Heroes are not to cry
So hold your head up high
The future is ours to see
So come on and rescue me
So tell me what I have to lose
I am ready to feel these new world blues

-New World Blues, Gov’t Mule

It has come to this.  Once I was annoyed by people always telling me that this MMO or that was so much better in beta, and now here I am treading down that same path.  I am here to say that New World was better.

Kinda… sorta… in a way.

Just how new and how worldly?

I’ve been meaning to write about New World for some time now.  At first it just wasn’t possible.  I was in some of the very early testing, back when the Imperium got a blanket invite to come play test the game.  Everything was under an NDA back then.  No screen shots, no blog posts.

More recently I just haven’t been moved to write because the way the game evolved just didn’t move me.  But the launch date it growing near and soon we’ll be awash in posts and news and whatever about the game.

I am sure that my not being all that enthusiastic says more about me than it does about the current state of the game.  But the way the game evolved also says a lot about what players want, or what they think they want.

Back in the early beta the game felt very much like what H1Z1 was supposed to be… H1Z1 Just Survive that is, not the clownish battle royale game it became.  This was going to be Smed taking what was learned from that and refining it into a better game that would deliver on that promise.  It was going to be sandboxy and allow players to group up and hold territory… you don’t invite a pile of null sec EVE Online players to your early beta for anything else I bet… and have a whole survival aspect to it.

And the initial world felt rough and dangerous.  There wasn’t a lot of guidance, PvP was on out in the open world so people were wary of each other, it had a really interesting vibe to it.  Crafting was raw but good.  You had to make things, and to do that you had to gather resources.

There was an early element in the beta where I had made a bow and was out learning how to hunt deer and wolves that felt really right.  It was that same sensation that later drew me into Valheim.  The early New World felt a lot like Valheim did, only it looked a lot better.

It was easy to get lost in that stage of New World, both on the map and on your path forward.  It definitely needed something more to keep enough people engaged and playing to be viable, but it felt like a world you could get into.

Maybe making it an MMORPG was a mistake.  Maybe it should have been a co-op, host your own world game like Valheim.  I have to imagine that Amazon would have happily come up with an AWS plan to host private instances of the game.  But and MMORPG was what was promised and an MMORPG was what had to be delivered.

That early beta test culminated in a giant PvP battle in a valley.  It was probably as big of a fight as one could have with the current state of rendering tech, and it was strange and laggy and fun.  That was the other promise of the sandbox, something to at least approach the grand battles of New Eden.

Then the beta was over and Amazon went off to work with what they had found and the feedback they have received.  More beta events came and went as the launch was pushed back again and again in order to get the game right.

Which brings us to the current state of the game.  That rough feeling, that survival vibe, that sense of danger, all gone, paved over by a slick guided PvE experience.  I had skipped some of the interim beta events, having decided that the game was going to be worth the effort when it finally showed up.  But it changed so much.

Some of the early version still comes through.  The crafting is still similar, though it feels a bit out of place, almost awkward now, in the shiny quest drive PvE world the game has become.

It isn’t a bad game.  Far from it.  And clearly a lot of people like the way it has turned out.

It is quite possible that I just haven’t gotten into it enough to find the hook that would keep me invested.  I am notoriously reluctant to get too involved in beta, to get took deep into any game before launch, before everything is “for keeps,” because that advancement is part of the hook a lot of games have in me and dulling that with early play and resets could turn me away… or make me that person who always says that the game was better in beta.  One of my minor claims to fame is that when Aradune asked me over on TorilMUD if I wanted to get into the EverQuest beta I turned him down.  So I might just be bad at getting a read in beta.

But still, I am wary.  I saw an article over at PC Gamer that sort of put a finger on a bit of my angst, the idea that the game had evolved from something different into something trying to be the next World of Warcraft… though even early WoW was a lot less hand-holdy that New World is now.

I will be there at launch all the same.  Like I said, I could very well be wrong, though I’m still just tagging posts “New World” rather than making it a full fledged category yet.  And it is sill another event in the genre.  We’ll see where it ends.

The 2021 Expansion

So at least we can assume for now that the Enad Global 7 purchase of Daybreak hasn’t broken the expansion stride for the Norrath crew.

While details are sparse so far, the Visions of Vetrovia will take us away from the lunar adventures on Luclin and send us on a seafaring adventure.

I find it a bit amusing that EverQuest has had two nautical themed expansions already while I’m pretty sure this is the first for the younger game, but EQ has an advantage in years. (Though you could argue that the original starter zone was something of a nautical adventure.)

The prelude event for the expansion kicked off yesterday after downtime.  Players can get warmed up for the new expansion by checking their in-game mail for a invite from Douglan Wakerunner, captain of The Swimming Oak.

Invite to adveture

Then it is off to The Village of Shin on the Isle of Mara for the preliminary quests.

The Village of Shin is there

You’ll find The Swimming Oak docked there, but it isn’t ready to set sail yet.

The ship is off limits for now

If you do the daily quests you should visit Aariena Glitterflitter near the docks to trade your bobbing acorn rewards in for some nice items, including a Striped Pteradon mount. (45 acorns, so start saving up.)

Of course, with the announcement that a new expansion is coming, the old one goes on sale.  The Reign of Shadows expansion is 25% off from now until the 18th of October, which I would bet is the date that pre-orders will open up for the Visions of Vetrovia.  Anyway, this is the last chance to get the extras that come with Reign of Shadows, as the Norrath team has moved to a model of having only a single expansion available for purchase at any one time.  (Though you might, at a later date, be able to buy get some of those items in a crate from the cash shop, but you never know when that is going to happen.)

Now is the time when I start wondering if this is an expansion worth coming back to play.  I run hot and cold on EverQuest II, but enjoy it well enough at times.  I’ll have until at least October 18th to think about it.  By the time they have the pre-order available we should have more details and be able to tell if this is a real nautical adventure… pirates maybe, though the foolish would assume them from what we know so far… or just a ship to another continent and the traditional overland adventure.

We shall see.  There are often a series of “gear up, level up” events in this time frame before an expansion, and usually the team gets a late start on the season with the annual Days of Summer event.  Did we get one of those already this year?  I didn’t see it on the news page.

Related:

• Inventory Full

Didn’t we all get stuck out here after that gateway closed?

And with that CCP is focused again on its favorite obsession of the last few years, the new player experience.  This time the NPE has been rebuilt around a new NPC faction, the Association for Interdisciplinary Research which will introduce new players to EVE Online.   The highlights from the dev blog are:

• More immersive experiences and faster iteration
• More dynamic visuals
• Gradual UI reveal
• Improved UI highlighting
• An integrated intro video
• Beautiful visuals

To the cynic in me that works out to “pretty,” “pretty,” “working with the UI we already have,” “working with the UI we already have,” “pretty,” and “pretty.”

I mean, there is room in there for real improvements, and maybe it is a better NPE, but CCP has chosen to emphasize the superficial and that the UI is too much for new players in its own description.  What is that supposed to tell me?

The new NPE is also said to be story driven, but so was the NPE two iterations ago, which was going to be a big new thing until they quietly ditched it, because everything PvE had to go into The Agency…. and probably also because once you got done with the story the actual game is nothing like that, bait and switch not being a great idea for player retention.  I hope CCP learned something since last time and aren’t just jumping back on the same idea they previously axed.

Though the NPE has been through the wringer more than a few times, CCP has been especially adamant about new player retention being an issue since EVE North back in 2019 when they gave us this chart.

How many new players log back in as time passes

As I noted at the time, that seems pretty dismal without any context.  But the one publicly available study on the topic I found seemed to indicate that those retention numbers are pretty close to the industry average for MMORPGs with a free to play option.  Given EVE Online’s legendary difficulty, obtuse UI, and open world PvP, that CCP does so well is probably an achievement.

So while I get that CCP likes to keep reminding us that new players are the lifeblood of the game… and I hope this next revision of the NPE helps on that front… farming the installed player base, the lapsed veterans and such, is how games like EverQuest and World of Warcraft have revitalized their bottom lines.  Here is hoping that another investment in another new NPE pays off.

The NPE is also emphasized in the trailer for the new quadrant.

I feel like I saw that launch sequence in the EVE Valkyrie opening… but I guess all tube launches feel kind of the same.  I’ll have to find some time to give it a try.

So that is the first thing on the list.

Next on the update front is skill training with the introduction of skill plans and a revamp of the training system UI.  This feels like a feature that benefits both new and old players alike.  Players will be able to create plans for specific goals, with milestones to mark improvements for specific configurations, and even certified skill plans aimed at new players to help them decide what to train.

There is also a revamp of the skill training UI.  Being an old fart that has finally gotten used to the current setup, I immediately wondered how badly could they screw it up? This morning already saw calls for the old UI on r/eve, but they hate everything there.  But here is the new UI on day one.

The New Skill Window – The red arrow thing is not part of the UI

For openers, skills now have their own window, no doubt because the game UI doesn’t have enough independent windows floating around, and it defaults to the new training plan UI, which I won’t even delve into right now, but it feels too big and not all that helpful.

For those of us who just want to see our current skills and queue together, the second tab has that, with all the skill groups now in alphabetical order finally.  I know, there is outrage that Spaceship Command isn’t in the upper left, but whatever, and my brain wants to read left to right along rows first, then down columns, and the sorting is by columns, but I’ll get used to all of that.

The window seems bigger than it needs to be.  It defaults to full screen, which is obnoxiously large on my 34″ monitor, but even when I make it a window it remains too wide for my taste largely due to the black dead zone between skills and queue (marked with the red arrow in the screen show above) that cannot be sized down by itself. (The gap between skill names and their states seems pretty wide as well.)

Anyway, there is always EVE Mon still if I need a more compact view.  Oh, and your character sheet is different now, lacking all those skills… and I hope you remembered to put pants on your avatar.

A fuller body view now

All of this comes with a couple of big changes to skills queues:

• The current limit of 50 skill entries in the queue will be increased to 150 for both Alpha and Omega clones.
• The current restriction of the Alpha clone training queue allowing only the skills that would start training within the next 24h will also be removed.

As somebody who came from the “one skill at a time and make sure you start a long skill the night before the next patch update” era, these seem huge.  150 skills in the queue will let you build up a might skill plan… I’ve bumped into the 50 skill limit a few times since it became a thing… and the removal of the 24 hour queue limit will be huge for new players.

And old players.  I can even now see people rolling up a new alpha, sending it the ISK for skills, setting up the desired queue, then letting it run for however long it takes until that suicide gank character or whatever is on the shelf and ready to use.  There is no improvement that EVE players will fail to exploit.

There are a few other items with today’s update.  A new skill points for sale pack is in the store.  EVE Online will be available in the Epic Store come September 23rd.  And, in a nod to the promise to relax the economic starvation plan (now planned for November), there was this tidbit slipped in at the bottom of the announcement:

More ice has been brought back into New Eden with its availability having doubled, and the availability of Mercoxit has also increased.

I wonder if the ice availability got boosted due to the jump drive fuel crisis that hit the game when World War Bee ended and PAPI had to move home?  Anyway, there is alleged to be more ice now.

So that is the what has come with the launch of the new quadrant.  Here are the related dev posts for today’s update:

• Gateway – New Quadrant Starts Today
• Improved New Player Experience
• Updates to Skill Training
• Patch Notes (arrived late)
• General Feedback forum thread
• Known Issues forum thread

Think of it as a space quinceanera

As always, I spent a good few minutes fishing around for a theme for this post and quinceanera popped up as something related to the number 15.  Here in California quinceanera refers to the party given for a young woman on her 15th birthday, though the usage of the word varies.  But my wife has a friend who is a party planner for these events, which can be huge, and she uses the word to refer to the event, so I will do the same.

Were this the blog of a decade back I would have gone to some effort to dress up the post to go along with the theme.  Look at what I did for the fifth and sixth anniversaries.  These days I am a less invested in the whole thing, so I am going to declare the theme and the almost immediately walk away from it.  If you want to imagine me in a satin party dress with a tiara, that’s all on you.  My wife isn’t sharing those pictures.

If I were feeling motivated I might have tried to work in some key elements of a quinceanera, things like the pinatas, a cake, the dance partner, the first bouquet as a woman, and the last doll of childhood.  But I think I’ll just let you imagine me in the dress.  that is less work and I am starting late this year.

Past Anniversaries

In case you want to revisit the evolution of these annual posts.  As noted above, years five and six are probably peak effort on my part, then like life, it is all down hill from there.

• A Year of Living Noobishly
• Two Years Below the Masthead
• Three Years We Grew in Virtual Sun and Shower
• Four Years In, No Further From Noobdom
• Heroic Results of the First Five Year Plan
• But Now I am Six, I’m as Clever as Clever
• The Seven Year Kvetch
• Eight Years of Link Rot
• Nine is a Magic Number
• A Decade Under the Influence of Online Games
• Elf
• The Dozens
• The Thirteenth Floor
• Condition Report for the Fourteenth Interval

Base Statistics

I was trying to figure out if statistics were the cake or the pinatas.  Pinatas I think, since there are a bunch of them.

Beyond that, we have the same opening set of numbers every year, looking at how the various needled moved over the last dozen months.  The current count is listed below with the change since last year noted in parenthesis.

Days since launch: 5,480 (+366)
Posts total: 6,028 (+419)
Total Words: 4,839,356  (+460,599 words, not including this post)
Average words per post: 803 (+22)
Post Likes: 15,164 (+2,578)
Average posts per day: 1.1 (+0.03)
Comments: 35,108 (+1,328)
Average comments per post: 5.82 (-0.21)
Average comments per day: 6.41 (-0.20)
Spam comments: 1,718,916 (+236,368)
Average spam comments per day: 313.67 (+43.1)
Comment signal to noise ratio: 1 to 48.9 (+5.9)
Comments written by me: 7,079 or 20.2%
Images uploaded: 18,054 (+1,844)
Space used by images: 2.1 GB of my 13 GB allocation
Blog Followers: 2,073 (+185)
Twitter Followers: 785 (+10)
Tumblr Followers: 36 (+2)
US Presidents since launch: 4
British Monarchs since launch: 1
Prime Ministers of Italy since launch: 8

For some of you that will be enough stats. Others will want to dive deeper, which you can do after the cut.

Demographics

As usual, I will kick off with the countries that visit the blog.  These stats are from the Flag Counter widget in the side bar and are based off of the last 250,000 visitors, so they are more reflective of the last year than the life of the blog.

This year’s sample sliced up

Surprising nobody, countries with large English speaking populations and modern economies dominate the list.  The biggest surprise is likely that the US fell below 50%, though just barely.

As for what browsers and operating systems, Flag Counter says the following:

Browsers and operating systems

Microsoft Edge disappeared from the browser chart because it now uses the Chromium engine and reports as Google Chrome to sites.  That was enough to push KHTML onto the list, which hasn’t been a thing really for about five years.

The surprise on operating systems is the amount of Android traffic.  The Android WordPress.com app generates a decent amount of traffic for me most days… well, it is in the top ten most days.  As we’ve seen there is Google, and then there is everything else.

Who Wants to Dance With Me?

I guess I am going with that theme.  These are the sites who send me traffic.

Over the last year:

1. Total EVE
2. Twitter
3. EVE Bloggers
4. Inventory Full
5. Reddit
6. Chromo Science
7. Low Sec Lifestyle
8. The Nosy Gamer
9. Blessing of Kings
10. Facebook

I am not sure what Chromo Science was, aside from a site that was somehow sending me traffic for about two months.  I was never able to spot a link to my site there and the traffic stopped as abruptly as it started.

Over the life of the blog:

1. VirginWorlds
2. Blessing of Kings
3. Total EVE
4. WordPress.com Reader
5. EVE News 24
6. Low Sec Lifestyle
7. EVE Bloggers
8. Google Reader
9. Keen and Graev
10. Reddit

Fifteen years of weight makes it hard to shake sites from that list, especially since the heyday of the blog was eight years in the past.  And really, the next 20 on the list are are old as well, save for Feedly I suppose.

The Search Engine Pinata of Page Views

I pick out search engines on their own, just to give Google its own list to dominate I guess.  According to the WP.com stats, here were the top search engines for me over the last year:

1. Google Search – 155,360
2. Bing – 2,716
3. duckduckgo.com – 2,384
4. Yahoo Search-  347
5. Yandex – 213
6. Ask.com – 26
7. Google Image Search – 23
8. Baidu – 14

There are not even ten on that list now.  AOL and Dogpile fell out of love with me.

As for Google, here is their affair with me for the last year.

TAGN Google Stats for Year 15

As you can see, internet stats remain garbage as the total clicks on that chart is nearly 20K shy of what WP.com tells me, though the chart might be for just US Google, which nearly lines up… not quite, but much closer.  But I can find Google telling me different numbers on the same page at times… so, garbage.  But it they are the only accounting I have for now.

As for what search terms bring people to the site, here is the top of the list for the last year.

Top search terms for year 15

That doesn’t add up to much, but the list carries on, often with minor variations of those search terms, and it isn’t until you get past the 700 mark that you finally find a search term that received fewer than ten clicks.

Who Do I Dance With?

Or where do I send traffic.  Over the last year:

1. Wikipedia
2. EVE Online (various dev and news blogs)
3. Reddit
4. Imperium News
5. zKillboard (EVE Online ship kills)
6. Inventory Full
7. SuperData Research (now defunct)
8. The Nosy Gamer
9. Massively OP
10. Twitter

Wikipedia is the perennial top of this chart as I tend to link out to concepts or other items I don’t care to explain… and Apple ][ games from that one post.  Those get the most clicks.  And then 2-5 are likely explained by there being a war going on in New Eden for the last year or so.

Over the life of the blog:

1. Nick Yee (the old guild name generator)
2. Wikipedia
3. Various Pokemon sites
4. Civ Fanatics
5. Various Blizzard WoW Sites
6. Hardcore Casual
7. Keen and Graev
8. Blessing of Kings
9. EVE Online Pictures
10. Inventory Full

That list is pretty solid.  Again, the weight of 15 years makes it hard for a new site to break into that top ten.

Most Viewed Posts

Over the last year:

1. Minecraft and the Search for a Warm Ocean
2. Alamo teechs u 2 play DURID!
3. Robbing Some Space Banks*
4. SuperData and Wavering WoW Subscriptions
5. CCP is Just Going to Keep Selling Skill Points for Cash
6. The WoW Shadowlands Pre-Patch with the Big Level Squish Arrives Today*
7. CCP Take Aim at Cloaky Campers in EVE Online*
8. Leveling up Your Crafting Without Actually Crafting
9. The Altar of Zul and Jintha’alor
10. Top 25 EVE Online Corporations Graph – The End Number

Posts marked with an asterisk were actually posted in the last year.  You can no doubt see some correlation between the search terms for the last year up in the search engines section and the posts that were popular over the last year.

Over the life of the blog:

1. Play On: Guild Name Generator
2. Running Civilization II on Windows 7 64-bit
3. Alamo teechs u 2 play DURID!
4. How To Find An Agent in EVE Online
5. How to Catch Zorua and Zoroark
6. From Alola Pokedex to National Pokedex in Pokemon Sun
7. April Fools at Blizzard – 2013
8. Considering Star Wars Galaxies Emulation? Better Grab a Disk!
9. Getting Upper Blackrock Spire Access
10. Diablo III vs. Torchlight II – A Matter of Details

Meanwhile again we see the weight of years hold a list fairly static.  I did a couple of posts two years about my most viewed posts over the life of the blog, both cumulatively and year by year.  In the end though, the absolute count this late in the life of the blog meant that only spots nine and ten changed, and they only swapped places.  Still, 11th place could make the list next year, it being that post about Minecraft and finding a warm ocean.

Categories and Tags

Categories, as I have said in the past, represent the larger scale topics I write about. There are a limited number of those, though I add a couple every year… or convert a tag or two to a category if they get used a lot. I currently have 98 tags, up one from last year, though I demoted a few categories to tags and created a few new ones for games like Valheim.

The top categories for the blog, and how many posts have used them:

1. EVE Online 1,915
2. World of Warcraft 1,480
3. EverQuest II 749
4. EverQuest 614
5. Lord of the Rings Online 448
6. Blizzard 447
7. Instance Group 357
8. Sony Online Entertainment 343
9. CCP 249
10. Pokemon 242
11. Humor 238
12. WoW Classic 238
13. blog thing 212
14. Misc MMOs 195
15. Month in Review 181
16. YouTube 180
17. Rift 162
18. Other PC Games 153
19. Daybreak Game Company 151
20. Nintendo DS Hardware 142

Categories are not mutually exclusive.  You only have to total up the top half of that list to get more uses that there are posts on the blog.  Month in Review posts… which have their own category… include summaries of various games and so get the categories or tags related to those games.  But it is still an indicator of what I write about and what I play… more the former than the latter I think.  I haven’t seriously played EverQuest since the Fippy Darkpaw server launched a decade back, but I seem to write about it a lot all the same.

Tags though, tags are a crazy town at times.  I throw out fresh tags on a whim and they can often be read as a “flavor” indicator when it comes to a post.  I have 4,072 tags for the blog, up from 3,851 last year.  Still, some get used more than others.  Here are the top most used tags for the blog so far:

1. Delve 127
2. Progression Server 124
3. World War Bee 123
4. Asher Elias 104
5. Reavers 95
6. Meaningless Milestones 93
7. Fippy Darkpaw 85
8. Nostalgia 81
9. EVE Updates 69
10. Warlords of Draenor 66
11. MMO Expansions 66
12. Free-to-Play 63
13. Council of Stellar Management 58
14. WWB Weekly Updates 57
15. EVE Monthly Economic Report 54
16. RMT 52
17. Skill Points 52
18. Casino War 52
19. Imperium 50
20. BlizzCon 49

Again, a year long war in EVE Online, World War Bee, had some influence on those tags.

A Peek Into Page Views

Here we are at the one day a year when I bare the raw page view stats for the world to see.  Unfortunately, the nice clear detailed chart that I used to post got the axe with a WP.com stats update earlier this year, so now you get round numbers… but the chart has colors!

Colors or not, you’ll probably have to click on them in order to read the numbers.  I know I do.

Total Page Views by Month/Year

Average Daily Page Views by Month/Year

Once more you can see the peak of the blog was in 2012, with a burst in 2013.  More recently the numbers have been sagging, with this month being quite low.  Without a war in New Eden and much interest in the other titles I write about Google isn’t sending people my way.

A Word or Two about Words

And for those who like some really obscure data, here is the chart that lists out total posts, words per year, comments, likes, and all of that detail.  At least that chart hasn’t changed recently.

Words and posts and much illegible detail

The usual summary applies, which is that over time my words per post has gone up as have “likes” per post, while comments have gone down.

Forward Looking Statements

I fell off my theme about halfway through, didn’t I?  And I was barely invested even before that.  Oh well.  Keeps me away from any unfortunate “now I am a woman” metaphors I guess.

So here we are, 15 years in which, as I may have noted in the past, is about 10 years longer than I figured I would last, my hobbies tending to be 5 year affairs, usually consisting of a bumbling first year, a peak at about the three year mark, then pottering around more out of habit than anything else for the final two.

Still, I wonder if I can spot those sorts of patterns within the blog itself.  My various interests had started, peaked, tapered off, and then disappeared, sometimes for good, other times to be revived at a later date and re-explored.  The blog is both an archeological treasure and an unwieldy collection of randomness, the latter not being helped by my own inability to be consistent in tagging or categorizing posts.  Going back to find things can be a chore, and once I am there I tend to spend as much time fixing dead links (usually re-pointing to the Internet Archive if possible), correcting typos and like errors, some of which have eluded me for more than a decade, and trying to normalize tags and categories.

I think the biggest effort for that last was when I decided Month in Review should be a category a few years back, so went and edited every single related post to add that.

Anyway, none of that is very forward looking, is it?  I am supposed to prognosticate, not ruminate.  So what does the future hold for the blog?

More of the same I guess?

Some combo of habit and obsession and self-reflection will keep me going, and there isn’t a real reason to stop.  What am I going to do, actually play video games?  Hrmm.

I will probably stop with the post every day thing as I said I would last month once I hit the 500 days in a row achievement.  I thought vacation would end that, but somehow I scraped together just enough words to keep the streak alive.  With this post it will be 534 consecutive daily posts.  For whatever reason, 550 seems like a good number… though it could very well become 600.  We’ll see.  I won’t get to 1,000 though, as I am sure something will happen.

As for the blog itself, traffic continues to slide.  I imagine, like an old MMO, my former readers probably outnumber my current readership.  How does one farm that installed base?  But most of the fall off has been search engine related, which is made up of mostly one time visitors I would guess.  I mean, a few of you refuse to bookmark the site and just Google “tagn” to find me.  The stats don’t lie on that.  But many more arrive here looking for advice on finding a warm ocean in Minecraft, only to leave disappointed, never to return.

The questions are can I do something about improving traffic and should I?

Most certainly I could do something.  I recently revived the blog connection to Facebook, so it has a page there now with a single follower.  I could certainly get out the credit card and pay Facebook to feature posts from that page more generally.  It works for crazy people and racists, why can’t it work for me?

The should is a little less obvious.  As I have said before, so far as I can tell, my regular readership remains about constant.  It is certainly down from 2012, but it does not ebb and flow with the whims of Google search results.  Quality over quantity is an argument that could be made, though it might sound odd coming from somebody chasing a consecutive days posting achievement for more than 18 months.

But it still might be nice to have some new regulars.  I am deploying some new tools, something for a later post, to look into who visits here in greater detail.  That may give me further ideas.

Otherwise, the main forwards looking statement is really just “expect more of the same.”

Thank you for coming by.  We will see what the next year brings.

Highway 3000 calls

That is the Hawaii state highway system number for the Lahaina Bypass, a 2.7 mile stretch or highway that lets people go around Lahaina, reducing congestion for both those who live there and those trying to get through the area.  It is a spiffy little stretch of road.  I just find 3000 to be a very big number for a very short run… plus “3000” feels like the new “2000,” the number that represents some distant technological paradise.  Anyway, it makes me smile whenever I see those signs.

Being away means that the posts between the first and today were all hastily pre-written in a flurry of activity before getting on a plane.  I would suggest that you might have noticed a decline in quality, but they all look about as half-cooked as most things I write. (I did managed to fix a couple of the more egregious typos and leave a couple of comments via my iPad.)

My new motto here is “everything is a first draft.”

The one give away might have been my lack of reaction to various events, from Apple winning most of its case against Epic or EverQuest offering perks for a price or Ji Ham being revealed to the public for the first time.  There may be a few posts to catch up if I can muster some opinions or a wry observation or two about what went on.

As for the time away, it was quite refreshing.  “Hot vax summer” has taken on a new meaning with the delta variant and wearing a mask everywhere in the tropics isn’t my idea of fun, but it was peaceful and the views were nice.

The view from our room in Kaanapali

Though they say you haven’t been to the real Hawaii until you’ve run across chickens.

Where the chickens are

There used to be chickens running around the rental car area at the airport on Maui, but they’ve since built a new rental car parking garage that is not suitable for livestock, so you have to look further afield now.

I will likely have one car related post based on our trip, probably next weekend.  For those who have enjoyed past posts, this will be another in the series.  You might even learn something about Maui.

And then there is the blog anniversary post.  Today is the actual blog anniversary, but I am not done with the post yet.  When we got home yesterday the internet was down.  After 90 minutes on the phone with Comcast technical support my only conclusion was that if you cease to suckle at the teat of the internet too long it might run dry on you when you need it again.

So I am back to sucking.

Twenty years is a long time and so much has happened since that date.  We’ve had five presidential elections, invaded Afghanistan, invaded Iraq, had hurricane Katrina, endured the great recession, saw the Arab Spring, the Occupy movement, the Tea Party, ISIS in Iraq, a festering civil war in Syria, gay marriage becoming legal, the election of an unhinged reality TV star as president, an open and proud racist movement, a thermonuclear armed North Korea, the end of civil liberties in Hong Kong, Brexit, an armed attack on the US capitol, a political party going all-in on voter suppression and racism, and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

2020 alone felt like it lasted five years.  No wonder 2001 feels like distant history.

And that is just what spills into my mind on a first pass.  So many other things happened since 9/11 that have pushed it deeper back in memory.

But I still remember the day.  It fell on a Tuesday at a time when I had early morning conference calls, the joys of dealing with teams a few time zones away.  I had stayed home to take those and the news popped up about the first building being hit as I was getting ready for the first call.  I had just turned on the TV when the second tower was hit.  It was surreal, watching that run on the news over and over again.  The conference call was cancelled.  Work was cancelled.  Everything was cancelled.  All flights in the US were cancelled, and those in flight landed as soon as they could.

By the time the towers collapsed it felt like everybody was watching CNN helplessly, not knowing what to do or what this all meant.  It was a unifying national trauma and we were going to do something about it.  We sent troops off around the world, my brother included, stirred shit up, killed hundreds of thousands, saw thousands of US service men and women killed, wounded, or traumatized in an effort that, in hindsight, didn’t make us all that much safer and didn’t help the average person in the countries on which we visited destruction.  In the end the main beneficiaries seemed to be US defense contractors and a layer of high ranking corrupt individuals who skimmed the cream for themselves.

Despair with US foreign policy runs in our family I suppose.  I had a great uncle on my mother’s side of the family who went to work at the State Department after the war, learned Arabic at the army language school in Monterey, and went off to the Middle-east to help make the world a better place.  In furtherance of that he he was seconded to the CIA and ended up using his diplomatic cover to carry suitcases full of cash to bribe politicians and finance coups and otherwise help make everything worse for no real long term gain.

He was moved to write a book about his time in the Middle-east due to the harm we had caused over there.  He described leaving Beirut in 1975, a city he had loved in the 50s and early 60s, which had become a byword for violence and destruction when he saw it for the final time.

And now there is my daughter, who will turn 20 in December.  My wife was six months pregnant when the 9/11 attacks happened.  My daughter has never known anything but the War on Terror and security theater at airports and a seemingly endless war in Afghanistan.

I suppose that last is… not over, because history never ends… entering a new era.

I don’t miss the Cold War.  Living under the threat of nuclear war was not a happy time, and those who long for the bilateral symmetry of NATO against the Warsaw Pact are glossing over the reality of the time.

But I remember a stretch of time that ran from the late 80s to the mid-90s where there was hope that things would get better, that world would hash out just a few more problems, that we might actually be able to settled things and get, if not peace, then at least something close to it.  Gorbachev, German reunification, the fall of the Soviet Union, the expansion of the European Union, the unity of the Gulf War against an aggressor, we seemed to be headed in the right direction.  And then, as usual, we fucked it up somehow.

Remember the dead.  Comfort the survivors.  Hope for something better.

As noted previously I have set myself up with Zwift, the exercise app that lets me ride my stationary exercise bike through a virtual world.

Ride On!

I have further follow ups on the whole thing, but this sort of struck me and I was motivated to bang it out, so here it is.

• Get on the bike

Kind of a given, but for me this is always a morning thing, or at least a before noon thing.  Being lazy is a full time profession, and one aspect of it in my book is getting all your work tasks out of the way as soon as possible to maximize the time left to screw around.  I want to be on board for the long lunch and a leisurely afternoon.

Also it is much cooler around here in the morning.  And then there is the drought, so I like to combine my morning shower and my very necessary post-exercise shower into a single event.

• Choose the route

I’ll go into more detail on this at another time, but I like to pick one of the pre-made routes.  You can just free ride through the world, picking whichever turns you like, but completing a route gets you an achievement and some xp and if we’re going to gamify this shit then why wouldn’t I go with something that gets me xp?

There are lots of routes that range from a couple miles to a couple dozen.  Since my goal is 20 minutes, which generally gets me about 7 miles, I look for the shorter routes.  I have learned to be aware of the climb involved, shown on the basic route info.  That 3.3 mile route with the 2,459 foot climb will take me more than 20 minutes because I’ll probably be going 4 MPH for a large part of it.

• Start to Ride

And we’re off.  I start pumping those legs, usually ramping up to about 85 rpm or so, passing some slow pokes and slackers on the side of the road.

• The First Crisis

Somewhere between 60 and 120 seconds into the ride my body will start informing me that we have surely out run the bear or whatever the hell prompted this flurry of sudden morning activity must have passed and it would be fine to just stop and go sit on the couch.

This happens every single time.  I want to stop or take a break or skip today.  I’ll make it up on Saturday, I swear.

So I have to negotiate with myself… just make it to 10 minutes, you’ll have started sweating by then so you can pretend you worked out… or sometimes bully myself… you paid how much for this Bluetooth enabled piece of gear to ride for two freaking minutes?

The crisis comes and somehow I manage to get through it most days, though if my body throws in, “Oh, and I have to pee” then things might stop.

• The Fan

At about the five minute mark the thermal build up in my body will be noticeable.  If I have forgotten to turn on the standing fan sitting in front, off to the side, of the bike, this is when that omission will become apparent.

You can just see the fan behind the bike

I have often had to get off the bike to turn it on.  Lately my wife and I have avoided this issue by simply never turning the fan off.

• The zone or something like it

There is a point where I will settle in, focus on the screen and the course and whatever and I’ll stop thinking about stopping.  My cadence settles down into what is apparently my natural rhythm, which is exactly 67 rpm.  I try to stay at 75 rpm, but the moment I am not thinking about it, I slide back into my norm.

The cadence is pretty much fixed no matter what resistance setting I have set on the bike.  I have, over time, dialed it up from 25 being the norm, to 38.  That means more power output for the same rpm.  If I dial it up too much… 40 starts to dig in a bit and 50 is comedy… then I start to slow down.

I may speed up a bit to pass somebody or keep somebody from passing me so obviously, but mostly I just cruise.

• Can we stop now?

This isn’t as dependable as that first two minute crisis, but often between the 12 and 15 minute mark I’ll start wondering if we can’t just take a break.  I’m now sweating and feel like I have some legit claim to have exercised.

When we first got the Schwinn IC4 I actually had to stop somewhere around the 15 minute mark and get off the bike and stretch because my legs would start to stiffen up from the repetitive motion.  I don’t have to do that any more.

This is also the zone where my ass may start to hurt.  A bicycle saddle, even with the gel foam padded cover, isn’t something I am yet used to.  I don’t have any fancy cycling shorts, and my old cotton khaki shorts don’t add much padding.  Still, it is better than the Schwinn 270 recumbent bike, where my back often started hurting at about the 10 minute mark.

At this point I just tell myself I’m almost done, just a couple more minutes and then all of this can stop.

• 20 minute mark

If I am doing this ride during the week, I am probably squeezing the ride and a shower in between some meetings.  That is probably an hour window, but I’ve probably screwed around a bit before the ride and want my hair to dry before I have to be on camera again, so I am looking to finish up the ride.

• Wrapping up

If I have not finished up the route, I’ll push on to do that (and collect my achievement and my 10 xp) so long as it is very close to being done.  I’ll also keep going if I am past half way to my next mile, since the game awards xp for every mile completed.

If it is the weekend I might keep going if I am in the zone and/or have picked a longer course.  My longest ride on record so far has been 38 minutes.

Not counting the first few rides where I was figuring things out, most of my rides make it to at least the 20 minute mark.  There are a couple of 15 minute rides, where I clearly didn’t meet the crisis, and one 10 minute ride where I am pretty sure work rang my phone and I had to stop.  But I am mostly keeping to my metric.

Other stages that may occur during a typical ride:

• I need to sit up and stretch – being hunkered down can get old so I reach up and touch the ceiling
• Should I pick up the weights? – the bike came with weights, I never pick them up, but I sometimes consider doing so
• The cats – they will come by and stare at me, standing way too close to the pedals
• My junk – it sometimes needs to stop moving around so much as I pedal, which I guess is why cyclists wear those tight spandex shorts
• Screen shot – I will suddenly want to take one, which means fiddling around with the iPad
• Thirst – I don’t keep a water bottle in the provided slots, but I usually drink some water before a ride

When I got to the end of the war my main had about 2.5 billion ISK on hand, with another 2 billion ISK still scattered about.

Where did all that ISK go?  Was the war that costly?  Didn’t I run on about how SRP was paying the bills previously?

Well yes.  Mostly.  Of my total losses in the war, I war reimbursed for every ship I lost on a strategic war op… as long as I remembered to fit the rigs. (That only happened once though.) My losses:

• Ares interceptor – 18
• Malediction interceptor – 7
• Drake battle cruiser – 7
• Atron entosis frigate – 7
• Cormorant destroyer – 5
• Purifier stealth bomber – 5
• Crusader interceptor – 5
• Rokh battleship – 5
• Scimitar T2 logi – 5
• Ferox battle cruiser – 4
• Jackdaw destroyer – 4
• Scalpel T2 logi frigate – 3
• Guardian T2 logi – 2
• Sabre interdictor – 1
• Eagle heavy assault cruiser – 1
• Scythe T1 logi – 1
• Raven battleship – 1
• Crucifier ECM frigate – 1
• Gnosis battlecruiser – 1
• Bifrost command destroyer – 1
• Hurricane battle cruiser – 1
• Sigil entosis industrial – 1
• Mobile Small Warp Disruptor I – 1

I did not, however, get reimbursed, nor file for reimbursement, for off the books ops I took upon myself.  I did a bunch of entosis ops in Catch and Querious at various times during the war and ate all of those losses.  That added up to about 1 billion ISK.

I also put 5 billion ISK into Imperium war bonds.

And then there was the big build up for the final battles in 1DQ1-A.  The Mittani encouraged us all to have multiple reships for key doctrines ready to go because, in a massive tidi fight you cannot rely on the market or contracts to work reliably.  I can attest to that.  So we might only have what we was in our hangars for a big fight.  So in July I stocked up on doctrine ships, buying battleships, battlecruisers, HACs, and logi ships to the tune of about 3 billion ISK… which honestly didn’t buy me all that many ships.  With the industry changes and mineral prices, a fit doctrine battleship was going for 400 million at Jita prices.

Add in other ships I bought over time and still had in my hangar, and I was down to 2.5 billion ISK on my main.

I was, however, rich in assets according to the in-game wealth appraisal, which said I was sitting on almost 50 billion ISK in ships, modules, and whatever else.  So my first step in reviving my fortunes was to sell some of that.

Doctrine ships are tough to unload when there is suddenly no war.  Those are all still sitting in my hangar.  But I clone jumped back to Jita on my main, which I had not done in almost a year, and started sorting through all the stuff that has accumulated there over the year.  I shipped some of it to 1DQ1-A, as the market there still looked good for some items… and some items had grown so expensive over time that I figured they would be better to have handy there if I needed them.

The big money item for me was a SKIN I had laying around, the SARO Black Troop SKIN for the Marshal, which came as the final mystery code reward a little over three years ago.

The mystery code’s last payout

I hadn’t activated the code because the fate of the Marshal was a bit uncertain back then, and then forgot I even had it.  But now, three years down the line, with a Marshal hull exceeding 4 billion ISK last I looked, I figured that was never going to be on my shopping list.  So I could part with the SKIN… which was going for two billion ISK.

I was also sitting on 100 doses of Quafe Zero.  I decided to hold onto that, but sold ten of them just for a bit of cash.  Selling two more than covered the costs of me shipping a bunch of stuff to 1DQ1-A.

Some ISK sales injection

There is probably a lot more stuff I could sell off.  I am always leery of dumping stuff I might need for a fit later, so my hangars tend to be full of modules.

So that was one shot of ISK.  And the Imperium war bonds drip a little bit of ISK into my account every month, to the tune of 41 million ISK.  That won’t buy you much, but it is something.

Meanwhile I have also been ramping up on planetary industry.  A while back I started training up my unused alts on active accounts in PI.  A few run around in high sec, where the payout isn’t that great, but it is very low effort.

I also trained up my KarmaFleet characters so they all have max PI skills and have started those running now that things are somewhat quiet in Delve.  I had given up on PI in Delve for a while because my main had all his PI stuff in 39P, which fell to PAPI.

I am not quiet ready to get into ratting or mining, but I might start doing abyssal pockets again for a bit of ISK.  I need to build up my reserves.  The big war is over for now, but there is always another war or deployment or whatever just over the horizon, so I need to start saving up for that.

Of course, I have no way of measuring its impact beyond my own perception, and I am not sure if even Blizzard could answer that question right now, there being so many other factors impacting their user base this year.  But a lot of work went into making it happen and details like not being able to answer a question has never stopped me from asking one.

So this is going to be more of a gut check I suppose.  An emotional response.

And even that isn’t going to give a clear answer.  I am of mixed emotions on the topic even a year down the road. (It feels like more than a year ago to me, but time is a blur.)

To start with, I didn’t even think Blizzard would do it.  I am on record a number of times thinking the idea was too risky for Blizz, which can be very conservative on game changes.

That conservatism was apparently outweighed by the growing absurdity of levels in between any new player and the current content.

So in I went to the level squish and… I did okay.  It took me a bit to figure out that there was both an old school path through to the level cap as well a series of parallel paths through to the cap.

My vision in Excel format

I got a couple of characters leveled up through the new system before Shadowlands.  It was definitely speedier than before.  So technically a win.  And I feel like making all the expansions viable paths through the game was a good idea.

On the other hand, the whole thing was more complicated that needed, which is kind of the traditional Blizzard method.  If you were a new player it put you on the Battle for Azeroth path, but if you were making alts you had to go find Chromie and get on the path you wanted, and you had a chance of accidentally ending up in the old layer cake path through the game.

The horizontal stack with level caps on each expansion

And if you made a Demon Hunter, as I did, you might not realize you were in that layer cake model until you found that the mobs all grayed out before you made it to 50.

So the whole thing seemed like it had some good ideas and clearly had the intent to serve both new players and veterans alike.  But did it?  Is it a long term win?  Was it worth the effort… and reworking every expansion to scale and be viable for levels 10 to 50 was a lot of work… make that a thing?

Part of it is hard to appraise because you’re viewing from the outside.  And when you add in the long content drought after the Shadowlands launch and then the company blowing up with the lawsuit it is easy to think that Blizz could have spent their time better.

So I am left feeling neither all that positive or all that negative on the change, which is odd because a year ago I it seemed like a big freaking deal.  So it goes.

I think it was in August, but honestly it could have been July or September.  It was a cash deal and no receipts were kept.  It was an Apple 1200 bps modem and I took it home, then went over to the used computer store that was close by… because used computers were a business then… and bought a Super Serial Card for my Apple //e so I could hook the modem up to it.

Apple and Zoom modem pictures gleaned from the internet, the latter being me second modem

At that point I had to do something with it.  I dialed up a BBS or two with some primitive terminal emulation software, then I started looking at online services, landing on GEnie.

There I ended up playing Stellar Emperor almost right away.  Somebody there told me to go buy the Apple ][ terminal emulator that CompuServe sold which was light, emulated well, and had ten macro keys, which would become all important in playing Stellar Emperor and Stellar Warrior. (I did a recap of my 80s online gaming a while back.)

I also never had to go sit in the computer lab in college anymore.  They had a dial up number I could log in through.  I still had to walk across campus to pick up my printouts for projects, usually from SPSS, a software package I am continually surprised to find still exists.  It is almost as old as I am.

I’ve told those tales before here.  I’ve even charted out timelines for various things, including platforms and connectivity.  I’ve written a lot down on the blog over the last 15 years.

Game Platforms

I should probably update that one a bit.  I can add iPhone to it, and a Nintendo Switch.  But mostly it has been Windows PC gaming since Y2K.

Connectivity

That one I really need to update.  I think it was about 2015 that we swapped over to Comcast for a cable modem connection.  That runs at 100 MBits.

100 megabits per second.  One hundred million bits per second.  That is a long way from 1,200 bits per second back in 1986.  I would need more than 80,000 little Apple modems humming along in parallel to even come close to my throughput today.  1986 me would be impressed.

Hell, 2006 me would be impressed.  We’ve come a long way.

Back in 1986 I was kind of an oddball, demographically speaking.  I mean, just having a personal computer was still kind of odd, though growing increasingly common.  But having one that connected to other computers, that was really not a thing for many people.

For a long time the idea of a computer being connected to other computers was kind of niche.  One of the jobs I had there were several Apple ][s hooked up to a central Corvus drive that would share accounting data and output reports.  And the stuff in the lab at school was all wired up, but for most people a computer was a stand alone unit.  If you wanted to send somebody data you printed it out or saved it to a floppy disk.

In 1991, when I was working for a company that specialized in hard drives I got a call from a guy who had moved from there to a data recovery firm asking me about modems.  I was the recognized “modem expert” largely because I ran a BBS at the time, which made me the one-eyed man in the land of the blind.  He had a client down in LA who really needed the data from a drive they had recovered and wanted to know how long it would take to send to him via modem.  They had a 2,400 bps modem handy to transfer the 40mb of data.

I told him it would be quicker to drive down to LA and hand him the drive in person.  I didn’t even get into the complexity of queuing up however many files and sending the one by one and then sorting through them at the far end.  He was discouraged, but understood when I did the math.  It was kind of a surprise that the client at the far end had a modem, even in 1991.

Modems didn’t really become a thing to have until 1994 or so when the World Wide Web suddenly hove into view for many people.  I moved from the hard drive company to a modem manufacturer… again based on the fact that I ran a BBS so knew something about modems… where our big selling point was that you could send a fax from your Apple PowerBook.  Hard copies were still a thing.  Remember faxing lunch orders into a restaurant or getting fax spam ads?  No?  You’re kind of young, aren’t you?

But with the web, the internet became a thing for everybody.  The rush to get online began and here in Silicon Valley there was a good year to 18 months when on a typical weeknight you could lift up the handset on your home phone and not be sure you would get a dial tone.  The phone company, built on the idea that most people make a few five minute calls, was suddenly faced with a bunch of people who would dial up to their ISP when they got home from work and leave their connection pinned up until they went to bed.   Checking your email was kind of a big deal.

There was an transition point from where a computer went from being a stand alone device, to being something that could connect to an online service, to a device whose whole existence revolves around connectivity.

Back in the 80s and 90s having a computer online meant you could be some sort of cyber ninja computer hacker.  Now having a computer not connected has a special mystic.  We have a special term for it even, an “air gapped” computer.

I mean think about how much you do every day that required connectivity.  My job, which has been work from home for 18 months now, pretty much required online connectivity all the time for the last 20 years.  The network being down meant no work was getting done.  And now I am at home and that connection is work, commerce, and entertainment.  I have a 10 channel package from Comcast for my cable TV service because they want so badly to demonstrate that people are not cord cutting.

So far this year we have watched live TV on January 6th and during the Olympics.

Meanwhile, “always on” internet is essential.  All my many screens, and screens have proliferated in the last decade, seem to now demand some sort of internet access.  I remember back in the day when my daughter and I got our Nintendo DS Lites.  Internet connectivity was kind of a rare thing.  Setting up Nintendo WiFi for Pokemon was a pain.  I think only Mario Kart really worked well with it.

Now if I pick up the Switch Lite somewhere out of WiFi range is starts acting like a junkie in withdraw.

And I suspect the trend will continue in that direction.  I’ve resisted wifi enabled appliances and stuff, given their legendary security vulnerabilities, but I am sure some day they will become mandatory.

Mudflation goes back to… well, as the name implies, MUDs and their economies.

Much has been written about the economies of online games, but my early experience with mudflation was around TorilMUD, which was big enough to have a player economy, but not big enough to absorb the faucets over time.

Mudflation generally refers to the growth of both power in online games and the effects of the uninterrupted flow of cash from drops, quests, and what not into the player economy.

In TorilMUD both aspects hit the game.  Power creep was generally part of the introduction of new raid zones.  If somebody made a fancy new zone for players to attack, they would seed it with some desirable gear, a bit better than you could get in some of the older zones.  That made people run the new zone to get the drops that they wanted, but also made older raid zones a bit easier to run.

For example, way back in time, the City of Brass in the Astral Plane was a tough zone for a raid group.  It had some nifty stuff, but groups primarily went there because it had drops for a couple of epic spell quests, including one of the druid spells… creeping doom or moonwell, I forget which this far down the line.  You needed a fire protection item, you needed to have fly cast on you, several of the fights needed very specific group compositions.

As new raid zones came in and gear got better overall, City of Brass became a bit of a cakewalk.  Part of that was the raid leaders learned all the tricks over time, what you could skip and how best to approach various bosses, but a lot of it was that we were all just now over-geared for the zone, so that save for one boss fight a run was rarely in question. (Unless Mori was running the raid, in which case we might all wipe just traveling through the Astral Plane and spend the next three hours recovering from that.)

The TorilMUD solution to this over time was to redo gear, generally by hitting it vigorously with a nerf bat until zones were, if not hard, but at least not a walk over.  Often the devs came for specific things.  There was the great war on haste items.  I remember Meclin lent me a pair of grey suede boots, which were haste items when he took a break and I traded them for some gear that was a big upgrade for me and then, two weeks later the devs nerfed them into oblivion.  I offered to go buy a pair of grey suedes for him when he returned to the game.  They were cheap because nobody wanted them anymore.

Part of the issue for TorilMUD is that it has had a level cap of 50 since 1993, so adjusting gear was the go-to solution.

Then there was the economy.  For some time after a pwipe, and I went through four of those, a player economy would grow and flourish.  I wrote a post about how we used to handle sales by yelling about our wares back in the old days.

TorilMUD was a game of many faucets and few sinks.  As usual, life was hard when you were level 1 and could barely afford the copper needed to buy a ration to eat.  But as you went on and looted every coin and sold every bit of junk to a vendor… we used to race off to the Faerie Forest with every crash/reboot because there were things we could sell available at such a reset… you eventually could cover your needs, then buy a few luxuries, then had excess.

When everybody was hungry, the economy thrived.  When people got fat, when the streets were running with gold, then the economy would die.  Basically, gear had value and coin did not, and who trades something of value for no return?  And when somebody did want to buy/sell something, it was for an obscene pile of coin.

That problem was never solved, save through the community itself.  People were generous in donating gear and when there was no demand, people stopped farming low level gear to resell.  But if you wanted to buy gear, pay money for an item, you were likely out of luck. (Except maybe for that tinker’s bag in the Faerie Forest.)

Both of those aspects of mudflation have carried on into modern MMORPGs.

In fact the experience of early EverQuest was very much a replay writ large, right down to people shouting to advertise their wares in the tunnel in The Commonlands.

The Plane of Knowledge kills all this eventually

The EQ developers had a different way out… a route that actually ran with gear inflation… which was expansions.  If you pile on some levels or some AAs to earn, a bit of story, and a pile of new gear to grind for, then you kick the gear inflation can down the road.  As long as you keep making expansions… and the EQ team was doing two expansions a year at one point… and don’t go crazy, you can sustain this for quite a while.

The economy was still a bit nutty in Norrath.  They had to turn off gravity in the Bazaar, the official player economy center, because you needed to haul huge amounts of platinum coin around to buy things, and woe to anybody who forgot to bank their coins before stepping out of the Bazaar, because you would find yourself weighed down, unable to move.  I’ve done that.

World of Warcraft had adopted pretty much the same point of view, at least up through the Battle for Azeroth expansion.  They did a gear squish at one point, just to reign in numbers, but gear progression through expansions was still pretty much the same; new expansion green gear was likely better than your old expansion purples.

And the team at Blizz made old raid tourism a thing for pets and transmog gear, so your inflated power could be used to go back and collect stuff you missed in past expansions.

It wasn’t until Battle for Azeroth that they started to feel that the “more levels with every expansion” model might be reaching the point of absurdity, so we got the great level squish before Shadowlands hit.  For me the jury is still out as to whether that was worth the effort, though it is hard to judge due to Shadowlands growing stale in the first six months and then the hostile workplace lawsuit hitting the company.

Regardless, I suspect that a level squish like that is a luxury that few titles can afford.  I am sure the EQ team feels the pain of having a level cap at 115 and 27 expansions to sort through.  I am not sure how Neverwinter managed it, though I suspect their plan was not as ambitious.

On the economy front Blizzard has just run with the inflation model, even expanding the gold cap over time.  Each expansion hands out more gold, but they add in a few fancy gold sinks… mounts and bags and what not… to try and offset that.  I am sure that WoW Tokens helped at least redistribute some of the hoarded gold in the game.

But the player economy isn’t critical to the game.  There are servers where the economy is totally screwed up, where the auction house is bad, but you can mostly ignore it.  You do quests, get gear, earn faction, get enough gold to buy from NPC vendors, and go on with your life and adventures.

It has actually been a bit amusing to watch the economy change in WoW Classic with the unlock of Burning Crusade Classic.  We would go out of our way to finish a quest with a one gold reward in vanilla.  In Outland the quest rewards are throwing gold compared to what we’ve been used to, and the market reacted.  People got rich, prices went up, and things moved along.

Still, the auction house it options.

Which brings me back to EVE Online, where started about a thousand words back.  CCP has been doing something that I have not seen before in an online game.  CCP has been trying to stuff the economy side of the mudflation genie back in the bottle.

After introducing all the changes that led to the current situation, epitomized at one point by the Delve Time Unit, CCP had a change of heart/staff and started down a path to reduce the wealth being accumulated in New Eden.  Rorqual mining was repeatedly nerfed as was supercap ratting.  Taxes on commerce were raised.  Anomalies were nerfed some more, then the whole ESS nerf was put in place to put income at risk.

CCP then got serious and went after mining and minerals, the core of the manufacturing economy, reducing ore yields, limiting where some minerals could be found, reducing the number of asteroids, and generally trying to starve the New Eden economy.

Most recently CCP redid industry.  Ship prices were already on the rise due to mineral prices, but CCP made certain ships, battleships and above, much more expensive to produce which saw a large downturn in production back in April.

A lot of effort has gone into throttling the economy, though after all that CCP threw some ISK at people for an event when they unlocked the ESS reserve bank keys.

July 2021 – Money Supply Over Time (with highlight)

While the money supply is down a bit from the June 2019 high, that last injection seems to have undone much of what they were attempting to achieve.

And CCP has promised that the starvation economy will be ending with changes slated for Q4 of 2021.  We do not know what those are yet, but I am very curious to see if there will be any tangible change resulting from these months and years of squeezing the economy.

For example, CCP loves when null sec goes to war.  Big battles with expansive ships set records and make headlines that help promote the game.  But this big economic squeeze has clearly impacted the war.

Yes, PAPI is claiming that the tax changes killed off their Tranquility Trading Tower revenues, which meant they could no longer finance the war, but that feels more like an excuse than major factor.

That said, making capitals and supercapitals more expensive to produce means that both sides in the war were much more careful about putting hard to replace assets on the line.  The tax change may not have ended the war, but the production change loomed large over how it was being fought and made those big battles CCP loves less likely.  Nobody wants to risk their big toys if they can’t be sure they can replace them.

CCP is in a tough corner, I will admit that.  If they think the economy is getting out of hand they cannot just add some more sinks in with the next expansion, a spiffy new mount or some such.  And the economy is vital to EVE Online in a way that few other games have ever managed.  Life goes on in New Eden because you can go to Jita and buy a new ship to replace the one you lost.  ISK has value in the economy.  Screw that up and the game breaks hard.

But I am still wondering if this effort will end up being an object lesson to other developers about how to, or how not to, deal with mudflation.

We started watching Ray Donovan and I swear to you we were not two episodes into the show before I started referring to it as Showtime Sopranos.

Seriously.  While I have absolutely no insight into the development of the show, it felt like somebody at Showtime was jealous of HBO and how popular The Sopranos were and figured they could play mix and match with the formula… we’ll make the family Irish, not Italian, and they’ll be from Boston rather than Jersey, and Ray won’t be in the mafia, he’ll be a fixer for the rich and famous… and come up with a winner.

Of course, by the time they got everything together and going The Sopranos was over and HBO was winning again with Game of Thrones, but whatever.  At least Ray didn’t have to go head to head with Tony.

Anyway, Ray is this big time fixer in LA, where most of his family has ended up, having migrated from Boston to the west coast to be together I guess.  The set is made complete when Ray’s father Mickey gets out of prison, where he had served 20 years for murder, and comes to LA to be with his family… and get in trouble.

The series is best summed up as a series of plans that all go wrong, but Mickey is the king of the disasters.  An old school drug dealer and bank robber, he has an endless series of plans to get rich, usually dragging in one of his sons to help, which inevitable go badly off the rails, often landing his partners in jail and causing no end of headaches for Ray.

But Ray’s services are so much in demand by the rich and the powerful that he somehow manages to make things right, getting people out of prison or out of trouble with gangsters, before the next scheme gets everybody back into trouble again.

The series is seven seasons of plans gone bad, dead bodies being hidden, disappearing Boston accents (except for Abby, who is on always on point), and plot lines left unresolved.  I mean, I swear there is at least one thing every season that, when the next season rolls, I ask aloud, “So what happened to… the Russians or the White Supremacist prison gang or the FBI investigation or whatever” because they clearly want to just “Yadda Yadda Yadda” themselves past a few things.

And then there are seasons six and seven, when the whole family relocates to New York.  All the key players magically end up in the Big Apple.  Not Boston, where they are from, but New York City where, if the show is to be believed, you can find parking right across the street from where ever you are headed.  Apparently Liev Schreiber, who plays Ray, got divorced during season five and his ex-wife (Naomi Watts, who will always be Jet Girl to me, and who I always confuse with Rachel Griffiths for no good reason… Australians I guess…) and kids moved to New York so he wanted to move shooting there so he could be close to his sons.  Maybe dysfunctional families do move across country together.

Still, there is a train wreck like fascination that grows on you as you watch the show because literally every plan, every aspiration, even the most simple of intentions, manages to fall through into some sort of disaster.  I stopped with references to The Sopranos and started calling the show Mickey Wrecks it All.  Also, there is an easy drinking game built into the show.  Every time Ray says, “Sure” in that curt, unconvincing way he has, take a drink.  You’ll be plastered before the end of most episodes.

The series was cancelled after the seventh season, which was almost a relief because I am not sure how much more Ray could take without straining even willing suspension of disbelief beyond all possible limits.

However, Showtime relented, and there is now a movie in the works to tie everything together.  I wonder if it will be complete fan service, like the Downton Abby film, allowing Ray to finally have a plan come together, or if it will just be Mickey finally bringing the whole family down with another of his bad ideas.  We’ll see when it comes out.

But Abed from Community would be proud.  His measure for success in television was six seasons and a movie.

In short, I picked Wilhelm and then, because I flew with a group that went by the name The Arcturan Empire (AE!), I tacked on the last name d’Arcturus, which I later simplified to just Arcturus.

Emperor of the Galaxy – 1987

I revived the name when I made my first, and still main, character in EVE Online and eventually adopted it here on the blog after being Wilhelm2451 for a while. (2451 was my player ID number in Stellar Emperor.)

I have pondered the name over the years, wondering if it was a wise choice.  It doesn’t flow well, it isn’t particularly easy to say, and people who say it aloud often try to imbue it with an overwrought German pronunciation.  While I have occasionally used Wilhelm IV in games, I am not trying to be the Kaiser.

On the upside, it is fairly unique.  You don’t find a lot of others trying to pass off that name.  If you Google it, you get me and one of the brothers Grimm, due to Arcturus Books publishing some of their works.

It is one of those things, like the name of this blog, that I think could have been better, but which I am pretty much committed to at this point.  I am unlikely to come up with a better name that would make the effort of changing worthwhile.

And then Jeff Edwards threw out a line for me that made the name useful for a moment.

Jeff Edwards was the author lined up for the ill-fate Fountain War book Kickstarter back in 2015.  I am pretty sure I started following him on Twitter back then and have carried on since.  This past week he tweeted something to which I had to respond.

The setup and reply

You can go your whole life, or at least 35 years, waiting for a setup like that.

And he seemed to appreciate the humor.

The reply

So that’s it, I guess I am now fully committed to the name now that it has delivered on the humor front.

Technically, according to the calendar, we’re in the “Lessons Learned” week of the event through Saturday, but I haven’t much else to add, so I will just round out the final week with some summing up.

I accomplished my goal.  I published a post every single day in August, 31 in total.  I am pretty sure I have earned the Rainbow Diamond Award for that.  Go me.

For making 31 post during the month of August

Unlike past years, I didn’t run over.  I have, at times, over planned and ended up with 40+ posts.  This year I made quote exactly, 31 posts in 31 days.  I suspect I made up for the fewer posts by writing more words per post, but I’ll leave that analysis for another day.

As is usual, I didn’t spend a lot of time focused on the event.  I tend to potter along on my own without much input.  I generally have more topics in mind, more things in my drafts folder, than I can find time to finish.  That is just me.

Still, even with that, I did managed to find time to do at least two Blaugust focused posts.  They were:

• One Blog or Multiple?
• On Blogging, Motivation, and Passion

There isn’t a lot new for me to add to my past blogging advice, but I try to come up with something for the event now and then.

Naturally Belghast, who set up the whole event, has a post summing up how things went and who achieved which goals.  I won’t steal all his thunder, but I do like the overall stats.

• 981 posts were made by Blaugust 2021 Participants
• 45 Individuals Participated in the event and made at least one post
• 2 Newbie Bloggers Participated and both made 31 posts
• 40 out of the 45 participating made at least 5 posts qualifying for Bronze
• 31 out of the 45 participating made at least 15 posts qualifying for Silver
• 22 out of the 45 participating made at least 25 posts qualifying for Gold
• 20 blogers made at least 31 posts qualifying for Rainbow Diamond

So congrats to everybody who participated.  You should take a moment to visit some of the blogs that were involved in the event.

• Alli – The Parent Trope
• Ashgar – Ashs Adventures
• Aywren Sojourner – Spot of Mummery
• Belghast – Tales of the Aggronaut
• Bhagpuss – Inventory Full
• Blockade85 – A Page Where My Brain Leaks Onto
• Chestnut – Gamer Girl Confessions
• Easha and Poppy – Glittering Girly Gwent Gaming
• Endalia – Narratess
• everwake – Everwakes Adventures
• Jaedia – Dragons and Whimsy
• jamesmcrosby – MMO Folklorist
• Jen – Book of Jen
• Kaylriene – Kaylriene
• Kluwes – Many Welps
• Knifesedge Games – Knifesedge Blogs
• Krikket – Nerd Girl Thoughts
• Magi – Indiecator
• Mailvaltar – Mailvaltar – MMOs and other stuff
• Mike Azariah – A Missioneer in Eve
• MMOJuggler – MMOJuggler
• Naithin – Time to Loot
• Nimgimli – Dragonchasers
• Nogamara – Battle Stance
• Rakuno – Shards of Imagination
• Rambling Redshirt – Beyond Tannhauser Gate
• Roger Edwards – Contains Moderate Peril
• Rowan – I Have Touched the Sky
• SDWeasel – Unidentified Signal Source
• Shadowz – Shadowz Abstract Gaming
• Shintar – Going Commando
• Shintar – Neverwinter Thoughts
• Shintar – Priest with a Cause
• Solarayo – Ace Asunder
• Stargrace – Nomadic Gamers Eh
• Stingite / Tom – The Friendly Necromancer
• Syp – Bio Break
• Telwyn – Gaming SF
• Thyanel – Thyanel Plays
• Tipa – Chasing Dings!
• UltrViolet – Endgame Viable
• UnwiseOwl – Leaflocker
• WelshFox – Whats Occuring
• Wilhelm – The Ancient Gaming Noob
• Wolfyseyes – Through Wolfys Eyes
• Zapp – Leeterati

After Sept 8th you can go back to slouching

While only one faction gets a full fledged event every year… I believe that was the Minmatar this time around… they all get at least some formal celebration.

As is par for the course, there is a login reward campaign.  You have seven days to log in and claim the five prizes… well, six days as of this post, since the event went live yesterday.

Login Rewards for Omega and Alpha

Despite having some very nice Union Day SKINs, the login campaign only gets you the olive drab Wiyrkomi SKINs.  Very military looking, but not very flashy.  To get the Union Day SKINs you’ll need to spend some money on PLEX packages.

• 240 PLEX gets you the Corax Union Day SKIN
• 500 PLEX gets you the Drake Union Day SKIN
• 2,860 gets you the Naga & Rokh Union Day SKINs

However, the you might want to buy some PLEX because the New Eden Store in-game has some additional SKINs up for sale right now, including a few Caldari variations on the ever popular black and white police SKINs.  I will be scooping all of those up… except maybe the Golem SKIN.  Seems unlikely that I’ll ever buy a Golem. (Though I can fly one.)

There are a series of small events going on for Union Day, including the daily task that sends you off to shoot fireworks at Caldari fleet parades in various systems.

The fleet awaits your arrival

That gets you 2,500 skill points, which is not bad.  You also get to see all the capital ships if you’ve never seen them before.

There is also a mining blitz and a special proving grounds event as well as a a couple of new monuments to New Eden events making their debut and a propaganda content, which has become a thing for all of these events.

Details are available at the dev blog about the event.

So we bought an piece of exercise equipment.  A Schwinn 270 recumbent exercise bike.  I am going to throw my wife under the bus here and tell you that she chose it because she thought the seat it came with would be more comfortable than a bicycle saddle.  And I suppose it was, but only marginally so.  But that was what we had so I made use of it, trying to make at least the minimum government definition of “exercise,” which is working out for 20 minutes at least three times a week.

I kept at it, but it wasn’t fun.  I am not a big fan of exercise.  Hard work pays off in the future while laziness pays off right now, right?

Eventually my wife got around to using the bike… about a year later… and she didn’t like it.  She wanted to work out with her buddies who all had Peloton bikes and used the Peloton app and all that.  The 270 came with Bluetooth connectivity, but only with the very lame and limited app from the company.  (I think Bowflex owns the Schwinn brand for exercise equipment.)

That and the fact that the seat wasn’t all that comfortable got us on the search for a new exercise bike.  Her friends pointed at another Schwinn model, the IC4, which is billed as a Peloton compatible, fully functional with their app and several others, for less than half the price.  It had good reviews and the local sporting good store had one on display for us to sit on, so we went with that.  We even managed to fob off the 270 on my brother-in-law, which is what brothers-in-law are for, right?

The Schwinn IC4 in our house

So my wife was now happily pedaling with her pals and I had an opportunity as well.  It is a “bring your own screen” device, but it has a spot to put your iPad or other tablet above the handlebars (which I managed to put on backwards initially when assembling the whole thing, yet got everything to work) so your app can use it to connect to the bike.

I had heard from Potshot about Zwift, a training app for bicycles.

Ride On!

After his April Fools post about the app, I asked him about it and we tinkered about a bit trying to get the old 270 running on it, but it was not to be.  This is where I learned about the limitations of its Bluetooth and app compatibility.

The Schwinn IC4 was said to be fully compatible with Zwift, but you never now how compatible until you get there.  I didn’t know that much about Zwift when I started out, and I honestly don’t know all that much now, but I did learn about the whole power meter aspect of its connectivity.

I had played around with a cadence counter back with the 270 and actually got myself hooked up to the Zwift app, but counting how many times the pedals go around isn’t enough.  I could pedal for all I was worth and maybe break 7 MPH because there was no power meter output.

The power meter is what measures the effort you’re putting into pedaling.  Without one the Zwift app assumes a static, and very low amount.

If you have a smart trainer, which is one of those things you mount as the back wheel of your bike in a static setup, it measures your effort, translated into watts, which can be adjusted via your gearing and the amount of resistance the smart trainer is applying to your effort.

My power output and speed… going down a 6% grade

The Zwift app lets you ride around in a virtual world… I probably should have mentioned that earlier, though I suspect you might have guess that… and the connection with a smart trainer lets it change the amount of effort required as your avatar goes up and down hills.  It can be quite realistic as I understand it.  But I haven’t owned a bicycle since my last one was stolen when I was 13.

The Schwinn also has a power meter, or at least feeds effort information that lines up as power to the app.  I do not, however, feel any change in effort when heading uphill or down.  The only way I feel a change is if I adjust the resistance dial on the bike itself.  When I dial it up, by power output for a given number of revs goes up as well.

I am honestly not sure if this is an advantage or disadvantage.  As soon as I am going uphill my speed slows down because my power output and cadence remains the same.  So hills are not actually more work for me, unless I make them so.  But they do reduce the distance I travel.

The bike itself knows nothing about it and has its own tracking method for distance, which uses resistance and cadence to calculate speed, which multiplied by time gets me a distance traveled.  But that is completely flat terrain based, so the bike and the app can give me some different results at the end of a ride.

The two do not agree

So I have gotten myself setup and riding.  I have met or exceed my minimum weekly minimum exercise goal with Zwift so far.  It does the things I want it to, like showing me my individual workouts and keeping track of my overall effort.  And it even has levels and achievements.

That pizza icon for calories is a little on the nose for me

Meanwhile, the IC4 is also frankly much easier to ride than the 270 ever was… take that recumbent bike zealots… so gets used more, and takes up less space as well.

So you can find me pedaling around a virtual world.  Next time a bit about where I ride and what keeps me going.

Another month goes by.  I hit two minor meaningless milestones in August.  In addition to my 6,000th post I also managed to make it to 500 consecutive days of posting.

Quantity has a quality all its own

That was one that was easy up until I got past 400 posts and then it started to weigh on me.  But I made it.  In fact, today marks 521 days in a row.  But I probably won’t keep it going.  The pressure of starting over again at 1 is starting to be outweighed by inability to really care about that sort of meaningless milestone after a certain point.  500 felt worth it somehow, but beyond that is just yadda yadda yadda.

Otherwise it was kind of a slow month for traffic here, which was odd because Blaugust usually heralds a bit of a boost in page views and visitors.  I appear to have fallen out of favor with Google again, as search engine referrals have tanked over the last three months.  Such is life on the web.

One Year Ago

It was Promptapalooza Blaugust a year ago, a bit of a change up since we kind of did Blaugust as Blapril earlier in the year.  I wrote something about Quote of the Day and my alleged writing process.

The pandemic was still in full swing with no vaccine in sight.  I started writing about the shows we were binge watching around our house.  And then I did it again.

Twitter reminded me I had been on their site for a decade.

Facebook said you would need a Facebook account to log into your Oculus VR headset.

Epic broke the rules for the Apple Store and the Google Play store and, when Fortnite was removed due to this, immediately sued, which was their plan.  But what did Epic really want?

Daybreak bought Cold Iron Studios.  I think.  The press release about the acquisition has since been scrubbed… classic Daybreak, though still available at the Internet Archive… and Cold Iron has since gone on to ship Aliens: Fireteam Elite, which was not published by Daybreak or EG7 so far as I can tell.  Both Massively OP and MMO Fallout followed up on this for me though.

The pandemic was turning out to be quite lucrative for Activision Blizzard and the Shadowlands expansion was just two months out.

Over at SSG they were in danger of entering J. Allen Brack territory in warning people that they didn’t want “classic” LOTRO.  They’re probably right in the case of LOTRO, but it still gets people worked up.

I had returned to Diablo II, writing up my adventures in Act I.

In WoW Classic, which turned one year old, we were getting ready for Sunken Temple.  The road there takes some time.  Our first run went down stairs.

EVE Echoes, the NetEase mobile game based on EVE Online, launched.

In EVE Online CCP was introducing space weather in the form of metaliminal storms.  We got armor plating tiericide, Niarja fell to the Triglavians, and the promised metaliminal storms came out way before the month was out.

I hit my 14th anniversary with the game and wrote something about the spaceship meta.

World War Bee was in full swing.  I’ll just list out the posts on that:

• Four Weeks of World War Bee
• Defending Odd Allies in Stain
• Fighting on Keepstars
• Five Weeks of World War Bee
• Fall of the IGE-RI Keepstar
• Defending the Y-2ANO Keepstar
• Six Weeks of World War Bee
• The O-PNSN Keepstar Blows Up
• Node Crash at KVN-36
• Seven Weeks of World War Bee

Finally, Brian Green passed away and the community mourned his passing.

Five Years Ago

It was really Blaugust, so I was posting every… single… day even though it was supposed to be the “super relaxed” version of the event.

After spilling Mr. Yoshida’s delicious sauce over my ancient cell phone, I finally joined the smart phone boom with an iPhone 5S.  Of course, that meant playing Pokemon Go, something my wife does better than I do.

I tried to come to grips with the constant whine that every MMORPG should cater to every single play style by asking if any MMORPG had ever managed to find a new audience after launch.  I remain unconvinced that it has ever worked.

Blizzard was telling people that World of Warcraft was still the number one subscription MMORPG. But after their vow of silence on subscription numbers, that brag seemed a bit hollow.

In the game though things were looking up as the pre-Legion expansion event , the demon invasions, proved to be a boon to leveling up alts as they built up momentum.  And I still had that level 100 boost with the expansion to look forward to.

And then WoW Legion launched and it was on to the Broken Isles and class halls and what not.

I speculated what WoW expansions would look like if they were done like Pokemon games.

The Stormhold server in EverQuest II was facing a unlock voting crisis over the Rise of Kunark expansion.  It failed the first two votes, and failing a third would put votes in a moratorium for a while.  However, it passed on the third try.  I also shared my secret EQII shame.  Of course, with the coming of WoW Legion I was out of the game… like Legends of Norrath… just in time to miss some deals.

In EVE Online we had the YC118.7 update.  I was wondering if better PvE could save the game, though I remain unsure as to what “better” would really look like.

I was also celebrating my ten year anniversary with EVE Online.  Meanwhile CCP had a free to play plan lined up for New Eden.  It looked like it had some holes in it though… which we later learned it did.

Down in the southwest of New Eden the Imperium had set up shop in Sakht and was banging on the door of Delve, dropping citadels, blowing up citadels, and fighting LUMPY over sov timers.  Despite threats to keep the Imperium down for good, the locals in Delve got very little support in their fight and we were into the region shortly.

Back up north I was able to slip my last belongings out of the newly quiet system of Saranen.  Meanwhile, Executive Outcomes, which rode out the struggle as part of the Imperium, parted ways once the Casino War was over.

And somewhere along the line I found the time to get out Half-Life 2 and give it another spin.

Ten Years Ago

Blizzard announced some crazy idea that you would have to be logged on to Battle.net at all times to play Diablo III.  Glad that never came up again.  Oh, wait…

SOE finally got a comprehensive server status page, and Scars of Velious opened up on Fippy Darkpaw.  I was wondering if they had “made good” with customers after the great hacking in April/May of the year.

I hit 70 million skill points in EVE Online and prepared to check out after the summer or rage.

I was back playing LOTRO for a bit.  I made it into Moria, then went looking for hoes.  I also wrote a post summing up my relationship with LOTRO up to that point.  It’s complicated.

Wargaming.net announced World of Battleships.  They have since changed the name to World of Warships, because we cannot have enough games we can shorted to WoW yet.  This got me musing on battleships and related games.

Meanwhile, World or Warplanes (another WoW) got a web site with cool pictures and stuff.

David Reid was telling people that Rift had ONE MILLION CUSTOMERS.  How one actually defines a customer was left as an exercise to the student.

I was still playing some Need for Speed World.  I was enjoying destructible terrain, though the weekend the police broke lead to some different destruction.

I mentioned some of the little things I liked in MMOs.

I was wondering about World of Warcraft Magazine issue 5.  It seemed to be very late.

And Namaste put out a Very Short History of MMOs video.

Fifteen Years Ago

This is the last month in review where I have to pull things from fifteen years ago without linking back to my own blog posts.

AOL, which is still a thing even today (I strongly suspect my mother-in-law still gives them money every month), bought the GameDaily site which, in a case of foreshadowing, was eventually disappeared into the Joystiq brand.

I started playing EVE Online on August 29, 2006.  It was my last “pre-blog” MMO start.  It was certainly another stepping stone on the way to the blog, as I felt I have to tell somebody about the horrible new player experience.  Some things never change.

Thirty Years Ago

Tim Berners-Lee released to the public the first browser for something he called the World Wide Web.  Geocities sites and pop-up ads and massive link rot are on the horizon.

Meanwhile, Linus Torvalds announced the operating system he was working on to the Usenet news group comp.os.minix.  While he wanted to call the OS Freax, it would eventually get the name Linux.

Forty Years Ago

IBM launched the IBM Personal Computer, perhaps the most influential and least IBM-like product the company has ever created.  After failing to come up with an internal design and feeling the market slipping away, IBM let a team working outside of the normal company hierarchy put together a machine with off the shelf parts and an open architecture that was the essential foundation of the PC market we have today.

IBM, seeing all the clones spawning in its wake, eventually decided to make a more proprietary model, so introduced the IBM Personal System/2 in 1987.  The rest of the market said, “No thanks!” and the clones became the standard and IBM no longer makes desktop or laptop PCs.  I think the most lasting legacy of that 1987 design is the PS/2 port.

Most Viewed Posts in August

1. Minecraft and the Search for a Warm Ocean
2. CCP Takes Aim at Cloaky Campers in EVE Online
3. CCP Releases the ESS Reserve Bank Keys and Hands Out ISK in EVE Online
4. Robbing Some Space Banks
5. Alamo teechs u 2 play DURID!
6. The Blizzard Name Will Go
7. PAPI Begins Pulling Out of Delve
8. The Altar of Zul and Jintha’alor
9. Activision Blizzard, the Lawsuit, and the Q2 2021 Financials
10. CCP is Just Going to Keep Selling Skill Points for Cash
11. CCP Rushes Warp Core Stabilizer and Interdiction Nullification Changes into EVE Online
12. Tempering Expectations with the Diablo II Resurrected Beta

Search Terms of the Month

Карта страны майнкрафт
[There are some map generators out there]

база майнкрафт
[I have made many]

симулятор секса игры на пк
[I get this search term in English a lot]

test alliance please ignore
[Easier to do these days]

ancient winter poncho
[No Ponchos!]

Game Time from ManicTime

The usual suspects top the list, though I was on EVE Online a lot more in the first couple weeks of the month.  Then, once Delve was recovered, that fell off somewhat.  The others I mention in their own entries below.

• EVE Online – 45.29%
• WoW Classic – 27.87%
• RimWorld – 15.47%
• Diablo II Resurrected beta – 6.20%
• The Fermi Paradox – 4.96%

Diablo II

The Diablo II Resurrected beta was available for two weekends for some of us, so I was able to get a look at it.  It is good, though the team clearly still has some bugs to work out.  We’ll get to see if for real come the end of next month.

EVE Online

World War Bee is over.  The enemy has retreated from our territory, various parties are still finding new homes, Legacy Coalition is no more, PAPI has effectively been disbanded, and the threat of the dreaded blue donut has been averted once again.  There is lots of rebuilding left to be done and lessons to be absorbed.  Absent our Ansiblex jump gate network Delve has become a target for neutrals looking for easy kills and gates camps pop up all over, so the Home Defense fleet has been pretty active.  The jump gates will be back up again in less than two weeks though.  Then there will be a new transit network to learn.

Pokemon Go

My wanted Pokemon, Heracross, showed up in raids in August, so I got my wish and finished off the Johto Pokedex.  So what do I wish for next?

Otherwise the month was okay.  After the high of Pokemon Go Fest last month I haven’t been too excited about playing, and was all the more turned off when Niantic went back to the 40m radius for gyms and Pokestops.  It is nice that it is back to 80m permanently, but I need something to spark my interest.  Level 41 is dragging on and every level after is that much more of a grind.

Level: 41 (77% of the way to 42 in xp, 4 of 4 tasks complete)
Pokedex status: 662 (+8) caught, 686 (+9) seen
Mega Evolutions obtained: 12 of 14
Pokemon I want: I need a Torkoal for my Hoenn Pokedex
Current buddy: Noibat

RimWorld

I kept on playing with the Ideology expansion for RimWorld.  It is pretty neat.  I have been meaning to write up a little review of it, but the dev has been adapting it from player feedback and it has evolved some, so it is probably better that I have waited.

The Fermi Paradox

I wrote a post about this during the month.  I played it for a while, but it felt a little light to me.  As I noted, it is in early access, and just arrived there in July, so it has plenty of room to grow.  I will likely revisit it at a later date because I like the concept, even if the initial execution isn’t quite there yet.

WoW Classic

As I mentioned in a post this month, our group has decided to stick with WoW Classic despite the troubles at Blizzard.  It is just the game that brings us together and I am not sure another title would work as well in the long term.  We spent the month working on epic mounts and then finally finished up Hellfire Ramparts as a group of four.

Coming Up

It is rumored that we will be getting the Valheim Hearth & Home update mid-month.  Our server is still running, so we might have to log in and see what that brings us.

By the end of the month we should also see the launch of Diablo II Resurrected.  I’m down for that.  It even sounds like mod support might be in place for it.  There was a piece about how the Median XL mod would be ready to go for it at launch.

There is also a likelihood that Amazon’s New World will ship next month, though I am in kind of “I’ll believe it when it happens” state of mind there.

In EVE Online it will be a time of rebuilding and homeland defense fleets.  In WoW Classic it is time for us to try the Blood Furnace, the second dungeon in Outland.

And, of course, there will be the biggest of my annual meaningless milestones in about two weeks when the blog will turn 15 years old.

My EVEWho Details

In the past I’ve written about skill points or my various homes in the game or the changing spaceship meta.  This time around I am going to talk about kill mails.

In EVE Online a kill mail is basically the receipt for a ships destruction that shows the who was blown up, how the ship was fit, how much damage it took, and who was involved in killing the ship, which includes people who applied damage, people who had damage on the way (like a missile in flight) before the ship blew up, and those who were pointing, scramming, painting, or applying ECM effects to the ship.  There are a few other circumstances that will get you included, such as being the interdictor that launched a warp disruption bubble, but only if the ship in question tried to warp but fail due to your bubble, but those are the usual suspects.

The actual kill mail goes to the person who gets the final blow.  Today it shows up in the form of an entry on the interactions tab of your character sheet, though as I understand it, back in the day, it arrived in the form of an in-game mail message, which I guess explains why we call it a kill “mail.”  I never actually got a kill in those days, though I seem to recall getting a few loss mails.

I will also say this; being excited about your overall kill board or total kills or the “green” state of your record is kind of silly.  People who fuss over that tend to be mocked.  But each individual kill mail is a story and batches of them can trace a battle.  They are important not because of what they say about you, but due to how they become a record of your journeys through New Eden.

Anyway, I thought about making kill mails the topic a few months back both because there was a war on… that tends to include a lot of kill mails… and because I was closing in on a round number.  I figured getting to 5,000 kills for my 15th anniversary would be kind of neat and I was fretting a bit back in May as to whether or not I would make it.  And then some battles finally hit and I was at the mark and past it.  So it goes.

As for tracking kills, there have been a number of kill board sites over the years including eve-kill and Battle Clinic, none of which ever quite lined up with each other.  Today zKillboard is the kill board of record, its competitors having fold up shop over the years.  So I will use its numbers, not having much of a choice.  You can find my entry on the board here.

zKillboard totals for now

As of writing this… which is a couple of days early because these posts don’t just poop themselves out… I have been on 5,267 kill mails over the last fifteen years.  That isn’t a big number, certainly not one worth bragging about, but it is my number.  That is roughly 350 a year, though honestly I was not on a kill mail ever for my first five years playing EVE Online.

The first kill mail I ever was on happened on December 21st, 2011 and was a POS tower that belonged to White Noise, the alliance we went to war with almost as soon as I joined TNT and jumped out to null sec.  I even have a blog post about that operation, during which I did and saw a bunch of things for the first time and managed to get on 60 kill mails.  When you shoot a POS you get on the module kill mails as well.  There was even a super capital assembly array in the mix of kills.

So if we just count the last ten years of my career, then that is over 500 kill mails a year, or well more than one a day.  They do tend to come in bursts.

And then there are losses.  The kill board says I have lost 334 ships, though that number is low by at least a dozen, if not more.  Due to API changes no kills or losses before 2008 or so are counted, and I know I managed to lose some ships during 2007.

My first recorded loss was a Drake that got blown up in Rancer in February of 2008 after being tackled on the gate by pirates.  I didn’t pay pirates then and I don’t pay them now.  I took the loss and learned to avoid the system.  There is a post about that encounter too.

I’ve been a lot of places since those days.

The kill board has evolved over time as well so that zKill now offers up some stats about your combat record, and there are few things that I enjoy as much as meaningless stats.  If we look at my top all time stats page, you can see see the ships I’ve been in for kills and the systems where they have happened.

Top 20 ships and systems

The venerable Drake is on top.  My first kill mail was in a Drake and I came to null sec when the MWD heavy missile Drake meta was just ramping up.  For the first year I probably flew that and little else.  I had the skills already trained… I had a mere 70 million skill points back then…. so I flew Drakes and trained for other ships, first combat ships then logi.

The Malediction is a more recent addition to the list, and kill mails from it are almost all likely to be from ECM burst runs.  I got on a couple hundred such kill mails during the recent World War Bee in the Keepstar fights in Fountain. (This also applies to the Ares down in 8th position.)

Then there is the Harpy, a solid assault frigate that we fly pretty often.

And then, then we get to the first logi hull.  By the time we hit the Fountain War in 2013 I had trained up my logi skills enough that I could start flying logi ships regularly.  I have a (bad) habit of keeping a combat drone or three in my drone bay when flying logi so as to get on a kill mail now and then.  My general goal is to get on one kill mail a month just as a proof of life measure.  So there was a long stretch when I flew logi more than anything else and a kill here and there starts to add up as the years go by.  And so there is the Guardian in 4th, the Oneiros in 10th, the Basilisk in 16th, and the Scalpel in 19th place. (And the Scimitar in 22nd.)

The rest of the hulls in the top 20 have all been mail line combat ships for doctrines the coalition has flown over the years.  They come and go as the meta changes.  Megathrons or Apocs are popular one day, gone the next, then back again as things change.  Feroxes and Cormorants seem to be evergreen in popularity.

I have been on kill mails in 65 different hulls over all, discounting the capsule kills, which total up to 29.  If you shoot somebody, then your ship blows up, but you last long enough in your capsule for the person you shot to get blown up you get on the kill in your pod.

As for the systems, many of them have meaning to me, many of them bring up that sense of place I wrote about last week now that I have history that includes them.

Saranen was the low sec system where the Imperium retreated to during the Casino War.  We fought from the Quafe Factory Warehouse station for months before retreating to Delve.

O-PNSN was the location of a Keepstar fight in which I racked up many of those ECM burst kill mails.  227 to be exact.

3-DMQT, T5ZI-S, and M2-XFE are all systems that saw ongoing battles during World War Bee.  It is probably telling that they rank much higher that 1DQ1-A, the Imperium capitol system and the focus of the PAPI onslaught that never really came together.

The other systems all have tales too, but I can’t write about them all here.  I’ve no doubt written about many of them already, like 3WE-KY, site of the Lazamo.

The kill board site also has a stats page, which tells me, among other things, that I have been on 15 titan kill mails.  My main combat alt has been on 18 though.  Kind of disappointing that.  But I don’t want to start in on him and his 712 kills, mostly in Feroxes and Ishtars.

According to the stats page the top five hull types that Wilhelm has blown up the most of are:

1. Combat Battlecruisers – 495
2. Heavy Assault Cruisers – 452
3. Cruisers – 421
4. Battleships – 383
5. Logi Cruisers – 326

Mobile Warp Disruptors were in 6th place, with 300 down.

And the top five hull types I have lost the most of are:

1. Combat Battlecruisers – 32
2. Logi Cruisers – 31
3. Interceptors – 24
4. Stealth Bombers – 18
5. Battleships – 16

My capsule has been popped 133 times.  I have lost no capital ships on my main, but I sacrificed a dreadnought on my alt.

That is my reflection on kill mails 15 years into the game.  I know some people hate them, or hate the idea of them, or just hate what the imagine they represent, but they are an integral part of the game to me.  Not for any “Ha ha! Gotcha!” sort of reason, but because they are markers that chart some of my journey through New Eden.

Plus I like a good explosion.  Even my own explosions, though other people’s are a bit more fun.

A Revelation blowing up

That, by the way, was the most recent kill mail I was on as of this writing.  I really like it when capital ships explode.

Past anniversary posts:

• Fourteen Years of Spaceship Meta
• All My New Eden Homes
• 200 Million Skill Points
• Ten Years of Internet Spaceships

Now, they certainly were not going to remove remote raid passes, something they added in response to COVID, because I am sure they are a big money maker for the company.  But they did throttle back on their usefulness.  They weren’t nerfed into oblivion, but if you started a raid with one it would be limited to 10 people and the damage output of remote raiders was dialed back.  Kind of a pain, but tolerable.  Our remote raid pass text group can still take down a five star boss if we can get six of us in the fight.

There were a few other changes, but the kicker, the one that got people howling, was the reduction in range when it came to accessing gyms and Pokestops.  In order to facilitate people being able to raid and battle in public during the pandemic they had doubled the range at which you could access gyms and Pokestops from 40 meters to 80 meters.

That is kind of a lot, and we immediately got used to that range.  We live in an area with a lot of gyms around, and that range puts a lot of them in range from the street, so my wife and I would go out and battle roll in the car, taking gyms and spinning Pokestops without having to stop and, in a couple cases, stand in the middle of somebody’s condo complex to battle.

So when Niantic pulled it, the change was immediately noticeable.  We had gotten used to the 80m range so quickly it was hard to recall the before times.  And we were not the only ones who felt the blow.  Lots of people complained, signed petitions, ranted on forums, and generally tried to raise an internet ruckus while Niantic seems quite unmoved.

This is one of those things where I wonder if the decision was even up to Niantic.  When they announced the roll back for Pokemon Go I went and checked their news for their other games, Ingress and that horrible Harry Potty skinned version of Pokemon Go, and the company wasn’t putting out press releases about post-COVID roll backs for those titles.

So I suspect, even if I cannot prove, that it was The Pokemon Company… which, given the ownership balance, is pretty much a sock puppet for Nintendo… that was calling the shots on this front.

The Pokemon Company oversees the Pokemon franchise with an iron fist and, because Nintendo has the biggest voice in the company, it also tends to reflect some of Nintendo’s obsessions, like health and forcing community interaction.   Some of that obsession has turned into fun features.  I liked the PokeWalker that came with Pokemon HeartGold & SoulSilver, and the whole Street Pass thing with the Nintendo 3DS series was genius.  But sometimes they push things a bit far, so I could see somebody at TPC declaring that 80m wasn’t close enough to foster community.

We had a grand old time with Pokemon Go Fest and sat on the steps of the old post office building with a crowd of fellow players and hit the four gyms in range without remote raid passes as we swapped stories and exchanged friend codes.  I think we were honestly more social being able to congregate in one place.  But you can’t tell Nintedo that.

But then the whole idea that the pandemic was over went out the window with the Delta variant and now ICU beds in red states are full of people who refused to get vaccinated to “own the libs” and makes and quarantines and working from home and remote schooling all possible in our reality again soon because we just can’t take this stuff seriously.

And so this past week Niantic announced that their task force studying player feedback on their pandemic feature roll back would be presenting their results on September 1st.  Yeah sure, whatever.

But they did say that the interaction range with gyms and Pokestops would be swapped back immediately and permanently to 80m.  Somebody saw the light… or felt the community wrath.

I texted my wife, who was out and about, and she confirmed that the 80m range seemed to be back in place.  So we’re happy again.  We’re going on a trip soon… if it isn’t scuttled by COVID… and having that extra range in a new place will make for some easier Pokemon adventures out in the world.

• Related – Pokemon Go Taskforce Results

Enad Global 7

Fortunately I have a Google alert setup for Enad Global 7 which, unlike some of my other alerts, has proven effective at catching updates about the company.  So early this week I got the nod that their Q2 2021 preliminary financials had been announced.  The statement was short and sweet:

During the second quarter, we delivered a net revenue growth of 179%, EBITDA growth of 360% and meanwhile having successfully integrated the acquisitions we closed in the first quarter of 2021. With our rapid acquisition growth, we have digested, integrated and built up the necessary processes to continue our strategic focus. I am delighted to announce that the relaunch of MechWarrior 5 was profitable already after a couple of weeks. It was a testament of the collaboration power between the subsidiaries of the group.

There was also a slide deck investor presentation to go with the announcement. (The income statement covers much of the same ground.) Quite a bit of the deck was information previously shared.  They did note that Daybreak’s seven titles account for 50% of the company’s revenue.

Daybreak, owner of 7 IP’s that are live and account for 50% of the revenue, mainly PC and Console.  Distributed mainly through our own platform.

Elsewhere in the presentation they say that live games make up 50% of the revenue for 2020, which includes My Singing Monsters as the 8th title, so I am not sure how that breaks out.

And, as always, the like to talk about the strong IPs and long running titles that came with Daybreak.

This slide from March was re-run, featuring 6 Daybreak titles in the highlights plus My Singing Monsters

Compared to that 16% of the revenue comes in via Innova’s 4Game platform which hosts titles licensed from other companies for distribution in the EU and CIS including Lineage II, Aion, and Ragnarok Online.

The presentation wasn’t big on news.  The previously announced plan to migrate all their titles onto the 4Game platform was reconfirmed.

We’ll all play on 4Game

Not a big news day for EG7 really.  A good financial report, some rah rah, and back to work.

As I was tracking down the financials I found that the same day a bomb dropped at EG7.  Robin Flodin, the chipper, young, and enthusiastic CEO of EG7 that gave us all such good feels when the Daybreak acquisition was announced, was being given the boot, with Ji Ham of Daybreak stepping in to fill the role as acting CEO.

The Board of Enad Global 7 AB (publ) and Robin Flodin have agreed that effective immediately Robin will transition away from his current role as CEO of EG7 and will be replaced by the current CEO of Daybreak Game Company, EG7’s largest subsidiary, Ji Ham. During this transition Robin will stay on for six months to assist Ji as he assumes his new role within the EG7 family of companies. Ji will be appointed acting CEO of EG7 as a search for a permanent CEO has been initiated. Ji has an extensive background in both gaming and finance and has for the last six years been the CEO of Daybreak. During his tenure at Daybreak Ji has overseen extensive growth and profitability of the company.

Of course, this made hearts sink, and not just because some of us had crushes on Robin.

Ji Ham should have an entry on the IMDB given his ongoing acting roles.  After Smed got the heave-ho from Daybreak, long time SOE exec Russel Shanks took over for a bit.  But that did not last long and Daybreak quietly updated its information to indicate that Ji Ham had stepped in as acting president of Daybreak.

Nobody outside of the company was quite sure who he was.  His profile over at Bloomberg, which has since been scrubbed from the site (classic Daybreak move), indicated that he was with Columbus Nova’s renewable fuels group, working closing with the Russian Renova Group, which owned Columbus Nova.

The profile probably disappeared during the 2018 panic when Daybreak tried to gaslight everybody , though “gaslighting” implies some subtlety and skill that was not present in the act, into believing that the company had never had anything to do with Renova, Columbus Nova, or any other Russians that might be facing sanctions from the US government.  And that is what the Daybreak era reminds many people of, a regime of obvious lies.

So why is Ji Ham in and Robin Flodin out?

I suspect we’ll never know the real dynamics of the situation, but looking at the slide deck from the quarterly numbers, Robin didn’t own a lot of the company.  The combined management and board of directors own 49% of the company, broken out like this:

EG7 board and management ownership stakes

I have pasted in the total ownership stake in the company for each individual (you might need to click on the image to view it full size to make those numbers readable) and in that mix that represents 49% of the company, Robin holds just 3.504%  That is a lot of shares, but not enough to maintain any sort of control

Meanwhile our old Columbus Nova friends, Jason Epstein and Ji Ham, own more than 9% of the company.  Add in the fact that Daybreak is responsible for 50% of EG7’s revenue and it probably isn’t a huge mystery as to how Jason Epstein and his partner Ji Ham got themselves in the driver’s seat again.

As for what it means… well, I am skeptical.  The press release says this about Ji Ham:

During his tenure at Daybreak Ji has overseen extensive growth and profitability of the company

That seems to be, from the outside, counter factual.

From the outside Ji Ham’s tenure was one of cancelling new titles, shutting down old titles, laying off staff, and tarnishing the reputation of the company with outrageous historical revisionism.  The company may have seen profits, but it wasn’t due to growth.  Growth didn’t enter into it.  Profits came by cutting costs and not investing in anything new, it came from maintaining the status quo at the cheapest possible rate.

Is that the future now holds for EG7?  Have they finished with their growth through acquisition phase and moved to consolidation and profit seeking?  Is Ji Ham being put on the throne to do to EG7 what he did to Daybreak?

Yes, I know he is “acting” CEO, but he was “acting” President and CEO at Daybreak too, and he had a long run in that role. He has recast his LinkedIn profile in the Daybreak tradition to indicate that he was CEO of the company since the date of Smed’s departure.  There was no Russell Shanks, only Ji Ham.  He did a modest attempt at downplaying the fact that he was deep in Columbus Nova, that company that never had nothing to do with Daybreak ever.

CN? What is CN?

I suspect he hopes people think he worked for Canadian Northern Railway and not a Russian oligarch investment front.

I might be borrowing trouble here, taking the dimmest possible view of events, but back in December, when EG7 announced their acquisition of Daybreak with a vision of growth and investment, a lot of optimism bubbled up for the future of the company and its titles.  That optimism came from the grim times that the Daybreak era represented, so bringing back the same actors to run the new show can hardly be expected to be received with enthusiastic applause.

Of course, some of that December optimism was likely misplaced, especially on the LOTRO front.  Making a console silk purse, as the initial announcements hinted at, out of the sow’s ear that is LOTRO now… and that, honestly, LOTRO has always been… would require an investment in funds that would likely never see a return.

And who knows, maybe EG7 is still looking to expand and grow.  Maybe Ji Ham will be given resources and instructions by the board to go in directions he could not when he was at the helm of Daybreak.  Hey, maybe the “acting CEO” bit isn’t a lie, maybe the company is really looking for a new CEO and Ji Ham will be just a caretaker… though why he needs a six month transition from Robin Flodin raises some questions on that front, though likely it means Robin gets paid as CEO for another six months while not having anything to do after a week or two.

But it is concerning.  It smacks of a return to the habits of Daybreak writ larger as they now apply to even more studios.  As I said with the initial burst of optimism about EG7 I will now say about this dark turn; we will have to wait and see.

Addendum: As pointed out here in the comments, Robin Flodin apparently had problems during an interview he was giving on Swedish television where he couldn’t explain the difference between sales and revenue.

That Tweet, which I also linked in the comments, points to an article about the interview.  Google translates the headline as, “Robin Flodin is forced to leave the position of CEO of EG7 after a high-profile interview.”

So the ascension of Ji Ham was perhaps not premeditated, though we have yet to see what it will mean in the long term.

Related:

• Contains Moderate Peril – LOTRO: We’ll Always Have the Books
• Inventory Full – The Lonely Financial Zone
• Massively OP – What the heck is going on at EG7 and Daybreak
• MMO Fallout – Daybreak Quietly Sold Off Cold Iron