The Agency and Finding Agents in New Eden

Yesterday I was on about how most of my time in New Eden has now been spent in null sec space.  Today I am back to something of a more PvE, if not wholly high sec, in nature.

That is The Agency.

The Agency started out during the summer as something of an event framework.  I called it The Temp Agency since there wasn’t much on offer.

But CCP had bigger plans for The Agency.  At EVE Vegas they revealed their vision for The Agency, with it eventually becoming the one stop shop for all PvE content in New Eden.  With the Lifeblood expansion later that month the update for The Agency was in place, with a dev blog to show us the way.

I meant at some point to write something about the new interface that The Agency offered, but never quite got around to it.  I used it a few times to find some Resource Wars sites to run, but for something like anomalies the probe interface is simply more efficient.  Also I hate that it has a definite article as part of its name.  I’ve had to restructure at least one sentence so far in this post because if sounded odd because of that.  My pet theory is that we refer to The Mittani as “Mittens” more because it removes the definite article than because we like the nickname.  But that might just be me.

Anyway, The Agency looked nice but felt a bit awkward in my hands.  You could find what you wanted, but you still had to know what you were looking for.  And while having a map in the middle of it seems like a good idea… it does at least show relative positions of items on the results list… the map is really too small and detailed to deliver information well.  CCP seems stuck on the idea that star maps must show the actual relative position of stars rather than doing something ala DOTLAN and giving us an abstract but clear view of systems.

For the most part I forgot about The Agency as things like the massive Alpha Clone update arrived.  But now The Agency is back on CCP’s list of things to do, with plans for the coming January update.  Specifically, according to a Dev forum post, the plan is for the following:

• The Agency is getting Factional Warfare, Incursions and Expeditions added to it along with some new cards for Ice sites and Epic Arcs
• The Journal is being stripped back to a couple tabs with all the removed functionality going to The Agency or other appropriate window like Contracts or Planetary Colonies
• The Agent Finder is being removed and finding agents will be handled by The Agency

The first bullet seems fine.  I suppose the PvE sites in Faction Warfare fit the bill, even if they are in a PvP environment.

I will have to see the details of the second when they get to the promised Dev Blog about all of this.  We shall see.

But the third, the removal of the Agent Finder, that strikes a nerve.  It strikes a nerve because we’ve been down this path before.

For a long stretch of time… from August 2007 through to July 2011… one of the most popular posts here on the blog was one entitled How to Find and Agent in EVE Online.  That was because for ages finding agents from within the game was a bit of a pain in the ass.  Click on that link to see what I mean.  Generally the preferred method was to use a third party site to find an agent, but I wanted to detail how to do it in game.

And then came the Incarna expansion.

I bitch about Incarna in EVE in the same way I bitch about Cataclysm in WoW.  There was a lot wrong in Incarna, both in details and in direction, but it wasn’t ALL bad.  And one of the shining lights of Incarna was the current Agent Finder interface. 

Finding Agents for the Imperial Chacnellor Corp

It was simple… certainly relative to the efforts previously required… and the button to bring it up was put in a few places so people could find it.

Agent Finder in the Captain’s Quarters even!

I wrote up a post about it which pretty much marked the end of life for my original post about how to find an agent in EVE Online.  CCP had essentially fixed the problem they had and people stopped searching the web to figure it out.

CCP messing about with the “currently working reliably” Agent Finder makes me twitch a bit.  So I went to go look at how The Agency interface handles finding agents.

As it turns out, when it comes to filters, The Agency has everything the Agent Finder had for filters, with a couple of additions, like being able to show the “highest available” agent level, which will show you when you cross the boundary from 2 to 3 or the like.

Finding Agents in The Agency

So far so good.  Then I brought up the Agent Finder just to make sure that both methods were returning the same results.  A life in software has made me a mistrustful soul.

The Agent Finder over The Agency Window blocking the map

I was happy to see that, with the same criteria entered, both interfaces seemed to be showing the same results.  And then I looked at how many were returned.

In what I imagine was an effort to keep The Agency from fire hosing too much data at new players, the results list in that interface is limited to a dozen agents.  The Agent Finder gives you 32 results for the same criteria.

I get the idea of keeping results down so as not to confuse… and maybe the last few agents that are 27 jumps away won’t be the most important to everybody… but I also have a long standing bias against any system that omits or hides information from me.

My hope is that CCP will figure out a way to resolve this or, absent a solution they can implement in the current time frame, punt on the plan to kill the current Agent Finder.

My fear is that they’ll say, “Hmm, good enough” and just go ahead as planned.

But maybe that will open up an opportunity for a new popular post about finding agents that The Agency won’t display.  Possible click-bait titles for this:

• One Weird Trick to Find More Agents!
• See What The Agency is Hiding From You!
• The Agency Hates This Guy!

Timewalking to Northrend

Timewalking has been in World of Warcraft for a while now.  This is where they open up dungeons from past expansions, reworked to support players in the current expansion.

Re-using old content and making it viable in the current context/meta of the game is something I am totally in favor of.  I just haven’t participated in the whole Timewalking thing up until now.

That is mostly because I haven’t been subscribed and playing for about the last year, so I missed the previous events.  Now that I am back though I took an evening to look into what was going on.

I was lured in by the fact that the current event is for dungeons from the Wrath of the Lich King expansion, which was provably the peak of my interest in WoW.

That was the only expansion I stuck with from day one through until the next expansion drop.  Unfortunately, the next drop was Cataclysm, about which I have a list of gripes, and which started my pattern of starting expansions, go away for six months to a year, then coming back to finish them off after Blizz has unlocked all the content and fixed the more egregious issues.

(As an aside, Wrath of the Lich King was launched nine years ago yesterday.  That seems like a long time ago now.)

However, now that I am back and enjoying Legion, timewalking is also an option, of course I was going to indulge myself in the current even and travel back to Northrend and the instances I knew so well at one point.

I did a couple of the instances before figuring out that there was a quest for the event that would award some additional benefit in the form of vendor tokens, so I grabbed that and kept on going for a while.  Going back to the old haunts was a nice little break from Suramar, and didn’t slow me down too much.  I have been on a WoW binge for a bit now.

Slaying King Ymiron again

The event was popular so queuing for it in Dungeon Finder was quick, even as DPS.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from the dungeons themselves and how they might scale or what drops one might get.  I was quite happy with the ilevel 880 timewarped Northrend gear I got, which was both an upgrade over what I was currently wearing as well as giving me a bit of the old school WotLK look.

Vikund and the Knights who say “Ni!”

There were also artifact boosts for every boss and vendor tokens along the way, though the drops from dungeon mobs themselves were still seemed to be in the WotLK level range.

Finding the vendor took a minute though.  When I completed the event quest it told me to go find the vendor in Dalaran.  However, he was nowhere to be seen in the Legion Dalaran, so I had to think about the best way to get to the WotLK Dalaran, the two co-existing in the game.

I decided to take the portal to the Vale of Eternal Blossoms in Pandaria from the Legion Dalaran, remembering that there was a portal from there to the WotLK Dalaran.

Passing through Pandaria

That got me to the correct Dalaran where I was able to find the vendor, standing in the center of town with a crowd around him.

The vendor is in there somewhere

The quest turn in actually gave me quite a few tokens to play with, tripling the tokens I had earned along the way.

The reward

The tokens can be turned in for various bits of gear… though honestly I got so many upgrades that there was only one piece that was a semi-side-grade for me… or tokens to up your standings with various Northrend factions… not helpful since I am exalted with all the factions for which there are tokens… and some expensive things like a mount.  I’d have to run a lot more dungeons to get there.

The list of things from the vendor are over at the WoW Head timewalking guide.

It was there that I also learned that there were only six dungeons in play for timewalking, which explains why I saw some repeats.

The limited rotation wasn’t all bad.  My main worry was pulling The Oculus, the gimmick instance most likely to cause a rift in a group in the entire expansion.  Dungeon Finder groups fall apart doing that on normal mode.

What is probably my all-time most run instance ever, The Nexus, was on the list so I got to run a victory lap there.  I even remembered to jump during the last fight.

Still, I wouldn’t have minded doing Utgarde Keep or a couple of the others.

Which leads us down to the experience of running the instances now, so many years later.

On the one hand, it was fun in its own way to romp through a few old places.  I even remembered how most of the fights went.

On the flip side the problems with both timewalking and Dungeon Finder were apparent.

The ilevel reduction to make the instances something of a challenge doesn’t seem to be enough.  This is doubly so since I noticed I was getting credit for doing Heroic instances in doing these timewalking dungeons.  The power/difficulty ratio barely put these on par with normal mode dungeons at level.

And then the real problem with Dungeon Finder, which isn’t jerks or the unhelpful, who tend to be rare in my experience, but the speed.  When you’re in a group with strangers you’re not there to share an experience but get the reward for completion.  So each of these runs became races through the content, made all the more hasty by the ease with which we tore through boss after boss.

Ideally I would have liked to go through these old instances in a pre-made group, preferably the old instance group, to savor a bit of the history, to sit a while and listen to what the bosses have to say, to actually enjoy the fights.  But you go with the options you have, and random Dungeon Finder groups are the only choice some of us have, so you have to make the most of it.

Monday Morning BlizzCon Thoughts

World of Warcraft

Some big big news for Azeroth fans out of BlizzCon this year, the biggest of which was likely the new expansion, Battle for Azeroth.

Battle for Azeroth

I was genuinely surprised that this did not leak as much as past BlizzCon expansion announcements have.  I was also a bit unimpressed by the name.  I mean, Battle for Azeroth makes for a decent acronym unlike WoW Legion, but even Blizz pointed on that had used this phrase previously, though only as a description.

Also, Warcraft II

And so we have a new expansion headed our way about which I am not entirely enthused.  This is the problem with expansions; they eventually stretch an MMO out to in crazy directions and, unless you keep up and never take a break, it is easy to feel left behind or to ask when enough is enough?

I have in the past criticized Blizz for being unable to churn out an expansion in less than two years.  However, the flip side of that is we haven’t gone as crazy with content sprawl the way its contemporary, EverQuest II, has.  And I couldn’t even make a game list off the top of my head as to the number of zones EverQuest has.  Feeling the need to feed users a new expansion TWICE a year for quite a stretch, and then once a year since then has left EQ with a huge amount of content, most of which has been made obsolete by later changes.  The Fippy Darkpaw time locked progression server started up back in February 2011 and has, with a couple of exceptions, unlocked content at the fastest rate allowed, and still has two expansions to go before it catches up to live.

That is cool and all… it is likely the only way to get  people to replay some of the plethora of zones in Norrath… but holy crap that is a lot of mostly neglected content.

So maybe I shouldn’t be so hard on Blizz for their rate of expansion release.  Then again, if they could pace the content right, people wouldn’t care so much.  #NoMoreDraenors

Anyway, having purchased the Virtual Ticket and listened through the WoW panels, these are my initial gut reactions to various aspects of the what is coming.

Interesting:

• New places to play/explore – and a double bonus for a troll themed location
• Ten more levels
• Unlocking some new playable races
• Six more character slots per realm to allow for those new races
• All the usual new stuff with an expansion
• Islands expeditions with advanced AI behavior… this will really piss some people off
• Island expeditions in normal, heroic, mythic, and PvP levels will keep too many people from being pissed off
• Flying on the same trajectory as Legion
• Another stats squish… this time with ilevel!
• Bigger base bag eventually if you use the authenticator

Not so interesting:

• Horde vs. Alliance being played up as a central theme
• New playable races look remarkably like current playable races
• 100% boost in playable elf races
• Legion legendaries pretty much getting tossed
• Azurite collection being the real central theme
• The Heart of Azeroth? Somebody been watching Titanic?
• War Fronts – Maybe this is Keen’s Warcraft 4 RTS?
• New social features, if only because nobody I know plays WoW anymore so my friend’s list is almost always gray

Outstanding questions:

• Will that level 100 boost I haven’t used turn into a level 110 boost?
• Launch date?

We are, I will admit, a good year away from seeing this, so there is plenty of time to hammer out details, but I wasn’t carried away with that “I’m going to delete all my other games and play this forever!” temporary enthusiasm that can come with new expansion announcements.

Also on the list of things for WoW is expanded zone level scaling.  The whole WoW Legion thing about every zone being the right level for you will be hitting other parts of the game with the upcoming Patch 7.3.5, within some parameters.  You will, for example, be able to play from level 60-80 in either The Burning Crusade or Wrath of the Lich King content.  Since, as things stand now, you will burn through the ten levels each provides long before you finish the content, this could be a boon.

Likewise, Cataclysm and Mists of Pandaria, both currently five level expansions, will scale from 80-90.  So you can skip Cataclysm and play the excellent zones in Mists of Pandaria.

Sounds good in theory, I will be interested to see how it plays out in practice.  I suspect that you’ll still outrun the levels bracket if you insist on doing both the quest chains and dungeons.  And, likewise, I suspect that you will effectively be able to do one expansion or the other and mostly not level out before you’re done.  They say you can switch back and forth, but the xp curve just isn’t going to support doing all the things from 60-90, the way that the current 1-60 leveling experience fails to support that.

WoW Classic

I’m just going to call this its own product for now.  No details, no timeline, and even Blizz admits that the obvious and potentially divisive “what is vanilla really?” question remains very much unanswered, but lots of reactions.  I think in the local blog neighborhood there were initially more posts and comments about WoW Classic than the expansion.  Some examples:

• Inventory Full
• Keen & Graev
• Parallel Context
• Priest with a Cause

Posts and comments were all over the map, with surprise, enthusiasm, and disdain all represented, but it was a lot more positive than I thought it might be.  There was a very strong hate vibe towards any thoughts of classic back when Blizz was on that side of the argument.  Now that seems to have dissipated some.  Maybe because WoW Classic is getting its own development team so won’t be seen to be stealing resources from mainline WoW?

And, of course, the press was in in with “What the hell Blizz, you said you wouldn’t/couldn’t do this?”

My own favorite was the Steve Messmer piece over at PC Gamer (I even met him at EVE Vegas!) where he interviewed J. Allen Brack and made sure to take him to task for his 2013 BlizzCon comments about the prospects for a Vanilla WoW revival, the infamous, “You think you do, but you don’t” response. (Recorded and on YouTube of course.)

Telling people the don’t really want something that they’re asking for like you know better is never a winning play, and doubly so in the face of the popularity of other similar ventures in MMOs like EverQuest and RuneScape.  Fun stuff.

Meanwhile, a lot of what Blizz said about WoW Classic was set in the future tense.  It sounds like they had a small group do some research and found a viable path forward.  Everything else, however, seemed to couched in “we will,” “we’re going to,” and “we want to.”  Basically, when Bhagpuss said something about the year 2020 I realized that we are at the tail end of 2017 and wanted to amend that with “the end of 2020… if we’re lucky.”  As I tend to say, we shall see.

And one of the lingering questions in the back of my head is how much will this cost?  Is this going to be a freebie people get with their current WoW subscription, which seems an obvious but not certain assumption, or will it really be its own product right down to the billing?  My guess is that it will be bundled with WoW… I think part of the reluctance for Blizz to roll another subscription MMO is not wanting to make people choose between their products… but we won’t know until Blizz tells us.

StarCraft

StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty is now free.  So you have to pay $15 for remastered StarCraft but StarCraft II you can just download.  Yes, that isn’t exactly like matched against like, and old StarCraft is also free, but I find it amusing.

I also continue to feel a barely perceptible vibe that remastered StarCraft is getting a boost as a competitive esports platform while StarCraft II is heading more into a PvE, co-op, story line future.  Maybe that is just me.

Diablo

Not much, as expected.  Really, only two 30 minute panels, one essentially about four Twitch streamers and one about the necromancer visual effect.  The Diablo franchise is asleep.  I suppose it is better than the long hibernation the franchise had after Diablo II, what with seasons and all, but nothing new is on the horizon.

Those Other Games

New heroes, maps, and/or card packs as applicable.  And they’re still fixing Heroes of the Storm.

BlizzCon Itself

As somebody mostly interested in World of Warcraft, I have to admit that I do pine a bit for the days when BlizzCon was really WoWCon with a StarCraft tournament along for the ride.  When I looked at the schedule I didn’t see a lot of WoW, which is something that made me consider skipping the Virtual Ticket.

But then there were the “What’s Next,” “Deep Dive,” and “Q&A” panels for WoW were all informative and worth going through. (The Q&A panel always makes me feel really good about the WoW community, because the questions are often either things I wanted an answer too or wished I had thought to consider) Those three answered a lot of the questions about the new expansion.  The three bullet point lists above about WFA I made during the opening ceremony and then updated as I listened.  I probably still missed some things… I know I did, actually… but I feel more informed.  And, as I tend to say, hearing how the teams present these things adds a layer of information you don’t get from the recap on the news sites.

Likewise the WoW art effects panel and creating a dungeon boss panel were both interesting to listen to, if less informative about upcoming products.  They were interesting from the angle of hearing about process, especially the boss creation

And then there was the Behind Blizzard Worlds panel, which was a nostalgia tour of Blizzard and products and ideas and who championed what and who was against this or that to start.

Contentious items included the whole Horde vs. Alliance things, which the EverQuest players, including Rob Pardo, initially felt would divide friends.  He got over that and we are seeing a renewal of that factional rift again with Battle for Azeroth.  I think, in the end, the server silos divided more people that the factions did, and the two factions did give us two story lines to play through with each expansion.

The real world 24 hour clock of Azeroth also faced a lot of push back.  Again, anybody who played EQ immediately thought of night time as dark and dangerous and thought the game might be nearly unplayable during prime time for most gamers.  Instead Azeroth is gently lit, and very playable, day or night.

And then there were the mistakes they made and the games they cancelled that shaped the company’s philosophy.  Don’t cry for Titan, it wasn’t the first MMO Blizz canceled.  Before WoW there was an MMO called Nomad that never saw the light of day.

So, while I would have liked more WoW on the menu, I guess I got a pretty good fill of information.   I want to go back and listen to the Blizzard Worlds and the Q&A panel again before they disappear from the Virtual Ticket site.  After than I will just have my memories and a pair of goofy mounts.

I think the Horde did better again this year

Neocom II for EVE Online

Third Party utilities are part of what makes EVE Online the game it is.  Without them it would be a much poorer experience.

I have been using the Neocom app on my iPad for a few years now.

Neocom for iPhone & iPad

It hooks up through the API interface and lets you view all the usual bits of information about your EVE Online characters.  You can see you wallet, your skill queue, your in-game mail, you financial information and such.  Basically it has about everything I could ask to keep an eye on, and is all bundled up in a reasonably attractive package.

So I was definitely interested when I heard that there was a Neocom II app available.

This version is made with moon goo

The Tech II indicator on the upper left corner turned out to be fairly apt.  The requirements are higher and you cannot fit as many characters.

Neocom II is a rewrite of the original Neocom app that dispenses with the old and now somewhat neglected API interface in favor of CCP’s single sign on interface.

In some ways this change is great.  When you use the SSO interface you get a lot more information out of CCP about your character.  Probably the biggest change is that SSO knows about Upwell structures in a way that the old API has not been updated to handle.  You want to see your assets in citadels, get details on sales from them, or see your market orders in such structures, you are now set.  You also get more detail on a number of things.

The down side… the bigger fitting requirement I suppose… is that the “single” in “single sign on” in this case seems to also indicate that you can only sign into a single account at a time with the Neocom II app.

Previously, with the original Neocom app, I had injected APIs for characters across four accounts and was able to swap between them in the same way you can have multiple characters in EVE Mon.

With Neocom II I can have more detail, however I am limited to viewing characters on a single account at a time.

Fortunately, the two apps are not incompatible so I just run them both on my iPad, with Neocom II keeping an eye on my main, who does most of my market stuff, and the older Neocom to peek in on the status of a wider ranger of characters.

If you have just one account, the Neocom II app is all you need.  It is a very nice addition to the family of third party EVE Online apps.  However, being a new app, it does have a few minor flaws.

For some reason I cannot make up its mind as to how many skill points I really have.

The larger number is correct

I don’t know if that is a flaw in how the app is calculating or if CCP is handing the app a bad value… or a value that is calculating something different, like all completed skills, leaving out the one being trained.

And while the app now includes assets in Upwell structures when calculating your total wealth, for some reason it believes I have 31 billion ISK in blueprints.  The old app put that number at about 300 million, and was very optimistic in that call.  Again, I am not sure if CCP is handing over bad data or if it is the app.  I do know I ought to just get rid of those blueprints.  I have a pile of blueprint copies from back when I was doing invention and I am sure they have no value at all.

Anyway, a nice little app.  It runs on the iPhone as well, though I prefer not to put it there.  I don’t need to stare at my characters that much and the small text on the small screen means I need to put on my reading glasses to see what is going on.

Friday Bullet Points for the End of September

Another one of those round up posts to quickly cover some things I thought about working up posts around, but which never quite materialized.

CCP Closes the Gate

CCP announced that as of Wednesday the EVE Gate portal on the EVE Online site has been shut down.

You shall not log in!

The EVE Gate, for those who do not know… which is probably most people reading this… was a portal that allowed players to log in and access their in-game email and calendar.  It should not be confused with the in-game EVE Gate of lore, which is how humans first arrived in New Eden.

I’m not sure how big of a deal this really is.  I think I used it twice over the years.  I don’t get much in-game email really, as my corp, alliance, and coalition have other preferred communications methods.

Riverini returned to EN24 to write a post about the demise of EVE Gate.  As CCP notes, you can use their phone app or, if you want, you can use a third party app like Neocom.  I find the latter is much more useful overall, though it won’t let you send mail.

CCP is NOT Turning Japanese

Earlier this year CCP announced that they were cancelling their deal with Nexon for Japanese localization.  NEXON was a mixed bag for EVE in Japan, so CCP decided to carry on with a single Japanese speaking employee.  Sad for the Japanese community, but at least CCP was trying to carry on with support.

I want to hear Falcon read this in Vegas

However, things have taken a further turn as CCP has asked a lone Japanese speaking ISD member to stop translating patch notes and posting them to the forums.  The person in question was doing this on their own time, but CCP felt it was confusing as it was not officially sanctioned and there was some disagreement over the translations as converting EVE Online lore and mechanics from English to Japanese is problematic at the best of times.  The tale of this, with some translation examples, is in a Reddit thread.

Free Brittania!

Ultima Online has been celebrating its 20th anniversary this month, which I haven’t covered at all since I never played it.  I think Lord British and I parted ways at about Ultima V.

Welcome indeed

The game is still alive and rolling and trying to keep pace with the changes in the industry under Broadsword’s stewardship.  Over at Massively OP it was mentioned that, along those lines, Broadsword was looking into some sort of “free” option.  As the FAQ on the UO site indicates, free will mean giving up some options that I am sure any serious player would not want to do without.  The option is called the “Endless Journey” as is supposed to arrive in Spring 2018.

Expansions Coming to Norrath, But Not for Free

Both the EverQuest and EverQuest II sites have made it clear that we’ll be seeing the usual yearly expansions again for 2017.

For EverQuest it will be the Rings of Scale, while EverQuest II will be going old school again with the Planes of Prophecy.

We don’t know much beyond the names yet, but the usual warm up events have been kicking off and last year’s expansions are now 50% off for those late to the party.

One of the usual aspects of this phase is the addition of some past expansion to the free to play access level of the game.  Usually you can buy the latest and the previous expansion and everything before that is open for everybody.  But no longer.  As Massively OP reported (a pity Feldon isn’t around for this, he’d have done a nice full story on this), when asked when the soon to be in third place Terrors of Thalumbra expansion might be made free, the official response was:

We will not be adding anything further to the F2P line-up.

Harsh words, but perhaps the flip side of something Daybreak has said before.  The Planet Side 2 team opined in the past that there is a point of diminishing returns when piling on things for subscribers.  Now we’re seeing EverQuest II declining to remove something from the paid column.

I have not seen word as to whether the EverQuest expansion The Broken Mirror will face a similar path in not moving to the free zone, but I expect that will also be the case.

And that is it for items on my list.  I’m sure I will hate myself a year from now when I try to put these into my “One Year Ago” summary.

Running some Warzone Extraction Event Sites

eve online warzone extraction wtf?

-search string that brought somebody here

Easily the most popular thing I have posted so far this week… or month… is the announcement about the Warzone Extraction event in EVE Online.  Google has sent many people my way, a pretty sure sign that the mechanics of the event aren’t clear to people.

EVE Valkyrie laughs at your confusion

So I figured it might be worthwhile to share what I learned running through some of the sites.

This event is in the structure of The Agency, and as such events go, you get tasks under The Agency icon to complete, each with a 20 hour cool down before you can do it again.  This time around there are just two tasks.

Warzone Extraction Tasks

One of the tasks is to complete a site, the other is to destroy 20 sleep ships, and they are worth 10 and 20 points respectively.

The sites themselves appear on your overview like the sites from previous events.  The sites seem a bit more sparse than some past events.  I had to go hunting for sites and rarely saw more than one in a system, with two in a single system being the max I noted.  The sites appeared on my standard travel overview without having to add anything.

Warzone Extraction sites

When you warp to the site you will land near a ship called the Quartermaster.  Sometimes, but not always, an alert will pop up with a message from him.

Message from the QM

There is also an acceleration gate there. When you activate the acceleration gate it sends you off to a pocket along with another message.

All the instructions you’ll get

When you land there will be some large collidable objects present.  If you have hidden them on your overview you (because they can be annoying and generally don’t mean much) you will have to change that or navigate by just eyeballing the wrecks in space.  There are five ship wrecks labeled Alpha to Echo and a station wreck.

Objects in the area

This where I got a bit confused because the very first site I tried also had a container visible.  I checked it and it was empty, so I moved on to find another site thinking it had been done.

Container confusion

However, I later discovered that if the site is still there it isn’t completely done.  But what do you do?

In the end I figured out what you have to do is approach each wreck.  When you get withing ~2,500 meters of a wreck it may give you a message.  The message might be about a container being discovered.  At that point the container will show up on your overview.  It might be at the wreck or it might be at the station wreck that is also on grid with you.  Once a container popped up in both locations.  I am not sure why.

In the container is the trinary relic that the quartermaster is looking for.  You can toddle over to it, loot the container, and you’ll be set for the Quartermaster’s Request task.

Off to collect the relic

The other message you may get is “Sleepers incoming!” at which point you’re going to have to fight.

I had read the post over at The Nosy Gamer about what to expect from the Sleepers that attack, the primary item being that they will use energy neutralizers on you to drain your capacitor in addition to warp scrambling and webbing you.  As I noted on a comment over there, for the unsuspecting capsuleer this might turn Warzone into Murderzone.

With this in mind I went out armed for bear with a passively tanked Drake I had sitting around.  It was the Clown Car entosis fit, but I swapped out the entosis module, cloak, and RLMLs for HMLs and a Auto Targeting system.  Later I changed out the HMLs for heavy assault missiles just to get more damage.  Fortunately meta HAM launchers are dirt cheap on the market.

The assault of the Sleepers is keyed to the security level of the system you are in.  In a 0.9 system I drew a pair of Sleeper frigates that went down to a single heavy missile volley.  They barely touched my capacitor.  Down in a 0.5 system I got frigates, destroyers, a cruiser, and a pair of battleships which combined to drain my capacitor in seconds.

Sleepers on the overview!

Of course, because this is a CCP event, the NPCs weren’t visible on the overview by default, which is why I brought the auto targeting system.  I had enough capacitor for it to activate for a few cycles and it targeted the Sleepers for me, at which point I could add them to my overview settings.

Of course, this being CCP, even the names were messed up on the first night when you tried to add them.

Wait, what?

That has since been fixed, though you still have to add each class of ship… frigate, destroyer, cruiser, battleship… to the overview separately.  The overview conspires to murder you.  That seems to be one of its functions.

Anyway, at that point, webbed, scrammed, and capacitor empty, you’re committed to the fight.  You will be mighty unhappy if you were depending on modules that required any power.  Rail guns and lasers won’t fire, repair modules are useless, and you won’t be scooting away with your prop module.

Resigned to your fate

My Drake was way over-tanked and never dropped below 88% shields, so I could just sit there and blast away at things.  I chose the Warden first, as it will rep other ships.  Then I hit the frigates, as they will aggressively go after your drones.  Once they were gone, it was out with the drones for the cruiser and then the battleships.

The short range of the HAMs was not a limitation most of the time as the Sleepers stay within web and scram range for the most part, which keeps them in your damage envelope.  There was one Sleeper battleship that pulled range on me and seemed to be able to neut me out to almost the 75km mark.  That put him way out of HAM range, which was 25km for my alt.  But that also meant he couldn’t web or scram me, so I decided to let him be rather than chase him down in a slow slog without a prop mod.  I was marginally faster than him, but it looked like it might take me as much as 15 minutes to close into shooting range.  Screw that.

The wrecks yielded boosters from the event… the damage and speed boosters were of value, but the tank boosters were for active tanks which, given the neuts present, wasn’t much good at that time… as well as Sleeper components to sell on the open market.

Interestingly, there were NPC buy orders up when I got around to selling those components.

The Emperor Family bought my stuff

I don’t know if this is a standard thing or if CCP foresaw the market getting saturated because of the event and decided to put a floor on the price.  I suspect the latter because I saw a lot of much lower buy orders out there.  That about off-set the drones I lost, the ammo, and the HML launchers I bought then traded out.

Anyway, that is getting ahead of myself.

Once you defeated the Sleepers and loot their wrecks, you’re ready to go.  If you’re feeling diligent and have not yet approached all the event wrecks you can do that until you have been to Alpha through Echo.  I have had Sleepers appear on two wrecks in a site.  But if you’re set, you just motor to the acceleration gate that is close by and activate it.  That will take you back to the Quartermaster.  Approach his ship and put the relic in it… it acts like a cargo container… and you’ll get credit for the site.  If that event task is active, you’ll get 10 points.  It if isn’t you seemed to get squat.  Such is life.

If you need to blow up more Sleepers then it is off to another site, but first you might want to repair, especially if you’re drones are damaged.  Fortunately there are publicly available citadels all over New Eden now, so you can just warp to one, tether, and wait a bit while it refills your capacitor and repairs your ship and drones.  Then you’re ready to go again.

I did both of the tasks which was enough to get to the first prize from the event, a support kit from The Agency.

Reward unlocked!

The reward was another event booster, of which I already had half a dozen.  So far I have just seen boosters and Sleeper drops.  There was a promise of SKINs somewhere, both fantastic and new, but maybe I just haven’t hit one yet.

Potential rewards: Fantastic new SKINs, useful Boosters, Skill Accelerators, valuable loot, and more

–Warzone Extraction Event announcement

Anyway, in summary:

• Warp to Warzone site
• Take acceleration gate
• Fly to wrecks
• Collect relic and/or kill Sleepers
• Take acceleration gate
• Give relic to Quartermaster

Also:

• Be passive fit – Anything that needs cap might not be available to you
• System security influences Sleeper difficulty

And, to follow up, a few screen shots from various points during the event.

 

 

 

In Search of the Thousand Dollar Video Game

Last night Keen saw fit to retweet this gem, which is the sort of statement than makes me shake my head in dismay.

In a world of $5 lattes a game with 50 hours of content is worth $1,000. Instead, many won't touch a game until some stupid Steam Sale. https://t.co/xoEDKpxeyj

— Michael Hartman (@Muckbeast) August 24, 2017

There it is again, the false comparison between lattes and video games, with a game dev angry that people are not paying enough for his product.  Even the go-to comic from The Oatmeal to cover this is more than five years old now. (Clicking on the image will bring you to the full comic, complete with the coffee comparison.)

The comedic exaggeration of the concept

The argument here, salted with jealousy, seems to be that all luxury goods are equal, so your should baseline for deciding where to spend you money should be solely factored on the value one gets in return.  In that world, the fleeting experience of a latte pales in comparison with the many hours of enjoyment a video game can bring.

Except, of course, that is specious at best and more akin to complete bullshit for most people.

The buying decision for a latte is never formulated as “What is the best value for my money today?”  In my experience the situation is more akin to, “I NEED coffee NOW!”

I don’t actually drink coffee, so I might not be the best person to make that assessment, but that is what it looks like from the outside.  I have seen developers get panicked and upset when they mislay their coffee mug and I am keenly aware how often we have to stop at Starbucks so my wife can get her favorite coffee beverage. (She prefers a “soy caramel macchiato,” which might as well be a magic incantation so far as I am concerned.)

Anyway, video games likely never come into the buying decision.  The latte experience is so different and so removed from video games that comparing the two is… well… I already used the words “specious” and “bullshit” didn’t I?  That.

So whining about people buying lattes instead of your video games is just a self-serving attempt to blame other people, including your customers, for your own problems in a cheap attempt to milk some guilt out of them.

And what are your problems if you’re a video game developer?  I think a lot of that has been covered elsewhere.  But then there is the video game market itself.

The video game market is overloaded with choices, most of which are uninspired imitations or direct knock-offs of worn-out concepts we’ve seen many times before hidden behind a series of horrible user interfaces that defy people to actually find the gems in the huge steaming stack of dung that is the video game market.

Imagine if Starbucks was run like Steam.

You’d have thousands of different lattes, each with a name that might or might not relate to what was actually in them, vaguely described, with mashed-up references to sub-genres of coffee drinks.  You would have to order them from a computer screen where you could only see 20 or so at a time.  Oh, and some of them aren’t compatible with your coffee cup, while others say they might be, but probably require you to upgrade your cup in order to enjoy them fully.

How is that for an analogy?  Let’s push it even further.

You can… slowly… look at latte reviews, but some of the positive ones are from people who were given a free latte, while some of the negative ones involve aspects outside of the latte experience.

Meanwhile, every previous latte you ever ordered from Starbucks is still available to you.  You can look in your latte library and see them all.  There are some in there you really liked, but probably a lot more that you barely even took a sip from.  Sure, you might be a bit tired of the ones you like, but they are reliable, certainly more palatable than most of your attempts to find a fresh new latte.

Oh, and then there is the Starbucks Summer Latte Sale and the Starbucks Winter Latte Sale, during which many lattes are marked down from 25-to-75%.  If you aren’t dying for that specific latte right now, you can wait and it will probably be cheaper.  Seems like a good idea, unless all of your friends are simply raving about some new latte.  You’ll buy that one right away.

I’m tempted to bring GameStop into the picture and examine the situation where you can return your latte for credit on a new latte, but I think I have pushed the envelope of absurdity far enough to make the point that comparing video games and lattes is an argument for the dim, desperate, or drunk.

While I too scoff at people putting down five bucks for a latte, connecting that to video game sales seems ludicrous.

Instead, they are a form of entertainment.  Video games are fun, not food.

As such, they compete with other forms of entertainment.  Here, the original tweet claims the entertainment value for video games should be $20 an hour.

That would make video games a pretty expensive form of entertainment.  My immediately to-hand similar comparisons:

• Movies – $20-25 per person for 90-180 minutes of entertainment, including popcorn and a drink.
• Books – $12 for a paperback, $30 for a new release hardback, 4+ hours of entertainment
• Audiobook – Varies, but I just wrote about an $18 book that is more than 7 hours of entertainment
• TV – Even being gouged by Comcast, probably close to a dollar an hour as much as our TV is on
• Netflix – $12/month, used enough to be under a dollar an hour
• On Demand – HD movie, 90-180 minutes, anywhere from $4-12, whole family can watch

At $20 an hour, the value proposition for video games doesn’t look so hot.  When you’re argument is undercut by Comcast, you’re on the wrong side of history.

Which is not to say I do not see the entertainment value in video games.  My Steam library runneth over, my history with them goes back more than 40 years, and I write a video game blog for Pete’s sake.  I love video games.

But if you think playing the bitter game dev, shaking your fist at your customers (and potential customers) and blaming them for not giving you what you feel you deserve, I have to say that you’re not doing yourself any favors.

And, after all of that, I have to admit that I did find a video game that hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people have paid over $1,000 to play.

It is called World of Warcraft.

I know I have spent more than that much, counting the base game, the expansions, subscription fees, and the occasional cash shop item.  Blizzard was just smart enough to not ask for all the money up front.

Of course, the Gods of Irony must be paid their due.  This shining example of a video game that many, many people are willing to spend that much money on… is the sort of game he disdains in a subsequent tweet.

So most gamers just give up and keep playing League of Legends or World of Warcraft and forget about trying to find anything new.

There is the problem.  It isn’t that we’re not willing to spend that much money on a video game.  It is that we’re not willing to spend that much money on the “right” video game.

I think somebody in the comments on the corrupt developer post made the music comparison.  A lot of people want to get into music, be a rock star, and live the lifestyle.  But there is only so much room at the top.  Likewise, in the video game business you get a few really successful games, and a few devs rich enough to afford to become space tourists, while the rest labor on, never achieving fame or fortune.

Anyway, cranky rant over.  I’ve been down this path before.  It is a pet peeve of mine.  Keen posted about this as well in his more optimistic tone.  You might prefer that.  I’m just too jaded to buy this sort of blame shifting.

Blogger Fantasy Movie League – Week Twelve

One of the problems, as the summer blockbuster season peters out and your into the dregs of the season, is that the movie press, ever keen to make predictions at the peak of the season, wanders off and stops giving you hints about what the given movies in a week might do.

Box Office Pro, one of the sites I watch, and the site that provides the official numbers for the weekly results, was providing two predictions posts a week, with updates in between, early in the season.  Late in the season… well, they might do one post… maybe.

Not that you don’t get some hints as to what should do well and what may not.  The weekly pricing scheme is essentially a set of predictions.  It is just a very early set, done before reviews or testing social media penetration or whatever other entrails the movie press examines in order to come up with numbers.

So for week twelve, the penultimate week of the season, we pretty much just had the pricing to guide us, which shook out as follows:

Hitman's Bodyguard  $254
Annabelle Creation  $216
Logan Lucky         $184
Dunkirk             $98
The Nut Job 2       $62
Spider-Man          $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

Meanwhile, enthusiasm within our own ranks was dwindling as well.  Three members have effectively dropped out, Braxwolf went all-in on The Emoji Movie, and leader of the pack Liore forgot to make her picks, so had to roll with her selections from the previous week.

Of course, Lucky Liore’s past picks were all still valid, leaving her with no empty screens, making me wonder if there was a strategy there.  It wasn’t obvious to me that she hadn’t picked until the first numbers came in.  Then she was at the bottom of the list, a position she held right through until the official numbers were announced.

The top movie of the week was The Hitman’s Bodyguard, which was not unexpected, and I was in on that with three screens, rounding out the rest with five screens of Wind River.

My picks for Week 12

The Hitman’s Bodyguard actually did a bit better than expected, given its low score with the critics, and at one point looked to be the best price/performer of the week, which would have been a nice bonus for me.  However, with the final count, it turned out that The Emoji Movie took the price/performance prize.

And so, a special mention goes to Braxwolf for managing to pick eight screens of the best price/performing movie of the week and still managing to be last place among those who bothered to pick at all this week.

Brax all-in on The Emoji Movie

That left the weekly numbers looking like this:

• Wilhelm’s Clockwork Lemon Multiplex – $79,032,172
• Void’s Awesomeplex – $75,556,725
• Pasduil’s Popcorn Picturehouse – $75,178,012
• Moderate Peril’s Sleazy Porno Theatre – $73,771,730
• Syl’s Fantasy Galore Panopticum – $65,247,704
• Ocho’s Octoplex – $58,620,296
• Braxwolf’s Waffleplex – $51,528,224
• Dr Liore’s Evil House of Pancakes – $44,312,427 (Forgot to pick)

I managed a first place finish, but the gap wasn’t that big, and was primarily because I was the only one to go with three screens of The Hitman’s Bodyguard.  That was the winning anchor move of the week.

If only Brax and I had combined our thoughts, me going with three screens of The Hitman’s Bodyguard and him heavy on The Emoji Movie, because those two, plus a screen of Despicable Me 3 were the perfect pick for week 12.

Week 12 – The Perfect Pick

However, as a sign of how chaotic and/or dissolute this week was, only 16 people managed the perfect pick.  I think that is a record low.

The overall scores after week 12 were:

1. Dr Liore’s Evil House of Pancakes – $1,224,086,213
2. Wilhelm’s Clockwork Lemon Multiplex – $1,179,008,520
3. Ocho’s Octoplex – $1,074,532,158
4. Void’s Awesomeplex – $1,059,475,800
5. Moderate Peril’s Sleazy Porno Theatre – $1,033,195,465
6. Pasduil’s Popcorn Picturehouse – $1,020,148,883
7. Braxwolf’s Waffleplex – $977,956,202
8. Syl’s Fantasy Galore Panopticum – $918,601,684

Nobody moved up or down in the rankings this week, the usual state of affairs.  I did managed to close the gap between myself and Liore by $35 million.  However, given that the gap was over $80 million last week, that still leaves a sizable distance between us.

I joked that my only hope was if Liore forgot to pick again, but then I looked at the lineup for the 13th and final week of the competition.

 Hitman's Bodyguard  $203
 Annabelle Creation  $143
 Birth of the Dragon $99
 Dunkirk             $74
 Logan Lucky         $73
 Leap!               $68
 All Saints          $67
 The Nut Job 2       $58
 Emoji Movie         $53
 Spider-Man          $52
 Wonder Woman        $50
 Girls Trip          $40
 The Dark Tower      $33
 Baby Driver         $32
 Kidnap              $30

That’s it.

You know a week is dead when the new movies on the list, in this case Leap! and All Saints, aren’t even in the top five when it comes to cost per screen.  So I am actually pretty sure if Liore forgot to pick again this week she would likely still take the season.  In a week where my only hope is a huge, huge win the total gross is likely to be barely enough to equal the gap between Liore and I.

Anyway, we shall see.  Tune in next week for the final score of the summer blogger fantasy movie league.