Operation Frostblind

It might be just me, but it feels like CCP cannot do two good player events in a row in EVE Online.  If they get one that is popular and gets a lot of response, the next one will be… less well received.

That is probably my memory being faulty.  I don’t run every event.  I know the Federation Grand Prix was a bust.  CCP said as much at EVE Vegas.  I am not sure how the Dawn of Liberation event went, but the Secrets of the Abyss event seemed to do well, rewarding people for running Abyssal pockets.

I think the contrast here for me is with the Crimson Harvest event we had a while back and the Operation Permafrost event, which kicked off on Monday.

Now Blinding Capsuleers in New Eden

As I wrote previously, I enjoyed the Crimson Harvest event.  It wasn’t a complete walk over, but if you fit yourself for it you could mine or zap NPCs to your hearts content, earning points towards rewards and collecting items from wrecks.  While I went in for just one SKIN reward, I rediscovered the serenity of mining while listening to a podcast or audio book and ended up going the distance on one character and continuing on with a couple more.

There were a couple of highlights for me when it came to the Crimson Harvest event.

First was the lack of scarcity.  When CCP does events based on sites spawning, they tend to be competitive.  You race around looking for sites.  Then when you find one, you warp in hoping it isn’t in progress yet.  And even if you get there first you have to hope somebody won’t warp in and get the last kill and loot the rewards.  All of that becomes frustrating if you play during peak hours, and even off peak there always seems to be somebody warping into your site to try and take the big prize.  That their bio is always in Russian is probably just a coincidence.

So for Crimson Harvest CCP put two sites in almost every system in New Eden.  I think they skipped Jita, though I saw the two in Amarr.  So if the site in your system was overrun, you could just move over one and find another.  One site in each system was for mining, the other was for fighting NPCs.  Each was fairly clearly marked.  And, when either site had been run out it would disappear off of the overview and a new one would spawn.

This meant that I could move a half a dozen systems out of Amarr and find a quiet site to mine.  The lack of competitiveness also seemed to make people relax and even cooperate on occasion.  Other players would mine happily or would chat as they dropped in to knock off any NPCs that happened to be hanging around.  It was quite pleasant in a way that events in EVE Online often are not.

The other was how nice the sites looked.  CCP, fresh from making all that pretty Abyssal space, went all out to make an autumnal space wonderland, with pumpkin-esque asteroids and bright orange nebulae.  I took way too many screen shots.

A Venture in the Crimson Harvest event

So the Crimson Harvest event set a quality baseline for me which carried over to the Operation Permafrost event.  That was probably my mistake.

But CCP did make it seem like the events would be similar.  There was to be the usual tasks to accumulate in The Agency for some prizes.  There was a promise of mining… both gas and ore this time… as well as NPCs to tackle and sites to hack.  And it was all going in another wonderfully done up skybox with a holiday theme.

The first sign of trouble was how the sites would be distributed.  This time around there wouldn’t be one per system, but just on per constellation.  Constellations vary in size, but they are rarely smaller than four star systems, so calling it five to be generous, you end up with only 20% of the sites to run that Crimson Harvest had.

Fine, whatever.  Crimson Harvest probably had too many sites.  One per constellation wasn’t going to be that bad, right?

I got together my Procurer, still knocking about in Amarr space after the Crimson Harvest event, and updated its fit a bit.

I even found an Amarr skin for it for cheap… screen shot taken later in Jita

Since the NPCs were from Mordus Legion, I made sure I was good versus thermal and kinetic damage and traded out my Acolyte drones for Hornets, the latter dealing kinetic damage.  Setup for things, I headed out to find a place to mine.

Once I found a site… The Agency tells me many things, but which system in a constellation has the event site is not one of those things… I warped to it and found three gates.

Hanging around the gates

The gates were labeled North, East, and West.  I knew that they aligned to mining, hacking, and combat focused areas, but which was which wasn’t clear to me and, once again, The Agency wasn’t helping me out.  So I chose a gate… the North gate, since it was closest, and took it.

I was accelerated into warp, through a white out of my screen, and into a very bright white atmospheric setting.

And while I am not going to complain about that as much as people were on the forums, it is a bit of a change for those were are used to the dark of space.  It is not the mellow black and orange of the Crimson Harvest.

On arriving after the north gate I found my overview loaded with NPCs.  This was clearly the PvE slaughter house.

A Mordu’s Legion ship laying in wait

I warped back to the marker and took the East gate.  That dropped me in the midst of a bunch of hackable structures.  There were also some NPCs to keep people on their toes, but the theme here was clear.

Back to the marker once more and then into the West gate.  That took me to what appeared to be mostly empty space.  There were a few NPCs around that immediately sent some missiles my way, but the site was otherwise empty.

Procurer in the bright empty sky

I sent my drones off to take them out, which wasn’t too tough.  The Procurer was able to tank the incoming damage well enough.

But I hadn’t come out to zap NPCs with my drones.  I didn’t mind doing that as a side task, but I came out to get in some meditative mining time.  So I left that constellation and moved on to the next.  There I found pretty much the same situation.  So I moved on again… and then again… and once more before I finally found a single unmined asteroid in an event site.  It was hanging in space about 300km from my warp in and my heavy tanked Procurer didn’t have a propulsion module to help scoot it along.

At that point I started looking online to see what was up with the mining aspect of the event.  Was I trailing behind some fleet of locusts?  Should I look elsewhere or just hang about hoping for a respawn.

As it turned out, the mining segment of the event only respawns at downtime.  That mean that while I am still asleep the server repopulates all the mining sites.  Then I get up, go to work, have lunch, work some more, come home, talk with my wife, listen to my daughter complain about school, have dinner, maybe watch a bit of TV, all before finally logging in about 18 hours after downtime.  During that interval pretty much everybody living in time zones to the east of me has had the opportunity to mine out all the sites, so that by the time I show up there are just the leftover asteroid or two, too far away from the warp in to even bother with.

So I set a course back to Jita.  I didn’t have any combat ships out in Amarr space for my alt so I figured I would head back there to put something together.  That Drake I use for events sometimes was there.

Hinging the event, or at least the mining aspect of the event, on downtime feels like a bit of a mistake to me.  That gave me a flavor of my old high sec mining days when several European corps used to mine out several whole systems every day before I got home, so I ended up having to move out to the hinterlands in order to find a ready supply of rocks.

I might try the combat aspect of the whole thing, but the mining portion of the event turned out to be a bust for me.  And I know I’ll be able to pick up the SKINs on the market soon enough anyway, so I might just leave it at that.

Further early opinions about the event are available over at The Nosy Gamer.

Why Fan Expectations for Blizzard are Hopeless

Fallout from BlizzCon and the Diablo Immortal announcement continues and some fans who feel betrayed by it are now looking at every Blizzard word and action trying to find new reasons to be angry at the company.

Time for the daily minute of hate

There was that whole statement made, then retracted, about Blizzard having planned to show a trailer for Diablo IV at BlizzCon.  Blizzard keeps coyly stating that they have “multiple” Diablo project ongoing, but their refusal to give us a hint as to what is really in the bag just gets more frustrating every time they repeat it.  It is feeling less like a reassurance and more like a taunt every time they say it.

And then there was Allen Adham’s statement at a press conference:

Many of us over the last few years have shifted from playing primarily desktop to playing many hours on mobile, and we have many of our best developers now working on new mobile titles across all of our IPs. Some of them are with external partners like Diablo Immortal. Many of them are being developed internally only, and we’ll have information to share on those in the future.

That practically the hair of enraged on fire.

The statement was quickly interpreted and repeated as Blizzard moving on to only doing mobile titles, with all their good developers are working exclusively on mobile, and that Blizzard is essentially abandoning PC and console games to whatever interns happen to be handy to take over the reigns.

This panicked point of view both accepts and ignores the long history of Blizzard.  Ben Kuchera did an excellent article over at Polygon about how Diablo Immortal broke the “rules” of Blizzard.  The essence is that Blizzard only ever makes games that are improvements of existing titles, trotting out the evidence with which many of us are already familiar, summed up in this list:

• World of Warcraft: Blizzard does Everquest!
• Warcraft: Blizzard does Dune!
• Overwatch: Blizzard does Team Fortress 2!
• Hearthstone: Blizzard does Magic: The Gathering!
• Heroes of the Storm: Blizzard does Dota 2!

Unfortunately, he missed a key aspect of the Blizzard story.

While it is absolutely true that Blizzard does this, they also only do this whole improvement cycle for games they are actively playing.

I was just reading David Craddock’s Stay Awhile and Listen Vol. I, received as part of my Kickstarter pledge for Vol. II, which details the early days of both Blizzard and Condor.  Blizzard’s first big title was the original Warcraft, which was, as note above, an improvement over the game Dune, which the team had played and loved.  Condor, which was purchased and became Blizzard North, was working on the original Diablo, which was a graphical version of Rogue, incorporating the random levels and monsters and loot ideas from the text game, which the key people at Condor had played to death in college.

Ben Kuchura, while mentioning David Brevik and his plans for an action RPG in his article, missed the whole Rogue angle.  It should be on that bullet point list above as “Blizzard does Rogue-like RPGs!”

So Blizzard doesn’t just improve games that are already out there, they improve games they actively playing and enjoy.  So you can see from the list above not just what they did, but the games they were playing and passionate about that got them on track to make the Blizzard versions.

And we’ve had ample evidence of this, up to and including not only tales of the Blizzard dev team recruiting from their EverQuest guild but a full on homage to EverQuest as their inspiration for WoW as part of the keynote of a past BlizzCon.

So you can see the problem here.  Blizzard devs play a game, love it, then make their own improved version.  And what happens after that?

Sure, sometimes they play their own game and realize they can do better.  Warcraft begat Warcraft II which begat Warcraft III as the tech and the team capabilities improved.  Likewise, Diablo led to Diablo II.

But when the game is good and the devs aren’t inspired to improve it because they like it as it is or have moved on, where do you go?

You get things like StarCraft II.

StarCraft II isn’t a bad game.  But the design is so close to StarCraft in so many ways that is feels like it was made just to get the original on a better engine rather than evolve the franchise in any significant way.

Likewise Diablo III, also a decent game, started off with some bad ideas likely because it was made by people who didn’t get the core of Diablo II.  When your core fans are complaining about the game being too light and colorful and that the itemization sucks… and that the cash money auction house is killing the game and looks like a cash grab… it might be better to pay attention rather than dismiss them.

But Blizzard rarely pays attention to fans.  They make the games they want to make because those are versions of the games they already play.  Clearly there wasn’t a big Diablo contingent left at Blizzard when Blizzard North left the building over a dispute with how Vivendi was pushing them towards things they didn’t want to do.

And we see it with World of Warcraft with every expansion.  In 2004 they launched something based off of the EverQuest template.  Since they they have fumbled about looking for ways to improve things.  When you’re making a product, you have free reign over ideas.  But when you have a product in production you suddenly have to listen to the customer support team and the GMs and IT team and whoever else has to keep things going every day.  You stop being as focused on innovation and start solving complaints to keep people from tying up the support line.

World of Warcraft was an improvement for MMOs the way the mini-van was for family transportation, replacing EverQuest the way the mini-van replaced the station wagon.   But after that you just refine.  The Blizzard team is adding cup holders and such.  And it isn’t because of the live team, B-list developer rumor perpetuated by angry fans.  It is because Blizzard mostly got what they wanted on the first pass, but the game made, and continues to make, so much money they felt they had to keep extending it.  You don’t walk away from a billion dollar a year game.

And so it goes.  Blizzard is never going to make another MMORPG because what would they copy?  They are never going to make another RTS because what would they copy?  It isn’t even a matter of competing against themselves as, say, another collectable card game would inevitably do.  It is simply that once you’ve made the game you really want and refined it a bit, you’re done.  After that you just fiddle and add some content or features to generate some more revenue.

So what does Blizzard do now?

They find a new game to copy and refine.  In this case, as Allen Adham stated above, the senior developers have been playing a lot of mobile games.  What does Blizzard do historically?  They copy and improve the games they are currently playing.  So this statement is a clear indicator where Blizzard is going.

The odd bit is the deal with NetEase.  That is not something Blizzard does.  So my guess on that front is that Diablo Immortal is a move more to sate the board of directors and the large investor groups than what they really want to do.  Blizzard is part of a publicly held corporation and has to bow to the whims of the shareholders, and we know rule by the masses rarely leads anywhere fruitful.  The only mistake was thinking Diablo fans would give a shit about it.

I suspect that, at best, this is Blizzard setting their mobile baseline and learning the ropes from NetEase while they work on the mobile game they really want to make… and grab some of the China market along the way, since the Chinese government is no longer approving foreign video games for domestic consumption.  But the end result, given what Allen Adham said, is that the next real Blizzard title… not Diablo Immortal, but whatever it is they are actually working on down in Irvine… will be a mobile title.

It isn’t a cash grab or a betrayal, it is just the way Blizzard works.  It is how they harness their passion for what they do best.  It is following the same system that made them the company they are today.  You can’t put a gun to their heads and force them to be passionate about WoW or Diablo again.  It just isn’t possible.  The moment has passed.

The actual cash grab is the stuff that likely interests fans more.  StarCraft Remastered.  Warcraft III Reforged.  World of Warcraft Classic.  Those are milking the fans by attempting to relive past glories.   Remastering an old title to stoke nostalgia is an excellent way to get money from your installed base.

I am not saying Blizzard doesn’t love those titles, that there isn’t a ton of affection for the days when WoW or WC3 were fresh and new.  You could see that passion at BlizzCon, when the devs on those projects… often devs who started at Blizz working on those titles… were talking about them.  But there isn’t a long and successful and lucrative tradition where Blizzard remakes one of their own titles fifteen years later.

So we will eventually get a “real” Blizzard mobile game… because, again, Diablo Immortal isn’t it… that might make people rethink mobile games.  And we will get the remakes and remasters, which will make the old school happy.

And maybe we’ll get a Diablo IV.  But it won’t be anything new.  At best it will be a good refinement based on lessons learned from Diablo III, the same way all the other games Blizzard has essentially “finished” keep going.  At least that is the way it looks to me.

LOTRO and a Legendary Launch

Yesterday was the launch of the Lord of the Rings Online Legendary server, and it was quite an event for a game that otherwise has felt a little tired to me of late.

The legend live on

Yesterday I posted a list of potential events that might happen with this launch.  I was right on a few, but off base with even more, including my first one.  The server was pretty much up on time.  Somebody tell Daybreak about that.

I was working from home yesterday due to being on call for jury duty… again… so was able to kick off the launcher to see if the server was up on time.  And sure enough, it was there.

Anor up at 17:00 UTC

It was a good thing I patched earlier in the week.  I heard that patching was going really slow at times.  But at least it did not die.

And within five minutes it had gone from red to green.  People could log in.

Anor live at 17:05 UTC

I figured I would log in, create a character, then log out and come back later.  The server had other ideas however.  While I missed the mark on the server being late, I was spot on in there being a queue.

Well, I guess I will just wait

Being in the queue I put that in the background and went back to work.

I checked back in about an hour and found my position hadn’t changed.  Thinking something was wrong, I closed the launcher and opened it up again, only to find my position in the queue had doubled with this maneuver.  I was at spot 3,335.  It was going to be a long wait.  So I put it in the background and continued on with my day.

Four hours later, as my work day was coming to a close, I found myself still in the same spot in the queue.

Meanwhile, the LOTRO team had put out an update.  They knew about the queue problem and that the overwhelming response was going to get them to put up a second server the next day, so we would have Anor and Ithil, sun and moon, with free transfers available between the two for a limited time.

A later follow up pulled the Ithil server launch in to 23:00 UTC yesterday.  I am not sure if there had been calls for a second server in the forums, but I was surprised they were ready to go on this.  Yay for planning.  The second server was online early even.

Red 5 standing by

The update also said that they had fixed the queue problem, but I am not sure that the concept of a queue was really clear to them.  It still seemed completely broken by the time I was done with work and ready to play.  Logging out and back in put me as high as 4,800 in the queue.

However, adding up tidbits from the forums and some advice from Roger of Contains Moderate Peril, who was in and playing already, I was able to come up with my own queue beating method.

I opened up two launchers.  I logged in and got in the queue with the first launcher.  Then I logged in and got in the queue with the second.  If the queue number was the same or higher, I used the “logout” option from the menu and logged in again.  If the number was lower, I swapped to the first launcher, logged out, and logged back in until I got a lower number.

This seems insane, or at least just dumb.  Yet, somehow, this worked.  As I ping ponged back and forth between the two launchers the numbers kept going down.  It was slow at first, but I would say after about ten minutes the numbers started to drop.  When I hit triple digits I was very happy, and double digits were not that far off.  And then, finally, the launcher logged me in!

Then I had to figure out what I wanted to play.  I hadn’t actually thought much on that.  But, when in doubt, I tend to have a class that I feel is the default in most games.  In this case I went with a man champion, which is the most ret pally class in LOTRO I think.  Plus I know those skill icons so well!  I didn’t even fiddle with his appearance, I just wanted to jump into the game and play, so I was quickly in the tutorial.

This was when the weight of years began to tell.  The first thing you do is get a weapon out of a pack on the floor, though in my case it was worse than the default weapon I started with.  But in getting it out of my bags, I realized that they were already full of stuff.

What is all of this stuff?

There is the ring from the pre-order and the Glass of Aglaral from the special edition along with anniversary gifts, years 1 through 11 inclusive, plus bonus items from various expansion pre-orders and specials.

One of the nice things about LOTRO is you get bags right away.  The downside is that is all you get for inventory space.  And with over a third of my bag space taken up, I was feeling the need to get to a bank.  But first I had to do the intro.

That went smoothly enough, and I exited into what I thought was Bree.  I thought that because it was so full of people.  But no, I was not yet at Bree.  This was Archet, the starting area outside of Bree.  It was full up, and had multiple instances of itself running.

Dynamic layers for all my friends!

Like so much else, I had forgotten about dynamic layers, the phasing/sharding technique that Turbine put into the game at some point after launch.  I suppose I just haven’t been in a zone that needed it for a long time.  So that spread people out some, but the starting zone was still pretty packed.  I was glad to see that somewhere along the way they also changed how mob credit worked.  Everybody who tags a mob now gets credit for the kill, which was helpful because the local fauna was being hunted to extinction.

Archet hasn’t changed much, but it has been years since I was there, so it was a series of “Oh yeah, this quest!” moments as I ran through.  I was interested to see that they had even restored a few quests specifically for the server.

The blue text declares this a restored quest

The above example actually gave out duplicate rewards when compared to the quest that replaced it. (The objectives were pretty close as well.)  But that suited me.  I got the Protector’s Helm for the stats and the Plumed Hat for the style.

The fashionable champion about Bree

I had also forgotten how pretty the world is.  I know I mention that from time to time, but it had still been diminished in my memory, so seeing the flora and the reflections in the water and all that was still surprising.  My current rig lets me have all the graphics cranked up.

Character models are still what they are though, even after the improvements.  If there was any more clipping they’d have to open a barber shop.

I carried on got that “specialization needed” alert, meaning it was time to pick my class traits.

Champion Choices

I went with the martial champion option this time on the theory that DPS would still be good but being able to tank at some point might be helpful.  I still moan about these skill trees.

I also unlocked my riding skill, and had a selection of mounts in my bag ready to choose from.  I saw a lot of people riding, though I was surprised it wasn’t more.

After Archet I headed to Combe to continue on down the quest chain, though not before riding off to Bree and the bank to empty out as much of my inventory as possible.

Back in Combe I also stopped for a bit to remember how to play music in LOTRO, one of the all time great features of the game.  I bought some instruments.  I played Istanbul (Not Constantinople) on my lute and got some applause.  I also fiddled around with a fiddle, a new instrument since I last played.  It is very good for classical music.

Playing some Vivaldi

Then it was back to the quest chain.  There were occasional problems with mobs being cleared.  No wolves in the wolf den, no Blackwolds and Bauman’s farm, no bears to find a stolen pack from.  But most of the time it wasn’t an issue.  And there are a number of quests where the constant traffic thinned out an otherwise grindy level of mob clearing one might otherwise have to do in order to reach a quest objective.

The main pain was harvesting.  I, of course, had to pick a crafting profession.  I went with weaponsmith, which means mining ore.  But ore nodes were heavily contested as people ran or rode to them as soon as they popped.  I won’t be making many bronze weapons in the near future.

I finished up my evening closing in on level 11.  I am not sure if my champion is really going to be my main.  I’ve done that class more than a few times, so I might try something else.  But it was good fun to be in the early game again.  It is fun and brings back lots of good memories, so I feel good playing.

And we’ll see what the queue is like tonight.

Others writing about the launch:

• Contains Moderate Peril

 

LOTRO Fresh Start Server Goes Live Today

I know I’m being somewhat high strung, but the whole “legendary server” thing sticks in my throat a bit.  I’ve seen enough other runs at this sort of thing and the effort here seems low.

And not low effort just compared to the amazing plans for WoW Classic or how Jagex handled RuneScape Classic or the work Daybreak has put into its progression servers for EverQuest and EverQuest II. I think even Trion did more with Rift Prime, and they were on the edge of going out of business.

But you get what you get.  Maybe success here will inspire further refinements later.

A Legend in our own PR

There are enough good things with the server that I’ll get over the hubris of the word “legendary” at some point.  A fresh start server has its own potential.  All the early zones full of people will be nice to see.  And there is something to be said about a subscriber only server.  As with the Daybreak runs, you end up with a crowd that really wants to be there.

And we do get at least one change to differentiate the server.  According to SSG, the experience gain will be adjusted in order to slow it down a bit.

Yes, you will gain XP on the Legendary server at a slightly different rate. The goal is to make sure you don’t outlevel quests in a given zone too easily, but that progress through the game also isn’t cumbersome.

This is another item of fine balance, because the standard live server XP slope leaves you outleveling zones long before you’re through.  This is understandable in an older game with so many levels where people are often running alts up.  But now we’re only going to level 50 and everybody will be on their main and there to see the old sights.

However, it would be easy to crank that meter over too far, ending up with advancement that feels like a slog or, worse, the quest chain leveling faster than the player.  We’ll have to see how that goes.

The server itself has been christened Anor, after a small town in northern France… wait, no… it is named after the sun… Anor is the Sindarin word for the sun.  No doubt SSG has bright hopes for the server, thus the name.

The whole thing is set to open up at 17:00 UTC, which is noon on the east coast of the US and about fifteen minutes ago out here on the left coast, assuming it launched on time and this post went up when scheduled.  So if you’re hearing about this server for the first time now, you’re already late!

Also, if you haven’t patched yet… yeah, you’re not playing any time soon.  The LOTRO patcher is just awkwardly slow.  It isn’t Runes of Magic bad, but it isn’t anybody’s ideal world.  I installed and launched Destiny 2, which weighs in at 81GB, about 5x faster that the last LOTRO update patched.

Anyway, I’ll be trying to log in later in the evening Pacific time, so I won’t have anything to report today.  But that won’t stop me from pondering the likelihood of what might happen today.

• Server Opens Late – Very Likely

If SSG has the server live at exactly 17:00 UTC I might concede them the legendary title.

• DDoS Attack Keeps People from Logging In – Minuscule

Who hates Middle-earth that badly?

• Login Queue over an Hour Long – Almost Assured

There will be the traditional rush for the server when it goes live, and the load will continue to rise as we get into US prime time.

• Server Crash – Even Odds

I suspect that this might be the highest load on a LOTRO server since they went free to play.

• Patching Slows to a Crawl – Quite Possible

There is going to be a lot of people patching, and SSG just pushed a big update last week.

• Patching Fails Altogether – Probably Not

I’m going out on a limb on this, because the patcher and the whole LOTRO web site was down for over an hour last night.  I’m assuming they were just working on something to prepare for the launch.

• Starter Zone Crashes – Unlikely

I think SSG is pretty solid here, though for the Shire I might go even odds.

• Hobbit with Immersion Breaking, Semi-Obscene Name – You Think?

I’d honestly be disappointed if that didn’t happen.

• Starter Zones Denuded of Quest Mobs – Mais Oui!

Yeah, this is just gonna happen.  Be ready and patient.

• Somebody Gets to Level 50 by Tomorrow – Of Course

Only if they don’t get there by tonight.  Don’t pay them any mind.  They’re just going to have to roll another character anyway if they want to play with other people.

• Calls in the forum for a second server due to crowds and queues – No Doubt

Pretty much standard item from the checklist for this sort of server event.

• SSG actually rolling out a second server – Very Low

I don’t think SSG has that in their plans.

• SSG Web Site Down – Possible

It is down as I am writing this the night before.

• No Crowds At All – Slim

SSG has done a poor job at getting the word out, but those who pay attention to the game have mostly seem to have heard by now.

• Drop in Population on Live Servers – Of Course

Most of the people interested in this server are probably already playing LOTRO.  Over at Daybreak their progression servers are their most popular.

• Complaints about the server in world chat – A Sure Thing

The problem with calling it “legendary” is that is that it sets an expectation that it might be something more than what is on offer.  And people won’t read the announcement and FAQ.  Just mute world chat.  That is my plan.

• Waiting for the Weekend and Being Happy Logging In – Seems Likely

Seems like the best plan for anybody not ready to run the gauntlet, though the following weekend will make it even easier to get on quickly I bet.

The Burning Lands Expansion Coming to EverQuest December 11, 2018

Yes, this was announced last Tuesday and I am just now getting to it.  What can I say, I was busy and pretty much had last week all written by Monday night and then there was BlizzCon to write about yesterday.

We knew it was coming.  As sure as daylight savings time gets rolled back every year, so does an EverQuest expansion appear.  Or something.  What a horrible metaphor.

Also I posted about it like a month ago.

But now things have changed.  We have some more information and you can pre-order the expansion.  So what does the 25th EverQuest expansion, The Burning Lands, bring us?

Does this feel a little “Disney” to you?

Delaying this post means I can put in the replay of the live stream Daybreak did about the expansion.

The stream starts off with three people who look like they were in diapers still when EverQuest launched and who, as with the Chaos Descending live stream from earlier in October, spend the first chunk of time talking about the stuff you get if you order the Collector’s or Premium edition of the expansion.  But after about the ten minute mark an adult shows up and starts talking about the actual expansion.

Again, I couldn’t sit through the whole live stream, but I did watch a bit, enough to see both how far the graphics have come in this soon-to-be 20 year old game and how short of current they remain.

If you don’t want to watch the live stream though, some information has been posted.  The order page describes the expansion like this:

The longstanding peace between the jann is over, and war has broken out between the djinn from the Plane of Air and the efreeti from the Plane of Fire! What has sparked this dispute and who will emerge victorious? Will you survive the Trials of Smoke and help end this conflict?

It is time to head back to the Planes and unravel the mysteries that await you there!

Back to the elemental planes, as foretold by prophecy and a need to crank out an expansion for both Norrath based titles.

The bullet point summary is:

• Luck Stat – A brand new stat that influences just how lucky you are! This stat will randomly increase the amount of gold in your split, the amount of critical damage you do, your chance to succeed at a trade-skill combine, and much more!
• 6 Expansion Zones – You’ll adventure throughout the grand and fantastic environments and architecture of the Planes of Fire, Air, and Smoke!
• New Raids, Quests, and Missions
• New Spells, Combat Abilities, and AAs
• New Collections

The Lucky Stat sounds like something new to optimize.  Six new zones seems about par for the course.  All the new stuff is, likewise, expected… though I hadn’t realized that collections, something I think of as an EverQuest II mania, had made it into the original.

Also as expected, the expansion is available in three packages.

I had to update this graphic finally!

The standard edition gets you all the expansion content, plus all previous expansion content.  So if you skipped last year’s Ring of Scale expansion, you get all that and anything else you might have missed.

And then there are the much pricier Collector’s and Premium editions.  I am not sure where I stand on these.  Over on the EverQuest II side of the house the upscale editions do deliver some significant boosts.  You can debate over whether any boost is worth $55 or a $105 in extra cost, but at least they seem more tangible that what the EverQuest versions bring you.  Going all in for the full monty Premium Edition of The Burning Lands will you get an item that teleports you to the new content, a house item that does that, a new mercenary, a stat boosting saddle, some cosmetic items, experience boosts, and familiars including the dread fire slug.

Not this however, this is a snail

That isn’t enough to sell me an upgrade to the base expansion.  But I am unlikely to buy the base expansion either, so I might not be the best judge.  I just know that I look at the EverQuest II upsells and I think, “Hmm… maybe…” while I look at the EverQuest upsells and think, “Nah, not worth it.”

Anyway, there it is, coming December 11th.  And how many 19 year old games are not only getting new content, but are able to sell it?  MMORPGs are strange.

BlizzCon Yawns 2018

Well, BlizzCon has come and gone and some of it was pretty tepid.

BlizzCon 2018

My rough draft title was just “BlizzYawn 2018,” but it wasn’t all that bad.

As I have said in the past, the problem with BlizzCon is in part because it was effectively WoWCon for a number of years, so if you were a WoW fan you had a lot of people catering to your needs and whims during that time.

Now with six franchises sharing the spotlight, if you are only interested in one of the titles, and they split the coverage evenly, 83% of the show is not of interest to you.  Nobody is getting all the attention, or even most of the attention anymore.  And if your title doesn’t even get equal time… like Diablo last year and StarCraft almost every year… or if what Blizz shows isn’t anything you’re interested in… like Diablo for a lot of fans this year… then you’re not off base to feel left out.

Anyway, I spent a bunch of time watching with the Virtual Ticket and I still found a lot interesting, even if a lot more wasn’t for me.

Opening

Mike Morhaime came out to open the show and greet everybody as he does every year. However, this time it was a farewell tour. He introduce J. Allen Brack, new CEO of Blizzard, got a handshake, and was sent off stage left for likely the final time on stage at BlizzCon.

I am still not sure how I feel about the change of leadership.  The leader gets blamed for all bad things and praised for all good ones, but in many companies is more likely riding the wave of events rather than shaping them.  So maybe the change won’t matter.  Blizz is old enough to have a culture set in concrete, and there is nothing so difficult as trying to change corporate culture.

And, of course, J. Allen Brack is this guy.

World of Warcraft

With J. Allen Brack now at the top of the pyramid they had to have the new chief of WoW come out and speak. While not an impressive figure, John Hight isn’t nearly as tall as his predecessor for instance, he did show more charisma on stage than the unemotive J. Allen Brack.  I mean, he was no Chirs Metzen, but who is? (Except for that guy in line at the WoW Q&A.)  Still, he seemed excited and invested and glad to be there.

When we got to the actual “What’s Next” presentation for WoW Ion Hazzikostas took the stage to actually get into the details as to what is coming with the Tides of Vengeance update, which is coming on December 11.  Basically, they are trying to follow the successful path they went down in Legion while improving on some of the things, like azerite armor and such.

He was followed up by Ryan Shwayder, formerly of SOE, the 38 Studios fiasco, and the Nerfbat blog, who spoke of new allied races coming with the 8.1.5 update, changes to Darkmoon Faire, holiday updates, Warsong Gulch and Arathi Basin remaster, and portal rooms in Stormwind and Orgrimmar.

Basically, lots of things are coming and, while I am not totally invested in WoW at the moment, there were things on the list for me.  Blizzard is still trying to tend to its biggest money maker, not that I doubted they would.  They haven’t addressed every little concern, but clearly there is still a lot going on.

WoW Classic

This was the interesting bit of BlizzCon for me.

First, the big news.  We got a ship date… well, a ship season anyway… for WoW Classic.  It is slated to launch in Summer of 2019, so at some point before September 23.  Going back and looking at what I have said in the past, I was clearly betting on 2020.  But the timing of Summer 2019 seems about perfect as that would put it a year after the Battle for Azeroth launch, about the point when many expansions start shedding players in large numbers.  It will also be pretty close when all those “six months for a mount” subscriptions start to come due.  It is like they planned that.

The other item is that WoW Classic access will be part of your WoW subscription, something I fully expected.  No conspiracy there to my mind.  You want to make it easy for customers to give you money.

And then there was the “Restoring History: Creating WoW Classic” presentation.  I wish they would put this up on YouTube, because it was great to watch. They spoke about how they managed to unearth all of the WoW 1.12 data from a backup of a backup and how, to solve the problem of making it run, merged it into the current WoW cand Battle.net framework.   With just some adjustment to data formatting they were able to get a prototype running.  This solved a lot of infrastructure problems for them and gave them a solid platform that works with their current systems.

Now there is a matter of paring back some of the things that come with that framework which led to a segment about their design philosophy.

Overall design philosophy

The last bit means if something is working the way it was back in 1.12, that is the way it should work.  There were some easy choices to make.

The easy stuff to eliminate

Other things were less obvious items, such as the debuff limit.  In 1.12 you could only have 16 debuffs on a boss.  That was a technical restriction, not a design choice, that they managed to get past later, so the number is now 255.  But since it was 16 back then it will be 16 in WoW Classic because to change it might change the raid and dungeon meta.  Other things they might let in, but only after close scrutiny.  You will likely be able to shift-click on in-game mail to collect attachments, but in-game mail will take an hour to be delivered.

Also, because WoW didn’t spring on us fully formed certain things will be introduced over time in waves.  The time frames are not set yet, but this is what they are considering, including the appropriate in-game events to go with them.

Raid progression

This opens the question as to whether or not they will be starting new servers over time as well, because maybe you want to run the Onyxia era raiding, but the server has already progressed to AQ.  We shall see.

And then there was the WoW Classic demo, which let you run around either Westfall or The Barrens in a character boosted and geared to the right level.  On the first day there were so many people that Westfall was effectively scourged of NPCs, even on a low population server (there were 20 servers up), but I was able to run around a bit.

Later in the evening, when the BlizzCon people stopped playing, things got more manageable and I was able to hunt the Defias and such.  While I didn’t go in with a strong mind as to how things ought to be, every time I touched the UI I was reminded of how things had changed and remember what it was like back in the day.  For example, remember how “B” used to just open up your first bag by default?  There were lots of those revelations.

Blizz has done a really good job so far, though there is clearly some work left to do.  Some random screenshots:

I am actually really impressed with how serious the WoW development team seems about WoW Classic.  This feels like Blizzard getting serious about a project and being determined to do it right, a welcome change and pretty much a complete about face from the “it can’t be done” and “you think you want this” messages of the past.

Candy Crush Diablo

This was the surprise disappointment part of BlizzCon for me.

Here is where Blizzard learned that if your user base is mostly PC gamers, with a smattering of console fans in the mix, announcing a new mobile title might not be the best BlizzCon plan.

Diablo Immortal, the NetEase created game set to bring the Diablo franchise to mobile platforms, was the only thing Blizzard had for the franchise, and did not sit well with fans in the Diablo hall at BlizzCon. Blizz had their most dedicated fans in the audience that day and managed to disappoint them en masse.

This seemed to be one of those polarizing moments. It you were an outsider or a member of the gaming press, you were likely fast to criticize the reaction of the fans. More entitled toxic gamer hate.  This is why we can’t have nice things.  Do you guys not have phones?

On the other hand, imagine if you were a fan and saw the primacy of place given to the “What’s Next for Diablo” presentation on the schedule, something that sets expectations even when Blizz tries to cool down the anticipation. The IP with the biggest announcement is always up first after the keynote. You have spent money on the Virtual Ticket or, worse, spent a lot of money getting to Anaheim for BlizzCon, and the announcement Blizzard has about the Diablo Franchise is essentially not for you. You might rightfully feel more than a bit betrayed if the only news you got was for somebody else, somebody not even at BlizzCon.

Blizzard had their core audience right there and was talking past them to some potential future fans who weren’t even watching.  I mean, they literally said that Diablo Immortal was for a market segment that doesn’t play Diablo.  So the complete lack of cheering or any enthusiasm in the crowd was a big red flag at an event where cheering is the norm. You have to have made a pretty serious con mistake to get there.

Guess what? Platform matters. Blizzard makes games for the PC platform with some titles available on console, and I am honestly surprised the PC and console players get along as well as they do. Yes, Hearthstone is available on mobile, but given that it only ever cracks into the top ten on the PC charts, my guess is that the PC demographic dominates. And Hearthstone fans were not sitting in the Diablo room.

Nor were Hearthstone fans or other mobile players at BlizzCon interested in the demo it seems. Pictures  from the demo area for Diablo Immortal showed sparse interest in the title from all BlizzCon participants who lined up to play all the other demos.

And the response from fans was entirely predictable.  We have seen it before.  We watch Disney kill Club Penguin with its mobile plan, ignoring the loud complaints of its installed base.  We saw a quite a tepid response to EVE Echoes, the mobile EVE Online game also being made by NetEase, just two weeks ago.  The saving grace at EVE Vegas was that we knew a mobile game was in the works and CCP had the good sense not to make the EVE Online keynote all about an outsourced mobile game.  Blizzard totally missed the expectations of their fans andis paying the price.  The Diablo Immortal videos on YouTube are getting a huge amount of down votes, so much so that they have removed and re-posted them in hopes of clearing the down vote tally.

You know what could have alleviated the pain of Diablo fans? Literally any news about something new for the franchise on PC.

A teaser for Diablo IV would have been oil on turbulent waters.  A mention that they were working on a remastered version of Diablo II, something we’ve suspected for three years now, would have dissipated most of the outrage.  But the only other new to announces was that Diablo III for the Switch was now available, but Nintendo had been bombarding us with that for weeks already.  Good for Switch owners, not all that interesting to the core Diablo fanbase.

I might hope we have a lesson learned here, but probably not.  Blizzard is certainly trying to walk this back without blaming the fans.  They love to stoke up that fan passion when it is going their way, so they have to eat it when it gets out of their control.  It is at least good that they get that.

As for own feelings about Diablo Immortal, I am sure it will do well with some demographic, but that isn’t me.  I like slower games on my iPad and on my iPhone I only ever play Pokemon Go, mostly because I have a small iPhone, which I prefer, so I need to put on glasses to see tiny text on the screen.  And given that the gaming press, which was so quick to jump on Diablo fans, could barely string together three nice things to say about Diablo Immortal in their own write ups, it seems unlikely that I will bother to give it a look.  Oh, and it is always online, just like Diablo III.  No single player for you!  The hits just keep on coming.

Of course, while this grabbed so many headlines and hot takes, it was only a small part of BlizzCon overall.

Overwatch

Unlike Diablo fans, those there to see Overwatch seemed pretty happy.  They got a new character to play, Ashe, and a couple of cinematics.  I don’t play Overwatch, so it is difficult for me to gauge how much this meant.

They are also getting a kids cereal with loot box prizes inside.

Lucio Ohs

This is really a thing coming in December.  A free loot boost is now part of this complete breakfast.

Hearthstone

No surprise here, a new expansion was announced, Rastakhan’s Rumble, a troll and Stranglethorn Vale themed package.  Seemed to get all the cheers Blizz could ask for.

Heroes of the Storm

A new character to play, Orphea, who is free to all BlizzCon participants.  There was also some gameplay updates slated for 2019.  I’m really at sea when it comes to HotS, but fans seemed happy.  But since I hear so little about HotS outside of BlizzCon, my suspicion is that they are happy to be getting as much attention as they do.

StarCraft II

StarCraft II got Zeratul a new co-op commander.  Also coming are building skins and the ability to earn skins and such by watching SC2 esports events.  I keep thinking I will go run the single player campaign for this, since the base game is free now… but somehow I never do.

Warcraft III Reforged

The good BlizzCon surprise, even though I mentioned it as a possibility last Thursday, was Warcraft III Reforged.

The return of RTS again

This one interests me.  I’ve been back to play Warcraft III and blogged about it.  It was the last Warcraft RTS, was very popular, and a player mod for the game, Defense of the Ancients, essentially kicked off the MOBA idea and is largely responsible for what became League of Legends and DOTA 2.  But it also came along in 2002 and once World of Warcraft hit in 2004, Warcraft III fell into the background, like everything else at Blizzard, as the company tried to get hold of the overwhelming success of WoW.

It’s legacy is huge, but timing put it in the shadow of its younger sibling, so I wonder how the remaster will play out.  It is available for pre-order at $29.99, which includes the expansion The Frozen Throne.  Or, for ten dollars more you can get the Spoils of War Edition, which gives you items in other Blizzard games including a mount in WoW.  Given that $25 is the usual toll for a WoW mount, that might be a deal.

Also, now that we have this and StarCraft remastered, Blizz might finally get to Diablo II remastered.

Destiny 2

Activision continues to try to horn-in on the Blizzard launcher.  They already have Destiny 2 and Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 in their own little roped off section.  It was announced at the start of BlizzCon that the Destiny 2 base game was available free to download from the Battle.net launcher, and would remain so until November 18th.  So if you want to try it out and have about 80GB of drive space to spare, there it is.  Of course, they hope to get you hooked so you’ll buy the expansions.

Panels and Other Events

If the gaming press had really wanted to roast gamers, they might have spoken up about how sparse the crowd was for the “Play Nice; Play Fair” panel.  That was an empty hall.  But I am going to guess the gaming press didn’t bother going either given that Google didn’t show me a single result when I went looking for which gaming news site covered it.  The press isn’t as different from the fans as they would like to think I guess.

I have long since gone off the cos-play and dance competitions.  I’m just not into it enough to care after watching it for a few years.  There are too few fresh stand-outs for me.

There were also five channels at BlizzCon devoted to “esports,” which I am putting in quotes just to annoy people, and I didn’t watch a single minute.

Still, I watched and enjoyed quite a few of the panels.  There are still some I want to watch before the time runs out on the Virtual Ticket and they disappear forever.  I think I might have enjoyed “Build A Panel: World Creation in WoW” the most, as it combined my enjoyment of looking behind the scenes on how things are made with just enough silliness.

Overall I suspect that for the rare Blizzard fan who loves all of their games equally, this was a reasonably satisfying event.  Everybody got a little something… well, except for the core Diablo audience.  But it you love Blizzard uncritically, as some seem to be demanding we should, then Diablo Immortal was good for you too.

Of course, people have been complaining about BlizzCon since the second one, during that dream era when it was just WoWCon.  The long time complaint was always that Blizz shouldn’t bother unless they have a huge announcement.  The few times there has been a huge announcement do tend to set a high bar.

However, I am fine with a tepid BlizzCon when it comes down to it.  In the end there is always more going on than I am able to watch and sometimes the fine details are more interesting than the big announcements.  And I got to play WoW Classic, which got me back to playing some WoW, so op success for Blizz on this front I guess.  I might even hit level 120.

Others in the neighborhood talking about BlizzCon 2018:

• Blessing of Kings
• Bio Break
• Kaylriene