Now it is time for EverQuest, the elder game in the Daybreak stable, the foundation of their MMORPG legacy, which last week announced that the thirty-third expansion for the game, Favors of Fortune, was up and available for pre-order.

EverQuest Favors of Fortune expansion

I am not sure what is going on in that image.  Cats, hearts, and terrorizing a bard seem to figure prominently, and the expansion pitch, below, isn’t helping much.

In the uneasy calm following the gods’ brief but brutal war, Mithaniel Marr and Rallos Zek struggle to forge a truce. Yet even as they negotiate the end of open conflict, Mithaniel’s focus fractures. A shadow clings to his thoughts, an unspoken fear for his sister, Erollisi Marr. Something has changed in her, something he cannot ignore. When he finally speaks, his voice carries a weight that shakes even the divine: Scorn has returned.

As adventurers begin their search, the first signs are subtle, then unmistakable. Across the lesser planes, chance itself twists unnaturally. Simple gambles collapse into disaster. Once‑reliable odds warp into impossibility. Victories slip away as though guided by an unseen hand. The very fabric of luck feels poisoned, bent toward failure by a force both deliberate and unseen. No one can yet explain how or why, only that the pattern is spreading.

With the gods distracted, fate unraveling, and Scorn’s influence rising, the path ahead grows darker by the hour. The champions of Norrath must step forward once more, not knowing whether fortune will favor them, or betray them at every turn.

Sure, Erollisi is the Aphrodite in the Norrath pantheon, so love and hearts are kind of her thing in the “love conquerors all” philosophy.  I’m just not sure where bard abuse enters into it.  But I haven’t kept track of the lore… ever, really… so I am no guide to what is going on there.

I am a bit better on the mechanics, and this is what the expansion is set to offer.

• 6 Expansion Zones – Experience the Planes ravaged by schemes and stolen fortune. Navigate a realm where love itself has been corrupted, where luck becomes a weapon, and where cunning plots threaten to reshape divinity itself.
• New Raids, Quests, Collections, and Missions – Navigate thorny betrayal and shield-breaking magic. Survive unpredictable chaos and coin-flipping fortune. Face echoes of legends past. The expansion demands skill, adaptability, and courage.
• New Spells, Combat Abilities, and AAs
• New race and class combination: Dark Elf Bard – For the first time, Dark Elves can be Bards! From the depths of Neriak, their songs rise velvet-smooth and razor-sharp. The Dark Elf bard plays, and the shadows stir.
• Collection Depot – A personal storage space set aside exclusively to hold collectible items.

We are in one of the “no level cap increase” expansions, but that has a long enough history to have been expected.  If we got a level cap boost every time imagine where we would be thirty-three expansion into this.

New zones, new raids, new quests, new spells, new AAs and such are all par for the course.

The more recent trend has been the addition of a new race/class combo.  Last year, with Shattering of Ro, we got Vah Shir druids.  This time around they are introducing Dark Elf bards.

Maybe that is what she is upset about in the image… that the bard… isn’t a dark elf?

Keeping with the traditions above, the expansion is available at the usual four price points.

Expansion Pricing

For those who just want the expansion, the standard package will get you there.

If you want ALL THE FLUFF, then the $140 premium is your ticket.  I personally can’t see spending that much on an MMO expansion, but I have spent at least half that much on some collector’s editions over the years.

And then there is the Family & Friends edition, which is strictly a Norrath thing, which includes items tradable within the game, including:

• Tradable: copy of the Favors of Fortune expansion
• Tradable: Level 115 Heroic Character
• Tradable: Golden Goose Whistle
• Tradable: Gilded Whirlwind
• Tradable: Collection Depot Slots (10-slot packs)

That is a lot of dough, but they wouldn’t keep running with it if it wasn’t selling.  I think that pack has been around since 2019 at this point.

In addition, if you pre-order you get access to the beta and some additional items as a reward.

When the expansion will arrive… Daybreak is playing that a little close to their chest.  No specific date is listed, though the recent producer’s letter mentions a developer live stream to introduce the expansion more fully on November 17th.  That puts it hard up against Thanksgiving week here in the US, which isn’t an impossible ask, but not a likely one.  So I suspect we’ll see it land on the first week of December.

Related:

• Daybreak – Favors of Fortune expansion page
• Daybreak – Pre-order and Beta for Favors of Fortune are open!
• Daybreak – Expansion order page
• Daybreak – September 2026 Producer’s Letter

Crimson Harvest 2026 – Open the Bloodgates

I am not a huge fan of the event, mostly due to the high standards set by the 2018 version of the event. (Which also just looked better!  Oh banana of death, we miss you!)  Another case of “Hey, I enjoyed that.  Why did you take it away?”  Welcome to video games.  So I start off with a bit of a bias against the event.  Last year I made it about of a third of the way through the whole thing.

This year, back for another try, I will admit that I was a little daunted by the initial goals of the event.  On top of half of the sites being for the other faction choice, seeing that the first step for the hacking task was to open 100 cans, I was feeling like that might once again be a hill higher than I was willing to climb.

The Crimson Harvest goals – St. Tetrimon side

I have some memories of past events where there was one can per site and the idea of scanning down 100 sites gave me a moment’s pause.  I was also wondering exactly how much progress 100 cans would get me.  Previous events this year have generally ramped up slowly, with goals increasing in something like a Fibonacci sequence. (i.e. 3 cans, then 5, then 8, then 13 and so on.)  So 100 seemed like a pretty big opening target.

However, digging into the progress track, hacking those 100 cans gets you half way to the initial 1,000 point goal.  Five points a can!  For whatever reason the team has eschewed the gradual build up and has jumped in for one big task.

And I guess that is fine.

It does make track progression a little weird.  You have nothing unlocked for quite a stretch, then suddenly half of the track is unlocked.  Maybe incremental unlocks are overrated?  What do I know?

What hacking 100 cans gets you

Also, I clearly made it that far.  I was encouraged by the fact that the sites all had three cans, so finding 34 sites seemed a more achievable goal than hitting 100.

Running up on a Blood Raider hacking site

And some site have an additional fourth can.

That extra can in a Blood Raiders site

The sites are competitive… so you can have other people drop in and snipe a can or two.  But at least you aren’t left doing a whole event cycle only to have somebody snipe the one ship that counts… though, given that the totals for combat sites have also changed, that might not be as big of a deal now either.

My in main irritation in these events is always around investing time only to make zero progress.  If they have fixed that, then good.  I can live with some progress over no progress.

I started out finding a lot of Tetrimon sites and, as I suggested in a comment on the last post, I considered cherry picking those.  My handy Swiss Army Helios has a cargo scanner on it that lets me see into locked cans.

Eyeing the cans of St. Tetrimon

However, most of what is in the cans is… well, it isn’t junk because it has some value… it just isn’t worth the effort.  So I gave that up pretty quickly.

As is my usual plan, I did my hacking later in the evening west coast time when the online population tends to ebb, at least on weekdays.  It is a fairly chill thing I can do while listening to a podcast or some music and I was clearly able find the sites.

However, I decided to layer another task on top of the event.  I decided to try for one of the new achievements that were introduced with the Cradle of War expansion.

The new achievements, not the old ones they put in, let break, then yanked from the game.  The ones that discard anything I’ve done in the last 20 years.  I find it irksome that the in-game map knows every system I have visited in the game and the date of my last visit, but the achievements know nothing of my activities before the expansion dropped.  Data is hard for some people I guess.

Anyway, while I was going to be roaming high sec, avoiding war decs and scanning for event sites, I figured I could work on those achievements, starting with the Blessed Pilgrim achievement, which requires you to visit all 689 systems in Amarr space.  I had visited just 20 systems when I started out, but figured I could expand that pretty quickly with my evening roams.

I knew up front, from complaints on Reddit, that the achievement does no helpful tracking for you, save for giving you a raw count of the systems you have visited.  But the achievement panel itself shows you the regions you need to visit, so I went over to DOTLAN and took a screen shot of the Tash-Murkon region map, pasted it into Paint.net, and went off exploring and scanning for event sites.

I started out doing it my constellation, but then started marking individual systems, just in case.

And I knocked out Tash-Murkon fairly quickly, but when I went back to the achievement expecting that at least it ought to show me the region was complete… no such luck  The company’s cartography problems continue and their answer would likely be HTFU.

Blessed Pilgrim – No Help for You!

Still, I was determined not to be one of those people on Reddit who ended up one system shy and had to then figure out which of the ~300-700 systems associated with the four achievements they might have missed.

On the whole my plan actually helped.  People tend to congregate around systems they feel are their home.  I, on the other hand, was wandering across entire regions, often traversing constellations where nobody was around… and thus, where data sites would linger, sometimes piling up as RNG sent more there… so in addition to making progress on the achievement I would also get in a few sites in a single system.

Which is how I managed to get my first 100 cans in, putting me halfway through the reward track in one shot.

After you do that, if you want to continue hacking, then you need to get 40 more cans for 100 more reward track points, which means another 200 cans to get the additional 500 reward track point to finish off the first phase of the event.

So 300 cans total.  I guess that isn’t so bad.

And then there is the loot.  Most of it is pretty modest.   But what would you expect for high sec data sites? (Or even low sec ones, since I did end up spending time in quite a few low sec systems when I was alone.)  Still, how many Positron Cords does one need?

I did end up with a few new SKINs, and a bunch more to stow away and sell at a later date.  The market for all of the stuff in cans will be flooded until the new year, so best to just save it for later.

There were also some event related items.  There was plenty of Mutated Blood Samples, the currency for the event.  I also ended up with quite a stack of keys for the Crimson Gauntlet sites.  Those unlock a short cut to the final room in those sites.  They do not, as somebody suggested, keep the site from being contested.  In fact, somebody with keys can totally screw you over by jumping ahead of you in a site you’re working on.  Welcome to New Eden.

I did run a few of the Hollow Outbreak sites. (Should that be “Hallow,” like “Halloween?”) There were just so many of them around that I felt compelled to not leave them unmolested.  They come in three flavors:

• Class 1: Highsec – balanced for new players in basic Tech I frigates
• Class 2: All areas – for experienced players in Tech I destroyers, Tech II frigates, and lower.
• Class 3: Lowsec, nullsec, wormholes, and Pochven – for veterans flying up to Tech III destroyers

These are absolutely open and contested and you only get credit for the site if you kill the final NPC, so awful people are out there sniping those.  However, there are a lot of them about, so I got out the ships I had used for a bit last year. (Also, not everybody is awful.  A good portion of people who warp in will just warp off.  That is what I do.  But you still get the awful people now and then.)

My Catalyst finishing a class 2 site with some fireworks

You can go active with guns, missiles, or lasers and be constantly targeting things, most of which will blow up in one hit. (And deal with how the UI seems to miss about 1 in 8 inputs. Is this a side effect of the the Python update?  Has that started?)  Or you can go with drones and just occasionally target the loot shuttle.

Both represent the primary problem of PvE in EVE Online (and video games in general), of being a problem that, once solved, becomes repetitive and a bit dull.  But you do only need 10 final ship kills to finish the task.  Seems viable.

As for being tedious, you could say that about the hacking game as well, which is just a variation on Minesweeper.  As it turns out, I kind of like Minesweeper.  Who knew?  Especially with some wandering through space I guess.

Anyway, we’ll see if I end up getting the BPC… or exploring all of Amarr space.  I am about a third of the way through on the latter at this point.  Domain is going to be the most annoying region.

Related:

• CCP/Fenris – Crimson Harvest: Open the Bloodgates
• CCP/Fenris – Crimson Harvest: The Bloodgates Are Open
• CCP/Fenris – Blood Raiders Invade Unstable Pochven
• CCP/Fenris – Don’t Miss the Biggest Rewards!
• CCP/Fenris – Patch Notes for Crimson Harvest
• TAGN – Crimson Harvest 2026 Lands in EVE Online Today
• EVE University – Crimson Harvest 2026

(With 50+ titles landing every day on Steam, this fear of GTA VI isn’t really a thing in my opinion, save for a few big titles and studios that needed some excuse to slip a date anyway.  Looking at you Squadron 42.  But abject fear is the gaming press narrative lately.)

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

But to appreciate what changed over the course of week forty-one, we have to start with the scoreboard from the previous week to set the stage.

Week 40 Scores

Week forty closed out with Arhanta landing in first place and the league forecasting them as the second place finisher overall.

The first score I want to mention is yet another Warhammer title.

• Total War: WARHAMMER III – Lords of the End Times
  • [Unpublished]
  • Now has a score of 85.7

The only reason I want to mention this is that I grabbed this title back in January as part of the initial draft, then dropped it for Rayman Legends Told, which then was delayed, so I dropped it and picked up WoW Forever.  So WoW Forever needs to beat that for my swaps to have been at all worthwhile.  We shall see.

The first releases for the week landed Monday evening with Shilgrod’s pick Star Wars: Galactic Racer hitting.

Star Wars Galactic Racer

It had already started off with a score of 86.8 last week.

Likewise, Gears of War: E-Day, in Potshot’s lineup, landed Monday evening.

Gears of War: E-Day

It also had a score in place, having hit 87.2 during week forty.

Those two arriving saw the first movement of the week on the scoreboard.

• Publisher Score Updates
  • S Class Warfare Studios (p0tsh0t)
    • Score has gone UP from 87.8 to 105.5
    • Moved from 6th place to 3rd place
  • Anthania Interactive (Ula)
    • Moved from 3rd place to 4th place
  • Corr’s Creative Collective (Corr)
    • Moved from 4th place to 5th place
  • Play Forever Mwahahaha (Shintar)
    • Moved from 5th place to 6th place
  • Rusty Shackleford (Shilgrod)
    • Score has gone UP from 43.3 to 60.6
    • Moved from 10th place to 7th place
  • Pretty Blue Fox Games (Bhagpuss)
    • Moved from 7th place to 8th place
  • Crash and Burn Games (Shawn)
    • Moved from 8th place to 9th place
  • Green River Gaming (Nimgimli)
    • Moved from 9th place to 10th place

That was followed the next day with an update for Nighthawks, which got a bit of a boost on further reviews.

• Nighthawks
  • [Picked by Pretty Blue Fox Games (Bhagpuss)]
  • Score has gone UP from 79.7 to 81.0

Bhagpuss also saw another of his picks finally get enough top critic reviews to get on the scoreboard as Nivalis Nights arrived with a 75.

• Nivalis Nights
  • [Picked by Pretty Blue Fox Games (Bhagpuss)]
  • Now has a score of 75.0

So Bhagpuss saw some benefit this week.  Not enough to change his position on the board, but at least there are more scores listed in his column.

At that point we had two more titles on tap for the week and on Wednesday scores started to appear for those, starting with Order of the Sinking Star.

Order of the Sinking Star

Picked by Ula, that came in with a solid score.

• Order of the Sinking Star
  • [Picked by Anthania Interactive (Ula)]
  • Now has a score of 81.6

It even got a bit of a midday boost as more scores landed.

• Order of the Sinking Star
  • [Picked by Anthania Interactive (Ula)]
  • Score has gone UP from 81.5 to 82.9

That meant when evening came and it was marked as release, Ula bounced up to first place once more.

• Publisher Score Updates
  • Anthania Interactive (Ula)
    • Score has gone UP from 102.1 to 115.0
    • Moved from 4th place to 1st place
  • Rodent Entertainment (Arhanta)
    • Moved from 1st place to 2nd place
  • TAGN HQ (Wilhelm)
    • Moved from 2nd place to 3rd place
  • S Class Warfare Studios (p0tsh0t)
    • Moved from 3rd place to 4th place

Ula wasn’t very far out in front.  With the gap less than half a point between first and second place, “skin of her teeth” might be the apt metaphor.

Ula out front by less than half a point

And that was not going to last for long because the score was already in for the final title of the week, Dragon’s Dogma 2: Dark Arisen.

Dragon’s Dogma II: Dark Arisen

Picked by Arhanta, its initial score suggested that Ula’s reign would be short indeed.

• Dragon’s Dogma 2: Dark Arisen
  • [Picked by Rodent Entertainment (Arhanta)]
  • Now has a score of 87.3

Score updates showed it wavering a bit.

• Dragon’s Dogma 2: Dark Arisen
  • [Picked by Rodent Entertainment (Arhanta)]
  • Score has gone DOWN from 86.4 to 85.3

But that was not enough to stave off the inevitable once it his its release moment.  Arhanta returned to first place after spending about a day in second.

• Publisher Score Updates
  • Rodent Entertainment (Arhanta)
    • Score has gone UP from 114.3 to 129.4
    • Moved from 2nd place to 1st place
  • Anthania Interactive (Ula)
    • Moved from 1st place to 2nd place

Then, in Parthian shot at the end of the week, Bhagpuss took a bit of an arrow to the knee.

• Nivalis Nights
  • [Picked by Pretty Blue Fox Games (Bhagpuss)]
  • Score has gone DOWN from 75.0 to 73.8

Still above negative, but not much of a help this late in the season.

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

Week 41 Scores

The league projection changed up, demoting Shintar to a second place finish as Arhanta’s revised picks cleared a path to a potential league victory.

Of course, the league projection can be comically wrong at times.  Also, there are still things in play.  Arhanta has one pick left waiting for release next week.  That will seal their score.

Meanwhile, Shintar has three titles yet to release on her roster.  One is coming up, but the other two do not yet have dates nailed down.  Shintar still has $27 left of her budget to work out some additional picks.  Or maybe there is a trade to be had with somebody?

All I know is that there were no bids this week.

There were, however, a couple of updates.  One of the many Warhammer titles got a firm date.

• Warhammer Survivors
  • [Picked by Rusty Shackleford (Shilgrod)]
  • Release date changed from ‘2026’ to ‘Tuesday, November 10, 2026’.

Who cares about GTA VI, do it!

Meanwhile, At Fate’s End was pushed out to 2027.

• At Fate’s End
  • [Picked by Crash and Burn Games (Shawn)]
  • Estimated release date changed from ‘2026’ to ‘2027’.

So I expect there will be some bids soon.

That left the next ten upcoming titles as follows.

Week 42 Coming Up

As for week forty-two, we have another four release week as we race to the end of the year.

The last league pick with a date is Professor Layton and the New World of Steam, which is slated for December 10th.  I am sure other things could come into play between then and the new year, score changes and some final reviews landing, but there are currently no titles allowed in the league set to ship after December 10th.

We’ll see how that wraps up.

Related:

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

Instead, I have always been at least vaguely annoyed at the various streaming services over one thing or another, so that they are making me more annoyed now doesn’t mean they were ever good in the first place.

In fact, if we’re going to start calling out “golden eras” in hindsight, I am going to declare the years when Netflix was a DVD by mail service to be such a time.  I would argue that the era of the Netflix red envelope represented the absolute peak in access to movies and television.

And, sure, maybe you didn’t like the Netflix DVD service back then.  I will admit that I am somewhat biased because I happened to live within spitting distance of one of their distribution centers such that I could drop DVDs off at our local post office on Monday and have the replacements at our home on Wednesday.  Our three disk subscription would keep us in videos pretty much constantly… at least until we got a video we never quite got around to watching.

Netflix

Netflix was only part of the ecosystem at the time.  It was general era of things being available on physical media.  Blockbuster wasn’t healthy, but it wasn’t dead yet either.  But movie and television studios were absolutely invested in putting every damn new movie and every season of every semi-popular show out on DVD.  It was an integral part of their business strategy.  The day a summer blockbuster arrived on disk at retail would get a front page mention in the weekly ad supplement from Walmart and Target and whoever.

You could get your hands on a lot of stuff.  As a backdrop to all of that, most of us still had some form of cable or satellite television.  Peak broadcast television for me was probably having the DirecTV satellite package with the receiver with the integrated Tivo DVR service.  Recorded shows with that 30 second jump button was all you needed.

The problem was all of that required some planning or some patience and we all want something right now dammit!  We were also sick and tired of playing for a cable package with a bunch of channels we never watched.  There were so many “we need ala carte cable” bad takes at the time by people who didn’t understand how the industry worked.

The promise of streaming was getting what you want, on demand, and not paying for stuff you don’t want.

The greatest trick the devil Netflix ever pulled was convincing all the studios that streaming would make more money than physical media.  A little over 19 years ago Netflix introduce a streaming service… I think there was an app for it on the Nintendo DSi at one point… with a limited amount of content as an additional feature for those who subscribed to their DVD service… and it has all been downhill since then.

Netflix on the Nintendo 3DS at least

Now, in 2026 my wife will bring up a show or a movie she has heard about and I will check, then inform her that it is not available on one of the half dozen services to which we subscribe.  Or, worse, that it is available as a pay per view… and, honestly, there is almost nothing I find worth dumping between five and twenty dollars to watch a once on the TV.  I am totally at odds with that, largely because the streaming services have trained me to not do that.

Streaming in general, and Netflix in particular, has also trained us to consume shows at an unsustainable rate.  If a 10 episode season drops we’ll watch two episodes a night and be done before the weekend.  And if we really like it, we’ll probably consume it even more quickly.  I think we ate up the whole first season of Ted Lasso on a rainy Sunday afternoon.  Then we’re stuck for a year or more waiting for the next season… unless Netflix cancels it… and they cancel most everything.

All of which was an excessive preamble to what streaming channels we currently favor.

The Three We Never Leave

• Netflix
  • Monthly with ads: $9.00
  • Monthly no ads: $20.00
  • Monthly, no ads, 4K; $27.00

The king of the hill of streaming services, as long as you don’t count YouTube.  If you include YouTube and all its user generated content, then Netflix is a distant second.  But we’re not going to count YouTube.

Netflix, for all its faults, tries harder than other streaming services.  It does so because it has, more than any other service, committed to the bit.  Apple, Amazon, Paramount, whoever… they all have other business ventures.  If Apple screws up video, they still have iPhones.  If Amazon drops video it might not even be visible on their financial statements.  Netflix lives or dies on the success of their streaming app.

As such they work harder at their service than pretty much all the other service combined.  Or that is the way it feels some days.  Their app works better, their algorithm is better, their original productions are tuned specifically to be on a streaming app and not obviously cut so they could be rebroadcast on 70s era cable TV.  Even when you watch with ads, they do ads better than any other service.  Now, I still can’t stand ads anymore, but Netflix is the least intolerable on that front.  It is the attention to little details, like not showing us long intro credits or skipping past the “previously on…” segment if you just watched the previous episode, that other services kind of go, “good enough” and move on is where the Netflix app shines.

But, mostly, they have more content.  New stuff drops every week.  Lots of stuff.  We log in every Friday evening to see what is new.  A lot of it is crap… or at least not for us… but there is a lot of stuff.

Furthermore, at some point in late 2024 other services were in a revenue panic and started licensing their shows to Netflix, so if anything on another service is any good there is an even odds chance it will show up on Netflix eventually.

The flip side, of course, is that shows come and go from the service like a revolving door.  Any of their productions remain, but anything licensed has a shelf life and is here today, gone tomorrow.  They are good at telling you what is leaving soon, but you cannot count on anything sticking around for long.

So, while $20 a month seems steep to me… for the moment at least… the available content on any given day is such that we probably watch more there than other services.  That is why it abides while other channels get cancelled.

• Amazon Prime Video
  • Monthly with ads: $15.00
  • Yearly with ads: $140.00
  • Monthly fee to remove ads: $3.00

The fee structure there isn’t full accurate because you cannot subscribe to JUST the video service.  It is part of the full Amazon Prime package, which includes free shipping and music and Prime Day deals and what not.  We’re subscribed to Amazon Prime for the shipping mostly.  My wife stages listings as part of her real estate business, so I end up ordering a lot of odd items to help with that.  Since we’re already subscribed we might as well watch it, and if we’re going to watch it I don’t want any damn ads… so I pay the tariff for that, though I might stop.

And I might stop because they don’t have a lot of good new content.  There is an interesting series now and then.  It is the home of Reacher, for example.  It is also the landing spot for movies with a 29% freshness rating on Rotten Tomatoes.  If you want to know where bad sci fi movies go to die, it is Prime Video.

They are also completely wed to the “one episode a week” thing, which feels bizarre because I have to believe NOBODY is subscribing to Amazon Prime just for the video content.  It is not worth it.  But I guess they want to get that extra three dollars out of me.

Finally, Amazon will never let you forget that they see their real business as a pay per view movie service and a front end to subscribe to every other streaming service.  There is an Always Sunny Charlie Day conspiracy theory meme waiting to be made linking together all the cross service subscription plans.

Otherwise their app is okay, their ads are annoying, their suggestion algorithm is the same as the Amazon store front where if you buy a new router they will suggest routers to you until the end of time, and the ability to find things to watch is helped mostly by the limited amount of content available.

In summary, we’re already subscribed to Amazon Prime, so it isn’t going away.  But if it was costing me $18 a month on its own I’d drop it and run away like it was Cobalt-60.

• PBS – KQED
  • Monthly: $5.00

KQED is my local public television station and I give them $10 a month, which gets me access to the PBS streaming service.  I could pay just $5 a month, but I upped that when the administration cut all funding for public broadcasting, something which mostly hurt rural communities which depend on public radio for farming related news and weather reporting.  But those communities also voted for Trump, so that was what they wanted I guess; tariffs, high diesel prices, and no locally focused news.  Good for them.

The PBS app mostly has whatever is currently being syndicated on PBS plus the archive of PBS funded shows.  You can go find episodes of Nova back to the 80s.  You can also find most of the Ken Burns documentary series and anything they produced in cooperation with the BBC or whoever, which means if you want Downton Abbey, here is where you find it.

I wish they had some of the older Masterpiece Theater or Mystery shows, but most of those were licensed for a limited showing, so no going back to Jeeves & Wooster or I, Claudius for me.

Technically no ads, which means you have to watch a 2-3 minute ad for Viking cruises before a show, but afterwards there are no interruptions.  The app itself is just okay.

Basically, this is for shows I watch when my wife is away for a weekend and I want to watch something from Ken Burns or an old episode of Nova.

The Two that Stick Mostly Stick Around

Then there are the duo of channels that I occasionally cancel, but mostly stick with out of habit.

• Apple TV +/- 
  • Monthly no ads: $15.00
  • Annual no ads: $120.00

Apple’s theme is good shows, bad movies.  Seriously.  I would argue that there are no good Apple produced films.  They tend to be very mid and forgettable, like Greyhound, or goofy and stilted, which includes anything with Marky Mark in it.  Some of the goofy stuff can be fun, and even memorable.  I enjoyed watching F1 in the theater, for example.  It still isn’t a good movie, but I had a good time.  Though, counter point, there is that Napoleon movie, which I am sure no normal person has actually sat through and watched without being on their phone most of the time.

So it is the shows, which they drip out one episode at a time and space out in such a way that they all slightly overlap in a completely transparent effort to keep you from unsubscribing, which annoys me.  I might not unsubscribe if you offered value for money or had a few more shows or produced a single movie I would watch a second time.

Recently they have started showing other people’s bad movies on the service, and that hasn’t helped.  Not as bad as the movies on Amazon, but not good either.  And this points to their biggest problem; they are the anti-Netflix who thinks they can get by with a few quality items… but can’t quite hit the quality threshold.

Also, like Amazon, they are also very much in the pay per view business and will occasionally feature a film at the top of the app that I would like to watch only to click on it and find their hand out looking for another $15.

Their app looks better than it functions.  When a show is selected, for example, its image in the app grows by about 5 pixels, so unless you just actively selected it I can often not tell what is currently selected.  It also isn’t great at finding things or the algorithm or just letting you see the episode list.

Finally I would like Apple and every other app who decides they are going to do the “stay tuned for a look into the episode” thing to give me an obvious way to indicate that I do, in fact, wish to stay tuned.  If you touch nothing, or touch the wrong thing Apple concludes you are done and closes off the show and once you figure out how to get back to the episode you have to start again from the beginning and fast forward through everything.  I should be able to just jump to that content.  I know you desperately want me to know who did the voices for the Bulgarian dub, but I really don’t care.

• Peacock
  • Select with ads: $9.00
  • Premium with ads: $13.00
  • Premium no ads: $19.00
  • Annual: Monthly x10

Peacock is the NBC/Universal/Comcast streaming service that is trying to straddle the line between streaming and old fashioned terrestrial cable.  So “Select” is basically the ability to watch cable live on a streaming app.  We used to get that for free because we’re in a Comcast only internet ghetto so they force us to subscribe to cable… my internet packages is literally twice as much without cable… but Peacock decided “You know what, pay me again!”

So not a fan.  They also have a fairly modest app that has all the usual content discovery problems AND even if you go ad free they cut their content so you get a moments pause every time you hit where an ad break would go.  I guess this is the implied threat to keep you going with no ads.

So why is this on the list?  The trick here is that we bundle this with Apple TV so get Premium with no ads for $7.00 a month, which I am sure isn’t tenable in the long term, but for now this is what keeps Peacock on our list.  In a market where everybody thinks they’re now worth $15 a month, $7 looks pretty good.

And they have some decent shows and get some stuff from other services and occasionally have a movie worth watching.

Services That Come and Go

Now we’re into the annoyance zone, with services that I occasionally think we’ll stick with, then cancel because they piss me off somehow.

• Disney+ / Hulu
  • Monthly with ads: $12.50
  • Monthly mostly no ads: $22.00

These two are one and the same now, with Hulu slowly being subsumed into Disney+.  Also, you get some form of ESPN with this package, but it is not the version of ESPN that has whatever sport you actually want to watch.  Seriously, I do not watch much sports, but I tried this and it is like dealing with John Cleese in the “I want to have an argument” sketch.  So it goes.

I remember a time when Disney+ was $9.00 a month and I felt like we would never unsubscribe.  Its prime draw is access to the huge library of Disney, Marvel, and Star Wars content.  Seems like a win.  Also, you have all episodes of The Simpsons available on demand.

In practice I have most of the stuff I would re-watch available on DVD or BluRay at home.  And while Hulu has some shows worth watching now and then, plus the back catalog for Archer, Rick and Morty, and Bob’s Burgers… do I need that?  Their app is also kind of shit and we’ll be better off when it is all just folded into the Disney+ app.

Disney also keeps doing things that makes me want to unsubscribe.  Most recently they announced a price increase AND changed their terms of service to say that the ad free plan can totally have ads when they feel like it.  That was too much bullshit for one week, so they’re out for now.

• Paramount+
  • Monthly with ads: $9.00
  • Monthly no ads: $14.00

Gets you the Star Trek universe, the Taylor Sheridan “Cowboys should be able to murder whoever they want” extended universe, the Showtime library of shows, and whatever CBS is doing right now.  What have they even got these days now that 60 Minutes is a complete clown show?  Oh, and it is owned by Larry Ellison and the only thing I want to hear out of him is the screams when the AI bubble pops and Oracle has to get parted out to pay the data center debt.  Oracle has only survived this long by acquiring competitors to keep making the line go up.  The AI thing has the potential to kill the company.

If I liked Star Trek or cowboys murdering people a bit less we might never re-subscribe… but murdering cowboys can be surprisingly compelling.

Will Subscribe for One Season of a Show Then Cancel

Here are the services that I’ll up for a specific show, but only once that show has completed its season and all episodes are available.

• HBO SuperMax
  • Monthly with ads: $11.00
  • Monthly no ads: $18.50
  • Monthly 4K no ads: $23.00

How the mighty have fallen.  Their leadership wants so badly to get back to the Game of Thrones or The Sopranos era.  They still manage to put out some interesting things… Hacks was fun, until it wasn’t… but nothing to keep me with them long term.  I’ll watch John Oliver on YouTube.

The last time we had it we got the package with ads… and on any new show, it wasn’t so bad.  For the final season of Hacks each show was “ad free” after you watched a two minute opening ad… so basically PBS… which wasn’t so bad.  But shows or films in the back catalog… well, ads suck in general, but suck more when your algorithm is bad at ad placement.  Also, do none of these networks have enough sponsors?  I swear I see the same set of ads, or the same ad back to back in the same ad break way too often to convince me that ads are worth the effort.

Oh, and their app is the absolute worst.  No other app crashes as often… or at all, really.  We bought an upgraded, more powerful Roku last year, in part because I thought maybe our old Roku Stick just wasn’t good enough.  But no, the HBO app still crashes.

And there are all the usual discoverability and navigation issues.

Meanwhile, Paramount Skydance EllisonCorp just got approval to buy HBO Warner Discovery Whatever, so maybe it will all be on one service at some future date?  Or maybe the black thumb of scary Larry will make everything suck even worse.  That is pretty much the history or Oracle; but a competitor and make them worse.

• Starz
  • Monthly no ads: $12.00

Starz is the strange third party left over from the premium cable channel era that was dominated by HBO and Showtime.  It was a second tier version of those back then, and is something of a second tier service today.

Also, the pricing I have above is the default, but they always have a deal running where you can get in for $5.00 for a month for a while or $30 for a full year or something crazy.  You can also find ways to bundle it with other second tier services if you dig around.

It has shows that you don’t get other places… except when they show up on Netflix… just not a lot of them and new stuff does not show up at regular intervals.  Their app is pretty basic, but it works.  The main problem we have is that we’ll watch a series we like and then… we’re kind of done.

• AMC+
  • Monthly with ads: $8.00
  • Monthly no ads: $12.00

AMC is/was a prodigious producer of new shows in the cable era and has somehow carried on despite having a pretty low key presence in the streaming market.  Definitely a second tier service, but if you want ALL the episodes of every variation of The Walking Dead, this is where you go.  Has other shows, but I cannot even remember any because they somehow never break into my ecosystem until they show up on Netflix.  Even The Walking Dead is on Netflix right now.

Another basic app, but whatever.  Also tends to have crazy deals off and on, like $30 for a full year or some such or available as a bundle with another service at a greatly reduced price.

• Britbox
  • Monthly no ads: $11.00

This is one my wife will keep suggesting we subscribe to… this and Acorn… because we grew up in a television environment where the only shows from the UK we ever saw were the best of the best and shown on PBS, which gave them a snooty, intellectual appear.  Seriously, watching PBS was practically raising your pinky while sipping your tea at the time.

And then we subscribe with no plan in mind and find that there are a lot of just mediocre shows in the UK as well.  I now have a standing rule that we need to have three shows to commit to before we subscribe… so we almost never subscribe.

Would be a bit more interesting if they had more of a backlog of old shows… you know, the stuff that was licensed for PBS and the disappeared.  But no.

Still, like AMC+, also prone to have deals and bundle options available.

• Acorn
  • Monthly no ads: $10.00

The same as Britbox, but a buck less and not affiliated with the BBC.  Also, some backlog… I think they have Riley, Ace of Spies, which I would like to go back and watch… but still not enough to keep us interested for even a month.

Summing Up

So it goes.  That is where our streaming service situation sits here as we roll into the 2026 holiday season.

The idealized vision of the future with all video instantly available on demand has gotten the monkey’s paw treatment and now we have a chaos of competing services, ever increasing prices, and I am still not able to just watch things I want even if I have the right service.

And I do not even watch sports.  Professional sports broadcasting rights have been scooped up by a few of the services so you have to have one service for Thursday night games, another for Monday night.

It is the sort of environment where scams and piracy start to pop up as people look for solutions that the industry itself have no interest in providing.  I have, for example, had the vSeeBox mentioned to me several times in the last few months. (Go look it up.  It is all over.  They aren’t even trying to hide these things anymore.)

This is a box you buy for $300-400 or so which will let you magically watch all professional sports and content from all the streaming services and movies still in the theater at NO ADDITIONAL COST.

You don’t need more than two brain cells to see something fishy in that.

When you start to dig into it you get into a battle between the rationalizations (Well akshully, it is not technically illegal to own the box), the real pirates (the box is a scam, you can get the IP theft software on the dark web), those who have burned (The service stops working for a given box after a while, or the company comes back and demands more money to keep it working.), and the willfully ignorant (Magic box just gives me all my shows/games so I don’t want to know more!) all going at each other.

It reminds me of the days of slipping the cable guy some cash to juice you up or when black market HBO receiver dishes were a big thing. (HBO hired a company to find those dishes and sued a lot of people over them… and later the RIAA sued a bunch of people based on IP addresses, so maybe not getting involved is wise.)

While I am not going to jump into the piracy end of the pool, neither am I going to turn narc or feign outrage over theft because I have little to no sympathy for the companies causing the chaos.  It is their mess and they own the consequences.

Instead we’ll probably stick with a few services, watch stuff we already have, and occasionally order a disk from Walmart where it is often cheaper to just buy the disk than to get setup on the right service to watch a given movie or show.

Physical media is still a thing, and Sony or Amazon or whoever can’t yoink it from you when they decide you’ve had it for long enough.  Not yet at least.

I mean, what else can I do?  Watch less TV?

Council of Stellar Management 21

CCP/Fenris announced earlier this week the list of candidates that had managed to clear the extremely low bar to get on the ballot.  I mean, it isn’t as easy as getting on the ballot to run for governor of the State of California.  We had 61 people on the primary ballot for that office, some of whom I am sure CCP/Fenris wouldn’t let serve on the CSM.

I went through the qualifications in a previous post.  If you are interested it is linked at the end of this post.

The CSM election cycle has four stage… or five, really, if you count announcing the winners, but the company didn’t put that date on the list!

• Candidate submissions: 17 September – 2 October
• Candidate announcement: 6 October
• Campaign period: 6 October – 21 October
• Voting period: 22 October – 3 November

Having just had the candidate announcement, we are now in the campaign period.  Most players will completely ignore the whole thing, as voter turnout indicates every year.  Of those who do pay attention, most probably know who, or at least what, they are voting for.

For the remaining few I have taken the company’s candidate list, linked each candidate to their campaign forum post (I don’t know why CCP/Fenris can’t put in that much effort, the short blurbs they included are useless), and then added a column titled “Bias,” which could be their bias, or could be mine.  Or maybe it is just an attempt at humor?  Could be all of the above!

For most candidates bias is simply the section of the game from which they come.  Easy peasey.

I did add additional text for some candidates.  If they represent a non-bloc null sec group (i.e. not Imperium, WinterCo, or The Initiative), I have noted that.  Also, having read all the damn forum posts… ugh… I did add the occasional area of expertise or focus if the case for it was well made.

Simply saying you represent something… or everything… doesn’t mean anything.

So, for example, Kenneth Feld has “industry” in addition to “null sec” because he has demonstrated a focus on that in the past.  He was totally on board with making capital ships too expensive to undock back in 2021, so this isn’t an endorsement of him being smart on the topic, merely that he is focused on it.

Some of the entries are editorial.  Ceema, for example, has built his fame with Reddit troll posts.  If you haven’t been fooled by Ceema at least once… you’re a liar or you don’t read r/eve.  Others are what the individuals have shown us they are about.

In another example, if your campaign thread brags about the waste of dev time that was the Ansiblex nerf, being anti-null sec is your revealed preference.  That seems a pretty reasonable statement of fact, and a useful data point.  There is an anti-null sec demographic out there looking for you I am sure.

Finally, if your platform is to be all about EVE Vanguard… and I know CCP/Fenris wants to push that particular agenda item… I personally think you should fuck right off and hope you are eliminated in the first round.  But that’s just my opinion.

Anyway, here is the list of the candidates currently slated for the ballot come election time.  There is a non-zero chance somebody will fall off the ballot between now and then.

There will be interviews through CCP and some other streamers that will try to get more information from the candidates, but that will mostly fail.  The only likely outcome of interest will be somebody making a completely disqualifying statement, like saying they wouldn’t mine cash shop items like “gold ammo,” something that sank a past candidate for office.

I will vote in my own self-interest, and I expect you will as well.  My only advice is to be wary of those who are promising to make the company do anything… that is not how this works… and anybody from one part of the game who seems obsessed with “fixing” another part of the game they don’t really play in.

From that list of 54 candidates, 10 will be elected to the CSM, while 2 candidates from the group that finishes in positions eleven to twenty will be picked by CCP/Fenris to fill the final two seats, giving us a full council of 12 representatives.

In practice, seven or eight of the elected seats will go to candidates from the null sec blocs, with the other elected seats being wild cards.  Sometimes wormholers or low sec will actually get on the same page and elect somebody.

CCP/Fenris will then ignore the null sec candidates, Rattati’s past publicly stated opinion being that at least Goons are to be ignored.  (We call it the “That’s just Goons” doctrine from the company.)

Their picks from the top ten runners up will be the two candidates that seem most likely to reinforce the established biases of Rattati and Okami and their voices will be the ones actually heard by the company… as long as they are agree with what the company was going to do anyway.

As I said back when the elected council idea was announced, and have repeated ever since, the CSM is basically the New Eden student council, lacking any power or agency within the system the company has created.  Having players elect a focus group is a questionable practice… though since most companies will build focus groups to reflect their own bias, the CSM at least it dodges that problem ever so slightly.

The most one can expect out of the body is maybe talking CCP/Fenris out of their worst ideas (roll file footage of the CSM announcing that some bad idea was never brought to them and they only learned about it when it was added to the game) and maybe finally getting some decade old bug or annoyance finally addressed because the EVE Online team often shows a lack of actual interest in the details of their game.  That is not without value.  But don’t get your hopes up that the CSM will change the course of the game.

So cast your vote wisely… or poorly… or not at all.  I am not sure it matters all that much.

But if it makes you feel good, go ahead and do what you were going to do anyway!

Related:

• CCP/Fenris – CSM21 Dev Blog
• CCP/Fenris – CSM 21 Candidate Announcements
• CCP/Fenris – The Roles and Duties of a member of the Council of Stellar Management
• TAGN – EVE Online and the Road to CSM 21