SuperData Shows PUBG Holding in PC Market

I have been waiting for SuperData Research to do their monthly chart blog post, but I guess they were serious when they said they were going to take the last two weeks of the year off.

So no post with supplementary data.  They did tweet the November 2017 chart before they went on their break, so I might as well put that up.

SuperData Research Top 10 – November 2017

On the PC side of the chart League of Legends remains glued in first place while PlayerUnknown’s Battleground held on to the second spot.  Not bad for a $30 game.  After reaching fourth place in October Destiny 2 dropped two spots, placing it just ahead of World of Warcraft which remained in seventh.  Call of Duty: WWII broke into the list at either, displacing World of Tanks, while Star Wars Battlefront 2, whose business model garnered so much attention last month, took the final position for November.  I expect those two EA titles will rise when we get the December chart.

On the console side of things Call of Duty: WWII topped the chart, displacing FIFA 18, while Star Wars Battlefront 2 grabbed third.   Meanwhile Fortnite: Battle Royale … I guess that whole co-op idea the started with is dead if they’ve put “battle royale” in the name now… made its way into eighth place.  It will be interesting to see if its rival, PlayerUnknown’s Battleground, which hit XBox One this month, will top it on the next chart.

On the mobile side Candy Crush Saga remained on the chart, popping up from ninth to fifth place.  More interesting to me is NCsoft’s Lineage M and Lineage 2 Revolution on the chart.  As we saw on the last NCsoft financial statement, mobile is taking off for them.  It makes you wonder if they might want to dump that whole MMO genre now that mobile is bringing in more revenue than any of their PC titles.

Steam Winter Sale 2017

The Steam Winter Sale is upon us again.  Having kicked off yesterday, it will run through to January 4, 2018.

Holiday Sales are Here Again

I was aware that it was here largely because I got the Paradox winter newsletter in email announcing sale prices, and they pretty consistently put stuff on sale through their direct store to match the prices on Steam.

As with last year you can vote on the Steam Awards, go through your suggestion queues to earn trading cards, and find lots of games on sale.

Naturally, I have my own gripes, though they are mostly about me.

The big sale is here and I am not really looking for a new game.  Last year I actually picked up a few titles and, more surprisingly, I actually played them.  Imagine that!  At some point I decided that there will always be another sale so there is no rush to collect games in my library that I might play some day.

Plus I am in something of a happy spot with gaming right now.  I am in the late expansion groove with WoW Legion, with a little something to do every day plus pet battles and alts to play with when I’ve done a few tasks with my main.

Likewise, in EVE Online there are a few ops a week to go on and not much logistical support needed to keep that up.

So I look at my Steam wishlist and am not burning to buy anything there.  Most of the titles on the list have been there for a year or longer at this point.  What are the odds I am suddenly going to buy GTA V this time around?

And there isn’t anything new out there that has my interest.  I mean, there are plenty of new games on Steam, but the barrier to entry is so low these days that you have to assume everything is crap until proven otherwise.  I suppose everybody is up about PlayerUnknown’s Battleground.  I am mildly interested in that… though it isn’t on sale so I can buy that any time.. but the voice in the back of my head wants to know if I really need another shooter to be bad at.  I bought Doom during a mid-year sale and, while it was an awesome, visceral experience, my badness kept it from being all it could be.

I guess I can always look at my daughter’s Steam wishlist to see if there is anything she wants.

Is there anything new in the Steaming pile I should be keeping an eye on?

Gallente Federation Endorses Fart Lighting

It pretty much said that the Gallente celebrate fart lighting in the launcher today.

Oh yeah, blue flames man!

Or maybe this is just a sign of my misspent youth, which occurred before we all had the internet to distract us.  Or encourage us.  I think farts get lit either way actually.

Still, “Blue Flames” brings a number of things to mind aside from flatulence ignition, including a rocket car  a Chevy engine, something half remembered about the temperature of flames, and Quafe ship SKINs.

When I think of the Gallente Federation itself, I tend to think of the color green.

Green, Steel, Rust, and the type of tacky Gold you see on Acura or Lexus emblems

But (heh, butt) if you want the Sapphire Sungazer SKINs despite this unfortunate association in the launcher, they are available now from the New Eden Store.  I’ll have to check them out, but somehow I doubt they’ll be better than the Quafe SKINs.

The Agency Warzone Extraction Event in EVE Online

CCP has a new PvE event up in EVE Online starting today.  Part of the framework of The Agency, this one is called Warzone Extraction and is meant, in part, to draw attention to the EVE Valkyrie Warzone expansion coming later this month.

EVE Valkyrie Represent

As is the standard procedure with such things, event sites will appear on your overview.  This time around all you have to do is warp to them and loot some wrecks.  Of course, there is a warning that hostiles might show up, which pretty much means that NPCs will be arriving to shoot you.

There is already a post up over at The Nosy Gamer about the sort of NPCs you’ll face and some cruiser fits that Alpha Clones can fly if they want to attempt the sites.  It is probably worth reading that post before you dive in.

The event itself runs longer than the standard event in The Agency framework so far, kicking off today and running through until October 3rd, giving people two full weeks to run the sites.  Possible loot includes boosters, skill accelerators, and SKINs.

The Imperium Buys a Keepstar

During the recent CSM summit Aryth, one of the representatives from the Imperium brokered a deal to buy a Keepstar citadel in the system of 68FT-6.  Let me bring that up on the DOTLAN map.

Hey, isn’t that Impass?

Yes, that is in Impass, and the system 68FT-6 is the capital system for Circle of Two.

In one of those great moments that happen from time to time in null sec politics, CSM member The Judge, who appeared on the Imperium ballot despite being in CO2, finally got fed up with the way GigX, the leader of CO2 was running the alliance and sold him out.

The Imperium ended up with a Keepstar… ISK well spent… so I guess it was true, we could work with him.  It isn’t the first Keepstar that GigX has lost.

Things have not gone well for CO2 since they betrayed the Imperium a year and a half back at the battle of M-OEE8 during the Casino war.  His immediate gains in territory were stripped from him once his erstwhile allies had sent us packing to Delve and he too had to head south to form up with TEST.

After acquiring space in the south things began to slowly deteriorate, both within the alliance and with neighbors, until things finally broke down with TEST, their closest ally, in late August.  Then war opened, with only a few siding with CO2.

And now this.  The Imperium holds their Keepstar and has a hellcamp setup to try to catch and blow up anybody trying to escape.  There is a temp blue situation with TEST so we can work with them on this.

Live from 68FT-6

(screen shot courtesy of Naice Rucima)

Meanwhile, TEST now controls all of the CO2 Fortizars, The Judge emptied the alliance coffers, and the line members have to be in a panic or looking for an out.  TEST has said they would accept corps and individuals from CO2.

This is going to take some time to play out, but I felt I had to put a pin in the date to remember when it started.  This could be the end for CO2.  It certainly seems likely to be the end for GigX, who was alleged to have threatened The Judge with an out of game visit and has reportedly been perma-banned for this.

Sources talking about what happened:

• EN24 – Apparent CO2 Coup in Progress
• Imperium News – CSM Meta Game – Aryth Flips The Judge
• Reddit – Statement from The Judge
• Reddit – Updates on the Situation in CO2
• Talking in Stations – Interview with GigX and The Judge
• PC Games News – The biggest theft in Eve Online’s history went down last night
• Jack Jomar – What Goes Around Comes Around…
• YouTube – Jin’taan overview video Judgement Day

One of the most significant works of espionage in @EveOnline just went down. Goons write LOL in warp disrupt bubbles over captured enemy HQ http://pic.twitter.com/KKMhHvycMm

— Andrew Groen (@ScienceGroen) September 12, 2017

And so it goes.  I was going to write something up about today’s patch, but aside from new skills coming in for the moon mining update set for the upcoming Life Blood expansion, there isn’t much to talk about.  But now we have this instead!

Blogger Fantasy Movie League – Week Eleven

When things start falling apart.

The edge was clearly coming off the contest.  Not only was Liore so far out in front as to be unassailable, but even in the pack changes in overall standings seemed unlikely.  Add in a week with no blockbuster launches and it was no wonder that two people forgot to even make their picks for the week.

Yes, there were a few new movies this past weekend, but when you have been through weeks with 50, 70, and even 100 million dollar openings, the opening of Annabelle: Creation, predicted to be in the $25 million range isn’t exactly stirring.  Plus I knew nothing about the film.  Still, I had a $1,000 budget and eight screens to fill, so I went down the list trying to make a stab at some sort of line up.

 Annabelle Creation $380
 The Nut Job 2      $176
 Dunkirk            $143
 The Dark Tower     $106
 Girls Trip         $89
 The Emoji Movie    $77
 Spider-Man         $75
 Kidnap             $72
 Detroit            $56
 Atomic Blonde      $54
 The Glass Castle   $52
 Despicable Me 3    $44
 Planet of the Apes $43
 Baby Driver        $21
 Wonder Woman       $20

In the end, for no good reason, I decided an all female leads theme was the way to go, so I went with two screens of Annabelle Creation, a screen of Kidnap, two screens of Atomic Blonde, and three screens of Wonder Woman.

As the weekend estimates came in, it looked like Liore was going to win another week.  She only went with one screen of Annabelle Creation, but she had three screens of The Glass Castle, which looked likely to get the best price/performance boost of $2 million per screen, enough to boost Liore ahead of the pack yet again.

And then the final numbers came in and Annabelle Creation, which beat estimates by $10 million, ended up being the best price/performance pick of the week, bolstering my selection and pushing Liore down into third place for the week, behind myself and Ocho.

My Week 11 Picks and their Revenue

I won the week, the rankings shaking out as:

1. Wilhelm’s Clockwork Lemon Multiplex – $92,413,326
2. Ocho’s Octoplex – $91,063,841
3. Dr Liore’s Evil House of Pancakes – $85,743,232
4. Braxwolf’s Waffleplex – $77,611,192
5. Void’s Awesomeplex – $75,807,974
6. Pasduil’s Popcorn Picturehouse – $74,817,084
7. Moderate Peril’s Sleazy Porno Theatre – $74,252,899
8. Syl’s Fantasy Galore Panopticum – $66,138,438
9. Bel’s House of Horrors – $26,866,850
10. Murf’s Matinee Mania – $14,924,605

Bel and Murf both failed to pick, so rolled with the previous weeks picks, which left them each with two empty screens as some of their picks were no longer on the list.

Nobody in our league got the perfect pick of the week, which consisted of two screens of Annabelle Creation, three screens of the Glass Castle, a screen of Planet of the Apes, and two screens of Wonder Woman.  261 people managed to get the perfect pick overall on the site, which netted them $99,547,100.

Perfect Picks for Week 11

As noted, there isn’t much that can be done at this point to shake up the rankings, save forgetting to pick for a couple of week.  At the end of week 11 the overall seasonal rankings looked like this:

1. Dr Liore’s Evil House of Pancakes – $1,179,773,786
2. Wilhelm’s Clockwork Lemon Multiplex – $1,099,976,348
3. Ocho’s Octoplex – $1,015,911,862
4. Void’s Awesomeplex – $983,919,075
5. Moderate Peril’s Sleazy Porno Theatre – $959,423,735
6. Pasduil’s Popcorn Picturehouse – $944,970,871
7. Braxwolf’s Waffleplex – $926,427,978
8. Syl’s Fantasy Galore Panopticum – $853,353,980
9. Murf’s Matinee Mania – $833,121,646
10. Bel’s House of Horrors – $799,170,850

The only change in ranking was Syl climbing up another spot after Murf failed to do his picks.

Beating Liore by about $7 million this week still leaves me $80 million behind.  That is way too much ground to cover with only two weeks remaining, and all the more so when one looks at the week 12 line up.

Hitman's Bodyguard $254
Annabelle Creation $216
Logan Lucky        $184
Dunkirk            $98
The Nut Job 2      $62
Spiderman          $58
The Emoji Movie    $52
Girls Trip         $50
The Glass Castle   $48
The Dark Tower     $48
Wind River         $43
Kidnap             $38
Atomic Blonde      $34
Planet of the Apes $29
Despicable Me 3    $28

On the bright side, I suppose, there are no $5 titles on the list.  However, there also isn’t a single title ranked over $300 either, making it look like a pretty thin week.  I’ll be lucky to get $80 million out of these picks, much less close the gap between Liore and myself.

So there we stand with two weeks left to go in the season.

Blogger Fantasy Movie League – Week Five

In which a perfect storm occurs.

Coming off of last week there was no doubt that Despicable Me 3 would rule the box office.  Nothing else huge was opening against it and the champions of the past weeks were worn out, still earning millions but no longer the dominate players.  And so it goes as the weeks of summer progress.

This summer league has made me pay more attention that usual to the movies and what is releasing when.  I like the movies, but aside from a few well promoted productions, I do tend to only know what is playing when I look up what is playing at the local cinema.  Now I am keeping an eye on what is opening every week and have the Variety film section in my RSS feed.

The week five options for the league were:

Despicable Me 3            $840
 The House                 $198
 Transformers              $175
 Wonder Woman              $131
 Baby Driver               $110
 Cars 3                    $102
 47 Meters Down            $36
 Beguiled                  $32
 The Mummy                 $26
 Pirates of the Caribbean  $26
 Rough Night               $23
 All Eyez on Me            $19
 Captain Underpants        $19
 Guardians of the Galaxy 2 $15
 Beatriz At Dinner         $12

Despicable Me 3, expected to earn over $90 million in its opening weekend was priced to match that goal.  Theoretically, if the Monday box estimates are correct, the pricing should reflect what the movie should do.  Or, to put it another way, if the estimates are dead on, spending your full budget should get you the same result no matter which movies you pick.  Given the list above, eight screens of Baby Driver ought to be worth just a bit more than one screen of DM3.

Of course, the estimates are just that.  They are industry guesses.

So DM3 was up at the top.  The House was expected to be in second place, slated to pull in about $20 million.  Then, in the $10-20 million range were the past champs, Transformers, Wonder Woman, and Cars 3.  Then there were the spent forces and lower earners, the movies that you would need to pad out your eight screens if you picked DM3.  From this lower end often comes the surprise pick of the week, the best price to earning champion that yields a $2 million per screen bonus in the game.

And in the middle was Baby Driver.  Pegged at $10-12 million at the start of last week, it looked like a movie you might consider for your mix because you couldn’t get eight screens of Wonder Woman or Transformers.

The week went on, reviews started to come in, early opening revenues started to be counted, and the field began to shift.  Estimates for DM3 started to soften some, but it was The House that got hit hard, with poor reviews.  Estimates dropped in half.  Meanwhile, Baby Driver was looking strong, with high marks on Meta Critic and a strong opening night.  It went from possibly the best performance pick to almost a sure thing.  The question was how many screens do you run it on.  If it was going to end up being the number two movie of the week, which looked like a distinct possibility, the answer had to be “all of them.”

All Baby Driver all the time

Thursday afternoon I was pestering my daughter to go do her picks.  As she looked at the choices she asked me what I chose.  I generally stay mum on that, but this time around I figured I would share.  I told her I decided to go with all Baby Driver.  She gave me that, “Old man, are you crazy?” look, but when I explained how the week had progressed, she had to admit I had something to back up my decision.   Still, she couldn’t bring herself to go all in on Baby Driver, and led with Transformers and seven screens of my pick.

And then Baby Driver pulled in a little more than $20 million over the weekend while DM3 “only” managed $72 million, both results quite a bit off from the view of the world at the beginning of the week… although it appears that the studios took a four day weekend like a lot of people in the US, so rather than getting the final numbers on Monday night for a Tuesday post, here I am on Wednesday night putting together a post just to make sure it is up before the week six deadline hits on Friday morning.

Anyway, that much pull in the US box office made going all Baby Driver the “perfect pick” of the week.  The perfect pick is the one that results in the highest score, and this week almost two thousand of the over sixteen thousand active player went with it, including both Liore and I.

Page after page after page of this…

So the scores for the week had the two of us at the top.

1. Dr Liore’s Evil House of Pancakes – $185,426,560
2. Wilhelm’s Clockwork Lemon Multiplex – $185,426,560
3. Ocho’s Octoplex – $167,005,690
4. Void’s Awesomeplex – $146,190,015
5. Murf’s Matinee Mania – $129,149,255
6. Syl’s Fantasy Galore Panopticum – $120,144,635
7. Moderate Peril’s Sleazy Porno Theatre – $110,805,100
8. Bel’s House of Horrors – $108,193,142
9. Pasduil’s Popcorn Picturehouse – $89,165,906
10. Braxwolf’s Waffleplex – $83,798,882

(Clockwork appears to have stopped playing, failing to update picks over the last two weeks, so has been removed from the list for now.)

The win for the week went to Liore because… I don’t know, it looks like a tie to me, but she got the credit.

If you are mathematically inclined you might look at the score Liore and I ended up with, subtract the amount earned by eight screens of Baby Driver, and find us with $21 million extra in our total.  That is because you get $2 million per screen for picking the best price/performer for the week, so eight screens gives you $16 million, plus $5 million overall for having the perfect pick for the week.

On the overall score front I managed to not fall further behind, but sharing the picks with Liore meant not gaining any ground on her lead either. The rest of the pack however saw the gap between them and first place grow by quite a bit, leaving the standings at the end of week five looking like this.

1. Dr Liore’s Evil House of Pancakes – $601,699,181
2. Wilhelm’s Clockwork Lemon Multiplex – $576,012,223
3. Ocho’s Octoplex – $531,959,640
4. Void’s Awesomeplex – $510,920,719
5. Moderate Peril’s Sleazy Porno Theatre – $481,943,596
6. Pasduil’s Popcorn Picturehouse – $471,472,045
7. Murf’s Matinee Mania – $454,458,439
8. Bel’s House of Horrors – $450,265,922
9. Braxwolf’s Waffleplex – $441,965,254
10. Syl’s Fantasy Galore Panopticum – $404,391,260

The main pack looks to be vying for fourth or fifth place now with Liore way out in front, while Ocho, Void, and myself bridge the gap, ahead of the pack but still way behind Liore as we go into week six.

For week six the line up looks like this.

 Spider-Man FRIDAY         $501
 Spider-Man SATURDAY       $448
 Despicable Me 3           $404
 Spider-Man SUNDAY         $339
 Baby Driver               $143
 Wonder Woman              $104
 Transformers              $70
 Cars 3                    $47
 The House                 $46
 47 Meters Down            $30
 The Big Sick              $28
 The Beguiled              $21
 The Mummy                 $14
 Pirates                   $13
 Guardians of the Galaxy 2 $8

As you can see, Spider-Man has been broken up into three entries.  FML sometimes does this on weeks when there is only one big contender for the week’s box office, splitting the big movie into Friday, Saturday, and Sunday box office results.  So when picking one would likely want to anchor their screens on Spider-Man, but which one?  You can’t get all three days, and if you go with two of the days your other picks are strictly limited.  Do you go with two days and hope for a big run or pick just one and fill out your line up with pictures on the decline hoping for an optimum pick bonus?

Another thing to note is that, in an unusual yet expected turn, the screen price for Baby Drive went up compared to last week.  Since it far exceeded initial expectations it went up from $110 per screen to $143.

That is where things stand going into week six.

The June 2017 Update Brings Null Sec Nerfs to New Eden

Again, I do wish that CCP would pick a naming convention for these updates and stick with it.  This should be YC119.6, or maybe YC119.5, except that was last month, but now we’re just going to toss that and go with the month and year.  Points for clarity, but it took a while to get here and I have my doubts that they will stick to it at this point.

YC119.6 if you prefer

I mean, look at the list of the updates so far in 2017 and tell me what the pattern is.

No more than two in a row alike

That minor gripe aside, now to the things in the update that are setting Reddit on fire.

First there is the next round of Rorqual and mining nerfs which came up back on the first of the month.  Excavator drones for Rorquals will be hit as follows:

• About 9% less yield for Ore Excavators
• 12.5% lower speed for Ore Excavators
• About 11% longer cycle time for Ice Excavators
• 10% lower speed for Ice Excavators

Meanwhile, the mining anomalies, where Rorquals harvest, will now have respawn delays as follows:

• 20 minutes for the Small Asteroid Cluster
• 1 hour for the Medium Asteroid Cluster
• 2 hours for the Large Asteroid Cluster variants
• 4 hours for the Enormous Asteroid Cluster variants
• 5 hours for the Colossal Asteroid Cluster variants

The anom changes will keep Rorquals from being able to continually harvest in colossal clusters in a single system without interruption.  It will also mean that people in later time zones might be left in the lurch waiting for respawns.

Meanwhile, in an effort to put a lid on the expansion of the money supply, Friday CCP announced they would be nerfing fighters in order to reduce the efficiency of super ratting.

This is the one that really lit up Reddit and required the moderators to create a single threadnought as new threads were spawning repeatedly.  There the threats to rage quit were rife while the only CCP response came from CCP Quant, who does the monthly economic reports, who seemed keen to follow the CCP strategy of increasing overall drama by opening with this:

What we have here is literally the top 1% of the top 1% screaming their lungs out over these nerfs, while trying to convince the rest of the player-base to think that CCP is ruining the game for everyone. What we are really doing is keeping it from becoming yet another hyper inflated virtual economy at the cost of pissing off a particular group of players. Prior to this patch, a relatively small group of players were making the same amount of isk in npc bounties as the entire player-base did a year ago.

His statement proved the danger of carelessly throwing around numbers in front of an audience of internet spaceship nerds.  He had to back away from his claim that people were making 260 million ISK ticks (a tick is 20 minutes of time) while the “top 1% of the top 1%” has to be such a vanishingly small number… maybe 50 people if you think half a million play on Tranquility, and it would amaze me to find that there were that many people playing… that he was wrecking what I believe was his point… /r/eve doesn’t represent the whole population of New Eden… with a distracting statement.

This surge of push back on the plans… some of which coalesced around the idea of balancing PvE on the back of PvP, ever a hot button topic… caused CCP to spend the weekend reflecting on the whole thing.  They came back yesterday with some revised changes.  The plan is:

• Light Fighters (Space Superiority): No Change
• Light Fighters (Attack): 10% reduction to Basic Attack and Heavy Rocket Salvo damage (was 20%)
• Support Fighters: No Change
• Heavy Fighters (Heavy Attack): No Change (was 10% reduction to Basic Attack and Torpedo Salvo damage)
• Heavy Fighters (Long Range Attack): 20% reduction to Basic Attack damage (was 30%)
• Heavy Fighters (Shadow): No Change
• NPC Fighter Aggression: No Change (was +15%)
• We are working on changes to Anomalies that will reduce the effectiveness of Carriers and Supercarriers. These changes will be announced at a later date.

They also added in some data, which people had been asking for, to support these nerfs.  For the first five days in June 10.6 trillion ISK was rewarded from bounties, with the top three recipient classes being:

• 22.3% (2.3T) of the ISK was generated by 1.4% of characters earning bounties, using Supercarriers
• 24.2% (2.6T) of the ISK was generated by 4.8% of characters earning bounties, using Carriers
• 19.1% (2T) of the ISK was generated by 16.6% of characters earning bounties, using T1 Cruisers

So 46.5% of the bounties paid out went to just 6.2% of the players awarded bounties.

That certainly sounds out of balance to me.  But I didn’t put down 20 billion ISK to buy a supercarrier when it became clear that running anomalies in them was the most efficient way to collect bounties… something that was pretty clear about six months back.  I still potter about in my Ishtar making the same amount of ISK per tick as I was five years ago.

Anyway, we shall see if this puts any sort of damper on the ever increasing money supply in New Eden or if CCP has to go further.

And then the third nerf, pirate faction battleship blue prints will drop less frequently now as part of an effort to reign in the proliferation of these hulls in New Eden.

I guess when a cheapskate like me who only rats in an Ishtar, thus deprived of dank super ticks, has a Machariel for fleet ops, it might be a sign.  Once such hulls were reserved for big spenders and the elite who would fit them with officer mods and fly them with expensive implants.  Now even the Imperium, ever conscious of the budget constraints of their rank and file, has a Machariel doctrine with Bhalgorns in the mix, several groups run Nightmare doctrines, and ratters everywhere… if not in supercarriers… use Rattlesnakes.

So this month CCP is trying to throttle the supply of blueprints, though the stockpiles of them in New Eden are huge, while next month they will be increasing the material requirements of the blueprints in order to make them more expensive.

None of which bothers me all that much.  I tend to be a fatalist, taking the game as it comes as opposed to wanting it to be something that it no longer is.  But all the more so, I fly for the Imperium, which tends to be the very pragmatic in its approach to the game, optimizing the mechanics as they change.  This will mean changes for us, but since it will mean changes for everybody else in null sec as well, we just have to handle them more efficiently than our foes.

Controversies aside, there are some other things in today’s update.

There is a new Rogue Swarm event going on from now through the 27th of the month.  Akin to past such events, rogue drone sites will be all over New Eden and will drop a variety of prizes including skill training accelerators and PLEX.

The defenders of the Blood Raiders Shipyards have been changed, presumably to plug the hole in their defense exposed by a force of T1 Punisher frigates. (Also exploitable by fighters, which are frigate sized.)

In addition, the drops from a destroyed Blood Raiders Shipyard will now come in an armored cache that will require an industrial ship to haul off to a station or citadel before it can be opened.  This will keep unstoppable interceptors from dashing in at the kill and stealing the loot.  The tale of this is over at INN.

There is a new color blind mode that allows players to adjust the UI to make things more visible relative to their own needs.

The Sin black ops battleship along with the Vexor and Ishtar are getting graphical updates.

The Vexor doesn’t actually look that different to me…

How fleets can be structured has changed.  While the same total cap applies, squads and wings are now flexible in size.  Additionally, who gets to be fleet boss when the FC dies should now be more consistent.  The watchlist will now show ship icons and double-clicking on people in your watchlist will no longer bring up their character info screen.

There are some additional update along with the usual array of tweaks and bug fixes, most of which can be found in the Patch Notes and on the Updates page.  Otherwise the update has been deployed.

One thing that is missing from this update however is music.  The tradition of a song to accompany ever single expansion or update has been broken.  If you want to be outraged and start an angry thread on Reddit and shoot the monument in Jita, do it because you want more music!

We will have to make due with the sound track from the Birth of a Capsuleer video instead.

 

Quote of the Day – Playing the Meta Game

The MER [Monthly Economic Report] is the best recruiting in the history of EVE

-Aryth, Talking in Stations May 13, 2016

Catching up on some podcasts over the weekend, one of which was Talking in Stations episode where host Matterall spoke to CCP Larrikin and GSF Director and CSM 11 & 12 member Aryth.

Aryth has the up front part of the show where he talks about an Imperium attempt to play the meta to their advantage.

You may recall some months back Aryth and Innominate, the Imperium CSM members, asked that CCP not display, or obfuscate, or delay the section of CCP Quant’s monthly economic report that shows the amount of mining done in each region.  I am pretty sure I even mentioned this in passing at the time, though I cannot find the post at the moment.  Either way, this was mentioned in the March 2017 Monthly Economic Report and the chart did not appear that month.

However, in the long term chart was not changed and resumed its position in the Monthly Economic Report lineup for April.

April 2017 – Mining value by region

There it highlight once again that in Delve we were ratting and mining like crazy.

On the show Aryth revealed/claimed that the request to suppress the information was done in order to bring attention to the report… after all, if Goons want to hide it, it must contain something good… to spread the word that if you want to mine (or rat) in null sec, then the Imperium is a destination you should consider.

Whether or not you believe this is really a “now it can be told” example of Goons playing the meta game, membership has been up.

Of course, we will see how well mining survives the next round of null sec directed nerfs.

If you are interested in hearing Aryth opine on the meta or CCP Larrikin talk about the Blood Raiders Shipyard before the event wentlive, you can find Talking in Stations linked above or over on SoundCloud.

CCP to Pay Out Remaining PLEX for Aurum

CCP announced earlier that after downtime today those who had less than 1,000 Aurum when New PLEX went live back on May 9th would be getting the PLEX owed them.

The New PLEX in New Eden

You can find the announcement here, but it is short enough to quote:

We are happy to announce that all pilots who had Aurum balances outstanding from the PLEX changes have now had their converted PLEX balances delivered as of downtime May 23rd.

In order to protect the market and value of PLEX during the transition, all pilots who had less than 1000 Aurum in their wallets did not have this converted to PLEX when the changes were deployed on May 9th, and were notified that they would receive their Aurum balance in PLEX three months after the deployment of the PLEX changes.

After careful consideration and close monitoring of the market, we have decided to reimburse these PLEX earlier.

Today’s daily downtime was extended slightly in order to allow for a reimbursement script to be run, and all pilots should now have their outstanding PLEX balances reimbursed.

As it turned out, the market did not need much in the way of protection.  The price of 500 new PLEX (needed for the 30 days of game time that a single old PLEX would grant) went up after the conversion and has remained up.  This wasn’t all that surprising to me.  It seemed akin to a 500 for 1 stock split, and the price of a stock almost always goes up after such a change. (If it doesn’t, you shouldn’t have done the split.)  And new PLEX can be used for more things (even if character transfers are no longer on the list) so more demand, and an accompanying rise is price, seemed likely.

That means ISK is effectively cheaper if you want to sell PLEX.  If you are buying PLEX to pay for your null sec Rorqual mining alts in the face of nerfs and low mineral prices however, this might be a painful time.  I will be interested to see what the monthly economic report for May and June will show.

Anyway, I will have to check in and see if I have 42 more PLEX on the accounts that had the 300 gift PLEX.

Trying to Find Data in the Activision Blizzard 2016 Financials

The final Activision Blizzard financial results for 2016 were announced yesterday.

You can find all that was said and posted over at the company investor relations site.

Gone are the days of straightforward information when they used to tell you the World of Warcraft subscriber numbers and listed out revenue from those subscriptions as a separate line item.  You knew how the game was doing in straight up, hard numbers.

Now though, now the finance team has done all they can to declare everything is wonderful without really telling you where the money is coming from.  Now it is mostly bullshit like Monthly Active Users, as with this slide:

Activision Blizzard Q4 2016 Financial Results Presentation – Slide 7

I mean, when the division that brings in the least revenue, King, has almost an order of magnitude higher MAUs, you’ve pretty much proven that MAUs are divorced from financial reality.  That is playing, not paying.

And then there are the oddly specific brags as we see on the next slide.

Activision Blizzard Q4 2016 Financial Results Presentation – Slide 8

I like this particular quote about WoW:

World of Warcraft time spent grew Q/Q, surpassing Legion’s launch quarter and all non launch quarters in the last 4 years

Time spent playing went up in Q4 compared to Q3.  That makes sense, really, since WoW Legion launched at the back half of Q3, so play time was probably going to ramp up after that.  But then things sort of fall apart as the quote goes on.  It surpassed all “non launch” quarters in the last four years.

So it isn’t doing as well as Warlords of Draenor or Mists of Pandaria launches I guess.  Seems like an odd thing to bring up.  And pining it down to just four years means… that things were better before that?  There was a quote previously about concurrency hitting a post Cataclysm high previously along with first day sales numbers.  So they are being cagey about anything that might allude to actual subscribers.

Still, it isn’t like Blizzard isn’t making money.  According to slide 10 of the presentation, Blizz is no slouch in net revenues and is the champ of operating income.

Activision Blizzard Q4 2016 Financial Results Presentation – Slide 10

Activision topped Q4, but they released a Call of Duty title, so their previous quarters were not so hot.  Blizzard was a little more consistent over the last three quarters, if you dig into the financial model spreadsheet from the investor relations site.

But it is the highlights part under Blizzard that caught my eye.  Specifically, it says:

In 2016, >60% of segment revenue from non-World of Warcraft franchises…

That seemed like something from which I could get a hard number.  I decided to take a strict reading of that sentence and declare that it just mean WoW and not Hearthstone or any part of Heroes of the Storm.  Elsewhere in the presentation it was stated that Blizzard revenue was driven by WoW and Overwatch, so I don’t think assuming WoW-only for that statement is way off base.

Also, I chose to take 60% as a hard number, since if it was much more than that, they would have said so, since declaring that Blizzard isn’t totally dependent on WoW appeared to be part of the exercise.  It it had been 65% or 70%, they probably would have said that instead.

Given that, we can see right there on the slide that Blizzard’s revenue was $2,428 million, which indicates that WoW revenue for 2016 might be as high as $970 million.  Not bad for a twelve year old game.   Not as much as League of Legends in 2016 no doubt, but a bit more than Pokemon Go made in its first six months, if the number is correct.  Even if it is off by… say… 100 million… that is still a lot of income.  That is more than GuildWars 2 made in 2016, as an example.  The billion plus earning years might be behind the game, but it is still a money printing machine unlike any competing MMORPG.

As noted, Overwatch also got special mention in the presentation, so it must be doing well.  And even Hearthstone got a mention, having boosted its MAUs year over year, for whatever that is worth.

That leaves two of the Blizzard properties unaccounted for.  Diablo III didn’t have anything new to sell, so there was no real reason to expect that to show up for a special mention.  And then there is Heroes of the Storm, which has already been called out for problems that keep it from being a contender in its segment.  No mention gives that credence.

Overall though, Blizzard continues to make bank and WoW can support its 300 member development team (according to a GameSpot interview) and still turn a profit.  But with that many people working on the game, there isn’t any excuse for another long content drought.  We shall see if they can manage to avoid that before the next expansions.

YC119.1 Update Deployed Successfully

Changes were made and the update was deployed and the world kept on turning.

This time for sure!

That last bit is quite literally so, as you will find this item in the patch notes:

Astro-Oil has been diligently applied to the rotational axes of temperate planets, allowing them to once again rotate freely.

No doubt some new religious sect has spawned somewhere in Amarr space based on this and some new tract will include a passage similar to Joshua 10:13.

As I noted on Tuesday when the patch had to be rolled back, there isn’t much in the way of new features in the drop.  It is mostly fixes and adjustments, which is fine.  I doubt anybody is going to claim there are not things in New Eden that need fixing or adjustment.  The updates page adds in a couple of SKIN lines that will be available in the New Eden Store at a later date, including the Nova SKINs for Mordu’s Legion ships.

Hot Surface Warning Markings on Mordu’s Frying Pan

And then there is a song, because there is always a song.