Top Five Rejected WoW Squish Ideas

We know Blizzard isn’t exactly a font of new ideas.  When they find something that works, they like to re-use it, to hone it, and to stick it in completely unexpected and inappropriate situations.  We have had the stats squish twice already, and what essentially adds up to a server squish on retail. (They don’t merge servers like failing games! But suddenly two servers now behave like one.)  At BlizzCon we were told that the level squish is coming coming with the Shadowlands expansion next year.  So squishing is clearly a thing at Blizz.

As it turns out, there was a leak recently that showed some of the other things that Blizzard has been considering squishing as part of an attempt to revitalize the game.  A few of them have made their way to me.

Jeff Kaplan hearing about more leaks…

• Gold Squish

The economy has been a big concern for Blizzard.  They put in easy gold faucets so that casual players can obtain enough gold to stay afloat, but hardcore players exploit and farm every such faucet.  Even after boosting the cap on gold, more and more players are ending up at the 10 million mark.  The various sinks do not absorb enough gold as most of them tend to be one-time purchases and players with maximum gold tend to distort the auction house.

So the idea of a “gold squish” was floated.  The plan was to simply cut the amount of gold on every character by 50%.  The whole thing was easy to understand and affected everybody equally.

However the idea was scrapped when feedback from focus groups indicated that reinstating Blitzchung’s original year long suspension, taking his prize money away again, and incorporating the flag of the People’s Republic of China into the Blizzard logo would be more popular with fans than taking any of their gold away.

• Alt Squish

Name usage and database size are big issues when it comes to a game the size of WoW.  People make alts, roll up on multiple servers, and generally use up all the names and hoard stuff in their banks until the database tables runneth over and a new player cannot show up and roll up a new toon without putting special characters in their name.

A management consultant group came up with the idea of “squishing” player alts that had been idle for a specific amount of time into a special “conglomerate” character that would total up all the currency, experience, and inventory into a single meta character.  If a player returned, they could activate that meta character, selecting sex, race, and class and collect all of the combined assets into one new character.  Names would be freed up and the idea of being able to get a new, revitalized character might bring people back to the game.

However, somebody pointed out that this might cut into level boost sales while the database team complained that there wasn’t a lot of benefit to them unless there was also something like an inventory squish as well, so the whole idea was scrapped.

• Guild Squish

As with alts, there are many idle guilds with inactive membership roles littering Azeroth.  Similar to the alt squish, the plan was to create something like an unnamed meta guild and push together sets of inactive guilds on individual servers into them.  Which ever member of any of the guilds logged on first got the meta guild, could name it, and was named leader, after which they could do with it as they pleased.

After much discussion it was decided that it was easier to just stick to the current plan where the database team would just delete inactive guilds and if anybody called customer support about such a guild, a flag would come up to prompt the agent to tell the caller that it looked like one of the member accounts got hacked, took over the guild, then was deleted for suspicious activity, then lecture them about the importance of account security.

• Battle Pet Squish

In a little over nine years Blizzard cranked out almost 1,250 battle pets in WoW.  Nintendo and Game Freak have been at Pokemon for more than 20 years and across eight game generations still haven’t crossed into four digits.  Some at Blizz were starting to feel that maybe they had gone too fast and that, perhaps, some of the battle pets were not very… special.

A proposal was made to tighten up the battle pet roles by doing what was at one point called “the bug squish,” largely because to roach and moth battle pet population were two of the main targets.

The idea was to squish down the number of battle pets who share the same model and abilities (and have nearly the same name in many cases) to a more discreet number.  Who needs, for example, a dozen variations on the cockroach?  Roaches, moths, frogs, and a few other common model/ability families were facing the squish.

And then the Shadowlands art team spoke up and said that there was no way they were going to be able to produce 200+ new battle pets for the expansion and meet their schedule if they all had to be unique.  Already pressed for time, the idea was dropped.  Expect some new, yet very familiar, roaches, moths, frogs, and whatnot in the next expansion.

• Expansion Squish

We heard at BlizzCon that the the company felt the path to level cap was too circuitous and confusing.

Before they decided to go the Chromie route, allowing players the initial plan was to mash the expansions together to make the path through to the current expansion more clear.  However, the whole idea fell apart when the group looking into it could not come to a consensus as to which expansions to mash up.

For example, the group seemed fine with Pandaclysm.  However, the strict orderist faction felt that meant you had to either mash up the base game and the first expansion, giving you something like The Vanilla Crusade, or leave the original game alone (good plan) and end up with Wrath of the Burning Crusade.

More radical suggestions included lumping together the three Draenor/Burning Legion related expansions into Legion of the Burning Crusade Warlords, though there was a strong argument made for just  disappearing Warlords of Draenor altogether.

At one extreme point towards the end of the life of the working group it was being proposed that they mash ALL the expansions together into something like Wrath of the Burning Panda Cataclysmic Vanilla Warlord Legion of Azeroth when one wag at the back of the room suggested that maybe they shouldn’t mash any of the expansions together and just make them all scale across the the same range of levels so the player could decide.

You get to choose

The idea was accepted, the working group was disbanded, and we got the result at BlizzCon.  It was an expansion squish of a different color, but one all the same.

Daybreak Lays off More Staff

The news from Daybreak is grim again as it came out yesterday that the company was experiencing another layoff.

Oh, Daybreak…

The word began to leak out on social media, which is the usual course of events these days.  The fact that there was a layoff was later confirmed.  The number of people laid off was estimated to be close to 70, though there is no official word on that.

The PlanetSide team was reportedly hit the hardest, while the team responsible for EverQuest and EverQuest II seemed to have been largely spared.  Of course, EverQuest II has a big anniversary coming up next month and both games have expansions slated to come out before the end of the year.

The future of the company remains in question.  PlanetSide Arena, which went into early access last month, has not obtained a strong following, while earlier this year Daybreak registered some new company trademarks and created Twitter accounts that seemed to indicate a possible change in structure or sell off of the company.

Sources:

• Gamasutra
• Massively OP
• PC Gamer

MER and the Blackout

Somebody finally got back from vacation and pushed the button to generate the EVE Online Monthly Economic Report for July.

This is the first report that reflects the Blackout and the VNI nerf.  The tax increase didn’t go in until August 1st, so that will be for the next report.

Anyway, there is an obvious graph to jump into first, so here we go.

July 2019 – Top Sinks and Faucets over time

It is easy to see what day the Blackout began on that chart as the yellow NPC bounty payout line, already down considerably from previous changes this year, fell off a cliff, no doubt contributing to an actual reduction in overall ISK in the New Eden economy.

July 2019 – Sinks and Faucets

The total bounties for the last few months:

• July – 29.1 trillion
• June – 48.2 trillion
• May – 55.5 trillion
• April – 57.2 trillion
• March – 71.4 trillion
• February – 69.8 trillion

But where did it hit hardest?  Last month the top 11 regions, since I wanted to include Delve, sorted out as follows.

1. Branch – 4.90 trillion
2. Esoteria – 3.56 trillion
3. Detorid – 2.88 trillion
4. Insmother – 2.71 trillion
5. Deklein – 2.70 trillion
6. Cobalt Edge – 2.15 trillion
7. Fountain – 1.96 trillion
8. Tenal – 1.80 trillion
9. Perrigen Falls – 1.70 trillion
10. Period Basis – 1.67 trillion
11. Delve – 1.57 trillion

Delve was way down because the Imperium was deployed to the north and attacking structures in Tribute and Vale of the Silent.  And then came the Drifters and the start of the Chaos Era and we pulled back home.  Being at home put the Imperium back on top of the NPC bounties rankings.

July 2019 – NPC Bounties by Region – Bar Graph

The top ten regions for July were:

1. Delve – 4.71 trillion
2. Esoteria – 1.77 trillion
3. Branch – 1.61 trillion
4. Detorid – 1.23 trillion
5. Deklein – 1.22 trillion
6. Insmother – 1.10 trillion
7. Tenal – 1.1 trillion
8. Fountain – 1.06 trillion
9. Omist – 0.85 trillion
10. Feythabolis – 0.81 trillion

Delve is at the top again, but that number is still below even the April number, which included a the start of the deployment north to Tribute.

So the Chaos Era has hit NPC bounties, though there was a bit of a bounce back up at the end of the month.  August will show if things continue down that path or if null sec adapts.

Then there is the mining front.  Last month the top producing regions in ISK value mined were:

1. Esoteria – 3.31 trillion
2. Detorid – 1.84 trillion
3. Insmother – 1.78 trillion
4. Domain – 1.31 trillion
5. Branch – 1.25 trillion
6. Querious – 1,19 trillion
7. The Forge – 1.16 trillion
8. Fountain – 1.12 trillion
9. Sinq Laison – 843 billion
10. Metropolis – 829 billion

Delve was down in 22nd place with a mere 276 billion ISK.  Again, June had the Imperium deployed to the north, so economic activity was down.  But in July everybody was back home to face the Blackout.

July 2019 – Mining Value by Region – Bar Graph

Delve was resurgent, with Rorquals out using tech II mining drones to combat attacks on excavator drones.  The top ten regions for July were:

Delve – 5.77 trillion
Querious – 3.18 trillion
Esoteria – 2.61 trillion
Syndicate – 1.99 trillion
Fountain – 1.92 trillion
Etherium Reach – 1.77 trillion
Domain – 1.69 trillion
Malpais – 1.64 trillion
The Kalevala Expanse – 1.61 trillion
The Forge – 1.47 trillion

Numbers were up in some places, including high sec, which remains a safe mining haven, and down in others.  But was there more necessarily more mining in places like Domain or The Forge?  Maybe not.  Since mining isn’t an ISK faucet, it is valued via the market prices, which change over time.  And July saw mineral prices going up some more.

July 2019 – Economic Indices

While not up as sharply as in June, mineral prices continued to rise.  That raises the value of ore mined for the purposes of the MER and encourages more people to mine.

And then there is destruction.  The Blackout was premised on greater destruction happening.  And, overall, there was more destruction in New Eden.  The summary of all regions in June showed 38.28 trillion ISK in destruction, while July saw that rise to 40.73 trillion ISK, and increase of 2.45 trillion ISK.  But where did that destruction occur?

Last month the top regions were:

1. The Forge – 3.46 trillion
2. Detorid – 2.31 trillion
3. Sinq Laison – 1.69 trillion
4. Tribute – 1.58 trillion
5. The Citadel – 1.54 trillion
6. Black Rise – 1.37 trillion
7. Delve – 1.28 trillion
8. Placid – 1.11 trillion
9. Lonetrek – 1.10 trillion
10. Vale of the Silent – 1.10 trillion

The chart for July shows the new ranking.

July 2019 – Destruction Value by Region – Bar Graph

The top ten regions were:

1. The Forge – 2.81 trillion
2. The Citadel – 2.33 trillion
3. Detorid – 1.86 trillion
4. Delve – 1.78 trillion
5. Sinq Laison – 1.47 trillion
6. Domain – 1.31 trillion
7. Lonetrek – 1.29 trillion
8. Metropolis – 1.17 trillion
9. Providence – 1.03 trillion
10. Cache – 1.00 trillion

Delve is up, but that was expected with everybody home again.  What is interesting is that there are now more high sec regions on the list.  There were four last month, but six on the list in July.  You might credit this to the alleged war on high sec, or maybe the less well known structure war in high sec, which is a topic for another post, except that not all the high sec regions saw more destruction.  The Forge, home of Jita, was more than half a trillion in destruction.

It feels rather that destruction was more spread out in July, that the increase was the result of a wider spread skirmishes rather than the destruction of ratters and miners due to the Blackout.  And, of course, the reduction in mining and ratting seems to indicate that many players simply declined to undock due to the Blackout.

All of which leaves me bereft of big conclusions.  But that is to be expected I guess.  The Chaos Era changes modified player behavior, but will it stick or are we just in a transitional period while people adapt?

For August we will have to see how the trend continues, along with what the change in tax rate does.  Plus we still have the coming cyno changes and something about wormholes that has some people freaking out, plus other things mentioned during the Fanfest Home keynote, which may impact the September MER.  We shall see.

Anyway, all the data and charts are available to download from the MER Dev Blog.  In addition, CCP has also introduced a Monthly Security Report about how many people they have banned and what they were banned for.

The WoW Classic AMA and Layering

Another day and more things to mention about WoW Classic.  Earlier today some of the WoW Classic dev team took some time out to do an Ask Me Anything event over on the WoW Classic subreddit.

I’m going to need a new default graphic in a week

You can find the whole raw AMA here, or you can go read the nice, clean summary that WoWHead put together.

There were quite a few short and easy questions thrown out there with clear answers that I might sum up with:

• No, you won’t be able to transfer from Live to Classic
• No, you cannot send gold from Live to Classic
• No, there won’t be character boosts
• Yes, I found code I wrote back in 2005
• Yes, we have contingency plans for crowding
• No, really, we have contingency plans
• Yes, we might consider transfers for Classic population imbalances, but we’d rather you pick a lower population server right now instead
• Hunters were the hardest class to recreate and required a huge amount of work

But things went deep quickly when the team was asked about the plan and functionality of the layering technology that Blizzard is using on the WoW Classic servers, such that I want to reproduce it here:

We’ve seen some confusion about layering, both about how it helps support our launch, and how it’s supposed to behave while its active, so I’d like to both speak to it and clear up some misconceptions about it.

First, we’re absolutely committed to reducing to one layer per realm before our second content phase goes live, and the sooner we can get there, the better. The reason we can’t do that initially is that on launch day, everybody will be clustered in the starting zones, and having players so close together causes an exponential drain on server resources. In fact, the same number of players cause more server problems crammed into Northshire than they do spread across all of Elwynn Forest. We expect that even after the first couple of days, we’ll need fewer layers than we need for the initial hours of launch, and our stress tests have confirmed that expectation.

A related concern that was raised during our pre-launch test was that capital cities felt empty, but that only occurred because we left the pre-launch test running two days past its original end date, and we didn’t reduce the number of layers at all during that test. During our launch week, as the players spread out across the world, we’ll monitor activity and reduce layers as necessary, so the world continues to feel full.

Some players have suggested using sharding in low level zones to address launch demand, both because we talked about that at Blizzcon, and because it’s what they’re used to from our modern expansions. Unfortunately, while modern WoW has content designed to work with sharding, WoW Classic does not. The most obvious example of incompatible content is Rexxar’s famously long patrol path, but there are lots of other examples throughout WoW Classic. Since we want all that content to work as it was originally designed, we’ve made sure that every layer is a copy of the entire world, so you can kite Anachronos all the way to Orgrimmar, and you can ride the boat from Ratchet to Booty Bay with the same people alongside you the whole way.

Some players have asked us to use realm caps and login queues to handle the demand, and while those are tools we have at our disposal, we don’t want to rely on them exclusively, because they keep people from playing the game.

One of the most frequently reported problems during our tests was players transferring to a layer for what seemed like no reason. There were several bugs that caused this, and we’re confident we’ve fixed them. At this point, the only thing that should cause you to change layers is accepting an invite from a player on another layer. Additionally, it should always transfer the player who was invited to the layer of the player who invited them.

Nonetheless, after accepting an invite, the layer transfer doesn’t always happen immediately, because we don’t want to transfer you in the middle of combat, or before you get a chance to loot. During our pre-launch test, we saw a few reports of what seemed like random layer transfers, but when we investigated, we realized this was due to us making that transfer delay too long. The delay was so long that players could unintentionally chain one delay into another by starting combat immediately after looting. Because of those reports, we’ve fixed the transfer delay to give you enough time to loot, without being so long that you’re left wondering why you can’t join your friend. We’ll keep an eye on that, and we may decide to reduce it further.

We’ve also seen reports of people transferring suddenly at the entrances to capital cities, which was related to the transfer delays. If you’re waiting to transfer to your friend’s layer, and you enter a capital city, we ignore the delay and transfer you immediately. The long delays were making it more likely that you’d enter a capital with a transfer pending, and now that we’ve reduced the transfer delay, it will be a bit more clear that your transfer was the result of accepting a group invitation.

Regarding PvP, we saw many posts from players wondering if getting invited to a party is a good way to escape from PvP combat. I’m pleased to say there’s actually a separate, longer transfer delay following any PvP combat. We know a lot of world PvP enthusiasts are excited for WoW Classic, and we don’t want the additional layers to feel like they’re robbing you of your kills. When the time comes to withdraw from the fight, you’ll have to escape from your enemies and get to a safe place before you’re able to join your friends on another layer.

I’d also like to clarify how multiple layers work with logout. Early in our stress testing, players reported that logging out and back in would let you hop to a new layer to farm the same mineral or herb node on different layers. That was a bug, and we’ve fixed it. Your layer assignment now persists for a few minutes between logouts, long enough that by the time the game would choose a new layer for you, that node would have respawned on its own anyway.

I hope that all makes things a bit more clear.

That is quite a bit more that I knew or considered about the layering plan.  And, of course PvP complicates everything.  But the overall goal is to get the population down into a single layer while making sure that servers have populations large enough to be viable over time.

Another item of interest to me was the question of player caps on dungeons, which got the following response:

This was indeed a bug that we have fixed and you should be able to enter most lower-level dungeons with up to 10 players, as was possible in Original WoW 1.12. There are some dungeons that had specific caps by the end of Original WoW however. To be specific, all lower level dungeons available through Maraudon should have a player cap of 10, with Blackrock Depths, Scholomance, Stratholme, and Dire Maul being capped at 5 players.

As was the case in Original WoW 1.12, Blackrock Spire should also have a cap of 10 players.

Somewhere in the back of my brain I knew that you could have 10 players in a dungeon, but that was so long ago that it ceased to be a thing to me.  Also, we were rarely ever in danger of having too many people to go do a dungeon.  Our primary problem was getting at least five together for an instance.

Finally, there was an entertaining bug mentioned, which I will reproduce since it involves Skronk’s favorite priest spell:

There was a bug when two priests mind control each other the mind control itself would cancel out but the camera would still switch to each other. The result is both priests would be stuck watching each other move around which hilarious and very confusing.

And so it goes.  As noted up at the top, you can find the whole AMA here, or the more concise summary over at WoWHead.

WoW Classic and What You Need to Know

Blizzard continues to wind its way to the launch of WoW Classic, now just 10 days and 45 minutes away from the time this post goes live.

Classic is as Classic does

A new FAQ has been posted summarizing all the details Blizzard has announced for the WoW Classic launch and what to expect when it comes to content and functionality.

WoW Classic FAQ

It collects together a lot of items that have been covered before, such as:

• WoW Classic primer about running WoW Classic
• The launch time for various world wide time zones
• Number of characters you’ll be allowed
• A link to the current list of realms
• The six phases of content unlocks (still no dates though)
• The status of battlegrounds
• A link to an article about itemization in WoW Classic

Some tidbits in the mix include the fact that if you bought the original WoW Collector’s Edition and are using the same account on which you activated it, you will get the pets from the CE.

In hindsight I regret not buying the WoW CE, which is a turn around from my usual feeling of regret when I do by the CE.

However, codes from the WoW Trading Card Game will not be valid for WoW Classic.

If the FAQ and subsidiary articles do not answer your questions about the launch, Blizzard has announced that they will also be holding an Ask Me Anything event in the WoW Classic sub-reddit on Tuesday, August 20th and 10:00 PDT, which is 17:00 UTC.  Expect queues for questions I bet.

Speaking of queues, there was an update in the forums specifically about the Herod (US) and the Shazzrah (EU) realms, both of which Blizz is estimating will face login queues in excess of 10,000 users come the launch based on the name reservation traffic they have seen so far.  Blizz would like people to swap to the two new realms they opened on Wednesday, and have said they will not open up new PvP realms until those two have filled up.

Finally, if you were wondering how the beta was going, the QA team at Blizzard posted a list of player reported bugs that were fixed over the last three month.

That is all I have.  I guess I can go back to pining for the launch.

Planned VNI Nerf Hits By Surprise

Back in June at EVE North one of the things that CCP announced that they had in the works was a planned nerf of the Vexor Navy Issue, the ubiquitous ratting ride across all of null sec.  Nosy Gamer has a summary of CCP’s EVE North statements.

The Glacial Drift SKIN on a VNI

A dev blog followed that up up last week with more details as to how the VNI problem would be addressed.

The problem itself is that a single hull had become generally accepted as the right answer for null sec anomaly ratting to the point that it is rare to see anything else.  The hull was also usable by Alpha clones, meaning that disposable accounts could be used to snuffle up ratting ISK, and if the account was run by a bot, caught and banned, the perpetrator could just roll up a new account and start over.

The approach to taking on the VNI scourge was two-fold.

First, to change the VNI to make it more of a railgun platform by adding in bonuses for that while reducing the drone control bandwidth so it couldn’t field the full flight of heavy drones it had before.

Second, to reduce drone skills available to Alpha clones so that it is more difficult to AFK rat with drones.  Those changes were:

• Reducing Heavy Drone Operation from level IV to level III
• Reducing Medium Drone Operation from level V to level IV
• Reducing Drone Interfacing from level IV to level III

The VNI would remain a decent ship, just not for unattended ratting, and especially not for Alpha clones.

That was what was under discussion per the dev blog, which came out last week.  However, people logged in today to find that the VNI and Alpha clone changes had been applied without much in the way of notice.  The update was appended to the June release patch notes.

This move was unexpected for two reasons.

First, CCP generally saves these sorts of changes for monthly updates.  They get announced, mulled over in the forums for a couple of weeks, get a final dev blog, and become part of the release.  They generally don’t just show up randomly on a Thursday unannounced.

Second, there was a feeling that that CCP wouldn’t bother with the VNI nerf until the local channel blackout in null sec had run for a while.  Part of the appeal of the blackout to many in null sec was going out and blowing up VNIs.  Why make them even more scarce when they are such appealing targets?

But there we go.  The nerf hit today and people were surprised.  CCP moves in mysterious was.  I heard that earlier today CCP Falcon blew off a scheduled meeting with CSM9.

CCP Should Build its Own EVE Online Kill Board

Over the weekend we were once again reminded about how much CCP and the EVE Online community depend on unpaid third party developers for much of the game’s knowledge infrastructure.  As part of the null sec blackout both ZKillboard and DOTLAN EVE Maps hid data that we have grown accustomed to having, with ZKillboard going completely dark for the weekend.  This led to glee, annoyance, and reactive behavior by various parties.

Forget ZKill, welcome to GKill!

When Monday morning rolled around the data blackout was removed and the sites returned to normal and, while it was a cute stunt to hype the blackout idea, it also made the point that information we have grown very used to accessing depends on the goodwill of people neither beholding to us nor CCP.

Squizz of ZKillboard and Wollari of DOTLAN both deserve our gratitude and respect for what they have contributed to the EVE Online community, but part of me has long felt that their stepping up largely came about due to CCP’s failure to do so.

EVE Online is past its 16th birthday and CCP has yet to create an in-game map that is half as useful as DOTLAN. (Or, for that matter, GARPA or the PDF maps that one guy made back in the day or even the old book of maps from EON Magazine, errors therein included.)  In fact, they managed to create a new in-game map that was even less useful than the original one.

How do you manage that?  Seriously, WTF CCP?

So you can see why third parties step in and end up filling an important role for the New Eden community.

Still, the blackout behavior was, as I started with, a reminder of how much we depend on these third parties and how much things would hurt if they got tired of their mostly thankless tasks and decided to move on.  And, while I hate to get all “EVE is dying!” the game is old and has seen better days and higher PCUs.  So I think it might be time for CCP to step up and start owning some of the services to which we’ve grown accustomed.

And my proposal is that they start with an official kill board.

Why a kill board?

Well, for openers, they have demonstrated that they cannot create a useful map… or, Lord help us… a UI comprehensible by mere mortals.  But a kill board is just a web site… they can do those, I’ve seen them… which displays data drawn from a database.

Then there is the fact that we’re pretty much down to one community-wide kill board.  EVE Kill is long gone… remembered via some dead links here on the blog… and Battle Clinic likewise shut down back in 2016.

Also, the software used for ZKillboard is open source, so they could start with that.

The whole thing could be setup at the data center in the UK, so it would have direct access to all the information needed to populate it.  And, after a modest start CCP could expand upon it, adding features and reports.

The upside would be a single reliable source for kill information as well an opening to perhaps a more advanced version of a kill board.  There has long been talk about getting support ships like logi on kill mails.  I am a logi pilot and I am against CCP wasting time trying to get logi on kill mails.  If CCP ran the one true kill board, it might end up being easier for them to pull data in order to create battle reports that would list out all participants, including logi, boosters, and whoever.  And, if CCP ran it they could also tune the amount and type of data that gets posted.

The downsides though… well, it would likely take up a dev resource that might otherwise be working on something else, and they would have to maintain it over time.  As a company they couldn’t even maintain the wiki they used to have.  A lot of people don’t like kill boards for a variety of reasons.  And, as attractive as a single source of truth kill board and battle report tool might sound, the flip side is that it also becomes a an intel tool with perfect recall.  None of the kill boards have ever come close to 100% coverage, and when there were three big kill boards running they were at times comically at odds with each other.  But with CCP holding all the data, they could lay bare every kill whether you wanted or not.

I don’t want to put Squizz out of business.  But I also don’t want to be left with the anarchy of no community kill board if he tires of the work or the lack of gratitude from the community.

Does this seem reasonable?  Or should CCP tackle something else, or maybe just leave well enough alone for now?

Null Sec Blackout to be Maintained Indefinitely

CCP has not given any direction as to how long the blackout of local chat in null sec will last, but today they gave us something of a hint.

CCP says Blackout

On the lore focused World News section of the CCP site, a post went up earlier today from Ret Gloriaxx of The Scope’s Galactic Hour with this bulletin as the lead item:

SCC Confirms Limits on Nullsec Bandwidth to be “Maintained Indefinitely” Despite Fall in Drifter Assaults

Yulai, Genesis – Following its imposition of bandwidth and usage limits on nullsec FTL communications via the New Eden liquid router network, the Secure Commerce Commission has confirmed that the limitation on communications will be “maintained indefinitely due to the effects of both Drifter attacks and the ongoing Triglavian invasions on the security of supplies of Quantum-Entangled 4-Helium.” The possible impact of both Drifter and Triglavian attacks on the supply of QE 4-He has been extensively reported on by the Scope’s Galactic News Network.

The SCC has reiterated that its primary concern is to maintain the “integrity and sustainability of the liquid router network for strategic and essential communications” and noted QE 4-He resupply logistics have been put under serious and continuous strain by the Triglavian invasions. Sources within the SCC have revealed that the Triglavian attacks began to seriously affect resupply missions once the so-called “major conduits” phase of the invasion campaign began. Since the Triglavian World Arks began to spearhead the assaults, there have even been attacks on stockpiles of QE 4-Helium.

“The Drifter attacks in nullsec came close to being the tipping point for the imposition of bandwidth limits but it wasn’t until we lost an entire QE 4-He production facility to a Triglavian assault that the SCC decided to act. We’ve since lost some other stockpiles but the DED have stepped up fleet presence at all the critical locations,” said one source in conversation with Ret Gloriaxx of the Scope’s Galactic Hour with Ret Gloriaxx.

CCP has handled the events of the Invasion expansion as in-game lore and has, for the most part, declined to comment in any “out of character” way about what has been going on with the Triglavian and Drifter attack.

The one exception preceded the imposition of “delayed mode” local chat… the blackout… when CCP officially announced that it was coming, promised then gave 48 hours notice of its imposition, and started a thread on the official forums to discuss the idea.  That thread is past the 9,000 post mark as of this writing, while over the weekend much of the discussion on the /r/eve subreddit was around the blackout and its pros and cons.  Meanwhile, over at INN, Arrendis tells us that the blackout won’t fix EVE.  I never thought it would, but some people clearly have that in mind.

CCP’s return to using the in-game lore to continue the narrative seems to signal that they are satisfied with how the event went over the weekend, while the statement itself seems to indicate that we will not see an end to the blackout in null sec any time soon, at least not until the Triglavian invasion has been resolved.

Furthermore, in a mailing to promote their current multi-training certificate offer (available until downtime on the 17th), CCP uses the phrase “events going on all summer.”

Also, buy our stuff please

While this is far from a hard promise… and who knows how long summer actually lasts from the Icelandic perspective…  it does seem like we might see local blacked out in null sec into September.

Post NDA CSM Tales

The past week of tales of bots and invasion plans and what not got me peeking in /r/eve on Reddit, something I tend to steer clear of.  As with many open forums the signal to noise ratio is too high and I prefer to follow somebody on Twitter or elsewhere who will pull out the choice tidbits worth reading rather than chase them down myself.

But today my curiosity with what was going on in EVE Online paid off, as Jester of the now silent Jester’s Trek blog, known in-game as Ripard Teg, had an AMA going Reddit earlier today.

The only time I can recall seeing him in space

Jester was on CSM8 and his five year NDA expired recently, so he decided to, if not tell all, then at least provide insight on his time on the CSM and his dealings with CCP.

You can find the Reddit post here.  He has tried to reply to serious questions and has recounted a few tales he had previously promised to tell, including the reaction of CCP executive staff to the Dominion trailer.

There is certainly some new information to be gleaned from his responses.  The tale of his posting about Erotica 1 and the bonus room controversy certainly sheds new light on the affair, and not in a way flattering to CCP.

Probably the biggest surprise for me were kind words said about the former CCP Pokethulu, David Reid, who is now running MetaArcade.  My somewhat sour outlook about him involves his hyperbole around Rift and the infamous Tabula Rasa is Triple-A and Here to Stay story over at Massively when he was president of the newly created NCsoft West, shortly before they announced they were shutting the game down, something that ground Editor-in-Chief Michael Zenke’s gears quite severely.

It can be hard to discern from the outside what sort of impact any one person has on a company, but Jester seems to think he was doing a good job given the resources he had.

Aside: While digging up the Tabula Rasa story on the Wayback Machine I ran across what may be the first post fretting about titan proliferation in New Eden.  Band of Brother’s 13 titans were viewed as frightening.

April in Review

The Site

As is usually the case, my post on April 1st about what Blizzard was up to for April Fools was the traffic peak of the month, and likely the traffic peak for the year, largely driven by Google throwing me a bone and showing me in the search results for related terms.  You can see my Google search stats below.

April 1st is always a spike

That is an enviable click through rate as I understand it.

April second saw an increased level of activity as well as people continued to check in on what Blizzard was up to.  But after that traffic slowed back down to the usual reality of 2019, which is about 500 page views a day.

Even April 1st was down, ringing in at roughly one fifth of the amount of traffic I got on the best April Fools, which was back in 2013.  But I was getting a lot more traffic back in 2013, averaging about 1,500 page views a day.  I am coming to the point of view, looking at old traffic and search terms, that writing about Pokemon was the secret to traffic.  Writing about WoW isn’t bad, and all the better if you have a rant about the game as shaking your angry fist at Blizzard still gets people stirred up, but Azeroth can’t really hold a candle to Pokemon.

Hell, even with April Fools the month of April barely had more page views than March, even accounting for one less day.  Maybe writing about EverQuest trumps WoW as well.  There is certainly a lot less competition on that front.

One Year Ago

April Fools at Blizzard was mostly about World of Warcraft.

Having unlocked the four allied races available with the Battle for Azeroth pre-order, I was set to take a break from Azeroth until the per-expansion events started.  The August 14th launch date had been announced.

Ultima Online‘s Publish 99 introduced a free to play option.

Speaking of things Lord British has touched, I also played some Shroud of the Avatar and then tried to figure out who it was really targeting.  That I uninstalled it later probably meant I wasn’t on that list.  I have not gone back to it since.

Pokemon Go got field research as a new activity.

On Rift Prime I was in Stonefield.  There was also a problem with claiming mounts.

There were two Kickstarter campaigns of note, one for Empires of EVE Vol. II and the other for the CIA agent training card game.  I backed them both.

For EVE Online Fanfest was on in Iceland, where the keynote announced the coming Into the Abyss expansion and the Triglavian menace.  There was a lot of other news and tidbits out of the event, which I tried to sum up on the following Monday.  CCP also got recognized by Guinness for the Million Dollar Battle.

Actually in game, we were busy up in Fade and Pure Blind, such that I am going to just list out all those posts as bullet points:

• A Tower Without Stront
• Notes from the Pure Blind Front
• Another Structure Delivered to Fade
• Fade and the Art of Structure Maintenance
• Rising to the Occasion in Fade
• Capital Ships Battle in VFK-IV – What Year is This?
• Escalating Battle Sizes in Fade
• A Return to Quiet in Fade

Good times in space.

But, in the end, the most bizarre moment of the month was probably when Daybreak, asked if Russian sanctions might affect them, went straight to declaring that they have never been owned by Columbus Nova, despite having told us they were for owned by them since the acquisition from Sony.  Then they went on to try and gaslight the internet (always a recipe for success) including editing their own Wikipedia page to remove all mention of Columbus Nova, then issued more statements, and then had a round of layoffs, all of which just succeeded in bringing more attention to their absurd situation, to the point that I had to write a summary post just to keep track what the hell was going on.

All of which could have been avoided if Daybreak had just said, “No, sanctions will not affect us.”  A warning to PR professionals everywhere.

That kind of took the air out of the announcement that the Angarr server on EverQuest had reached the Planes of Power expansion.

Five Years Ago

Spacewar! for the PDP-1 was up via emulation on the internet archive.

The Elder Scrolls Online launched, hitting its planned April 4th date.  I did not play.

I was diving in to Pokemon X & Y, having returned to Pokemon at last.

The strategy group played a game of Civilization V that ended with a win via nuclear terror.

The Kickstarter campaign for the book A History of the Great Empires of EVE Online kicked off.  We were also watching Pantheon: Rise of the Something was splutter along after failing its Kickstarter campaign.

In EVE Online proper there was Burn Jita 3, which seemed like less of a thing the third time out.  There was a video.  Then there was the CSM9 vote.  At least there were only 36 candidates on the ballot.

In null sec we were shooting Black Legion things, because that is what we did in the CFC.  I was just happy to be using lasers, those skills having been trained up amongst my 120 million skill points.  There were also some posts about being space famous and an attempt at in-game blackmail.

But on the broader CCP front, World of Darkness was officially cancelled.

On the iPad I was playing Hearthstone and QuizUp… for about a week.

Turbine announced that Beornings were coming to Lord of the Rings Online.

SOE gave me a key for seven days of Landmark, so I went and tried it out.  SOE also announced H1Z1 and began their love affair with Reddit and got their new All Access plan running.  While on the old school front, Dave Georgeson said SOE never plans to shut down EverQuest.

Warlords of Draenor was still a long ways away.  But Blizzard was doing well on other fronts.  The instance group finished up Zul’gurub.  And there was the usual April Fools stuff.

Ten Years Ago

Dave Arneson passed away.  He was, with Gary Gygax, the co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons, that so-influential gaming system that has shaped how we view fantasy swords and sorcery games for over 30 years now.  There would be no World of Warcraft as it is today without Dungeons & Dragons.

We also saw the launch of SOE’s Free Realms, which stuttered a bit on day one.  Soon though they had millions of people signed up for the game, but since it was free to play, not a common thing at the time, that was no indication of revenue.  My daughter tried to sign up four times, so that was at least four out of the millions.  SOE was advertising the game heavily on Cartoon Network.  But FR did not run on MacOS, and my daughter was running on an iMac at the time.  I knew she has signed up because her email used to get routed to me.

In EVE Online I was mulling over the Apocrypha expansion and configuring up a Cerebus to try out as a mission runner.  I was also doing invention to make tech II missiles, which meant data cores and research agents and such, and pondering the idea that maybe using your skills should increase your skill points or something.

As usual, there was much ado about World of Warcraft.

• PETA was planning some event in WoW.  I still have trouble believing this wasn’t a joke.
• In a blinding flash of the obvious, Nielsen reported that a lot of guys play WoW.
• There was Noblegarden, or Blizzard Easter, and its egg collecting frenzy.
• There was my daughter and I trying to swim to Silvermoon to find a pet for her hunter.
• I couldn’t find a copy of The Burning Crusade at Fry’s.
• After hitting level 30 my daughter, my mom, and I were all riding around together on our night elf cat mounts.
• And the instance group, after a hiatus, got back together, did a warm up run in the Shadow Labyrinth, then went on to finally collect the head of Ingvar the Plunderer.  After that it was on to The Nexus.

I was sniggering like a pre-teen about Cornhole.  Also, there was something about Honest Scrap that was a meme, back when memes weren’t just pop culture references.

I was looking back on two years of the Wii and the games we played on it.

On the TV we were apparently watching Castle and Dollhouse.

And then there were new comers as we brought home two wee kittens.

Fifteen Years Ago

City of Heroes launched in the US.  Closed down by NCsoft in 2012, the game has been much in the news this month past month regarding emulators and such.

Most Viewed Posts in April

1. April Fools at Blizzard 2019 is Pretty Much No Fools
2. Alamo teechs u 2 play DURID!
3. How Many People Play EVE Online?
4. What Should EverQuest 3 Even Look Like?
5. April Fools at Blizzard 2018 is Mostly Just World of Warcraft
6. From Alola Pokedex to National Pokedex in Pokemon Sun
7. Minecraft and the Search for a Warm Ocean
8. WoW Dance Battle System!
9. Visiting the Katia Sae Monument
10. Brisc Ban Nightmare Scenario
11. A Handy Guide to Criticizing Games You Do Not Like
12. Brisc Rubal Exonerated

Search Terms of the Month

does tetris get faster
[Ladies and gentleman, somebody who has never played Tetris!]

is fortnite popular still
[Fortnite is popular still]

orcs gay game pc download
[Not willing to play a gay orc online game?]

“everquest 3”
[You are well advised to put that in quotes]

what did brisc rubal do
[Won in the end]

лего хогвартс
[Google says that is Russian for “LEGO Hogwarts”]

Game Time from ManicTime

There are a lot fewer games on the list this month.  March had ten games on the list, while April has just four.  And I didn’t leave any off just because they had a tiny percentage.  I appear to have played just these four on my computer.

• World of Warcraft 72.52%
• EVE Online 15.21%
• Minecraft 9.78%
• EverQuest 2.49%

The total hours played was down a bit, but not by much.  I just played a lot of WoW in April.

EVE Online

The low key conflict in the east against Pandemic Horde, NCDot, and the rental areas of both carries on.  I did not spend as much time on ops as I did last month… some nights you cannot just jump in not knowing if an op will last 30 minutes or 3 hours… but I did get in and play.  I got my PAP links and on a couple of kill mails to prove I am still alive.

And, of course, there was the whole CSM13 drama where Brisc Rubal and two other players were banned in a very public way only to have CCP roll back the whole thing based on further investigation.  This was all apparently because somebody thought it was odd that somebody else was selling their Molok titan and felt the need to report it.

EverQuest

After the big 20th anniversary Norrath nostalgia binge that was March, EverQuest fell a bit by the wayside.  I logged in a few times, as the anniversary experience bonus carried on into April a bit, and was revived for Easter weekend, but otherwise there wasn’t much to report there.  I suspect EQ will not make the list for May.

Minecraft

This came up because we got the Village and Pillage update which added a bunch of new stuff to the game.  My daughter helped hype this up a bit in our house, as a group of her friends have a server.  That got me going on figuring out the new stuff and exploring yet again.

Pokemon Go

We had a reasonably good month of Pokemon Go at our house.  My wife and I being on the same team now helps.  Thanks to the luck of simply being at the right place at the right time we even managed to participate in a few level 5 raids.  That was exciting.  However, I wasn’t aware how hard actually catching the legendary Pokemon after those raids can be.  I threw a stream of Golden Razz Berries to try and help, but did not catch a single one.  Ah well.

Level: 36 (+0)
Pokedex status: 410 (+9) caught, 441 (+10) seen
Pokemon I want: Meltan, but I still have to catch a damn Aerodactyl to get one
Current buddy: Luxio

World of Warcraft

I guess if you wanted to summarize my April play time, you could just say I played WoW.  I got in with Darkmoon Faire, then hit the pet battle bonus week, and then there was the WoW 8.2 Rise of Azshara preview that got me on board to unlock flying and there we go.  Also, as I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I was big on pet battles.  I did potter around a bit with at least one allied race alt.  My Highmountain Tauren is now in his low 30s.  But he started at level 20 and the prospect of getting him up to level 120 currently fills me with boredom.

Coming Up

EVE Online will turn 16, so there will be the usual gifts and giveaways and such.  There was also some speculation that we might get the named expansion in May, but now that seems like it might come in June.

Around mid-month we should get the Q1 2019 quarterly results for Activision Blizzard.  We shall see if it brings good news, and if good news means laying more people off.

In WoW we will probably hear more about the Rise of Azshara update.  I suspect they will have the achievement unlock requirements for flying set.  But the speculation is that it won’t release until June or even July.

I will carry on some with pet battles… on a new alt… and getting my rep up to exalted on my main.  Maybe I will actually bring an alt into BFA.  Probably my hunter.

LOTRO… I sort of fell off the wagon when it came to LOTRO.  I got into the Mines of Moria on the legendary server and actually made my way through the first couple of areas.  Then all those other games I played in March sprang up, so I never made it back.  I think I missed the 12 year anniversary in April.  Oh well.  Maybe I will make in back in May.