The CCP Battle of Atioth info graphic

While the silhouettes do represent some of the hulls on the field, if there were any justice in the world cruisers would have been represented by a Vexor silhouette.  So many Vexors.

They also included a link to their new favorite visualization tool, killmail.app, which does make a splashy little battle report header if you have a mind to crop it down a bit.

Killmail.app Atioth Battle Report Header

I am still a bit dubious of it as a tool, as I noted on Monday, and all the more so since it seems to exclude me from the pilot list in all the battles I have checked so far.  I have actual kills and losses from that fight, but neither my main nor my alt appear.  Oh well.

CCP also tread very lightly into the whole server crash situation, providing a population chart and some time stamps, but otherwise providing less insight into what was going on than anybody involved could tell you.

Server Population timeline

I have added two markers to the chart provided, if only to distinguish the server crash, when everybody was kicked out of the battle, and downtime, the normal 11:00 UTC event when everybody is kicked out of the game while the servers restart.

CCP’s taking the stance of non-interference sounds fine, but also I have questions about what they thought would happen once we squeezed 10,253 capsuleers into Atioth.

Yes, you can absolutely turn that right around and ask the players what they thought would happen… I was pretty sure nothing good would come of it in my posts at the time on social media as I sat in my carrier on grid updating as the population rose from around 3,000 to past 10,000.

It isn’t as though I expected CCP to have a magic fix.  But I would be interested to know what the discussion was like for those watching the server as this built up.  Was there an “uh oh, this can’t be good” moment when the numbers pass 8K or 9K characters in system.

I am also a little disappointed at the soft sell of what players experienced.  There was a whole situation where players who had been on grid before the crash got stuck in a black screen that gave no feedback or indication that anything was going on, but they were actually logged into the game an in system and their ships were visible and able to be shot.  That was kind of screwy.

Meanwhile, others were able to log in with a short delay.   I got an alt on the field a couple of times and was able to shoot WinterCo successfully despite the crushing time dilation that was going on when there were just… heh “just”… 5-6K capsuleers in local.

This has all happened before, this will most likely happen again.  The server is going to break when players push too get too many characters in system and there are no easy answers.  You cannot put a cap on the system population, like they do with Jita, because… have you met us?  If there were only 5K allowed in system it would turn into a race starting at the end of downtime for one side or the other to fill up the system.

Meanwhile, the usual arguments broke out on Reddit, with some demanding CCP make this better somehow, which seems unlikely given they feel they need to maintain a single execution thread for most ship actions on a server, and those demanding that CCP break up the big blocs, one of those ideas that sounds simple but is hard to execute without wrecking the game and alienating one of their biggest groups of players.

And CCP also has a vested interest in us doing this.  There are not a lot of headlines to be made or Guinness Book world records waiting to be awarded for ten people gate camping in Rancer.

Hilmar may be all in on the blockchain scam future of EVE Frontier and CCP Rattati may only give a damn about EVE Vanguard to vindicate the idea of Dust 514, but EVE Online is the only game they run that makes money and they know it.

So it goes.

All of that is pretty normal stuff.

The annoying bit of the report was the charts comparing Atioth to previous large battles.

To start with, they didn’t roll out a chart about the number of players involved, which seemed like a gimme frankly, the one place where Atioth towers over past battles, even if that undermined the battle as well.

So you’ll just have to stick it on the chart included after M2-XFE yourself.

Player counts at the Largest Battles… sorted chronologically… because reasons

Now, that may be because they have not yet figured out exactly how many people were actually fighting at any given minute during the battle.  That 10,042 characters in system at once doesn’t mean they were all undocked, on grid, and actually shooting.

Given how quickly the server crashed once the shooting started, the actual peak total of combatants engaged at any one time was probably south of 6,000.  No new world record for you!

But the kicker for me was the comparison of destruction over past battles.  This was what CCP reported after the battle of M2-XFE.

Largest Battles by ISK Destroyed

This is what CCP reported in their summary of Atioth.

ISK Lost by Battle – April 2026 version

Somehow the battle of B-R5RB, where 75 titans were destroyed, dropped from being valued at 10.57 trillion ISK in 2021 to a mere 3.04 trillion ISK here in 2026.  Some other battles changed value, but none as drastically as B-R5RB.

I went down a rabbit hole about how that could be possible for a battle that took place at a time when zKillboard was valuing titans at over 400 billion ISK.

The Superlative Six from my kill board from B-R5RB

75 titans multiplied by 400 billion per titan gets you to the 30 trillion ISK range, triple what CCP claimed at the time.

That thread got picked up over at The Nosy Gamer where the valuation of titans seemed to be different for CCP than the kill board… which is something we know to be a thing because CCP has trouble valuing ships that aren’t on the market very often, like supers, titans, and AT ships… but still didn’t really explain how CCP could have arrived at 3.04 trillion ISK number.

Assuming no other losses, divide that by 75 titans and you get 40 billion ISK titans in 2014, long before skill injectors and the Rorqual mining plague put a titan the hangar of every Keepstar for every pilot who could scrape together as little as 60-80 billion ISK.

So I don’t know what the answer is there.

This also got translated into the loathsome but headline grabbing “so how much is that in US dollars?” graphic… sort of.

Back after M2-XFE they produced this chart.

Largest by the “show me the money” metric

This chart is missing the one of the M2-XFE battles.  Probably the first one, but with CCP who can tell?  But everything else seems like a baseline we can work with.

For Atioth they coughed up this particular hairball of a chart.

Atioth – Dollar dollar bill chart

We get two battles of M2-XFE… though I am not sure how the second battle cam out that much lower.  They must have excluded all of the PAPI titans they reimbursed.

The rest of the chart… well, again, I don’t know how to reconcile the two.  But somehow Atioth saw a loss in ISK of three times that of B-R5RB in the new charts, but B-R5RB was still worth more in dollars… though again, only about a third of the dollar valuation of the first chart.

If we take the ISK values to be true, then Atioth should be worth much more in dollars because the price of PLEX, on the basis of which one makes these tenuous calculations, is much higher today than it was in 2014.  Was a single, pre-split PLEX selling for more than 2.1 billion ISK on the market back in 2014?  I don’t think so.

I arrived at that number by taking the the recent low point value of PLEX, which was about 4.2 million per, and multiplying it by 500, in order to get the value of old PLEX, because the new PLEX didn’t arrive until 2017, at which point is was about 2.6 million per unit.

Anyway, I always find the conversion to dollars to be a bit dubious to begin with for a number of reasons, top among them is that few people get all their ISK by spending real world money on PLEX, how you calculate the value of dollars to PLEX depends on what unit of purchase you choose and the current market value in game, and because you can’t cash PLEX or ISK out… not legally… so all the theoretical cash is even more theoretical.

So that is my review.

TL;DR – Big fight had server problems, and it will probably happen again.

Related posts, both current and older sources:

• CCP – Clash at Atioth
• Reddit – Clash at Atioth Thread
• Killmail.app  – Atioth Battle Report 
• TNG – Revisiting The Losses Of B-R5RB Vs Atioth
• TAGN – The Imperium Loses 33 Titans Battling WinterCo and the Server in Atioth
• TAGN – Friday EVE Online Bullet Points in a Wet Spring Season
• TAGN – B-R5RB by the Numbers – CCP Dev Blog Details the Fight
• TAGN – CCP Details the Titan Massacre at M2-XFE along with Two New Guinness World Records

Then I worried a bit about gear, so I looked into heirloom gear, which turned into a bit of a pricey thing to upgrade.  And then I got it into my head to finish up the Outland loremaster achievement while I was there.  I only needed to clean up a small thread in Nagrand and the Blades Edge Mountains, wrap up Shadowmoon Valley, and do literally all of Netherstorm.

How hard could it be?  I did all of Hellfire Peninsula in basically two sessions.

Cleaning up Nagrand was a breeze, and while the Blades Edge Mountains were a chore, they were mostly so due to the need to travel quite a bit and some sketchy or outdated quest text.  But I did it.

Which sent me straight into Netherstorm.

Flying into Area 52 in Netherstorm

There were six quest chains listed in the achievement for the zone.  Piece of cake, right?  I mean, I had similar chains complete for every other zone besides Shadowmoon Valley.

So I dug into it.

Netherstorm is/was one of the more advanced zones in the expansion and had a lot more quests that recommended they be done with 2 or 3 players in the quest text.  See, I read the quest text… when it has numbers at least.

However, that was for the 2007 version of the game.  Here in post-squish, Chromie-time, post-Midnight class changes my arms warrior Iron Dwarf in his heirloom gear was OP enough to solo them all.  The class talent tree… matrix… is so complex now that I just let the game pick the skills and I mostly just use the one-key auto pick attack rotation, which even with the 25% global cool down penalty was enough to kill stuff and keep me alive.

This has completely detached me from even the concept of what my skills really are.  I am not even face rolling the keyboard at this point, but just pressing one button at the rhythm of the global cool down.  But I guess there are some self-healing skills because somehow I managed to stay alive even when my health drops below 25% a few seconds into the fight.

My health just drops down, the hovers there… ignore the levels shown, I’ll get to that

The self-heal was clutch because I have no freaking idea how food or health potions work in Chromie time… everything says it heals you for a single digit value of health… and not even a large single digit… while the first aid trainer just stares at you like you’re speaking gibberish.

2 health is NOT going to make a difference

I suspect that the tool tip is just wrong, but also when I sat down to eat something that said it would heal me for 3 health over 3 seconds, it seemed to do just that while natural regen took care of the rest.  So it is just full speed ahead, kill the next thing… and the next thing almost always seemed to die unless I got in really over my head.

The challenge was more just figuring out where the quests we sending you as the quest map markers for some of the quests… not so accurate… or not so helpful at least.  Highlighting where to turn in the quest once I did the thing, but not where I need to do the thing happened a few times.

But my biggest problem… if this can even be considered a problem when my overall goal was to level up a new character… was that I was leveling up pretty fast.  I was getting a level every 4-5 quests.  One of the most active parts of my UI was it telling me I had another talent point to spend.

Yes game, I know, another talent point

This was messing a bit with my heirloom gear plan.

I had invested in upgrading my full set to go to level 44, as the price jumps up after that.  However, I quickly out ran that, so decided to invest in four pieces of heirloom gear, bringing them up to level 60… or 59… because the game can’t be consistent.  That would give me two of the set bonuses, because the second set bonus seemed to have some value.

The first set bonus, a reduction in the rested xp use rate ended up being pretty useless and I did most of my leveling without rested xp.

I left the other items on for the time being, until I got drops to replace them and found that their contributions to the set bonus went away immediately after hitting 45.  Or maybe 46.  I didn’t take the screen shot until I was already at level 48.

Heirloom set bonuses

I kept going on that, driving on the level 50, at which point I was rewarded for getting an allied race from creation to level 50 with some cosmetic Dark Iron dwarf heritage gear.  I used my one free outfit per character option to grab that look.

Dargan in his Dark Iron finery

The armor set is good, but I had to use the staff model for a decent weapon transmog as most of the options you get are for one hand weapons.

Then it was back to Netherstorm, where I kept driving until I had only two of the six story lines left to finish.  One was the Violet Tower story line, which requires you to do a dungeon to finish it off.  This was one thing that I couldn’t solo.  So I put myself in the dungeon finder queue to see if I could get it done.

A lot of dungeons in Outland

That was taking a while, but Potshot and Gaff… the latter having also returned to retail WoW, so we theoretically have a five person group again if we can all log on at the same time… said they would come along.  Gaff got out his druid bear tank and Potshot his healer, both of whom were over level 81.  However, I put our group in the queue and we popped a instance almost immediately.  As always, there were DPS just waiting for this.

The Botanica is ready

In we went where everybody seemed to scale down to the lowest level character in the group and things pretty much worked.

I mean, it wasn’t challenging or anything.  We didn’t have to do much more than keep Gaff’s big bear butt in sight and just attack whatever he attacked.

In the Botanica

Gaff did say that rando dungeon finder DPS was at least better than the DPS that follower dungeons assign you, specifically mentioning the hunter you get who will absolutely run around behind the current mob to shoot it from behind and aggroing the next set of mobs in the process.

We got through that, easy peasy, with bags stuffed because personal loot apparently now also means that you get to loot every mob.  I don’t know.  I am kind of surprised the system works at all, easy though it was.

That wrapped up quest chain five of six, just leaving me with Socrethar on the list.

The final Netherstorm quest chain

I could not find a quest giver or drop to get that one started, so ended up on WoW Head where I read that you needed to pick a side with either The Aldor or The Scryers and get rep with them in order to unlock that quest chain.

I hadn’t been selling off all of the rep drops, though I did a couple of times when my bags were filling up.  I had a lot more stuff hanging around for The Scryers, so I headed to Shattrath to see how far I could get with them with what I had in my bag.

As it turned out, not enough to get to friendly, which I needed to unload most of the rep drops I had.  I needed more of the boot strap drops that can get you to friendly, so I decided to just move along and head to Shadowmoon Valley.

That ended up being a little tougher.  There are more quests that suggest three players rather than two and I got in over my head a couple of times clearing mobs.  But I was still able to handle any overland elite mob one on one, including Uvuros, the health bar of whom I linked up above.

That also displays the next problem I hit, which was passing through level 60 where all of my heirloom gear save for my weapon… for some reason I cannot recall past me upgraded the two handed heirloom axe all the way to level 70, the cap for heirloom gear currently… which meant no set bonus and my gear now rapidly falling behind, which probably made the Uvuros fight as dicey as it was.

Outland just doesn’t drop or reward gear at a rapid enough rate to keep up, it having been designed to cover you needs for just 10 levels and not the 50+ levels I had gained since I wandered through the portal at level 10.

Fun times.

Solo quests were no problem of course, but being able to solo the three player recommended quests when the mobs are leveling up with you while your gear is falling behind. Already at 64, I decided not to spend the gold to upgrade the heirloom armor any further and decided to do the “catch up experience” route which, among other things, tosses a full set of at level gear at you.

Come on, you’ll love it!

That got me up to snuff and ready to go at it again for another six levels.  So, maybe 30 quests left until I hit the end of Chromie time and get kicked out of Outland and have to go to Dragonflight?

For all my cutting remarks, it has been a fun ride.  I have put about 20 hours in to Dargan, which is a non-trivial amount of play time I suppose, during which he went from level 10 to 64.

I am afraid I won’t be getting the Outland Loremaster achievement, not unless I turn to simply farming mobs for the right drops.  Maybe some other time.  I have at least advanced the effort.

In addition I’ve been seeing more and more people talk about winter co as though we’ve been abandoned by winter co. We haven’t been abandoned at all by our allies.

Sapporo Jones, Leader of TEST, March 5, 2026

This past weekend saw multiple armor timers for TEST structures in Geminate.  It was a big red crayon strat op for us in Chinese time zone.  These were very early on Saturday morning for me and, after a week of work, I wasn’t quite up to a 3am alarm clock op.

And, as it turned out, staying in bed was a good choice on my part as WinterCo declined to show up to defend those timers.  I’ve shot enough structures to not feel I missed out.

This is where we get to the flood plain discussion, which comes up in every war, where an alliance or coalition under attack has to make hard choices as what to defend and what to fight for.  Flood plains are the term, in vogue since the PAPI attack on the Imperium in World War Bee, for those parts of space that a group is willing to lose in order to be better able to defend more important systems.

So it is not completely out of the ordinary for a group to decline to doggedly defend everything in what they consider a flood plain… and anything can be a flood plain at need.

That said, it was something of a slap in the face for TEST when, while WinterCo declined to show up for the armor timer for three Keepstars and a Sotiyo on Saturday, the found time to form up to defend Northern Coalition Skyhooks in Pure Blind.  This cranked up more than a few memes on Reddit. (My fav)

Pure Blind is in play because WinterCo still has that war, which they started, festering on their northwestern frontier because The Initiative wouldn’t come back later simply because WinterCo was busy elsewhere.

Norus sent out a broadcast drawing the line at the 4-HWWF Keepstar in Vale of the Silent.

Noraus Statement to WinterCo

**norausdot** NØRT [redacted]

@everyone it’s all TEST part of geminate getting burnt, without a fight. WC formed 1k4 to defend FRT’s gemi.

it’s cuz we tried in M-MD at our best case scenario and tried in atioth also. neither worked out well for us while we lost grounds elsewhere, grounds where we could used to spare at critical moments.

the writing on the wall is on the day 0, we have said this loud and clear to coalition. All space except for 4HW keepstar will be choose to lose at a time. I should not need to ping this daily, except i agree I probably should have said this in ping more often that `TEST space is in the worst part of this invasion, defending them would have been possible but when INIT decided to join it’s lost already`

we choose to weight more defense on PB cuz it would net us results, breathing room (space systems) to spare. Should Goons stall for another month we will still be fighting over around vale border except init isn’t in Cloud ring, they could be in X47.

Can I plainly communicate all above except for repeating `We only defend at our choices strategically?` probably not before they are at the keepstar armor like now. It doesn’t take any genius to figure out our priorities and exploit it. But it’s all good now that we have repelled all serious attempts from INIT. I could cede pure blind tomorrow and it wouldn’t affect if goons and we stuck in a titan brawl.

Now friends, there will be a few more days you can’t shake off that noraus abandoned you. You will hint that if not saying so to my face. There was at least one imp high level spy trying to do that on the exec level before they even put down the atioth keep. When you chose to live in geminate I’ve warned people this could happen. I said we couldn’t defend those space but we would house the members, eat the damage together then revenge those who’s responsible.

This would be pretty normal for a coalition under siege that is losing fights and wants to husband its forces for use in a more defensible environment.  Is Vale of the Silent more defensible?  I do not know, but it does stretch our logistical tail a bit more, and I’ve been through campaigns where we have reached a point that being able to resupply the front line has become an issue because the war has simply moved too far from our home.

But WinterCo isn’t losing fights.  If we just use the ISK outcome they are often breaking even or winning pretty decisively.  There have been a number of brawls over the last week… usually just escalations over minor objectives, that have turned into bloody slug-fests between battleship fleets.

The fight that went down on Saturday night in H-5GUI in Vale of the Silent, sparked by The Llama feeding a CFI fleet then coming back for more, was probably the closest brawl of the bunch, swung our way because WinterCo dropped some dreads and we went after them like somebody said, “Treat!” in the other room.

A WinterCo Phoenix gets our attention

From the new killmail.app battle tool report, this header resulted.

H-5GUI Battle Report Header

Going off topic for a moment, I do like the visualization that tool provides, but I feel the need to crop it down to something more useful for a blog post.  You can click on the link to see the original.

Another problem with that tool is it only tracks one system at a time, and in null sec Aegis Sov means that we will have constellation spanning fights at times, and fights do often spill over from one system to the next.  I was in a fight over the course of the week where half of it took place on one side of a gate, then WinterCo pulled back through the gate, we followed, and the fight continued on the other side.  No battle report for me on killmail.app.

Also, it doesn’t show the major participants on the main page and names the sides after the largest alliance present.  That should say WinterCo and The Imperium.  And also INIT, because they showed up, but you can only have two sides in a battle as well.

My usual fallback is the Battle Report Tool site, though that seems to be having some issues currently.  I could not get it to generate anything like a reasonable battle report for the fight at H-5GUI

Ideally, I want a tool that has a nice, not too cluttered summary that doesn’t require me to crop and rework too much to get something readable to include here.  (More than a decade ago Asher asked me to include a visual of the report headers with my posts, as the sites that generate them come and go.  This was wisdom and I have not regretted following that advice.)

There is another new player on the block, EVE War Beacon, which does generate some nice battle reports and has most of what I want.  Here is the same fight as a battle report from there.

EVE War Beacon BR Header for H-5GUI

That gets me about everything I want, just in tiny eye-strain-o-vision size type.  You may need to click on that image to see it in full size for it to be legible.

I personally contributed two Raven Navy Issue (RNI) battleships to that report, which run 650 million ISK on contract.  I have already been paid out via the ship replacement program (SRP) for strategic operations, but losing those two has boosted my SRP total past 2.3 billion ISK.

My losses in our new SRP tool

But it was a glorious and satisfying fight, even if I lost two ships.  But at least I remembered to put a frigate in the escape bay in the second RNI.  You cannot transport a battleship in a capital ship with a frigate in the escape bay… no ships in ships in ships I guess… so I had to take them all out to haul them, and then I keep forgetting to put them back in.

Also, I once again forgot that the escape bay frigate was even a thing when my second RNI blew up and got up to go to the bathroom, only to come back and find I was in a ship, albeit a much smaller one, and somebody was shooting at me.  I barely got away.

Still a few points of armor left, no sweat!

Having loaded up a combat drone in my Scalpel, I was able to send it out on a couple of the targets we went after, including a Phoenix Navy Issue, where I did my part applying a while 134 points of damage.

My Scalpel over the battle

I lost that drone on a sudden cold warp across the battlefield, but was able to reconnect with one of the drones I had deployed from my RNI when we landed, so carried on doing that and repping the occasional target in our fleet.  I was mostly left alone and made it out when we rushed the gate through the bubbles and a pile of hostile Maelstroms.

It was an opportune time to overhead your prop mod

Anyway, that was all a semi-relevant digression as part of the point that WinterCo has been holding its own when it comes out to play, and should be able to dominate when it comes to structure timers set to their time zone preference.

Oh, and I keep forgetting, WinterCo won a major victory over the Imperium at the Atioth Keepstar timer, winning both the objective and slaughtering us in the ISK war, blowing up 33 titans, just two weeks ago.  While not an M2-XFE round 2 level of win, it is the sort of loss that had caused some coalitions to pause.  But we just plowed forward, lying about how many Keepstars we were dropping and deploying forward all the same.

So it doesn’t feel like WinterCo should be falling back, but I am not privy to what Noraus knows about his own coalition.

So WinterCo has decided to let go of Geminate, which included all of TEST’s holdings.  That, and then the decision to put in the effort to defend Skyhooks in Pure Blind has reportedly made TEST a bit salty in coalition coms.

A sample from a menu shared out on Saturday

It would be enough to make you feel for TEST… but then I have to remind myself that they chose to put themselves in the middle of the road we would have to take for any attack on WinterCo… and also, we have long memories and hold grudges.

TEST locations, November to January

[Thought experiment: If TEST had stayed in Pure Blind, would WinterCo be defending their Skyhooks as aggressively?]

Noraus eventually had to put out an quick update to put the heat on himself for this decision.

Noraus takes the hit

**norausdot** NØRT [redacted]

@everyone also it’s not possible to feel ok. I don’t mean to force people especially TEST members to PRETEND we are ok and dont worry about us.

You can fire up all the complaints but please do NOT point them at FCs. Why would you be mad at the people who can not decide grand plans yet try to net the best results for you.

Going to personal is the only thing should not happen here.

rather you should be mad at me, which is quite OK. I still offer all of you to tend your wounds here then revenge at a time we can. I made the decision and you are the most impacted. You’ve lost the most. you have the right.

This is what leadership has to look like when things are not going your way.  You don’t get to blame others when you’re in charge… not if you want to keep your organization from fracturing.

Will this quell the discontent?  I do not know.  But there are a number of structure timers coming out in the next 24 hours, the structures I referenced at the top of the post that WinterCo declined to defend at the armor timers.

It is generally assumed that the big fight happens at the armor timer and that you evacuate the structure and abandon it to your foe at the structure timer.  But Noraus may feel the need to put in some effort now to defend at least one of those structures for TEST, if only to prove that Skyhooks are not more important than Keepstars.  Also, again, these fights will happen in their core time zone, so they should be able to contest the field against EU and US pilots who will be at work or asleep on Tuesday when they hit.

We shall see this week.

Addendum:

Then, after I wrote this yesterday morning rumors started to run about moves to low sec and other items.  Not sure of the veracity of any of it, but Asher did post that TEST would be allowed to setup shop in the Drone regions if they follow the rules.  Could be trolling.  Could be the future.

Addendum 2:

Survey says… no resistance on the Keepstar kills, which went off as planned.

Three more WinterCo Keepstars Down

There was a Sotiyo on the list that also got popped later on.

Fantasy Critic League – Like Fantasy Football, but for Video Games

The question was, as always, how much would that shake up the rankings.  But first we have to start where the scores stood last week.

Week 15 Scores

Last week saw Pokemon Champions land hard on Potshot, with our first negative score of the season.  However, it did only have five reviews, so any additional ratings would/could have a visible impact on that score.

Pokemon Champions

And, sure enough, it got a small bump as the week kicked off.

• Pokemon Champions
  • [Picked by S Class Warfare Studios (p0tsh0t)]
  • Score has gone UP from 56.7 to 60

And then, the next day, it took a hit… but at least did not go down as far as it had come up.

• Pokemon Champions
  • [Picked by S Class Warfare Studios (p0tsh0t)]
  • Score has gone DOWN from 60.0 to 58

Increasing the number of reviews will attenuate the swings, but will also tend to lock a score in place.  I don’t think PC has a score of 80 within its reach anymore.  Maybe 70?

Meanwhile, Potshot had another title on tap, which landed later that day.

• Replaced has released!
  • [Picked by S Class Warfare Studios (p0tsh0t)]

We had to wait a day for that to get a score however.

• Replaced
  • [Picked by S Class Warfare Studios (p0tsh0t)]
  • Now has a score of 78

Not a stellar score, but enough to lift Potshot up a place in the standings.

• Publisher Score Updates
  • S Class Warfare Studios (p0tsh0t)
    • Score has gone UP from 19.2 to 27.2
    • Moved from 7th place to 6th place
  • Hidalgo Trading Company (Pallais)
    • Moved from 6th place to 7th place

Then, out of left field, one of Cyanbane’s picks took a hit in the scores.

• MLB The Show 26
  • [Picked by Neutical Publishing (Cyanbane)]
  • Score has gone DOWN from 76.3 to 73.6

That turned out to be just enough to lift Potshot another notch on the scoreboard.

• Publisher Score Updates
  • S Class Warfare Studios (p0tsh0t)
    • Moved from 6th place to 5th place
  • Neutical Publishing (Cyanbane)
    • Score has gone DOWN from 29.8 to 27.1
    • Moved from 5th place to 6th place

That situation was not destined to last as we were starting to get scored on additional titles slated to release.

• Pragmata
  • [Picked by Corr’s Creative Collective (Corr)]
  • Now has a score of 86.8
• Mouse: P.I. For Hire
  • [Picked by Neutical Publishing (Cyanbane)]
  • Now has a score of 82.8
• Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream
  • [Picked by Frabjous Day Enterprises (Archey)]
  • Now has a score of 78.1
• OPUS: Prism Peak
  • [Picked by Anthania Interactive (Ula)]
  • Now has a score of 89.3

Especially interesting was Ula’s pick, OPUS: Prism Peak, which came out of the gate strong.

OPUS: Prism Peak

Then it got even stronger.

• OPUS: Prism Peak
  • [Picked by Anthania Interactive (Ula)]
  • Score has gone UP from 89.3 to 91.2

That was setting Ula up to have the top scoring pick in the league so far… but she already had the top scoring pick in the league with Pokemon Pokopia.

So when Thursday hit and three out of four of those titles officially launched, there was a pretty big shakeup in the roster.

• Publisher Score Updates
  • Neutical Publishing (Cyanbane)
    • Score has gone UP from 27.1 to 40.5
    • Moved from 6th place to 2nd place
  • Play Forever Mwahahaha (Shintar)
    • Moved from 2nd place to 3rd place
  • TAGN HQ (Wilhelm)
    • Moved from 3rd place to 4th place
  • Green River Gaming (Nimgimli)
    • Moved from 4th place to 5th place
  • S Class Warfare Studios (p0tsh0t)
    • Moved from 5th place to 6th place
  • Frabjous Day Enterprises (Archey)
    • Score has gone UP from 5.1 to 13.3
    • Moved from 12th place to 10th place
  • Rodent Entertainment (Arhanta)
    • Moved from 10th place to 11th place
  • Crash and Burn Games (Shawn)
    • Moved from 11th place to 12th place

Eight out of thirteen in the league found themselves in a new spot between Ula at the top and Bhagpuss, with not titles released still, at the bottom.

Then Potshot got another small boost as Pokemon Champions reviews pushed the score back up a bit.

• Pokemon Champions
  • [Picked by S Class Warfare Studios (p0tsh0t)]
  • Score has gone UP from 58.3 to 62.9

Every little bit counts… and that little bit was enough to get Potshot back into fifth position.

• Publisher Score Updates
  • S Class Warfare Studios (p0tsh0t)
    • Score has gone UP from 29.1 to 32.8
    • Moved from 6th place to 5th place
  • Green River Gaming (Nimgimli)
    • Moved from 5th place to 6th place

Then something changed score and there was another position swap.

• Publisher Score Updates
  • Frabjous Day Enterprises (Archey)
    • Moved from 10th place to 9th place
  • Corr’s Creative Collective (Corr)
    • Moved from 9th place to 10th place

That was followed by another score change too small for the bot to announce but big enough to cause a position swap.

• Publisher Score Updates
  • Play Forever Mwahahaha (Shintar)
    • Moved from 3rd place to 2nd place
  • Neutical Publishing (Cyanbane)
    • Moved from 2nd place to 3rd place

Ending the week for releases was Pragmata , which also came out pretty strong at close to 87.

Pragmata

That gave Corr a score boost.

• Publisher Score Updates
  • Corr’s Creative Collective (Corr)
    • Score has gone UP from 13.4 to 30.0
    • Moved from 10th place to 7th place
  • Hidalgo Trading Company (Pallais)
    • Moved from 7th place to 8th place
  • Rusty Shackleford (Shilgrod)
    • Moved from 8th place to 9th place
  • Frabjous Day Enterprises (Archey)
    • Moved from 9th place to 10th place

Then we had two late score updates.

• Pokemon Champions
  • [Picked by S Class Warfare Studios (p0tsh0t)]
  • Score has gone UP from 62.9 to 64.6
• Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream
  • [Picked by Frabjous Day Enterprises (Archey)]
  • Score has gone UP from 78.3 to 79.4

Neither of those changed the rankings, but both were good news for Potshot and Archey respectively.   Pokemon Champions, slowly digging its way out of that hole.  We’ll see if it can keep going.

All of which left the scoreboard looking like this at the end of the week.

Week 16 Scores

Ula, who holds the top two scoring titles overall for this year in FCL is pretty solidly in first place with five titles released.  While Shintar is almost 36 points behind, she only has three titles live.  There is still a long way to go on that front.

Then we had three bids this week.

• Bids in TAGN League
  • Awaysis
    • Won by Neutical Publishing (Cyanbane) with a bid of $10
  • Rhythm Heaven Groove
    • Won by Pretty Blue Fox Games (Bhagpuss) with a bid of $5
  • Warhammer Survivors
    • Rusty Shackleford (Shilgrod)’s bid of $20 did not succeed: No roster spots available.

That means two more titles on the board… and a reminder that you can’t win a bit without having an open spot.  Still, it could have been a mind game move.

On the ship date front, we had a couple of changes pop up.

• Outbound
  • [Picked by Pretty Blue Fox Games (Bhagpuss)]
    • Release date changed from ‘Thursday, April 23, 2026’
    • to ‘Thursday, May 14, 2026’.
• Trails in the Sky 2nd Chapter
  • [Picked by Crash and Burn Games (Shawn)]
    • Release date changed from ‘Fall 2026’
    • to ‘Thursday, September 17, 2026’.

Outbound isn’t a huge slip, while Trails at least has a date now.

That leaves the next ten titles on the list as follows.

Coming up for Week 17

That is four releases next week.  The one with the biggest impact might be Diablo IV: Lord of Hatred as it was picked by me but counter picked by Pallais.  We shall see how that turns out.

Related:

• TAGN Fantasy Critic League
• TAGN Discord Server
• Fantasy Critic Site
• Fantasy Critic How to Play
• Fantasy Critic FAQ
• Open Critic Review Site

Or, commonly when I was a kid.  While I was born nearly 60 years after the earthquake, there was still people alive who were there.  My father’s grandparents were there in the city that day, and I am in a picture with one of them, so I met a survivor of the great quake, even if I was maybe five years old in the picture. (My brother is an infant in the picture, and I am four years older than him and my great grandmother in the picture passed before I turned six, so that kind of narrows it down.)

I did not get any first hand tales of the day, or if I did I forgot them or wasn’t paying attention, as children often fail to do.

My main image of the quake and the subsequent fire, which did most of the destruction, was from a book that sat in a bookshelf in the family room of what I think of as my childhood home.

That book was The Earth Shook, The Sky Burned: A Photographic Record of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire, from which I took the title of this post.

The book was kind of old by the point that I discovered it on the bookshelf.  It was probably purchased for my father by his father back when the it was first published.  My grandfather could spin a gripping, if second hand, tale of the events of that day.  Second hand because he was born a decade after the fact.

This book was ideal for me at the age I discovered it… which is to say that it was mostly a collection of pictures from the even, organized into something of a narrative flow, with a few before images, then a lot of after shots.  It did not have a lot of words, and most of the words included were devoted to describing the pictures contained in the book.

If it has been a written narrative of the quake I probably wouldn’t remember it at all.  While I became an avid reader in my teens, before then I tended to judge the quality of a book based on the quantity of the pictures it contained.

And by that measurement, The Earth Shook, The Sky Burned earned high marks from me.

Or, such was my memory of the book.  My father might still have it around somewhere in his house, but I rather suspect it fell by the wayside in one of the moves we went through since I lay on the floor in the family room of that first house leafing through the book.  He has lived in eight more homes since then, and few things get you to lighten your load more than moving a few times.  At one point I moved five times in two years and the keep/toss threshold changed quite a bit over that time.

But images of the ruins of the city, like this panoramic view taken a month after the quake, still linger in the back of my head.

Of course, I have been through my own earthquakes.  They are a fact of life living in coastal California, as they are living anywhere on the ring of fire around the Pacific.

The biggest of my own personal experience was the Loma Prieta quake in 1989.  While an order of magnitude smaller than the 1906 quake, it still brought down buildings and overpasses, left gaps in highways, and threw nearly every jar of pasta sauce I had just put on the shelf onto the floor creating a great glass filled marinara puddle.  A pity it was a few aisles over from the wine section, which likewise saw many bottle smashed on the floor, as it would have made an interesting mix.

I probably wouldn’t have noticed the passing of the 120th anniversary of the quake, except for the fact that I received a package about a month back from one of my father’s cousins… or one of my cousins, once removed, if you prefer.

It it was a small bust or statuette of a woman with “La Citana” on the base.

La Citana – The Gypsy

That is Italian for “The Gypsy” if Google translate is to be trusted.

The short note that came in the box noted that one of her aunts salvaged this from the remains of their house in San Francisco after the quake.  I am not sure of the significance of the bust… did it have some meaning to someone or was it just a nick knack that caught somebody’s fancy… or was related to somebody’s nickname, as all that generation seemed to have several odd nicknames… but it arrived, reaching through time to land on our doorstep and remind me of the day.

Meanwhile, all of that made me go look up the book and, hey, it is still available.

The dust jacket I remember from my childhood

It has been republished a few times, with the last full hardbound edition landing at the 100th anniversary.

I wasn’t keen to grab a physical copy, but Amazon had a Kindle version.  That I was fine with.

The pictures aren’t as dramatic on my iPad in the Kindle app as they were on the family room floor when I was a child, but it does have a lot more words that I remembered.  I’ll probably pay a little more mind to those this time around.