It is Friday and, while I have posts that I could put up today, I wanted to cover a few small items that popped up this week, if only to write them down for discussion later. As usual, just marking the dates with a bullet point post.
King of the Kill Dethroned
In a surprise move… to me at least… Daybreak announced that their battle royale game H1Z1: King of the Kill, already under pressure from hot new contenders like PlayerUnknown’s Battleground and Fortnite, decided that one of the things it needed to do was simplify the games name.
So they cut one side of the colon. The side with what I sort of considered the actual name.
The game is now simply called H1Z1.
H1Z1 – October 2017 logo
Back where we started in 2015 when there was only one game with two modes and a single name. Only the other mode is now Just Survive.
H1Z1 2015 Logo
Daybreak gives a several dubious sounding reasons for the change, ending on what was likely the real answer”
…having the word ‘Kill’ in the name of the game can be limiting with some global audiences…
I have to admit that I cannot, off the cuff, come up with a widely successful game with “Kill” in its name. Maybe they’re right.
Of course, none of that changes the fact that the two titles mentioned above are eat H1Z1’s lunch, that the game is still in Early Access after saying it would be released last year, and the planned console port is still just a wink and a promise.
Oculus Price Cut
Facebook announced a price cut for the Oculus Rift. The unit, which started off at $599 back in the day, will now be $399 and include the Touch controllers as well, at one time additional cost items.
That is a better price, though I am still in the boat of having to upgrade my PC first to be able to support their VR implementation. I am at the very minimum spec for the Oculus Rift, and we now how well minimum specs work out. And there still isn’t a must-have game or app out there to push me forward.
Facebook also announced the Oculus Go, priced at $199, but then didn’t say much about what the hell it actually was. According to the Game Informer post linked above, the Go unit is stand alone and comes with one controller and a lot of promises. So I am not sure what that even means. Can I watch movies on it?
Empires of Kunark Still Half Price
Back to Daybreak, where the Norrath titles are in the middle of their annual expansion run up. I’ll probably compare and contrast the pre-order offers at a later date.
But as part of that both EverQuest and EverQuest II put last year’s expansion up for sale at half off the original price for a limited time.
Empires of Kunark – Half Price through Tuesday
If you wanted to get all of the goodies that came with the more expensive packages… well… they are less expensive now, though you don’t get any price credit for having bought the base package it seems.
Half Price Pricing, Buy or Upgrade
As usual, being a subscriber gets you an additional ten percent discount.
Lockboxes and Gambling
This has been going around due to a petition to the UK government to declare lockboxes a form of gambling. This seems silly to me as lockboxes do not meet the required win/lose scenario of gambling. You always get a prize. That it is not the prize you wanted is irrelevant and you don’t get to claim that virtual good have no value if you only mean the ones you don’t like.
The above doesn’t mean I like lockboxes and I don’t spend money on them. I think they are a predatory device that plays to the same weaknesses that gambling does. They just aren’t gambling any more than Pokemon cards or the gumball machine at the grocery store. Chance alone does not make something gambling.
Meanwhile devs offer responses as to why they use lockboxes. Spoiler: They have families to feed, so are apparently absolved of any moral issues.
Meanwhile, Activision has patented a system to punish you for not paying to win, which can include buying lockboxes, so welcome to reality. Good luck playing for sympathy with that on your side.
It had been on my wishlist for a while as something interesting to look into, but the early access label kept me at a distance until I saw SynCaine’s write-up on it. That was enough to flag it as safe to buy, but even a little while with it told me it was a game which needed some time devoted to it, a good game to while away the hours with once the weather turned chill enough to have a legit reason to stay inside.
Now, as the nights have grown longer and the weather a bit more chilly, I have finally gotten around to RimWorld.
My elevator pitch for the game is that it has all the sticking power of early SimCity at a more micro level. Like SimCity it moves along constantly (though you can pause or speed things up) and you don’t control the people in the game directly. Instead you setup tasks for them to do. And, of course, keeping them happy is important lest they face a mental breakdown which, best case, will have them huddled in a corner for a while. If they have the pyromaniac trait they might start setting fire to everything instead.
The game itself looks somewhat like Prison Architect and Escapist 2 and probably a few other indie games with stylized characters.
The default scenario starts off with three people in a wrecked spaceship landing in their survival pods on a semi-tamed planet, a world on the rim of explored space. Once down on the planet your three stranded characters have limited survival gear so must setup a camp in order to survive.
In the first shelter built
Each character has certain skills (e.g. shooting, melee combat, cooking, crafting, medical, etc.) they bring to the mix, but nobody is strong all over. (Though skills improve through use, so that person who is only level 1 in cooking may become a chef some day.) They also have some traits, things they enjoy, things they will never do, biases and weaknesses.
That first mix with three characters is pretty vital because once you are down you’ll need to build shelter, defend yourselves, and start working on a food supply. Wood will get you shelter, beds, and some covered storage, while the bits and pieces from the ship will let you setup some basic electrical network. With electricity the first thing I always build is a freezer to store food indefinitely.
I tend to over-focus on food. But the first few runs food became a problem, so now I end up with excess rice and potatoes. You can hunt as well, but there is a bit of risk in that and you need a butchering table to process the prey into raw food to be cooked and skins for clothing, so I start with rice, which grows quickly, along with harvesting the local berries.
Another setting you get at the start of the game is placed in the context of telling the story of your adventure. You can choose what sort of story it will be. You can have a tale where nothing bad ever really comes your way, or when events like packs of wolves or raids by nearby settlements come at regular intervals, all the way up to facing a series of ever more powerful kaiju attacking your base.
Well, maybe not kaiju, though there are a lot of mods out there for the game, so there might be a kaiju option. There is certainly a Star Wars option… but when there are mods there is always a Star Wars option.
Meanwhile your characters need to go on surviving day to day while you try to keep them happy and on task. Their mood and ability to go on are keyed into what is going on. Some things are easy, like keeping the housing area clean. Living in a dump is depressing. So it having your sleep disturbed, so you have to split up sleeping quarters to make sure the early risers don’t end up next to the night owls.
And then some of your characters are boosted by specific things.
Sammy saw somebody die and it was intense!
If they grow too unhappy they may wander off or have a psychological break. I had one character who would start setting fires around the base when her mood got too low.
Their relationships count as well. Sometimes they bond or become lovers or hate each other and will start fighting and need medical care.
And then there is their past history. I had one guy who had a smokeweed dependence going in, so eventually I grew some and he became happier. But then other characters started smoking too and I ended up with one guy who would go off and binge on the stuff for a day at a stretch.
Likewise I grew hops to brew beer and ended up with a character who ended up disabled from alcohol abuse. She had to stay in a medical cot all the time and have people feed her.
So, while there is an end to the game, a winning and losing scenario where you either escape the planet or all die off, I spend lots and lots of time just managing the day to day operations and expansion of the base, managing supplies, setting tasks, dealing with bandit raids, mad animals, and trading caravans, and just generally making sure things are getting done.
Mae is setting fires again while Jova and Queenie are disabled
It all ends up being something in which you can lose yourself for hours at a stretch. This is probably the first game in a while where I have sat down in the evening to play for a bit then realized hours later that everybody else in the house has gone to bed and I am up way past my own bed time on a work night. I have played little else over the last few weeks, save for my time at EVE Vegas.
So it has that going for it. You can just keep going with one crew for ages, adding new people to your group as you find them and expanding. Even when you suffer a set back, like that time I had everybody bunched up for defense and I found out about grenades when the raider attacking us threw one into the crowed killing two and maiming another, the colony goes on and you can rebuild.
On the other hand, sometimes you hit a dull stretch. People are happy-ish, but you are just waiting for tech to be researched or you’re short of some supply… for me usually components for building complex items… and and the random number generator just won’t send a trade caravan your way, and things suddenly lose their luster and you quit.
Still, for a Steam Summer Sale purchase I have already gotten a lot of play value out of it and I haven’t even started exploring the mods available for it in the Steam workshop.
So if you’re into the whole God-like control game where you set your people to work, this might be a winner for you.
Also, hunting with a light machine gun is totally a thing in the game. Hell, machine guns in general are pretty cool in RimWorld.
We are getting an August update this year, which I found a bit surprising. And they even kept the naming consistent for three months running. If they hit four that might be a record. Anyway, lots of people at CCP are generally on vacation during July and August, so the month has been skipped at times for lack of content to deliver.
Not this August though, this August we’re getting some… stuff… I think… even if it was delayed a day.
We got a new event. As a follow on to The Agency event, we got the Lucky Clash event starting today.
I want to say Lucky Cash… or LSMFT
This event pits the Independent Gaming Commission against some pirates known as the Redtail Sharks, and the IGC needs your help fighting them off. So from now through August 23rd you can join help defend the various IGC gambling dens around New Eden from the Redtail Sharks.
So now we’re defending casinos again? I wonder if that was accidental or deliberate irony.
Anyway, check your overview… and then go fix the settings… to find a site to defend near you.
After that, well, CCP giveth, and CCP taketh away. The other big item in the August update, as CCP announced last month, is the removal of the Captain’s Quarters from stations in New Eden.
Me in the Captain’s Quarters back in 2011… the last time I used them
The source of much of the Incarna drama, the captain’s quarters were too much or not enough of something, depending upon whom was speaking. In the end, walking in stations ended with the rejection of the Incarna release and the Captain’s Quarters have been mostly lingering ever since.
No, six years later, they are being removed from the game. CCP posted a dev blog as to why they were doing this, but the upshot is that the code takes dev time to maintain and it is standing in the way of a 64-bit client.
As somebody who went through three Fortizar fights in the last week or so, each of which would have been made better by having a 64-bit client… unless you turn down graphics the current client is likely to access all the memory it can and then crash… I applaud this decision. We’ve had 64-bit processors and 64-bit operating systems for a decade now, time to move the client forward.
I know, somewhere, somebody is really mourning the passing of the Captain’s Quarters. One of my iron laws of MMORPGs is that any feature, no matter how bad, tangential, or useless, is somebody’s absolute favorite feature, and you’ll find out who the moment you remove it. Sorry you have to take one for the team, but dealing with what tends to be called the “technical debt” of old features is painful, and sometimes you have to drop a feature to move forward.
And so it goes.
After that the August release is just fixes and adjustments to things already in the game.
There were some tweaks to how citadel launched void bombs work:
Reduce the rate of fire of the Structure Guided Bomb Launcher from 20 seconds to 40 seconds
Reduce the area of effect of Guided Void Bombs from 40km to 20km
Reduce the neut amount per second of the Guided Void Bomb by 25% (6000GJ every 40 seconds as opposed to the previous 4000Gj every 20s)
Reduce the velocity of the Guided Void Bomb by 20% (increasing flight time to keep the range the same)
That, however, is not going to be enough to change the structure shooting meta. You will still have to attack them with a fleet doctrine that can shoot when neuted out, so armor tanked Typhoons or Machariels or Hurricanes supported by cap-chaining Guardians will still likely be the only options against slower shooting, but harder hitting, void bombs.
Meanwhile, deploying Upwell Structures has been made a bit easier, and using them has been made more attractive as some of the bonuses for the soon-to-be-removed player-owned starbases have been removed. Industry and reprocessing bonuses are gone.
The beta map is another one of those features that makes my head hurt. One of my long standing gripes about EVE Online has been that the in-game map isn’t very useful.
It is pretty, and hella impressive to show your non-playing friends, but it just isn’t very practical as an in-game tool. And I say that even today, with the current map, which is a vast improvement over the state of the map back when I started playing EVE.
Seriously, I went to DOTLAN yesterday and got a database error when I tried to look up a system and my heart about stopped. The idea of not having that out-of-game map resource, and being stuck with the in-game map, was painful to even consider.
And then came the beta map, the plan for which seemed to me to be “let’s make something prettier and more impressive to look at, but even less practical to actually use.” And so the new map has lingered as the beta map for a few years now, because it was clearly a step back from the already impractical in-game map in terms of usefulness.
But CCP seems to have decided to get back to work on the long neglected beta map. The list of changes is long and impressive. Somebody spent some time on the project recently. But is that enough to make the beta map useful?
There are a pile of other small fixes that have gone into the August update. Details are available via the Patch Notes and the Updates page.
The update has been reported as successfully deployed, so it is all there waiting for us.
Still no music though. I guess the days of a new song with every update are over.
In which I play the same hand for the third week straight.
Going into week seven it looks like it might be time to break with the past. There were enough newer movies over the last couple weeks to think about a completely fresh line up. Here was the price list for our pretend theaters:
Planet of the Apes $705
Spider-Man $586
Despicable Me 3 $201
The Big Sick $143
Baby Driver $93
Wish Upon $92
Wonder Woman $68
Cars 3 $33
Transformers $30
The House $26
47 Meters Down $17
The Beguiled $12
Pirates $6
The Mummy $5
Best of the Rest $5
Planet of the Apes and Spider-Man were clearly going to dominate the box office, and were priced as such. After that though, there was a lot of room to play different combinations.
My process is to make my “gut pick” first and throw out a line up. I picked apes over spiders and built up what seemed like a sound lineup for a theater.
Then I started looking at reviews and estimates and started tinkering in my spreadsheet to see if I could come up with something better. As I put numbers in and changed them up, it became clear that Baby Driver was still priced pretty well and had a good chance of being the top price/performance pick.
Of course, that was my logic last week, and it did not serve me well. And Baby Driver was not going to do well enough for me to go all-in on it again. I needed a strong anchor for it. Despicable Me seemed to fit the bill. I could get a couple of those in and then load up on Baby Driver to fill out the selection. So, I ended up with two screens of Despicable Me and six screens of Baby Driver.
Still obsessed with Baby Driver
As it turned out I was on the right track, I just had the wrong emphasis. The optimum line up of the week was four screens of Despicable Me, two screens of Baby Driver, and two screens of Best of the Rest (which ended up being Guardians of the Galaxy), the latter winning the price/performance race with its $2 million per screen bonus.
Week Seven Perfect Pick
Failing to get on the right bus with the 78 other players who managed to get the perfect pick of the week put me $14 million behind their pace.
However, in our little blogger group it was a different story. Here are the scores for the week:
While my picks were sub-optimal, they were still good enough to squeak out a win for the week.
Ocho also went with Baby Driver, but his second place slot was secured by dedicating two screens to Best of the Rest and its resulting bonus. That put Liore in third place by just under $300,000 with what was the most picked lineup of the week, anchored on Spider-Man with six screens of the fading Wonder Woman and one screen of the now salty Pirates of the Caribbean.
At the bottom end of the list, Belghast didn’t pick for the week, so his entries rolled over from last week. Unfortunately for him, three of his picks from week six were not available for week seven, leaving him with soft picks and three empty screens. And then there was Murf who was the only other one to pick this week and not anchor on apes or spiders. Four screens of The Big Sick and four screens of Baby Driver did not serve him well however.
And so, at the end of seven weeks, the overall scores sits thus:
Liore maintained her lock on first place, while Ocho and I edged ever so slightly closer to her. At our rate of advancement I think we need a lot more than six weeks to catch her. Braxwolf made the only move of the week, jumping up a couple of spots based on this week’s performance, overtaking Syl and Murf.
And now we look forward to the week eight options, which are:
Dunkirk $667
Girls Trip $334
Planet of the Apes $299
Spider-Man $266
Valerian $219
Despicable Me 3 $148
Baby Driver $70
Wonder Woman $57
The Big Sick $54
Wish Upon $33
Cars 3 $22
Transformers $14
The House $10
47 Meters Down $6
The Beguiled $5
Dunkirk has great reviews so far and looks to be the sure fire box office winner for this coming weekend. However, war movies are not usually date movies… I’ll probably have to go see it myself, as the wife and daughter won’t be interested… so it won’t open like Wonder Woman or Spider-Man, with estimates putting it over $50 million this week. Girls Trip, also opening this week, seems likely to drain off some of the young adult female demographic. That is still very strong and it is priced accordingly. Like the British Empire, you can only afford one Dunkirk.
The other big new arrival on the list is Valerian and the City of 1000 Planet. While it is from acclaimed director Luc Besson and was promoted heavily as part of his Fifth Element 20th anniversary tour earlier this year, first week estimates are still somewhat soft based on middling reviews, putting it behind Girls Trip, which is slated for $20 million. (And it has better reviews as well. So, despite it being new on the line up, it is down the list in pricing, which might make it a decent gamble if it does better than expected. I know we are likely going to go see this over the coming weekend, so that is two tickets you can count one.
And then there is Girls Trip which my gut says is prices a little too high on the list, and you can only have two screens of it. It needs to do $30 million to justify that price, and is only estimated to hit $20 million, so I will be interested to see if this makes it into many picks.
As predicted/expected/hoped, the Steam Summer Sale went live at 17:00 UTC today.
Summer Sale Comes Again
I have been much less ambivalent about the upcoming sale than I have been in past years. I am feeling the itch for a new game or three. So as soon as the sale went live I checked my wishlist and… nothing I added recently is on sale.
Ah well.
This year the activities are driven by quests to obtain sticker by performing various activities. Going through your discover queue is the obvious one, but there are other tasks.
Sticker pack for checking my prefs
Of course, the immediate heavy load on the store meant that such tasks led to errors, but it will smooth out once the rush to find the inevitably comically mis-priced items has died down.
Since my wishlist let down my initial rush of enthusiasm, I’ll have to stalk the store to see what I can find. Or maybe I will buy something I really want at full price. It’s been known to happen.
My time with Guild Wars 2 continues as the game of chasing objectives on the map gets me to log in for a bit every day.
That game
My time spent per session slipped some over the last week or so by my reckoning. I did manage to wrap up the Glendarran Fields zone.
All boxes checked off
There is something of a pattern to finishing off a zone which includes the inevitable vista that I have to Google in order to figure out how to access it.
From Glendarran Fields it was into the Hirathi Hinterlands, featuring more of the same objectives and the now normal herds of centaurs.
A couple of people have suggested other zones to avoid the centaurs, but I do not find them to be objectionable in any way. At worst, fighting them is no worse than fighting goblins or orc or gnolls or whatever bad guy stand-in you care to choose. Also, gotta avenge my sister. Also, they do seem a bit comic when examined closely. I keep wondering how they pick things up when they drop them. The upright humanoid torso at the front of their otherwise equine bodies don’t seem to have the reach.
In the Hirathi Hinterlands I made it to level 40.
Level 40 unlocks
However, the last three levels came about due to a daily reward that gave me three boosts good for one level each. That was timely, as I had taken the wrong path in the zone and was getting in a bit over my head. It is better to be a couple levels too high and get down-leveled in GW2.
Hitting level 40 also unlocked the next round of my personal story, this time in Lion’s Arch. That yielded some upgrades and another level. While there I used the opportunity to buy and collect a couple more upgrades, including a significantly better longbow. Then I ran around and picked up some of the points of interest in the city as well.
After that it was back out to the hinterlands to lay in wait for more centaurs.
Waiting for the next wave to hit
And so it goes. The centaur menace must be opposed.
Not much changed here and WordPress.com didn’t add anything that particularly annoyed me this month, so pretty much the status quo.
As it is May I guess I can talk about my other blog, EVE Online Pictures, the one-time experiment that became an official EVE Online fan site. It turned nine years old this month. Next year I will devote a whole post to its anniversary. This year I will just post the usual page views per month chart.
EVE Online Pictures – Page Views per Month through May 2017
You may need to click on that to see if full size in order to make it legible.
Anyway, that is the page view tale. You can see the sudden drop off when Google changed how image search worked in February of 2013. Traffic to the site can be very much peaks and valleys. There is a fairly regular group that hits the site on the three days a week that I post a picture. At that rate after nine years the total post count is just past 1,300. There were times when I was just posting twice a week, and a month stretch during the Fountain War where I posted every day.
But then something will happen and boost stats suddenly. During January and March CCP Phantom used a picture for the EVE Online week in review post and linked back site. That prompted a couple of spikes, including the highest page view count in a single day back on January 17th with 939. That was quite a jump for a site that generally has 25-50 page views a day.
And sometimes a person will show up and scroll through the whole site. The theme I use there lets you page down while it keeps loading content, so you can browse all the pictures without needing to click. I will log on and see a spike of 50 page views, but only two unique users have hit the site. So while the uniques to page views ratio for this site is about 1.5, for EVE Online Pictures it runs from 2.5-4 most days.
Anyway, my time capsule of pictures from New Eden carries on, there waiting to be browsed. There are some 2006-ish classic graphics all the way through to whatever is current. New stars was the latest thing and I have a few of those up already.
There was word about Pokemon Sun & Moon, Civilization VI, EverQuest II prestige servers, the tribulations of WildStar, and the WoW Legion Beta, all in one bullet points post.
In space the Casino War was still a thing. We were huddled up in the back room of the Quafe Warehouse in Saranen plotting ways to strike back and keep the war going. We threw industrials at sovereignty. That got us a foothold back in Fade for a bit.
38 Studios went tits up due to managerial incompetence. Not how you run a start up. But the myth of what greatness might have been lives on, fostered primarily by those whose reputations would benefit from such tales.
The owners of Allakhazam, long a staple of EQ knowledge, sold off their gold selling RMT wing, thus removing that taint and a host of gold selling ads from the site.
SOE officially announced the Rise of Kunark expansion for EverQuest II, keeping the game firmly on the nostalgia train. Meanwhile, I had a suggestion for the new Arasai race.
cash and carry price list daybreak
[I think you and I are talking about different Daybreaks]
how fast travel eve
[Clone jump is about it, and you leave your ship behind]
show me the planets in the world
[I don’t think it works that way]
nes classic in 25 years
[That’s about the wait to get one]
www pngporn.com
[I don’t even know how this got you here]
EVE Online
I don’t feel like I have played all that much… but then I look at my list of participation credits and I guess I did go on some fleets. Reavers have been out and about and blowing things up. We killed four Astrahus citadels in one evening. I just tend not to post about that until the deployment is done.
There was also the first Blood Raiders Shipyard event, which turned into a bit of comedy in the end. At least I got to go out and see a bit of the battle. And, having bookmarked the spot, I was able to guide Mark726 out to it so he could do a post about it on EVE Travel.
Minecraft
The Minecraft server remains pretty quiet. Aaron has been back a bit and must be working on something. I have been logging on some myself and wandering up and down the north mansion road and doing improvements to some of the villages and other rest stops along the way.
Pokemon Sun
I have been slowly but surely trading away at the GTS in order to expand my National Pokedex coverage. I am close to finishing up the first two generations. I also signed up and tried the May International online tournament. I battled six people and lost to five of them. Three of them beat me with the same pair of Pokemon using the same moves. I’ll have to write about that.
Pokemon Go
There was an event this month that made rock Pokemon more common for a week, as well as reducing the distance required for your buddy Pokemon to earn a candy. That actually got me a couple of new Pokemon this month as well as helping me level up to 28. I also managed to finally evolve one of the first generation starter Pokemon to its final form, getting an Venusaur at last.
My basic stats this month:
Level: 28 (+1)
Pokedex status: 166 (+11) caught, 187 (+9) seen
Pokemon I want: Gyrados
Current buddy: Magikarp… only 230km more to get enough candies for a Gyrados
Runes of Magic
Runes of Magic was sort of the guest host game for the month of May. I jumped in at the start of the month and was pretty much done with it by the time we got to the last weekend. It does still feel like 2009 in Taborea… though you’ll have to decide for yourself if that is a good thing… even if the screen has gotten a bit more cluttered since launch. I think they have hit the limit for the number of icons around the mini map. I won’t say I am done with it forever, but I am done with it for the moment.
Coming Up
Steam Summer Sale? Summer is just twenty days away in the northern hemisphere, and said sale usually starts right about then. A price break might get me across the threshold towards buying Rimworld. Been on my wishlist for a while, but “early access” is a red flag to me these days. SynCaine seems positive about it though. And Zubon seems happy with Mini Metro, another game that has lingered on my wishlist for a while. Maybe I will buy some stuff.
I also need a replacement for Runes of Magic to fill the fantasy MMORPG void. Actually, I might have a replacement lined up, and those with a keen eye for detail might be able to tell what it is.
My daughter says that I must play Pokemon: Magikarp Jump on my phone. We’ll see if that warrants a post.
In New Eden we remain deployed, which means more ops to go on and fights to be had.
The Ashes of Creation Kickstarter campaign winds up in a couple days. That is closing in on the $3 million mark, so the question is just which stretch goals will be achieved… and what the post-campaign fund raising will look like. Star Citizen has proven that you should never stop asking for money.
Otherwise, I am not sure what the next month will bring.
As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, what I am playing is driven as much by what I am in the mood for as anything. No amount of “I should be playing…” will get me to launch a game.
And moods come and go. Today I am playing a lot of Pokemon. Next week I might tire of that and move on to something else.
But mood alone can only go so far. Mood gets me to log in, sets up the scenario. Then I need a task, a direction, a place to go. I can be very task oriented, so I need a plan or a goal to work towards. I was in the mood for EverQuest II back in December, but the plan for progress never solidified and I walked away.
All of which brought my thoughts to World or Warcraft. I am not playing it currently, but I expect that I will eventually. Curse has been keeping my addons up to date. The Legion expansion lost my interest after running through all the zones and finishing up the quest lines. Beyond that and hitting the level cap I ran out of goals there.
But the 7.2 update introduced both new content and a good goal.
now running in Azeroth
Unlocking flying in the Legion expansion is the sort of task I could see myself coming back to the game to run down. It requires a lot of work, but the tasks themselves are not insurmountable on their own… they were even reduced in scope… and knocking them out as I went would provide a feeling or progress. Progress feeds the soul of the MMORPG achiever.
The problem is that Blizzard threw a monkey wrench in the gears for me with the 7.2 patch.
The new feature where mobs scale to your item level seems bizarro world bad.
And I even understand the problem they are trying to solve, a problem I have bitched about myself, the trivialization of content.
You can see that issue just by starting a new character in WoW and running up to level 30 or so. If you insist on running all the quests… which is to say, you want to consume the actual content and see the various zone story lines through to their conclusion… you will soon find you have out leveled the quests as they go gray on you while any foes are now so weak in comparison that Blizzard actually made a piece of gear that was effectively the “false swipe” move from Pokemon that would not kill mobs so you wouldn’t sneeze and slay an NPC you needed alive. (I think it was the toy foam sword, though I could be wrong.)
So there is an issue there. This was addressed to a certain extent in the Legion expansion at launch by making the initial set of zones auto-scale to your level. After you were done there, everything else would be at level cap.
You still had to keep up with gear progress. But that wasn’t so bad, and gear progression is one of the things in WoW that makes you feel good, especially in the case of weapons. Few things make you feel like you’ve grown stronger than being able to smite down a foe more easily than before.
But now when that hot new piece of gear drops and your item level count goes up, your foes get tougher as well. That effectively kills the good feeling you get with gear progression, at least out in the open world. If you’re running instance or raids it is a different story. And, as somebody with a strong achiever streak in them, this rains on my achiever parade.
In an attempt to solve what I will cop to as a legitimate problem it feels like they have just made a new one. It reminds me of the tale where a guy gets cats to chase away the troublesome mice, then dogs to chase the troublesome cats, and so on until he ends up with elephants and has to get the mice back to rid himself of the pachyderms that are literally knocking his house down; it feels like a solution that just changes the problem rather than solving it.
Of course, I haven’t actually resubscribed and logged back into WoW to give it a try, but the feeling that this may suck makes that less likely to happen. And all the more so since I haven’t seen much about the topic of late. Maybe it wasn’t that bad. Maybe people quit and left over it.
Yesterday we got another minor patch on top of the YC119.3 update that gave us a new feature. Per the updated release notes:
Added a Total Net Worth counter to the character sheet. This is accessed by clicking a ? icon in the character sheet header. This counter updates once every 5 minutes.
So now not only can you see your total ISK on hand by checking your wallet, but looking at your character sheet will give you your estimated net worth. Clicking on the question mark will break the two numbers out so you can see how much you hold in ISK and assets.
Wilhelm… the background color behind the name is sub-optimal
This isn’t a startling new thing. Some third party apps, such as Neocom on iOS and the internal GSF utility EVE Thing have been able to give you such an estimate in the past.
However, then citadels came along and mucked everything up on the data front, something we’ve yet to recover from. The two apps I mentioned just don’t know about any assets you might have in citadels, while EVE Mon reliably crashes every time it tries to tell me a sales order was completed in a such a structure. Since I don’t really pay attention to the CREST API stuff, I can’t tell you if that isn’t up to par yet or if the utilities haven’t caught up, but citadels certainly seem more opaque than stations when I go hunting for data.
Anyway, I am actually surprised my widely spread assets are valued at that much. Almost 22 billion ISK seems like a lot of money for me to have tied up in stuff. I have an Archon and an Apostle, which together add up to maybe 5 billion ISK. But other than that, I have some normal-ish sub caps, none of which likely exceed 300 million ISK in value, and then a bunch of modules and ore and other crap strewn across stations all over New Eden.
So I suppose the next logical feature to ask for is some sort of ranking list to show what assets are tying up how much wealth, because my gut says there is probably 10 billion ISK worth of stuff I don’t use stored away somewhere.
After we moved into the old house… our first real, single family detached dwelling in the mold of the suburban American dream… and had settled in a bit, it became time to get a cat. We had a cat at our old condo, a charmer named Woody, but he had passed and we decided not to think about another cat until we had settled down in a new home. Getting there took a while, but once we had ourselves established in the autumn of 2000, we went looking for a cat.
Two cats actually. The thought was that a pair would be happier. And so one weekend we picked Felix from a rescue shelter. He was an adult can of unknown age who had been living in the parking lot of the IBM facility on Cottle Rd. in San Jose. When that was closed, the woman who had been feeding him collected him up and brought him in to find him a real home. He was happy and friendly and liked people and warmed right up to me, so he came home with us the day we met him.
The next weekend we went searching for a companion. Since I had chosen Felix… or maybe he chose me… my wife was looking for a cat for herself. After some searching we came across a black kitten with a white tummy, white paws, and a little diamond shaped white spot on his forehead. He wasn’t a tiny kitten, but about five months old. My wife thought he was adorable and so we brought him home.
Earliest known picture of Oscar, hiding under our bed
He came with the name Dylan, but we changed that to Oscar, to match Felix as the “Odd Couple” of cats, and it turned out to be quite the fitting name.
When we brought him home we followed what we had been told and set Oscar up in the guest room with the door shut to keep the two cats apart until they grew used to each other. That lasted for about 30 minutes. They were almost immediately on either side of the door sniffing and meowing and obviously anxious to see who was on the other side. There were no hostile signs, so we said, “What the hell” and opened the door and the two became immediate buddies.
Felix sharing his catnip pillow with Oscar
But while the two of them were pals for life, they had very different personalities. Felix had to be around whoever was over to visit, greeting every guest, and was always happy to sit in anybody’s lap. He was the good cat, gregarious and happy and always in the thick of things.
Oscar, on the other hand, was quite reserved. He loved Felix and my wife, but held himself aloof from the rest of the world. I joked that it took him five years to get used to me, but it was about the truth. He wouldn’t go out of his way to find me, but would seek out my wife day and night to be close to her, preferably in her lap.
Felix would be in the thick of thing and Oscar would be peeking around the corner or sneaking around the periphery of any event, keen to know what was going on but not willing to go out there with all those strangers. He was also always getting into everything. While Felix was content with things as they were, Felix had to know what was under, behind, over, and around anything in the house. He could be quite the wiener, and his nickname quickly became Oscar Meyer.
And then my daughter showed up and there was a whole new world of adventure for Oscar Meyer. There was some combination of new stuff and a little human that was constantly around my wife and who, no doubt smelled a bit of her, that made my daughter and all of her stuff of immediate interest to him. I don’t think my daughter had been home for more than 10 minutes before he appeared at her bassinet to see what we had brought home.
What do we have here?
Of course, he immediately tried to get into the bassinet with her and curl up. She was nice and warm and that was a trait he loved in people. We had to keep a close eye on him and even had to get a mesh “kitty tent” to go over my daughter’s crib to keep him out once she started sleeping there. But her stuff was his stuff as far as he was concerned and looking back at the pictures he was around her and my wife a lot.
Life with Oscar and Felix was good. They were pals and Felix, who would welcome anybody in our house, took up the slack with visitors as Oscar remained wary of strangers and really only liked my wife and daughter for years. I remained under suspicion.
Of course, when it came time to go to the vet, I was the one who had to stuff the kitties in their boxes. Felix would go easy, but Oscar… who could somehow sense I was coming for him even if left no evidence about… would run and hide under the bed the moment I glanced his way. I recall once having to take the mattress and box spring off the bed to get at him. Still, once in a while he would show up and hang out with me.
Hey, is that Age of Kings you’re playing?
Felix, older and having lived a harder life in his youth, passed away just about eight years ago. Oscar though, he was in his prime at that time. He was king of the house and soon had to rule over two new kittens. The coming of Fred and Trixie worked out well, and the three of them became pals, with the two younger cats cuddling up with Oscar.
Black and white fur at rest
With three cats, everybody in the house had one. Oscar remained ever my wife’s cat, while Fred would sleep with our daughter, and Trixie would hang out with me… though she would cuddle up on my wife in bed. She knew where the warmth was.
Fred and Trixie were not with us long however. They both suffered from a congenital issue that cut both of their lives short, feline aortic thromboembolism. Fred went a year before Trixie, and in the interim she had to have a new cat to call her own, so Rigby joined us as a kitten.
Not being black and white, the new tabby kitten wasn’t welcomed very warmly. It took a while for Trixie and Oscar to accept Rigby, but eventually they did.
Trixie, Rigby, and Oscar together on the tower
By this point Oscar was slowing down. He was still king of the house, and held court on the couch where he would welcome any guest and sit in their lap… so long as it was warm… but he was more interested in sunny spots and treats than running around and playing. Then Trixie passed and it was just Oscar and Rigby.
Those two were not pals. When Rigby was young he wanted to play when Oscar wanted to sleep. Later when Rigby came into his adult size, he stated testing Oscar over who was really the boss. There were the occasional fights, but mostly it was the kitty equivalent of “I’m not touching you, I’m not touching you!”
Oscar trying to pretend Rigby isn’t there
They could be cuddly at times, but their rivalry was never far from the surface.
And Oscar was getting older and slowing down even more so. The vet told me a couple of times that 12 to 15 years is a good life span for a healthy cat. Oscar hit 16 last year and was closing in on 17 this year, but time was telling on him. His hips were bothering him, so we got him a heating pad to sleep on during the day. He had gone deaf at some point, which meant that an already vocal cat had no real way to gauge his volume. He then got a bad ear infection about 18 months back that took a long stretch to go away with antibiotics, a respiratory infection late last year that sapped his strength before it was over, and then this past January an episode that looked like another ear infection (head tilt, problem with balance) but which the vet thought was an issue with his brain; not a stroke but some sort of episode. His blood pressure was very high and in addition to his other symptoms he was blind in one eye.
I started writing this post after that day at the vet because he looked to be done, even crawling under our bed to be some place dark, something past cats I have owned have done that indicates their time has come.
Then he bounced back a bit. The “maybe this will help” medicine the vet gave us seemed to actually help. He got up on the bed with us the next day. His balance improved, he could get around the house on his own, and he started eating again. He wasn’t eating much though and he was far from his old self. We made him as comfortable as we could and offered up food he really liked just to get him to eat more. Even Rigby (mostly) stopped being a pain to Oscar and would groom him.
But it was borrowed time. Oscar was eating less and less and was losing weight. Even for an older cat who slept a lot already, a lot of his time was spent asleep. And then when I got home from work Wednesday I found him in the middle of the floor of office. My wife said he had used the litter box, but then just stopped in the carpet there and wouldn’t move. She had food and water close to him, but he was just sitting there. I found a cat bed he would occasionally deign to sleep in, put it down next to him, then placed him in it. He curled up there and slept. He did not move until the next morning when he was trying to walk to our bedroom. I picked him up and put him on the bed in the dark room and he curled up again and stayed there.
I was working from home yesterday and my daughter was home sick from school, so we kept an eye on Oscar, but things did not look good. There was no interest in food or water. I let my daughter take him out in the back yard where it was warm (72 degrees) and sunny to see if that would stimulate him. Oscar has never been outside and has shown no desire to ever leave the house. But as a cat any new environment is of interest to him. He explored a bit, but could barely go a dozen steps before having to lay down and rest for a bit.
Out in the grass
While he was out there with my daughter I called the vet and made an appointment for one last check before the end. We all went to the vet and cried a lot as we said good bye. He is at peace and suffers no more, but we are still sad today and miss him.
The end of an era. We always grow attached to our pets, but after 16 years the bond is very strong and the parting all the more difficult. Oscar had been with us since before my wife was even pregnant with our daughter, and we used to joke, when my daughter wanted a sibling, that he was her older brother.
It is even difficult to choose pictures to post of him. We got our first digital camera as a gift just before we got Felix and Oscar and he has been a kitty of the digital camera and then the iPhone age. There are literally hundreds of pictures of him to choose from. But I think my favorites are from the early days, when he and Felix roamed our house and were such pals, and when Oscar just had to get into everything, so I will add a few more of those to the end of this already over-long post.
