The EVE Online New Dawn Quadrant to Start With Mining Changes

Earlier this week we got an announcement for an announcement when CCP promised us a dev blog today.  And CCP has lived up to that promise, hitting us with the first big dev blog for the quadrant.

Prosperity Promised

The title of the dev blog is From Extraction to Production and it covers a lot of ground on the resource gathering, processing, and production front.

On the prosperity front, the post promises a doubling of many resources found in New Eden

• All ore quantities are doubled in asteroid belts
• All ore quantities are doubled in all resource anomalies
• All ice quantities are doubled (in addition to the previous 200% increase)
• All Omber, Kernite, and Crokite quantities are doubled in sov anomalies, whilst Mercoxit quantities are increased by 20% (in addition to the previous 200% increase)
• All Mykocerocin quantities are doubled, whilst spawn chance of extra sites that was added earlier this year has been reduced
• All Cytocerocin quantities are doubled
• All Fullerine quantities are doubled
• Extraction rate is doubled from moons
  • Moon Extractions will take the same time as before, but will yield 2x the quantity of ore when fractured. Extractions which are in progress (and not yet fractured) at deployment time will receive the 2x yield when they fracture

But you will need all those extra rocks to chew on because CCP is also introducing the concept of “waste” in the mining equation.  As CCP puts it, it is “a chance per cycle for resources to be turned into space dust.”  You’ll still get a full yield in your ore hold, but some of what was left to be harvested will disappear.

The amount of waste will be dictated by the type of mining module you are using to harvest, with tech I modules being considerably less efficient than tech II or faction modules.

There is also a big change coming to mining skills and crystals.  Reprocessing skills will be condensed down from 19 varieties covering each individual ore type to 6 to cover the new categories of ore that are being introduced.  They are:

• Common
• Uncommon
• Rare
• Superior
• Abyssal
• Mercoxit

Mining crystals will be reworked to cover just those six categories as well.  In addition, there will be different variants of crystals that are currently targeted as:

• Standard yield
• Higher yield, high waste, less reliable
• Lower yield, very high waste, very unreliable

I may be misunderstanding that third one, but it does not sound like a viable option, but this is just the initial dev blog and things may change.

CCP is going to add compression ability to gas and moon ore.  The Rorqual, Orca, and Porpise will all be able to compress ore, but will require new modules for the type of resources they are attempting to compress. (And the modules will require new skills, so if you got any skill points refunded from the reprocessing skill changes, you can spend them here.)

Also ore and gas compression will no longer be perfect.  Compression efficiency will be:

• Ore 90%
• Gas 90%
• Ice 79%

So, once again, CCP giveth and CCP taketh away.  You’re going to need that extra ore out there in space to make up for this.

There is also quite a bit on ship and module changes, with some ships getting new ore and gas bays, industrial cores being changed for the Rorqual and added to the Orca and Porpise, new gas harvesting modules, and some stuff that has a supporting spreadsheet to illustrate, which is how you can tell we’re really getting into nerd levels of industry.  I always mildly resent people who dismiss EVE Online as “spreadsheets in space,” unless they are specifically referencing industry.  This is where the spreadsheets come into play.

There is basically a lot in the dev blog to unpack.  But it is just a dev blog, which is generally a statement of intent by CCP.  They do, occasionally, listen to feedback on them before pushing the ideas into the live game.  CCP usually does big changes like this in stages, starting with seeding blueprints for modules and skills required in advance.  The dev blog says they expect to start that by the end of the month.

Being more than a decade distant from care much about industry and mining, I am going to sit back and listen to those immersed in the topic discuss the changes and pass judgement.  Angry Mustache who, along with Kazanir, was on the Meta Show last week for a deep dive into scarcity already has his gut reaction to the changes up on Reddit.

Related:

• CCP – Dev Blog
• CCP – Forum Thread for Dev Blog Discussion
• Reddit – The r/eve thread on the Dev Blog

WoW Classic Season of Mastery Name Reservations Available Today

Blizzard’s World of Warcraft Season of Mastery, their return to the nostalgia well.  This is another fresh start opportunity for those wanting the day one WoW Classic experience, and the whole thing kicks off for real today… or tonight… or possibly tomorrow depending on where you live… with a name reservation event.

When you can get logged in to reserve a character name

There was a similar event for WoW Classic more than two years back, which turned into a bit of a fiasco because they hadn’t put up enough servers.  Not enough servers became a bit of a theme for the launch, with long queues and more servers being added and layering tech, which allowed more players to be on a server than it would otherwise hold, having to run much longer into the life of the game than Blizzard expected.

So I am sure that this time around Blizzard will be prepared.  That have had the big WoW Classic launch, back in 2019, and the Burning Crusade Classic launch earlier this year, to help them size things.

And with all of that experience, they have 13 servers setup for name reservations today, eight in the US and Pacific and five in Europe.

• U.S. East Barman Shanker PvP
• U.S. East Jom Gabbar PvP
• U.S. East Shadowstrike Normal
• U.S. West Mutanus PvP
• U.S. West Nightfall PvP
• U.S. West Obsidian Edge Normal
• Australia Lionheart Normal
• Australia Swamp of Sorrows PvP
• EU Bonescythe PvP
• EU Dreadnaught PvP
• EU Ironfoe PvP
• EU Kingsfall Normal
• EU Quel’Serrar Normal

That doesn’t seem like a lot of servers.

But I cannot tell if the Blizzard team feels that WoW Classic has been done once, so it won’t ever be as popular again so there is no need to plan on anything like the 80+ servers WoW Classic eventually needed the first time around, or if they feel that Blizzard’s bad odor in the news cycle means nobody will show up for their grand re-opening (though that certainly didn’t seem to be a problem for Diablo II Resurrected).

Now, I suspect that this event is as much to let people reserve names… though this time around you will be limited to one character on one server… as it is a way to test the popularity of the idea.  After the 2019 name reservation event Blizzard started adding a lot more servers.

So we will have to wait and see if Blizzard piles on some more servers between today’s name reservation event and next Tuesday’s launch of the WoW Classic Season of Mastery.

The Fate of Gundabad Expansion comes to Lord of the Rings Online

The day has arrived and the eighth expansion for Lord of the Rings Online is set to go live today.  Say hello to the Fate of Gundabad.

The fate is per-determined by the quest chain I’m sure

As I noted previously, this expansion “farms the appendix” of the Lord of the Rings books, to which Turbine/SSG/Daybreak/EG7 have the rights to use for their game.  While the team yet has events in the main story to cover, they have never shown any desire to rush to the end of the tale… reaching “done” being anathema to MMO devs… so the game carries on with its side journey into the war between the the dwarves and the orcs, started last year with the War of the Three Peaks expansion-ette.

From the expansion page:

Following the grueling battles and heavy tolls of the initial assault, Prince Durin and his allies now regroup and prepare their final offensive on the mountain-home of Gundabad, seeking to reclaim their ancestral legacy from the corruption of the Orcs, hobgoblins, and Angmarim that have been infesting it. As the great dwarven army musters, tensions remain high between the Longbeards, Stout-axes, and Zhélruka, threatening to break the already fragile alliance before they can recover and restore their birthright. Meanwhile, thought to be fractured and pushed back by the dwarven victories, the host of Orc-Chieftain Gorgar the Ruthless now unites under the true Lord of Gundabad – the fearsome, great dragon Hrímil Frost-heart – who will stop at nothing to bring an end to Prince Durin and his followers.

Everybody loves and orc with a grudge.

The expansion features the following:

• New Brawler class
• Level cap raised from 130 to 140
• New mobs to face, new zones to explore
• New instances and raids

In addition, there is the newly revamped (and hopefully now fixed) legendary item system to work with.

The expansion is available for purchase and comes in three different flavors:

Standard Edition – $40

• Fate of Gundabad Content
• Brawler Class
• Extra Character Slot
• Standard Expedition Supplies

Collector’s Edition – $80

• Fate of Gundabad Content
• Brawler Class
• Extra Character Slot
• Improved Expedition Supplies
• Brawler Gauntlet Box
• Level boost to 130
• Gundabad Cosmetics
• Gundabad Mount & War-steed
• And more bonus items!

Ultimate Fan Bundle – $130

• Fate of Gundabad Content
• Brawler Class
• Extra Character Slot
• Ultimate Expedition Supplies
• Brawler Gauntlet Box
• Level boost to 130
• Gundabad Cosmetics
• Gundabad Mount & War-steed
• Fateful Gundabad Cosmetics
• Thunder Boar & War-steed Appearance
• Dye Carry-all
• 10,000 Virtue XP
• And more bonus items!

As I said before, the fact that the expedition supplies in the two more expensive bundles include XP accelerators seems a bit ironic… your new content is so good let me help you speed through it… but the have to load up on some extras to get people to pay a premium price and boosters like that cost nothing at all to throw in the box.

The Coming WoW Community Council

In the further adventures of Blizzard trying to fix the mess that World of Warcraft has become, last week saw them announce the creation of a World of Warcraft Community Council.

The council will be seated

They even created a minute and a half video to accompany the announcement, so they must be serious.

One of the common complaints about WoW from many in the community is the lack of responsiveness to player feedback.

This, by the way, is also a common complain for literally every MMORPG I have ever played, though some are more egregious that others.

In EVE Online there is a long standing tradition of CCP putting things on the test server, collecting feedback, filing it somewhere, then pushing the new feature to the live server only to have to address most of what was given as feedback in patches.

SOE used to be notable for listing to player feedback only after announcing something, then changing their mind in front of a live studio audience as its rebellion brewed in its player base.

Customer feedback is hard to deal with.  It is often emotional, semi-coherent, and based on flawed assumptions about what is easy or hard or impossible to implement.  And suggestion that begins with something like, “All company X has to do is Y” inevitable fails to understand the issue at hand in any meaningful way.

Customer feedback can be contradictory.  One of my repeated observations over the years has been that there is no single feature in any MMORPG that is so bad that it isn’t somebody’s favorite aspect of the game.

And, finally, player councils are nothing new.  Any number of games have had them in some form.  I think EVE Online’s Council of Stellar Management is probably the most interesting, if only because the members are elected, an aspect that gives players something additional to complain about as large groups use their organization power to influence the results.  But players will complain if then studio chooses the council as well.  Complaining is kind of our brand at this point.

In the end though, all such player advisory groups have one thing in common: a complete lack of power to accomplish anything.  My one big example of a council wielding some influence is when the EVE Online player base was mad about the Incarna expansion and the CSM sided with the players against CCP, and even that wouldn’t have amounted to anything if players hadn’t unsubscribed in significant numbers due to the expansion.  To this day, if you go to unsubscribe from EVE Online, one of the default answers to the “Why are you leaving?” questions is “Because of the last update.”  They want to know who is really leaving because of whatever they just pushed to the live server.

And, in this fact, the WoW Community Council will be no different.

So is this all window dressing, a promotional stunt to appease unrest in the player base, a way to deflect those who say that Blizzard does not listen to player feedback?

Maybe.

I do not doubt that there is some desire within Blizzard and the World of Warcraft team to figure out what would make the game more interesting and playable and popular with their audience.  But how do you get there?

The Blizzard plan is to gather together 100 people with the following plan:

• Submissions are open to any player interested in taking part in the program.
• Once players are selected, they’ll be given the ability to post in a new discussion forum that is publicly visible to everyone.
  • In this new forum, we’ll ask members to share their experiences and perspectives on anything in the game, and some topics may be started by Blizzard developers and community managers.
  • Responses and updates from Blizzard will be posted there so they can easily be discussed by the entire community.
• A private discussion will also be setup for Council members to encourage direct interaction between members.
• Separate conversations between smaller groups of members and Blizzard developers will be encouraged to ensure players with differing perspectives are being heard.

Anybody can apply to be one of the 100, see the announcement post I linked above, and those chosen will be members of the council for a year, after which new members will be selected.

The rest of us get to watch what goes on in the special forum… and complain about it elsewhere… which kind of makes me think that the more interesting discussions, the ones that explore changes, will happen in the more discreet channels.  (I will also be interested to see which member of the council gets doxxed first for saying something unpopular in the public forum.)

Blizzard will be setup with a new channel to get feedback from players.  That is the easy part.

With “only” one hundred people to listen too, that will give them something less than a fire hose of angry customer noise to deal with.

But will that group of one hundred be the right one hundred.  Will they be able to articulate things that will help the game?

And, will the Blizz side of the equation be able to spot those gems if they do arise?

The latter is probably the biggest hurdle.  The problem is that game developers and designers are people with their own values and opinions and you don’t rise to a decision making tier in a company without holding some strong views, and all the more so in a bro culture that is self-reinforcing.  In that position, the voice of even a single person reinforcing their vision probably outweighs a dozen or more expressing some other view on a given topic.

So the real effort will be on that front.  We’ll see if the Blizzard has the vision and the discipline to find something substantial in the feedback that they can bring themself to agree with and work towards.

Watching Week One of Alliance Tournament XVII

The Alliance Tournament has returned, having been on hiatus since 2018, with ATXVII officially kicking off this past weekend.  It came out during some of the between match discussion that this was in large part due to the efforts of CCP Aurora.

Alliance Tournament XVII

I spent some time watching the first weekend of matches, though being on the Pacific coat means that they tend to start while I am still asleep.  I do want to say that I am happy the AT is back.  While I have my reservations about it and while it has not been without controversy, it does represent an aspect of the game that a segment of the player base enjoys, and in a sandbox game we’re all better off if groups can thrive in their part of the field.

That said, in watching this I am reminded once again what an abysmal spectator game EVE Online really is.  It can work for a streamer where you can see their modules and overview, but from a third party perspective viewing a battle it is tough to get anything from what is being displayed on the screen.

Though, honestly, that might be a true reflection of being in such a battle where the visual of the game are often just so much chaos, where the brackets merge and overlap into an unreadable mess at times, and where the overview is often the only thing delivering useful information at a given moment.  At that point as a viewer the match depends a lot on the announcers, and even the best of those can be wrong or off the mark in a game as complicated as EVE Online.  Of course, when so many matches are pretty much decided in the first 30 seconds, maybe complexity isn’t the biggest issue.

As usual, there were some interesting matches and some complete wipes.  I think the second match for What Could Possibly Go Wr0ng might have been the best morale wipe.  They went in with an artillery Maelstrom core against LAZERHAWKS and just got stomped.  One of several 100 to 0 results.  But I had just been thinking about arty Maelstroms because, as I am coming up on a decade in null sec I have been looking back at some old posts, and the Maelstrom based Alpha Fleet was the first doctrine I flew in way back then.  Greetings from 2011.

Probably the most exciting match for me was the second Goonswarm match against Deepwater Hooligans.  GSF got wiped in its first match, going down 100 to 16 against Psychotic Tendencies,  so everything was on the line for the second match.

I was away from my keyboard and missed the first five minutes of the second match, only pulling it up to find GSF down 55 to 18 with only two ships left on the field.  It seemed like things were a foregone conclusion.

This does not look good

And then ren taka and Dirk Stertille managed to rack up a series of kills as the clock counted down, knocking out both DWH Eoses .  If the Golem could have held on a bit longer it might have been the end for the Ishtars.  But it could not, and its explosion seemed to call the match.  But then the Navy Scorpion did kill one of the Ishtars and the score got close again, sitting at 72 to 70 in favor of DWH.  But Dirk couldn’t hold out for very long, and with less than a minute left in the match the Scorpion exploded and that was it for the match.  Goons knocked out early once again.

The final score for GSF vs DWH

That was probably not the absolute best match of the game (the Fraternity vs The Network match was something else) but it was a good one and one I was invested in.  I bet all my channel points on Goons twice and lost twice.

It is interesting to see what comps were popular this year.  There were a lot of command ships on the field.  The Sleipner is usually pretty popular, but the Eos and the Nighthawk saw a lot of usage.  There were also multiple attempts at battleship heavy compositions to try and bring as much damage to bear early in the match as possible.  That worked a few times, but the mobility of command ships seemed the better choice in the first week.

All of which is a reminder of the esoteric nature of AT fleet comp theory crafting, where both teams are limited to ten ships and have a 100 points to spend on hulls in a pricing scheme setup by CCP.  This leads to a very tight balance between hulls and fits and pilot skill to create a winning team, and the teams that spend the most time testing fits and practicing tactics tend to stand out as the tournament progresses. (And props to Arrival for putting a 22 billion ISK Barghest flagship on the field. The AT took place in TQ in the UUA-F4 system so you can see all the losses on zKillboar.)

So it was an interesting weekend for round one.  We even got to see some teams secure prize ships as this time around the top 16 teams will all walk away with at least a few.

Marring all of this a bit was the whole turning kill mails into NFTs thing that CCP announced at the last minute, which went over like the proverbial lead balloon.  Hilmar was out on Twitter hyping up the NFT aspect and meeting quite a bit of push back.  The big defense for him was that these NFTs were less environmentally harmful than competing NFTs, with the tech bros he contracted with throwing links to dubious charts in his wake.

It is one of those things where I understand somebody like the CEO of Electronic Arts saying that NFTs and blockchain are the future of gaming.  He is just jumping on the hype train to try and juice is stock price (and thus part of his compensation package) even as he admits in almost the next breath that he doesn’t know what his statement even means. (And even if they have no real benefit and plenty plenty of downside for video games.)

But Hilmar and EVE Online have a pretty small audience so it isn’t clear to me what benefit he thought he was bringing to the company by diving in with NFTs, which is currently little more than a haven for scams right now, and block chain, which represents the favored currency of criminals globally.  This might be taking that “Be the Villain” ad campaign a bit too far.  That 10% cut of all sales transactions for the kill mail NFTs seems more like an accounting encumbrance than a benefit.

But he was all in on VR to save the company too at one point.

Anyway, we’ll see what becomes of that in the long term as well I suppose.

Related:

• CCP – Alliance Tournament Week One Announcement
• CCP – Alliance Tournament XVII Brackets
• The Greybill – Killmails in a Blockchain

Carbot and Ideas for Diablo II

As we learned last Tuesday, Diablo II Resurrected was pretty much the one bight spot in Blizzard’s Q3 2021, lifting the studio through an otherwise difficult quarter where there wasn’t much else to talk about.

The return of the classic

Unfortunately for Blizzard, D2R is a buy and play game, so the majority of the income they will ever get from it came in one big bubble in September.  They will sell more copies over time, but it won’t have the legs to save Q4 2021.

One obvious thought is basically, gee, could we have some more D2R content?  That probably isn’t viable, at least in the short term.

But they could add a few things to make the game a longer term prospect.  Again, that won’t sell a bunch more copies, but making it a game with even more too it might sustain the remaining sales cycle longer.  And that is where Carbot comes in, because he has a video up about additions he would like to see for D2R.

The video kicked off with a bit of silliness with the first idea, but seems pretty solid from there forward.  I personally like the second idea about mercenaries, or at least having a way to put your mercenary away for a fight because the price of a ress starts getting a bit crazy at higher levels.

I am not sure how much more Blizzard can do with D2R.  But the original Blizzard North team seemed to think that a remaster wasn’t possible, much less porting it to consoles, so you never know what they might come up with.

The Unexpected 5K Award

I have mentioned that WordPress.com has achievements of some sort, though I don’t think they have a list of them published anywhere, so save for the consecutive days of posting, I am really not sure what they’re looking.

And then last week I received one for 5,000 page views.  It wasn’t for this blog, which is working its way towards the 6 million page view mark (I wonder if I’ll get an achievement for that) but for a blog I started on a whim back in August of 2011, Stuff MMO Bloggers Like.

You have made it to 5K

I am pretty sure I was inspired at the time by a blogging trend that was popular at the time which included titles such as Stuff White People Like, Stuff Black People Like, Stuff Southerners Like, and so on.

The entries for those blogs were always numbered, and so I followed suit, thinking this might be fertile ground.

And I made it to four posts.

I probably could have made it further.  While I am not sure there were a hundred posts of content in that series, I can think of half a dozen more that would have at least been relevant at the time, if less so now.

I suspect that I realized, as I always do with these side projects, that I have about one blog’s worth of effort in me, and if I expend that effort elsewhere then this blog will likely suffer.  Better to concentrate my efforts.

If I had been smart at the time I would have just made that a weekly series of posts here, something for Saturday maybe.  Instead I felt the experiment needed a new blog and a new pseudonym… I don’t know why the latter always seems important to me, but it does… to have its full effect.

That effect being 5,000 page view in a little over a decade.  Whatever.

The odd thing, however, is that when I went and checked the statistics for the site, it has 5,530 page view, well over the 5K number.  And its current rate of traffic indicates that it probably hit the 5K mark years back, given that it seems to get about a dozen page views a month on average over the last few years.  Its peak was a whopping 532 page views in March of 2013 and it was easily past the 5K mark by the end of 2014.

Anyway, just another odd WP.com thing.

Addendum: There is even a half finished 5th post still in the drafts folder titled, “That guy in the PUG.”  Maybe I should finish that.

The Group Rolls Through Act III and Mephisto in Diablo II

When it comes to Diablo II, Act III is kind of the misfit.

In coming from the original Diablo, Act I puts you back in the world and connects the two games.  Act II then raises the bar, showing you new places, while Act IV is the “Go directly to hell and slay Diablo” big finish.

And, in the middle, there is Act III and Kurast and jungle and a series of quests that are mostly skippable.  It feels like the team had to meet a quota for six quests and six waypoints, so kind of made some stuff up quickly and moved on.  Though, honestly, with Act IV only having three quests, it is as though a lot of work went into the first two acts and then time was running out and they had to get things ready to ship… which is, in fact, the story I have heard before.

And the other thing that came up around Act III was we were starting to feel like things were a bit too easy.  The necro with nine skeletons and a golem, the paladin with the might aura buffing up the skeletons, the druid now featuring the “mobs be gone” spell that is fissure along with three wolves, the amazon stabbing like crazy, and two Act I mercenaries providing ranged support and two Act II mercenaries providing two additional auras was a group that went into Act III bowling over any groups of mobs that cared to show their faces.  We have forged our spirits in the traditions of our ancestors and built a fighting force of extraordinary magnitude.

As noted previously, our horde frequently outnumbered the locals as we moved through zones.  We looked a bit into difficulty settings, but to get to nightmare you have to make it through normal, so off we went.  I thought that at least Mephisto, the boss at the end of Act III would give us a challenge.

It isn’t that, as a group, we never die.  But when we do it is usually because somebody is off on their own or gets ahead to the skeleton flying wedge that clears our way through most situations.

On getting logged in we did a bit of work on our gear.  I found some mail and a helm upgrade at the vendor, allowing me to join Ulfar in the horned helm club.

I’m not just a member…

But the best thing we came up with was an actual piece of runeword gear.  I had been telling the group to be on the lookout for a chest piece with two sockets because I had found a Tal and an Eth rune along the way.  Despite having played the game on and off for years, I had never managed/bothered to actually make any runeword items.  But for most of the time I was playing seriously there were not the plethora of resources on the web to look all of that up.

But now even WoW Head has a page listing out all the runeword items you can make.  So we put all of that together and made the Stealth armor item.

The first I have ever seen

I am not sure it was the bestest best gear ever, but it was an upgrade for Talon, our Amazon.  She seems to have to run a lot to get in there and stab people with her spear.

Gear set, we headed out into Act III.

We had actually gone to the first waypoint when we were done with Act II, so we popped in there and began looking for the Spider Cavern, the first necessary stop on the way to Mephisto.

Thus began the wandering in the jungle part of Act III, which is not a favorite of mine.  Lots of up and down paths, across bridges and logs, only to find dead ends.  We did find the Great Marsh waypoint along the way, but never used it.  The layout this time made the Great Marsh completely optional.

We eventually found the Spider Cavern which was, as advertised, a cavern full of spiders.

In the spider cavern, look at all those skellies

From there it was another stumble through to find the Flayer Jungle.  More running up and down paths and storming through crowds of pygmies until we found the Flayer Jungle waypoint and then, finally, the Flayer Dunegon.

Many pygmies died trying to block our way

That got us the second pieces we needed… a brain, or maybe an eyeball… and set us looking for Kurast proper at the far end of the jungle paths.

Once you hit Kurast navigation becomes simple.  The three main sections are just rectangles laid out in a grid.  We made it through lower Kurast into the Kurast Bazaar where we found our way into the sewers to get the next piece on our quest shopping list.  We also made a couple of side trips into the smaller dungeons along the way.

Making a side trip

The loot drops, while as chaotic as they tend to be in the game, did yield us up a few good items.  You can see in the screen shot above that we found a bard door sized shield drop for a paladin.

Also along the way we managed to hit most of the side quests, which was a bit surprising, but it somehow worked out that way.

Then it was to Upper Kurast and then across the Kurast causeway into Travincal, which none of us could pronounce on comms.  Another one of those words I’ve seen many times over the years and have never once had the chance to say aloud… and when the chance finally came I stumbled.

Travincal is one of the places in the game that is always laid out the same, so after we broke through the first couple layers of defenders I led the group over to where I knew the waypoint to be.  Best to have that in our pocket in case something went wrong.

From there it was time to take on the city council there on the steps of the main government building in Kurast.

A vote of no confidence is in progress

Solo this fight can be chaos and usually involves my mercenary dying a few times.  As a group we pressed on through at the cost of a couple of skeletons.

At that point it was time to talk to Deckard Cain, use the cube to create the flail that would let us into Mephistos dungeon, and get started finding him.  We came back and beat on the orb to get in.

The orb awaits

We got into the Durance of Hate, the final dungeon for Act III and had our usual luck, finding our way through in what seemed like record time to me.  I have spend long stretches trying to find my way through that dungeon, but as a group we found our way to the waypoint and then down to level three, where we put up a portal in order to unload and resupply in town.

That done we put up two town portals, just in case, then launched ourselves into the main chamber, hacking our way through the restored town council again, then working our way around to Mephisto.

The Mephisto fight was soon on.

Fighting Mephisto

And, honestly, soon finished.  Once again the might and size of our group were more than a match for the final boss.  We lost five skeletons and my minion, but otherwise came through intact.  Having brought him down, we sorted through his loot.

The loot of Mephisto

From there it was through the portal and into the Pandemonium Fortress and Act VI.

We did use the waypoint to go back to Kurast to wrap up the sixth and final quest, so we managed to knock them all out, which is something I almost never bother with.

Then it was back to Act IV where we sold loot and went shopping for better gear.  Talon joined the horned helm club, finding a deal on one at the shop.

The might of our horns

Now just hell lays between us and Diablo.  We will see how tough he is.  The game is supposed to scale up in difficulty as your group size grows, but I think we might have picked a sent of complimentary classes that let us scale up more than the difficulty.

Why Harry Potter Wizards Unite Failed

The news hit this week that Niantic would be closing down their Harry Potter Wizards Unite title, with it being removed from the App Store in early December and shut down completely come January 31, 2022.

This doesn’t even look like my neighborhood

While “failure” isn’t in the announcement… the marketing department says that says that they are set to complete a two year story arc and that not all games are meant to last forever… I am pretty sure if the title were bringing in even a quarter of the money that Pokemon Go still manages to grab we would be hearing about a bright future for the game.  But the numbers I find on the web seem to indicate the title made about as much over two years as Pokemon Go makes on a good, but not great, month.

So how can a game that is pretty much the same as Pokemon Go, just dressed up in a different but extremely popular IP, fail to gain the same traction?

Wait, did I just answer the headline question there?  Maybe, and I certainly have opinions as to what went wrong.

My experience with Harry Potter Wizards Unite is somewhat limited.  As my wife and I approached the level 40 cap then in place in Pokemon Go, we thought we might give the recently launched Harry Potter game from Niantic a try.  If there is an IP more popular in our household than Pokemon, it is Harry Potter, since my daughter and I both read the books and my wife likes the movies.

I grabbed a copy from the App Store, which was a bit of a challenge as I wasn’t quite clear what the game was called and if you search on “Harry Potter” there are a lot of results, which is a problem right away.  Wizards Unite was not, and is not, the only Harry Potter game in the store.  But I managed to find the right app, downloaded it, and signed up.

I got through the intro and into the game where I went over to the park near us where there is a Pokestop and a gym in Pokemon Go to find there a fortress and something else… I don’t recall now… and there were things to catch or battle by doing wand motions, but it all looked very much like a re-skin of Pokemon Go.

I didn’t hate it, but nothing about it really grabbed me and when Pokemon Go upped the level cap to 50 my wife and I just carried on with that and never looked back at Harry Potter Wizards Unite again.

So I made it to level 10 and stopped, that hardly makes me an expert on the game.  Fair point.  But as a fan of the franchise, I still wondered why it didn’t grab me.  I should have been in the prime demographic for the title.  But here’s the thing.

Pokemon Go is a brilliant translation of the franchise into a mobile AR enabled game.  As a player you get to become that 10 year old in every one of the core RPG titles and go out into a world inhabited by Pokemon to catch, collect, and trade them.  You get to battle in gyms, battle other players, and even fight against the legendary Team Rocket and its leadership.  It took a while to get all that in play, but even at launch it convinced me it was a Pokemon game to play.

That is almost the core of the entire franchise, which was based on a video game that came out in 1996 which did pretty much those things.  The collectible card game, the TV shows, the movies, the spin off games, they have built on and expanded beyond that core, but the core is still there.  If you played Pokemon on your GameBoy or DS, you left you house in the game to do all those things.

Harry Potter doesn’t benefit from that.  Based on the books and a series of popular movies, Harry Potter always feels like we’re going some place else.  Our world is parallel to the world of Harry Potter, and wizards pass through our muggle society, but they are of a different realm entirely, and the magic of the series is being let into that realm and going to places that aren’t in our neighborhood or across town at the community center.

Basically, Pokemon Go can make you feel like a Pokemon trainer, but Harry Potter Wizards Unite never made me feel like a wizard.  My local park spawning Pokemon and having a gym seems is adorable, the same location with a wizard fortress… well, it doesn’t really sell me.  The park isn’t dark and foreboding, it is a happy place with grass and a playground and kids playing.  It is a place where Pokemon fit right in and wizards probably don’t show up until past my bed time.

We’re probably bordering on that immersion topic I have been harping about.  Maybe there is a post about Pokemon Go possible in that series.  I’ve been to Minecraft already, so why not?  I certainly seem to be making a “sense of place” argument here and how Pokemon Go succeeds and Harry Potter Wizards Unite fails.

Which isn’t to say that great Harry Potter games are not possible.

I thought the LEGO Harry Potter titles were great, as an example.  But you know what LEGO Harry Potter did?  It brought you into the world of the books, reimagined in LEGO form, and let you explore an experience that world and the stories we know from it in a fun and whimsical fashion.

And that, I think is the key.  If it sent me off to a LEGO version of my park, that would be kind of cool, but it wouldn’t be Harry Potter.

So that is my working theory.  Harry Potter Wizards Unite did not capture the essence of Harry Potter the way Pokemon Go did with Pokemon.

Honestly, I think it would be tough for a lot of IPs to work well in the structure of Pokemon Go.  I can’t really see Star Wars or Lord of the Rings working at my local park either.  Maybe Star Trek, as time traveling away teams are canon, or perhaps some sort of superhero IP, but it would have to be done just right.

Pokemon Go just caught the lightning because it was just the right IP at the right time on the right platform.

EVE Online Fanfest Returns to Iceland for 2022

There won’t be a BlizzCon or a BlizzCononline for the foreseeable future and the annual events that SOE used to hold are but a distant memory at this point, but CCP carries on with its tradition of EVE Fanfest at the top of the world by announcing the event will return for 2022.  With the pandemic at least somewhat under control in many places and vaccinations readily available CCP felt it was time to get the band back together in Iceland after having skipped 2019 to do the FanFest World Tour instead and having had to cancel in 2020 and 2021 due to COVID.

Return to Iceland

Attendees will have to comply with the Icelandic government’s regulations… which as of today is asking people to avoid non-essential travel, but who knows what tomorrow will bring… and provide proof of vaccination.

But tickets are now available for purchase, with early bird tickets as a discounted price likely to be gone quickly.

So get ready for the triumphant return of EVE Fanfest in 2022.  Details are available at the EVE Fanfest 2022 site.  There is even a quick announcement video.

Now what about EVE Vegas?

Related:

• EVE Fanfest 2022 Announcement
• EVE Fanfest 2022 site
• EVE Fanfest 2022 forum thread
• Buy Tickets Now