What Happens When They Buy EVE Online?

With the word that CCP may be for sale, I put together some speculation as to the results of certain companies buying the makers of EVE Online.

Worse case scenario?

(Above picture lifted from the Twitter of J3w3l/Eri of Healing the Masses)

Tencent – (My pick for likely candidate.)  Development moved to the west side of LA.  Runs mostly as usual.  Cash shop expanded.  Tournament play enhanced.  Alliance tournament winners paid in cash.  Able to straight up buy characters with skill packages (e.g. Avatar pilot, Amarr battleship pilot) for real world money.

Perfect World Entertainment – ZEN becomes the new RMT currency.  Officer drops only available via lockboxes.  Introduction of the Jovians with ships that look suspiciously like the Klingons in Star Treak Online.

Activision – Call of Duty: New Eden Combat becomes a thing.

Blizzard – Expansions now take more than two years, cost $50, and completely reset the combat meta with new modules you can only fit if you buy the update.  Scamming is banned.  High sec pilots are unattackable unless they flag PvP.  Faction grinds necessary again to even access empire stations.  Null sec space made much more colorful.  Fedo battle pets.  Chris Metzen comes back to do the lore.  Onyx renamed Onyxia.  Jovians turn out to be orcs.

Square Enix – Titans now wield giant swords.  Everything redone in soft focus.  Jovians discovered to be a race of hydrocephalic midgets. (That is a Lalafell joke right there.)

XL Games – Female space apparel now much more revealing.  Gallente ships now feature cleavage.  Avatar called out for what it actually modeled on.  You now have to pay rent to use the Captain’s quarters.

NCsoft – Whole thing gets moved to Austin and mostly ignored until revenue tanks and everything gets shut down in five years.

Daybreak – Expansions now only show up every November and cost $35, though there is a $140 collectors edition.  They mostly feature new incursions and missions.  Captain’s quarters now the 2 bedroom Freeport apartment with EQII avatars.  Corp housing available with ORE agents that will mine for you.  Minmatar ships begin to look more like gnomish clockwork and Antonia Bayle becomes Empress of Amarr.  Capsuleer Studio features player made ship SKINs and clothing.  As with other Daybreak games, the company gives the creators a cut of the sale price.  Rixx Javixx’s financial woes are solved.

Paradox Interactive – Game now moves faster than real time, but space travel is slowed to compensate.  Capsuleers no longer immortal, so you have to worry about your heirs.  Alliances now must be sealed by intermarriage between the families of corporation leaders.

Hello Games – Space is made infinite via procedural generation.  You can land on planets, but it is really boring so almost nobody bothers.  Later discovered that when you leave current New Eden space, the whole thing is just running locally on your own computer, which is why you never run into anybody else.

Cloud Imperium – Rebranded as Star Citizen: Strategic, the conversion of art assets begins to bring it into line with the Chris Roberts vision.  An Alpha version of the conversion is released two years later, but you still can still only look at all the ships you bought for it in an offline simulator.

Mojang –  “Players build everything” dream finally achieved, even if “everything” is now a lot more “blocky.”  Regions replace with biomes, space is now effectively infinite but really slow since it all runs in Java.  Llamas replace fedo.  NPC “creeper” drones now spawn at night… and it is always night in space… and blow up your shit.

Wargaming.net – Game rebranded as World of Spaceships and becomes a lobby based game where you start with corvettes/rookie ships and grind up for equipment upgrades and crew training through ten tiers of Alliance Tournament style fighting.

Microsoft – Excel integrated into the game, making it literally spreadsheets in space.  Buying a copy costs a lot more, but it comes pre-installed on your work machine and is on your IT department’s approved list.  The Caldari replace the Amarr as the focus of the in-game lore.

Electronic Arts – Second server opened with scamming banned, safe high sec, flagged PvP everywhere else.  Population of both servers fall below critical mass and the game is mostly ignored for three years, then EA closes the studio and shuts the whole thing down.  A few years later New Eden appears as the setting for a BioWare RPG while some art assets show up in a forgettable mobile game.

Any other likely candidates or scenarios?

If WoW Expansion Were Done Pokemon Style

Ideas that come unbidden in the night when you’ve been thinking about Pokemon and World of Warcraft too much.

What if Blizzard did World of Warcraft expansions the way Nintendo and Game Freak do new Pokemon titles or was simply influenced more by Pokemon than EverQuest?

This is where this ends up…

• Each expansion would be a complete 1-100 experience, but would require you to start at back as a new player each time.
• You get to create exactly one avatar per expansion copy.
• There would be two versions of each expansion, each with rewards not in the other, and the only way to obtain them would be through trading across expansions.
• Occasionally there would be a single expansion that was just the previous two merged together, slightly altered, and with a few more rewards.
• Every once in a while the two different versions would have completely different groups to fight, though the story and quest line would be essentially the same.
• Interaction with quest givers initiated solely by making eye contact.
• It would be a solo experience, where you created parties for dungeons and raids from the NPCs you captured while battling along the way.
• Party size is now six.
• You don’t level up, only the followers in your party do as they fight for you.
• Your followers can be different classes, which have a rock/paper/scissors dynamic to them.  There is no holy trinity.
• Draenor garrison-like need to collect all possible followers emphasized in the game.
• Only mounts: Roller skates and a bicycle.
• Flight points unlocked only after defeating a dungeon half way into the game.
• Dance contests!
• Geography of each expansion loosely based on a real world location.
• Blizzard offices cleverly hidden in each expansion, allowing you do rage at the devs through your avatar.
• At some point each expansion would require you to wake up a sleeping ogre that is blocking your progress.
• Defeating the story antagonists just lets you move on to your real goal; Defeating the final four and then the Azeroth League Champion.
• We still end up waiting at least two years between expansions

What other Pokemon tropes would likely infect Blizzard were this true?

And would any of this necessarily be a bad thing?

Google Tells Me Nearly All Games are Dead

There is a game you can play with Google… well, there are probably many, but this is one of them… where you enter the name of something, followed by “is” to see what pre-filled search suggestions come up.  These results are driven by what people have searched for previously.

As I was playing this game the other night instead of doing something important, I began to notice a trend in my searches.  It seemed like Google was declaring most everything dead.

Sure, sometimes that was apt.

Abe Vigoda, after being reported dead by mistake on multiple occasions over the years, does indeed now sleep with the fishes, having passed earlier this year.

And sometimes the result wasn’t so spot on:

I’m pretty sure somebody would have mentioned if he was dead… or a mack daddy.

I decided to see if that trend held for video games on my side bar.  First on the list was, of course, EVE Online:

Given that “EVE is dying…” is practically an meme at this point, that wasn’t too surprising.

Likewise, EverQuest, at 17 years of age got a similar result:

At least it wasn’t both “dead” and “dying” I suppose.  Of course, that last item lead me to World of Warcraft:

Three of those aren’t so good, “dead,” “dying,” and “boring.”  Even EVE Online didn’t get “boring” as a top result.  That lead to a series of other titles, all of which at least got dead as a result:

I had a whole run there where “dead” wasn’t just a result, but the top result.  Then I started branching out from MMOs:

I finally hit a game where “dead” wasn’t the top result, though I am not sure that was a good thing:

Even Minecraft got “dead” as a result, though at least it was in fourth position, which was practically an endorsement at this point:

Hey, “awesome” came before “dead!”

Landmark was odd, but I think it suffers from having a generic name:

Still, I think “dead” might be in there just for it.

Then, finally, I hit a game that wasn’t dead:

League of Legends is only “dying,” not “dead.”  Also, it is “gay,” which I think says more about the demographic that is searching for things about it.  Still, it is doing better than Heroes of the Storm:

“Dead,” “dying,” “bad,” and “free!”

Then at last, I hit a search where “dead” wasn’t even a result:

I’m not sure Hearthstone was really winning with that draw.  I mean sure, “dead” wasn’t on the list, but the rest was hardly an endorsement.

Quote of the Day – Your Name May Not Be a Name

Your user name may not be discriminating, unethical or otherwise offensive and may not contain a name.

-LEGO, on changes to their terms of service.

The fine people at The Lego Group dropped me a line to remind me that they have changed their terms of services.

They were concerned apparently because I had not yet read and accepted them.  Literal truth.

You are receiving this email because we have changed our user terms for your LEGO ID and we can see that you haven’t read and accepted them yet.

I haven’t read or accepted them because I haven’t logged on to anything LEGO or LEGO related in a while.  My daughter is now a teenager and far more interested in makeup, clothes, and what her friends are posting on Instagram than getting plastic blocks and building things.  She does occasionally get wistful when she  sees the LEGO minifigures… she keeps the golden C3P-0 on her desk… but not enough to actually dust them off and do something with them.  I should go do another minifigure roundup this year and drag her along.

Anyway, The Lego Group was kind enough to append a short list of the items that they felt were the most important of the changes to the terms.  Number one on the list is quoted at the top of this post, and it makes my head hurt.

I get “discriminating,” though through the quirkiness of the English language and custom, we tend to use that word to indicate a positive.  If you have “discriminating taste” it is a good thing, right?  So I might have phrased that differently… maybe “promotes discrimination” since “discrimination” is the usage that is always negative… but I get what they were shooting for.  Marketing and legal probably spent hours on that word alone.

I can also see “unethical.”  If you pick a user name that makes you look like an employee of The Lego Group, that would be well on the way towards “unethical,” though I still think you have to try and use it to misrepresent yourself intentionally before we get fully in the zone.  Whatever, I get it.

“Offensive” is a minefield in this day and age.  I dare anybody to come up with a workable definition of what “offensive” means in a world where people are offended that somebody has the last name “Lynch.”  But they have to cover themselves, and now they can site this statement if somebody complains about.  Yet again, I get it.

But then we get to the last phrase in that sentence (which should be separated with an Oxford comma dammit) and I start to think that they are trolling me.  My user name, the name with which I identify myself on the LEGO site, must not contain a NAME?

I might understand “must not contain your real name” or “must not include your surname” as stipulations, but they appear to be literally saying, “Your name… it may not be a name.”  That quote at the top, it is directly from the section of the terms to which the user is specifically required to agree.

If I go with all numbers, will that still be a name?  It all seems pretty silly to me.

Dating My Daughter – The Star Wars Test

This started as a comment on MBP’s post on this topic, but quickly sprawled into enough text that I felt I ought to bring it back here and make it a post on its own.  All the more so since we just had a “Star Wars” Thanksgiving which included watching some of the movies and debating their relative merits with a fellow nerd.

And it has been a long time indeed…

So young man, when you come to pick up my daughter for a date and I ask about your favorite Star Wars movie, here are how I may view potential answers and how said answers may predict our own relationship.

Safest:

• The Empire Strikes Back – Best Star Wars Evah!  Just a quick statement about what endears it to you and you are safe on this front.

Safe:

• Star Wars – Nobody can argue with the classic that started it all.  Tell me about how it changed your life.  It is okay to mock some of the bad acting, but only if you acknowledge that such enhances the movie’s authenticity!  Just know who shot first.
• I’m more of a Star Trek fan – An acceptable dodge, though you will be required to display deep knowledge and/or own an actual Star Fleet uniform.  Be prepared to rank the movies and the various series.  Tread carefully it you intend to mock TOS… and know what I mean when I write/say TOS.

Requires Some Effort:

•  Revenge of the Sith – Can be justified, but you will be grilled on the topic.  Bonus if you point out what a bastard/fool Obi-wan was, leaving Anakin legless and on fire rather than finishing him off.
• Return of the Jedi – May mark you as a bit young/immature if you express a love of Ewoks.
• Star Wars – Things may be dodgy if you insist on referring to it as “A New Hope.”  I don’t care what George Lucas says, you aren’t dating HIS daughter, now are you?
• One of the LEGO Star Wars specials – We can work with this.  Come let me show you my own LEGO collection.  Tell me which minifigures you like best.  Praise my limited edition Golden C-3PO!

Danger Zone:

• The Clone Wars – First, you’d better know that there was a movie before the TV series.  Then you’d better own an action figure or a LEGO set or be prepared to explain how it and the TV series improved the Star Wars canon.  Saying “Ahsoka was hawt!” will not cut it!
•  Attack of the Clones – Will need an essay, submitted in advance, on this one.  I WILL run phrases through Google to see if you plagiarized any of it.  Comparing it to US Middle-east foreign policy is walking a tightrope.
• Phantom Menace – Almost no hope at all if you go this route.  Seriously, WTF?   You cannot disavow Jar-Jar and midichlorians fast enough to recover.  Will mark you as a fool or a troll unless you are prepared to show me an actual pod racer you built in your back yard.
• Star Wars: Droids – How do you even justify this?  Some Boba-Fett backstory?  Anthony Daniels needed the money?  I’ll listen, but you’ll need to explain how C-3PO never brings any of this up during the movies without reaching for the “memory wipe!” card.
• Star Wars Holiday Special – Only if you actually own an VHS copy of it.  Otherwise you will be branded an ironic poseur.  Take your piano keyboard tie and get out!
• I only watch Anime – I can see how you met my daughter, but you’d best be moving the conversation to Hetalia, Space Battleship Yamato, or Attack on Titan or our conversation will dry up quickly and you’ll be stuck with me staring darkly at you.

Get Out:

• Star Wars: Ewoks – Do your parents know you’re out after dark?
• Star Wars: Rebels: – You were made to drink store brand cola as a child, weren’t you?
• I only watch Anime and I once went to a convention dressed as Sailor Moon.  Here, I have some pictures… – You can never recover from this.  Do us both a favor and just leave now without making eye contact.
• I don’t like science fiction – Who sent you?  Are you at the right house?

 

The Test Drive

I stood there on the edge of the dealership lot, on the sidewalk, but just barely.  My eye had been caught by a 1969 Buick Skylark convertible.  It was the GS 400 trim level and was white with red interior.  It sat there and beckoned me as I walked by and I was drawn to it.  It looked something like this:

A Skylark Convertible

However, that picture doesn’t really capture the moment as it was back then.  It was a bright, sunny and warm California day, the car was fully detailed and every surface gleamed.  We were in that dead period for US made convertibles, so this car, with a powerful motor and an open top on a perfect day for such things, was an object of desire.  I wanted it.

As I sat there, likely drooling on the body work as I ran my hand lightly over the synthetic leather-ish seat material, a salesman wandered over and began to engage me in conversation.  He must have been good because I didn’t run away immediately or make the sign of the cross and shout, “Just looking! Back! Back! I am JUST LOOKING!” as I tend to in such situations.

As I recall, he was quite willing to talk about the object of my desire for a little while, and so we went for a bit.  It was a weekday afternoon, so things were slow I imagine.  I certainly do not recall anybody else on the lot clamoring for his attention.

Eventually we started talking about other cars and he said he had another one that he wanted me to see.  I had nothing else to do, so I followed him, wondering what other treasures the lot might hold.

However, he wasn’t really interested in looking at cool cars and shooting the breeze.  He wanted to sell me a car and, having sized me up from our conversation, brought me over to the used end of the lot where he showed me a 1976 Plymouth Arrow GS.

In this very shade, though not this shiny

This was, I must admit, a lot closer to my potential price range.  It was a popular car for a bit, being heavily advertised with the Me and My Arrow track from the Harry Nilsson’s album The Point! back in the day.   The salesman was quite keen to demonstrate the vehicle to me, insisting that we go for a test drive.  Being somewhat shy, I let him lead on and got in the passenger seat.  He started it up and drove off the lot and up the street a ways, then pulled over, undid his seat belt, and said we should switch seats.

Slowly I got out of the car and walked around to the driver’s side, slid in, adjusted the seat a bit, and buckled up.  The salesman was busy telling me how he had to drive the car off the lot for “insurance reasons” but I could take it from here.

This is the point in the story where I need to stop and tell you I was 13 years old at the time.  It was the summer between 7th and 8th grade and I was standing in front of the Century Chrysler Plymouth dealership there on Stevens Creek Blvd. because that is where the old 23/24 line bus stop was located.

But rather than getting on the bus and heading to… I don’t recall… probably to the San Antonio Hobby Show up in Mountain View… where ever I was going, I was now sitting in the driver’s seat of an automobile on Kiely Blvd. with the engine running and an adult in the seat next to me waiting for me to put it in gear.

What the hell! Let’s go!

Actually, the whole scenario wasn’t all that bad.  If I put my daughter in the same situation today, as she is the same age I was back then, she would be lost enough for it to be obvious she shouldn’t be driving.

But I had spent many a summer on my grandfather’s farm out in the central valley of California.  I had been driving farm equipment of one type or another since I was six.  The thing about being tall when you are a kid, and I was tall as a kid, is that adults frequently… and mistakenly… estimate age, maturity, ability, and general assumed knowledge of the world based solely on your height.

In hindsight, my grandfather, who didn’t stand all that much taller than me by the time I was 13, just had me do things that he estimated were appropriate for my height as much as anything.  I was the first grandchild, so everything to do with me was pretty much experimental anyway.  Boundaries that corralled my cousins later on had not yet be drawn.  Plus, when you’re out on the farm and you have to drive out to help repair a piece of broken equipment or top up the tank of a pickup that ran out gas, and there is just the two of you, both of you have to drive back.  Practicality dictates.

So, technically, I could drive.  I had certainly driven vehicles more complicated than this Plymouth.  It was even automatic transmission, so why not?

I don’t recall if I put my signal on or looked over my shoulder before I pulled out onto the road, but I got there.  As we reached Saratoga Avenue the salesman told me to turn right.  I went through the channelized right and onto Saratoga where he again indicated I should take a right, only this next right was the on ramp to Interstate 280.  I was a little rough making that corner, not having bothered to slow down, causing the salesman to grab the overhead handle.  There was no real danger, I just hadn’t gauged the corner quite right.

We went down the on ramp and onto the freeway and I brought the car up to and then past the speed limit, the engine roaring to the extent that the little four cylinder could.  He then indicated I should take the next off ramp, which would put us along Lawrence Expressway and then to turn back towards the dealership up Stevens Creek Blvd. again.

I took the corner onto Stevens Creek a bit too fast, but otherwise kept it between the lines and managed to pull up into the dealership lot and park the car with some degree of accuracy.  I am sure the salesman had seen worse.  The route was something like this, with the X marking where I took over driving and the red pin where the dealership lay.  Oak Tree Mazda is right next door and only on the map because I used it as the start point and then made the route go via Interstate 280.

Map copyright Google Maps and all that

Google puts the whole route at just shy of three miles.  Great fun and likely the highlight of my summer on reflection.  I have actually driven that same test drive route on several occasions when shopping for a car on that stretch of Stevens Creek, and I think about this day every single time.

So there we stood, the salesman and I, his hand on the hood of the car.  We were now into what I recall as the difficult bit.

As you might have guessed, he wasn’t just taking people out for joy rides for the fun of it.  He wanted me to buy the car.  He was just three years early on that front.  When I was 16 and had spent two summers working at the family business to save up money and had a fast food job during the school year to keep an automobile in tires, gasoline, and repair… and actually had a driver’s license… this would have been a very good car for me.

I even thought about this very car when it came time to buy one of my own.  Unsurprisingly, it was long gone from the dealer’s lot by then.  Trust me, I checked.  The optimism of youth.

But at that point in time, with no job, a weekly allowance of $2, and lacking any official state sanction to operate a motor vehicle on the public roads, the whole idea… no matter how much I might have wanted the car… was pretty much off the table.

But how to communicate that?

I was already keenly aware of the unlawfulness of what I had just done.  I was not about to blurt out my actual age and lack of a driver’s license.  I figured trouble lay that direction and could see them calling my parents at a minimum and maybe the police if they were well and truly enraged.

But I couldn’t just up and run away, though the temptation struck me.  While I lacked any sort of polished manners, not an uncommon situation for 13 year old boys, I had a sense of what being completely rude was, and turning on my heel and walking off after being offered a test drive seemed to fall into that territory.

So I adopted an attitude of non-committal interest in all the salesman had to say.  Yes, the car seemed to be a good deal, if not explicitly for me.  I appreciated that he had some room to work with on the price if I was a serious buyer.  I acknowledged that the detailing they offered to do on the vehicle and the extended warranty were generous, as far as it went.  I just never said, “I ain’t buying the car” and I never hit a point where I felt I could exit the scene gracefully.

This went on for a while as the salesman pointed out that I clearly liked the vehicle, that the price was one of great reasonableness for a car of such value and efficiency, and offering to sweeten the deal in this way or that as time dragged on.

As an adult I have never been able to hold this much sway over a car salesman as I did as a scared and embarrassed 13 year old boy.  I could have set my price, had I been in the market and all those other details.

Eventually he decided that he needed help to pull me over the threshold and get me to buy the car.  I was clearly interested, as I was still standing there on the lot with him next to the car.

So he went to get his manager.

In hindsight the couple of minutes I was standing there alone next to the car was my opportunity to escape.  I could have bolted around the back of the lot and come up around behind the Meridian Quad to hide in the Time Zone arcade where I would later see Space Invaders for the first time.  I would have been free.

Instead I waited, not wanting to be rude.  And so I was standing there as the sales manager came out.

He was a salesman of the old school.  He was loud and brash and literally used the phrase, “What do I have to do to get you to drive off the lot in this car today?”

He wasn’t going to put up with my non-committal nonsense.  He wanted an answer… the right answer… and he wanted it now.  And when I kept veering away from the direction he wanted to go, he got angry… or decided that playing angry was the right move.

That was actually a liberating moment.

I have much more trouble saying no to people who are being reasonable than people who are not.  And somebody who starts yelling at me… well my Catalan heritage has a tendency to surge to the forefront and I will go from very inoffensive and deferential to yelling back twice as loud in a flash.  It can be very much a light switch mood change.

I didn’t quite go there, but my temper flashed and it gave me the courage to storm out of there like I was offended and wasn’t going to take that shit from anyone.  And so I was free.  To this day I hope that the salesman felt that his manager came out and screwed up his sale.

I don’t recall what I did for the rest of the afternoon.  I am pretty sure I didn’t go back to the bus stop around front.

I was also unsure who I could tell about this.  Who could I trust to not tell, because I still feared that some trouble might follow, and more importantly, who would even believe me.  So I kept it to myself for quite a while, but every once in a while I drag out this anecdote when sitting around swapping tales of misspent youth.

Meanwhile, time has moved forward, as it tends to do.

Century Chrysler Plymouth on the corner of Stevens Creek and Kiely has long since folded up shop.  The location is now the home of Stevens Creek Toyota.  The VTA 23/24 bus line has since been re-routed .  When it came time for me to buy a car three years later, I did end up with a Plymouth.  However it was a 1974 Plymouth Duster, with the 225 Slant Six motor and a three speed shifter on the floor, a ride probably better suited the abuses a young driver can inflict on a car.  It came into contact with a number of large objects over the years I drove it… a tree, some garbage cans, a mountain, the side of a house, a concrete bridge abutment, Barbara Avenue, and two considerably less solid Japanese cars… though one of the latter hit me first.  It was also the vehicle I used back when we played U-Boat, a topic I wrote about previously.

The Duster, second from the left, me sprawled on the hood

And in late 1986, when the old Duster finally stopped running and could not be revived… it literally quit on me as I was driving to work and the mechanic could not get the motor running again… I bought my first new car, a 1987 model year Mazda 626 Coupe, the last year for that generation, and a great car that I might still be driving today if some guy in a Honda Civic hadn’t plowed into it as it sat at a red light.  A tale for another time.  I purchased it from Oak Tree Mazda, which is right next door to where the events of this story began.  I even went on the same route when I test drove the 626, though the salesman at Oak Tree Mazda wanted to see my driver’s license first.

Probably a wise plan, all things considered.

The Four Stages of Ragefire Login Grief

The official launch announcement is up in the forums, the Ragefire time locked progression server is live.  Now the reality strikes home…

Login server is getting SLAMMED. Be patient. Servers are up, and Ragefire awaits you!

— EverQuest (@everquest) May 22, 2015

1 – Cannot log in

You could at least not toss my user name with each try…

2 – Cannot connect to server list

Oh come now, this part should be easy

3 – Time out at the server list

And yeah, that login screen doesn’t like me either

4 – The server is just full

Wasn’t instancing the starter zones going to cover us on this front?

And about every fourth time I click on “PLAY EVERQUEST” there is just long enough of a delay before the error comes up that I think I might just get through.

Oh well, I guess I’ll watch the promo movie a few more times.

Hey, I had ISDN when EverQuest came out, no modem connecting chatter for me back in 1999!  Also, I was totally able to log in the first night.

Hrmm, how about that EverQuest Lore video then, that will keep me busy for another minute.