was directing the show and the game went from trying to have a split personality that both acknowledged the old game and pretended it had nothing to do with it as it tried to forge a completely independent lore path. But with the 2006 Echoes of Faydwer expansion the game got back on board and embraced its Norrath identity and sought to build on it, returning to old locations time and again.

And it was good. Echoes of Faydwer was a big freaking deal, a welcome change in direction for the game that helped it find its place in the SOE ecosystem and probably got some early players to come back and commit to it. This blog is just old enough that I was writing about Echoes of Faydwer at launch.

Echoes of Faydwer

See, just that little tidbit of information got me going on about it as a choice even though we hadn’t been told anything about the server rules itself. But last week we got some actual meat, including the server name, Anashti Sul, which hearkens back to the Desert of Flames, the first EQII expansion… that is her picture up at the top of the post… and one of those that sought to blaze a new trail on the lore front.

So what have we been told? Here is what we have so far:

There will be no spell research.
Krono will not be able to be consumed, traded, or sold on an Origins server.
There will be a 6-week Beta to ensure we cover a wide breadth of testing.
Attributes have restored secondary functionality, agility will help avoid melee attacks, intelligence will increase ability potency, strength will increase melee damage, and wisdom will grant extra resistance.
All bosses will be original stat/buff packages.
No weight. It could not be restored.
Unlocks have not been decided yet, however we do have new forums, and we will be able to poll and discuss unlocks before we launch.
No holiday events.
There will be a marketplace, but it will be very limited.
It will not be free trade.
This server is on its own design depot.
- This is the first time for this type of separation for EverQuest II.
- It cannot be affected by Live design updates, and vice versa.
- Code and Art are still across all server types, for a variety of reasons. For example, connections to external or shared resources such as Database, Authentication, etc. have completely changed over the years.
Freeport and Qeynos are back to old school, in both appearance and functionality.
- Livable neighborhoods, and their quests, are back! With the scope of the changes, these will need a lot of testing.
No persistent instances.
No tradeskill subcombines.
- The current build is right after subcombines for crafting were removed.

That this is an “origins” server, a new type of special server, seems to say that the team is committing to the special nostalgia server concept more so than previously. It is quartered off in its own “design depot” so likely doesn’t have to get updates in lock step with the live servers.

That means that they can go back to some old stuff. Yes, we had the Isle of Refuge previously, but now we’re going to get original, old school Qeynos and Freeport, complete with the racial neighborhood ghettos… though I still feel that barbarians and dwarves got the short end of the stick being lumped together in one generic area while gnomes got a sprocket theme park.

No free trade, so there will be bind on pickup items from bosses, no holiday events, which would probably break with the older version of the cities, and a limited marketplace, which is the Darkpaw term for the cash shop. I will be interested to see what is in that cash shop.

Krono, the Norrathian PLEX substitute, won’t be available on the server either. You will have to grind mobs for you copper like everybody else.

Which reminds me, did mobs drop coins by 2006? At launch SOE was extremely paranoid about the economy and inflation so mobs dropped no coins, only things that you might sell to a vendor later. Will we start past that?

It is interesting that they couldn’t restore item (and coin) weight to the game. But, like the old crafting system, it has ceased to be relevant by 2006. Every time a new expansion lands everybody got big stat increases from gear, so strength stopped being much of a gate. I was carrying around storage crates at one point, something that would drag your mobility down to nearly nil at launch, by the time Kunark hit in EQII. It became something that merely punished low level players without being at all a limit at level cap, so I am not sad to see it is being left out.

The one thing left out is what the expansion unlock cadence will be. I am sure it will move lickety split when compared to WoW progression servers, which are four and a half years in and only three expansions have dropped. But will they move too fast? It is a hard balance.

It all sounds interesting. I am just not sure at this point whether it will be something I can commit to. The game was solo friendly by 2006… another thing about 2004 is that beyond a certain point overland zones were balanced around group play… but it could also be pretty grindy. I might find some time to peek in and look at the old versions on Qeynos and Freeport.

Darkpaw – April 2024 Producer’s Letter
Darkpaw – Anashti Sul Beta Announcement
Darkpaw – How to Participate in Beta
Inventory Full – Anashti Sul or She Who Could Not Be Destroyed

Web Banking, The Acquisition, and the Start of the Great Decline

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My problem with writing the next post about my time at Edify is figuring out what is even worth mentioning. I posted how I got hired there and then how I went on to avoid what I had been hired to do in order to dig into speech recognition. From there I could write a whole series of posts about various technologies I worked on, from text to speech and controversies over what “US Spanish” really is, to automated response tech based on language models that have evolved into what we’re calling AI today (but which have just about zero “I” in them), to being involved in standards committees for things VXML and SIP, to a whole range of products attempting to serve call center agents that failed for a variety of reasons that were pretty obvious up front, to that time I spent as an ISO 9000-2000 site monitor, and a whole bunch of really stupid business decisions that absolutely screwed the company again and again.

And I may still cover some of that. There are a few amusing stories in there. But I am in a mood to lay the groundwork for what really screwed over the company, how it played out, and why it is just another in a long list of tales about why Wall Street won’t ever allow us to have nice things. Everything must be burned to the ground in the name of shareholder value.

The catechism of Wall Street is that if you are not growing then you are dying, that the line must go up, and that if your company isn’t poised to be one of maybe three leaders in a market segment then you should just give up and go home. Sell out to the leaders, consolidate the market, let efficiency benefit the consumers.

Mergers and acquisitions are always sold with the idea of efficiency and benefit to the consumers, and it is always, always, always a lie. I mean maybe, if two small companies merge but they are not market leaders, the customer might benefit. But usually not. And what Wall Street seeks is monopoly control over market segments so they can raise prices. The only efficiency involved how fast they can grab more cash and the other thought for the consumer is how hard they can screw them over before government regulation looms.

And they’ve bought so many politicians that regulation never looms.

Okay, with that out of my system for the moment, let’s talk about Edify again. While I was toiling away over in the telephony subsystem, another group had used the extensive back end connectivity built into the product to create a web subsystem, which would deliver data to a web site as easily as we did to our IVR apps, and then built a state engine over that on which they built a web banking app.

This was pretty big stuff in the late 90s and, with the dotcom boom, put Edify on the map in a way that our steady, reliable, but boring IVR technology did not. Sure, we had a PC in every Sears store in North America, but did you see we stood up a web banking front end for Scotia Bank or TNZ is no time at all? [Edit: I am informed I might mean the ANZ Bank deal.] Or maybe Scotia Bank was somebody else. I don’t remember at this point in part because it was 25 years ago and in part because I never worked on any of that directly.

Anyway, it was announced at a company meeting that we would be merging as a company with two competitors, S1 Corporation, based in Atlanta, a web banking company that was a spin-off from the failed Security First Network Bank that was the first attempt to be a completely online, internet bank, and FICS Group, a European company doing web banking.

The S1 corporate logo of the time…

Edify had beaten out S1 on a couple of critical deals and now we had S1 president Chip Mahan showing up at our company meeting telling us how the united company would be “the dog catching the truck!” in this merger of equals.

This turned out to be an incredibly apt metaphor, because the joke always is that the dog won’t know what to do should it catch the truck and certainly Chip didn’t know what to do once the deal came to pass in late 1999.

To start with, the vaunted merger of equals became “we bought you and own you now and don’t you forget it!” on day one. We were all treated with great disdain as HR acted like we were a batch of new hires and sent us forms to sign, including unenforceable non-compete agreements, and instructions for things such as how to answer the phone correctly as an S1 employee.

S1 then divided up the IVR team from the web apps team, put the web apps team in one building, us in the other, then laid off everybody on the web apps team in a series of waves. We managed to shift a few over to our building… they knew the platform and we needed more staff… but a lot of the core than made the web apps we were selling were gone for good.

The plan all along was to buy Edify, kill our competing product, then force all the customers using it to migrate to S1’s platform. This is the sort of market consolidation Wall Street loves.

The problem was that S1 had a crap platform, which was a major part of the reason they were losing deals to us, and over the next few years while they owned us they persistently and repeatedly failed to ship the promised new platform that would address all customer issues.

Big customers of ours like Banamex refused to consider what S1 was trying to force down their throats. Also, we were such a small segment of the market that the three companies combined made no tangible change in the landscape of web banking. It was all bullshit to make a few people more wealthy and to feed the self aggrandizement of Chip.

So the CEOs and boards of directors at Edify and FCIS Group were laughing all the way to the bank having gotten a big payout. Our own CEO went off to work for the VCs who effectively destroyed the company, he now being a certified expert on such things.

FCIS had especially snookered dip shit Chip as they were primarily a professional services organization so there wasn’t even any source code S1 could pretend they would integrate, while FCIS had been greatly over valued by Chip’s team. I think they ended up getting spun back out as their own company having succeeded in fleecing Chip. Good on them.

Chip was not very good at the whole business thing. He only excelled at talking a big game, which as we have all seen, is only enough to fool Wall Street for a while. Chip was eventually replaced, then returned when things got even worse for the company. S1, so far as I know, never shipped their new platform and was scooped up by ACI Worldwide in 2012 after foundering for over a decade.

But they left the IVR side of the house to its own devices… mostly. We were put in one building, spun off as a wholly owned “special business unit” and were back in the telephony market which, while not as hot as all things web, was stable and reliable and where we were a trusted name. (Also, we took some of the web banking customers with us because S1 had thrown away the organization that had built it, so couldn’t even provide support to justify the lucrative maintenance contracts. We at least knew the core mechanics of the platform and had a couple people from the old team, so it was back on us.)

And then S1 put the worst possible person in charge of us, which nearly drove us out of business with a series of obviously dumb, even to the outside observer, decisions, starting with our building lease. But that is another tale.

EverQuest Starting Points – Highpass Hold and Kithicor Forest

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Time to move a couple more zones closer to Freeport as the trip from Qeynos reaches its literal, if not figurative, peak in Highpass Hold.

Welcome to Highpass Hold, have your passport ready

Highpass Hold is also a dividing line in several ways. It splits Antonica in half, the west being the domains under the influence of Qeynos, the east favoring Freeport. It also represented a similar division of NPCs, with gnolls on the west side of Antonica and orcs on the east side… a point illustrated by the fact that there is a camp of gnolls on the west side of the city and a camp of orcs on the east side… though for some reason the gnolls are inside the city walls. Like, wtf man?

The orcs have the decency to wait outside the city

Highpass Hold is also a dividing line between old and new. It is the furthest west that SOE’s revamp of original 1999 zones reached, a series of updates in 2006 to 2008 that sought to make those areas of the game look less dated. And while they do look marginally better than their 1999 versions, they also lack all the soul and nostalgia driving air that old zones have when you go back to visit them. Today those zones that were revamped still look old and dated, but they don’t look like the zones you played in back in the day either, so I find no attachment to them.

As I have said before, this is one of the times that I was glad SOE showed their obvious favoritism towards Freeport. It is now a strange town that feels like it is from another game.

And so it is with Highpass hold, though the effect is less striking mostly due to the fact that I never spent a whole lot of time there save when passing through to get from one side of Norrath to the other. Its main feature was being a bit of a tangle of paths so you could, and often did, end up at some dead end or another when all you wanted to do was get to the other end.

Also, the map from the Project 1999 wiki orients the whole thing north-south, though I think of it as being east-west for travel purposes… but like I said, the place is twisty and disorienting and we didn’t have a compass built into the UI back then.

Highpass Hold Map

The map key for that map:

1. Gnolls with Grenix Mucktail who drops Polished Granite Tomahawk (Common) and Vexven Mucktail who drops Cracked Darkwood Shield. Guards patrol the named gnolls pop area, and can and will kill the named gnolls.
2. The Golden Rooster, with Brewing Supplies, Alcohol, and Miscellaneous Items
3. Shop with Kiln, Pottery Wheel, Goods, Food, and Pottery Sketches
4. Tiger’s Roar, with Alcohol, Brew Barrel, Oven, and Brewing Supplies. Underwater tunnel at (-158, 225) leads to smuggler’s area with Dyllin Starsine and Cyrla Shadowstepper (Rogue Trainer)
5. Bandit Camp
6. Serpent Supply, with Kiln, Pottery Wheel, Food, Forge, and Tailoring Supplies
7. The Lumberyard, with Brew Barrel and Alcohol
8. Greenbanes’ Weapons, with Weapons, Clay, and Firing Sheets, Forge Outside
9. Orcs with Hagnis Shralok who drops Shiny Brass Halberd (always), Recfek Shralok who drops Shralok Pack (always), and Vopuk Shralok who drops Shiny Brass Idol (always)

Gnolls at the top of the map, orcs at the bottom, and somehow bandits in the middle. I don’t know. But there are some classic EverQuest drops from the gnolls and orcs, at least two of which became the basis of the heritage quests in EverQuest II, the polish granite tomahawk and the shiny brass halberd. These drops were why both groups were heavily camped, which made traveling through a bit easier.

There is, in the middle of the zone, the High Keep zone, which I won’t delve into mostly because I can just barely remember visiting it back in the day and there being a bank in there, the latter being the most important bit for me. Also, there were goblins in there, because orcs, gnolls, and bandits were not enough variety. But the Project 1999 wiki has a page about it with multiple maps.

In passing through the zone I, as was always custom, took the wrong path and ended up at a couple of the dead ends.

The Tiger’s Roar still stands

There was another shop I landed at, though I didn’t catch the name of it and it is too small to see in the screen shot.

Somebody’s corpse out front, totally normal

You will notice in the map legend a lot of references to alcohol. For some reason they really wanted to make drinking a thing in the game, and there was (and may still be) a skill called “alcohol tolerance” for characters that you could only skill up by getting drunk.

Actually, after writing that I logged in and checked and it is still there on the list.

Some Skills in 2024

This was on my heroic 100 druid. That got him max skill in alcohol I guess. Looking at that list I also see a couple of languages, and there is a whole story about those back in the day and learning them in xp groups, but that is for another time. Also down the list was the “sense heading” skill, which had a chance of telling you which direction you were facing.

Back to alcohol, even more strange, the WoW team felt that drunkenness and alcohol were totally things they needed to grab from EQ. Though at least they didn’t also snatch brewing as a skill, but I bet they considered it! I don’t know if that was a valuable aspect of the lore in either. It isn’t like smoking in LOTRO, which at least has a mention in the book, with the blowing of smoke rings and pipe weed from The Shire.

I am sure I explored Highpass Hold back in the day, but the memory is gone. The only trip I can recall taking there for something besides travel was to go up and buy metal bits for armor crafting. You didn’t mine in the world for metal, you had to buy it and in 1999 Qeynos did not have a vendor that sold it, so if you wanted to craft armor, which sounded like a better idea than it was, you had to run all the way to Highpass to buy it… and then run back or do your crafting there. There was, as I mentioned, a bank in the Keep at least.

But if you were in Freeport, there was a vendor in town within sight of the forge that would sell you metal bits. This is when I began to suspect that Qeynos was perhaps not the favored city.

Anyway, on the trip to Freeport, once you passed through Highpass Hold, it was on to Kithicor forest, where it was always dark and undead walked about the place and you were likely going to die if you followed the road through it. The map from the Project 1999 wiki.

Kithicor Forest

The legend for that map:

1. Shop with Boxes, Boots, Lightstones
2. Shop with Food
3. Closed Hut
4. Ruined Hut
5. Closed Hut
6. Haunted Stone Ring
7. Ranger Trainer Morin Shadowbane, as well as Ranger who gives out Ivy Etched Armor Quests, Shops with Food, Staves, and Arrows
8. Closed Hut with Thumper outside
9. Ruined Hut
10. Shop with Compass, Food, Alchemy Leaves (Balm Leaves, Larkspur, Elf Leaf, Dragonwort)
11. Shops with Food, Arrows, Spell Components, Peridot, Bloodstone
12. Named Orc area (the Gan’Shraloks)
13. General Spawn area (Ruined Hut)

The place was always dark and the trees loomed up everywhere.

The road through Kithicor in daylight

As I said, you wanted to avoid the road as it held nothing but trouble. The design team seemed to take a perverse pleasure in marking out a nice road and then putting something hazardous astride it at various points.

Instead we would immediately turn north and run along the edge of the zone as high up the zone wall as was allowed. I have some images from our 2011 venture into the Fippy Darkpaw server.

The only hazard here is falling off…

As the caption says, falling off was the only hazard, but a possible one. There were trees that might obstruct your progress and jumping around them could lead to a fall. Or you might just fall into the entrance to Rivervale, the halfling home town.

Rivervale through here

I don’t know what they halflings did to get stuck between Runnyeye and Kithicor Forest, but it was a hazard in both directions if you didn’t know what you were doing. A halfling corpse or two was not an uncommon sight.

I remember once or twice trying to go “do” something in Kithicor Forest, if only because all the other likely locations for us to camp were taken, but I don’t remember if much was accomplished.

Now, with a level 100 character, I can run through it with impunity, but there isn’t much to see.

Some cabins in Kithicor Forest

And at the far end there is a path to the Commonlands, from which it is a straight a relatively safe run to the gates of Freeport.

Again, not the Freeport I remember

So it went back in the day. I don’t have much to say about the transformed Commonlands or Freeport really. So I am kind of there as far as the run from Qeynos goes. But I have some other starting points in mind before I wrap up this series.

Posts so far:

Friday Bullet Points about the Timeline into Summer for World of Warcraft

BlizzCon 2024 News… There Will Be No BlizzCon 2024

3 Replies

Blizzard announced earlier today that there would be no BlizzCon this year.

BlizzCon in Blue

This is a particularly odd announcement as the somewhat regular autumnal event would have been poised to celebrate both 30 years of the Warcraft franchise as well as 20 years of World of Warcraft, the undisputed most profitable and popular title the company has ever produced. And you could throw in the return to China and the big new expansion… I mean, there was stuff to celebrate.

Strange times indeed. Maybe this is an aspect of being part of Microsoft?

Instead they will be doing other events and live streams, to be announced at some later date.

The text from the announcement:

After careful consideration over the last year, we at Blizzard have made the decision not to hold BlizzCon in 2024. This decision was not made lightly as BlizzCon remains a very special event for all of us, and we know many of you look forward to it. While we’re approaching this year differently and as we have explored different event formats in the past, rest assured that we are just as excited as ever to bring BlizzCon back in future years.

Over the next few months, we’ll be sharing more details about our launches coming later this year, including World of Warcraft: The War Within and Diablo IV’s first expansion, Vessel of Hatred. To celebrate these upcoming releases and to bring our communities together in new and special ways, we will soon share some exciting plans for other industry trade shows and conventions like Gamescom. We can’t wait to tell you more about those plans soon. We’re also looking forward to the Overwatch Champions Series’ stops at both Dreamhack Dallas and Dreamhack Stockholm. And we’re thrilled to be planning multiple, global, in-person events to commemorate the 30th anniversary of Warcraft, which will be held in addition to the in-game celebrations across our Warcraft games throughout 2024. While these events are distinct from BlizzCon, we’re harnessing all of our creativity and imagination to ensure that they carry the same spirit of celebration and togetherness.

Our hope is that these experiences – alongside several live-streamed industry events where we’ll keep you up to date with what’s happening in our game universes – will capture the essence of what makes the Blizzard community so special.

No matter how you choose to connect with us at these events this year – whether it be in person or virtually – we can’t wait to see you there!

So it goes.

I guess I was going to keep up my perfect record of never attending BlizzCon in any case, and smaller, more focused events seem like a better option for me, but it still seems odd.

Anyway, as you might expect, this is getting some coverage.

Blizzard – Official Announcement
Massively OP – As Warcraft turns 30, Blizzard has preemptively canceled BlizzCon for 2024
Game Developer – Blizzard cancels BlizzCon 2024, will host smaller in-person events
WoW Head – No BlizzCon in 2024 – Global In-Person Events for Warcraft’s 30th Anniversary
Blizzard Watch – When is BlizzCon 2024? Never! This year’s convention is officially cancelled
MMO Bomb – There Will Be No BlizzCon This Year, Despite It Being Warcraft’s 30th Anniversary

The Mistlands in Valheim are Pretty… Once you get rid of all that damn Mist!

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I feel like we are kind of stalling out on Valheim once more. More than “kind of” really. Conan Exiles showed up and ate into our play time in a big way, and now WoW Classic Cataclysm is approaching and it feels like the group will pick up with that once it lands. Plus, of the four of us, only Potshot and I really invested much time in either of those first two titles.

And that is fine. Our passions ebb and flow. We can always return to Valheim and the world we have. I mean, we never do return to our old world, always opting to start fresh… but it could happen.

But part of me is all “we just made it to the Mistlands and I kind of want to figure that out before we depart once more!”

As I noted, however, the Mistlands are a bit challenging. This is part of Iron Gate’s reaction to people getting through to the plains biome so quickly, the decision to ramp up the difficulty in the Mistlands rather dramatically.

So everything hits harder and moves faster, the terrain is rocky and tends to restrict and channel your movement, resources are sparse and some are hidden in difficult to find dungeons, and the whole thing is enshrouded in a layer of mist that, even when you are wearing that damn wisp light on your hear, limits your view to a 1-3 meter diameter bubble around you so that you’re constantly lost and stumbling into hostiles or steep cliffs.

A thick mist at high noon

And yes, if you sit still and the light is right and the RNG is feeling generous, you can get a peek into the middle distance.

I can see a ways from up here, but not the path to get there

Then you take a couple of steps and the sphere of mist surrounding you shrinks again and you’re bumping into walls and being surprised by the local menace mobs.

There it is, in the mist!… and I am standing in another biome at that point…

Basically, it is a pain in the ass. But the purist in me wanted to take it on as it was, to deal with the challenge and figure out how to overcome it.

Then, after a couple of weeks of my nibbling into the mists and running in terror or dying, never once finding an infested mine from which critical resources must be obtained in order to get to the next tier of gear upgrades, I was starting to get frustrated.

And that made me think of mods. After all, we’ve already committed to some mods that change how the game is played, including increasing item stack sizes and decreasing item weight. (Where there was an issue at one point.) I was sure there must be a mod out there that would remove the mist.

Me in the Thunderstore mod list…

So I found a mod in the store called MistBeGone which only required a client end install, so no need to taint the server with my indiscretion, and got that loaded up and…wow, the Mistlands are beautiful when you can see more than two meters in front of you.

Rosy dawn shaded Mistlands

Yes, there is still some mist around in the distance at times, enough to still remind you that you are in the Mistlands. But the view is unlocked, which changes the feel of the place dramatically.

Things viable at range now

And, without the mist, the whole biome is suddenly a much nicer place simply to look at. There are details which you see up close in the mist, but which tell more of a tale of what might have happened at some past time.

A giant rusted sword sticks up from the landscape

Really, the landscape in the Mistlands can be quite striking and less claustrophobic when you can see a ways.

A Dvergr structure spotted before I ran face first into it!

Of course, the clear air grants you some advantage as you are now able to see the bads before they are gnawing on your leg or raining down fire on you.

Doesn’t Gjall look good framed by the scenery?

That does let you at least engage with your bow at range so you can whittle it down a bit before it gets into tick throwing and fire spewing range.

Still, things will eventually close with you.

Well crap… time for the pain

That guy had finished off two Dvergr while I shot arrows at him before he came for me. I survived, but they still hit hard.

It also makes navigation easier, though perhaps not as easy as previous biomes. You are still hemmed in by steep rocky peaks that often channel you away from the direction you are trying to go. But at least you get a better view of things.

Water between me and my destination

All in all, removing the mist does take the difficulty down a bit and give you a greater sense of where you are. I do not feel lost quite as much. And, as noted above, seeing the bads at a distance does let you bring ranged weapons to bear. But stuff is still out there ready to mess you up.

Watching some Dvergr get firebombed… I put some arrows in to help

Finally, while it has opened up my ability to find things, I still haven’t found an infested mine yet, so I am still wandering the landscape in my plains gear, the only upgrade available to me being some slightly better food. You need the stamina a salad brings if you’re going to try to scale the sheer rocks in the Mistland.

So I am torn. I feel like I both copped out and went easy mode AND YET didn’t end up with things getting much easier. I kind of like my “I win” buttons to deliver a little harder. Oh well, back to Northrend I suppose, where I have draw distance issues of another sort.

Also, Iron Gate is saying that the Ashlands are close, the next biome on the list, which is supposed to be even harder than the Mistlands.

EVE Online’s Equinox Expansion to Arrive June 11th

Embracer Group Announces Plan to Re-Arrange Deck Chairs

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Yesterday the bumbling CEO of Embracer group, Lars Wingefors, announced that the company would be split into three groups in an attempt to distract from his disastrous handling of the company over the last year, which was based on a business plan that seem to have all the sophistication of:

Buy a bunch of companies
??????
Profit!

All of which led to the need to lay off more than 1,400 people, close down nearly 30 projects, shutter several of the purchased studios, and required the sale of two enterprises, Gearbox and Sabre Interactive, to keep the company going and to, of course, “maximize shareholder value.”

Embrace This

This was just the latest pronouncement by CEO Lars Wingefors who somehow manages to still hold that position despite doing pretty much the opposite of maximizing shareholder value. But the board of directors is no doubt made up of others from his class and they do like to take care of their own.

Anyway, the announcement declared that the three new “independent” companies would be:

Asmodee

Asmodee will be listed as a separate entity in the next year, being listed on the market under that name, with shares in the new company being distributed to current Embracer shareholders. The current Embracer CCO will take over as CEO of Asmodee while the current CEO will join the board of directors.

Asmodee will be largely unchanged, continuing to run the 23 board game studios that have been folded in under its charge over the years.

Asmodee will also be saddled with an additional 900 million Euros in new debt as part of the transition because this is all pretty much a shell game to try and hide the current state of the company. Embracer has loans coming due and they need some way to pay them.

Coffee Stain

Coffee Stain will be split out at some point in 2025, with the current CEO retaining control of the helm. It will be focused on premium and free to play video games, including Deep Rock Galactic, Wreckfest, Goat Simulator, Star Trek Online, and Neverwinter.

The plans for Coffee Stain, including the eventual name of the group, seem more nebulous. There were no specific declarations about saddling them with additional debt as part of the transition, but I imagine we just are not there yet.

Middle-earth Enterprises & Friends

This name is subject to change, being exceptionally lame, and will cover all of the licensing, creative, and other intellectual property related work.

This group will not be spun out as an independent stock but will remain fully controlled by Embracer, it being the simplest business model, not involving the need to make anything of have any creative talent. It is just a rental business for ideas other people had and the company bought.

Now the catch in all of this is that Embracer will retain its current ownership stake and control over all of three entities, so it isn’t like someone actually smarter will be able to do anything they haven’t already had the opportunity to do. Also, stuck in there, was the statement that cross company business for things like IPs would be handled “on market terms,” which in my experience means that Embracer will be able to shift money by changing the terms to siphon money from one entity to another… or use their IP leverage to just pull maximum profit into Embracer itself.

It is, instead, all something of a smokescreen to hide the ongoing problems at Embracer. For the next year they will be able to do a song and dance about how shareholder value was maximized by this move.

Under other circumstances I might see the splitting of ponderous, poorly run Embracer Group as a net positive, with the three entities able to focus on their core competencies without having to make cuts and align goals with the other disparate entities in the company.

But, as the GamesIndustry.biz article on this says,

Embracer CEO Lars Wingefors will remain the owner of all three companies, and has said he “intends to form a new long-term ownership structure.”

Yeah, Lars is still running the show, still has control, everybody will still need to bend to his whims… and according to sources he wanted to keep it that way until at least 2041. Some big assumptions about him not making things even worse in that aspiration.

So breaking out Asmodee and Coffee Stain into independently listed by fully controlled by Embracer entities just adds overhead, as now they need their own board of directors and independent accounting and auditing and all the legal requirements that go into running a public company, while simultaneously removing responsibility from Lars.

A suspicious mind might even think that this was all really just a shallow attempt to create some additional board seats for the larger Embracer shareholders so they could get paid directly to leave Lars in charge. A bit more corporate welfare for the capitalist class.

You might think that, I couldn’t possibly comment.

I suspect that we are not done with the travails of the Embarrassment Group and the inept machinations of Lars Wingefors as he continues on his primary quest of maximizing shareholder value.

Lots of coverage of this yesterday for me to link to!

Embracer Group – Official Press Release
GamesIndustry.biz – Embracer Group splits into three: Everything you need to know
The Verge – Gaming giant Embracer Group is splitting into three companies
Game Informer – Embracer Group To Split Into Three Companies
Game Developer – Embracer splitting into three standalone companies to search for ‘winning formulas’
Massively OP – Embracer Group announces plans to split itself into ‘three standalone publicly listed entities’
AI MMORPG News – Embracer’s Empire Falls: Sweden’s Gaming Goliath Splits in Three
Game Developer – Embracer CEO Lars Wingefors hopes to stick around until at least 2041
Iven Gaming – Embracer Group to split into three new companies
Board Game Geek – Asmodee Parent Company Embracer will Split into Three Companies
MMO Bomb – Embracer Group Will Now Split Itself Into Three Different Entities
GamesIndustry.biz – Lars Wingefors on why Embracer is going away, and what happens next

The Ancient Gaming Noob

Veni, Vidi, Scripsi

Monthly Archives: April 2024

The Cataclysm Classic Pre-Patch has Arrived

April 2024 in Review

Thoughts on the Coming EverQuest II Anashti Sul Time Locked Expansion Server

Web Banking, The Acquisition, and the Start of the Great Decline

EverQuest Starting Points – Highpass Hold and Kithicor Forest

Friday Bullet Points about the Timeline into Summer for World of Warcraft

BlizzCon 2024 News… There Will Be No BlizzCon 2024

The Mistlands in Valheim are Pretty… Once you get rid of all that damn Mist!

EVE Online’s Equinox Expansion to Arrive June 11th

Harness Planetary Power with the Skyhook

The Return of Passive Moon Mining

The Sovereignty Hub

Upwell Goes into the Ship Design Business

Motivating the Cadres

New Colors, Better Corps, AIR Goals

Embracer Group Announces Plan to Re-Arrange Deck Chairs