WoW Classic Gets Paid Character Transfers

As part of the patch last week, which was primarily about battlegrounds and key rings, there was a mention that support for paid character transfers had been added to the WoW Classic client but had not yet been enabled.

Well, now that has been enabled.

Classic is as classic does

With Tuesday’s update the interface has been unlocked that allows players to pay to move their characters to different realms, at least within a given set of rules.  The announcement said the following:

Paid Character Transfers are now available for players in WoW Classic who are looking to relocate their characters to a different realm within their region. There are a few things to keep in mind before you take the leap into making a home on a new realm.

• Each transfer has a ninety-day cooldown.

• Gold transfer limits specific level ranges are as follows:

  • Level 1-30 can transfer with up to 100 gold
  • Level 31-50 can transfer with up to 500 gold
  • Level 51-60 can transfer with up to 2000 gold

• Characters cannot transfer from PvE realms to PvP Realms and RP realms cannot transfer to RP-PvP realms.

You cannot go from PvE to PvP, which I believe has been a long standing rule for character transfers, and you cannot transfer across regions, but otherwise you’re free to go where you want.  Is it time to abandon that PvP server?

The gold cap limit is both sad and amusing.  I have four characters past 30 and all told they don’t have 100 gold between them.  I’m going to be walking in Azeroth for a long time.

Reactions to this have been… mixed. The only real surprise for me was that nobody called it a “money grab” until the third comment on the announcement.  The move will certainly rankle as the addition of honor to PvP has made life miserable for some on PvP servers and the free character moves were all shut down on December 5 in the US and December 6 in the EU.

Anyway, there is now a shop button on the character selection screen where you can access this.  Of course, once you put together a cash shop UI it is a shame to waste it on just character transfers.  Bets on what goes in there next?

BlizzCon 2019 Before the Storm

Today is the day.  In a few hours BlizzCon 2019 will kick off with the keynote address.

I am glad I was so keen to get my BlizzCon post out at the start or October.  There is a little bit more satisfaction in having declared that Blizz had better have an announcement about Diablo IV back then than after it was pretty much confirmed by leaks.

The schedule shows that after the keynote there are four as yet untitled presentations on the main stage.  To my mind that means no fewer than four big announcements.  Diablo IV, Overwatch 2, and the next WoW expansion seem to be three likely suspects in that regard.

And that is just on day one.  There are two more untitled presentations on the main stage set for day two.  This could be a very big BlizzCon if most of those are new titles.  There is even room for a new IP in there I hope.  I don’t think things like Warcraft III or Diablo II remasters, as cool as they are, are necessarily main stage worthy.   We shall see.

The big question for me is what will they say about WoW Classic.  Indications from the outside via things like the additional servers the company had to pile on to the earnings boost recorded seem to mean that WoW Classic is bigger than the company anticipated.  This means, as I noted before, they cannot simply say nothing about it.  But what they might say, beyond the expected hype, could surprise.

Then there is the Hong Kong thing.  There will be people anxious to rub that in Blizzard’s face.  The question revolves around how many people will be there to protest.  Has hype and time tempered the rage, or will it turn into a real problem?  Even if that isn’t a focus, it has put Blizzard in a bad odor with some who are now looking for any reason to criticize the company.  I’m not saying you shouldn’t gripe about Blizzard.  I’ve done plenty of that.  But maybe avoid pilling on with completely garbage complaints.  Or don’t.  You do you.

Anyway, we shall see it all soon enough.

Or I will anyway.  I don’t know about you.  I bought the Virtual Ticket.  I am interested enough in seeing the panels, many of which won’t get any coverage outside of the event, if history is any indicator, that it is worth it to me.  I am happy that Blizzard has extended the time you can watch panels, with replays promised to be available through the end of March 2020.

So now we wait for the keynote and what many of us hope is a lot of big news.

Warp Speeds Raised in New Eden

Once upon a time, in the bygone days of New Eden, all ships entered warp with equal rapidity.  Once aligned you went to top speed pretty much up to your destination.

And then CCP decided this was wrong.  With the Rubicon expansion changes were made, and acceleration and deceleration were made part of the equation.  It was all covered in a dev blog, because of course it was. (More numbers over at EVE Uni.)

When battleship warps became really slow

This made traveling with battleships a painful process, as they were slow to accelerate, slow in warp, and slow to decelerate.  Moving bigger ships became annoying and there was no greater pariah than the person who brought a battlecruiser to a cruiser fleet, causing fleet warps to slow down to their level.

Today however CCP made a change.  There was a somewhat less than informative announcement that warp speeds had been changed.  It is short enough to quote in full:

Warp Drive Active – Warp Speed Changes Now Live!

Got somewhere to be in New Eden?

Every Cruiser, Battlecruiser and Battleship now warps faster than before.

Travelling via autopilot will also be faster now with the warp in distance changed from 15km to 10km.

Head into New Eden to find out more!

Fortunately, Reddit is there for us to figure out the changes.  At the top of the thread there is a post which lists out what changed generally, but I am going to steal a chart posted by Sticky Mess (whose flair says Suddenly Spaceships) which goes into finer detail.

Image credit: Sticky Mess

So subcaps from cruisers on up will now move faster in the warp stage of their travel.  People have been asking for this for a long time.  I guess after the Chaos Era CCP felt they needed to throw out a quality of life improvement for everybody.  Judging from the calculations, an increase in warp speed should also shave off some time at both the acceleration and deceleration ends of each warp.

The other interesting, but less discussed bit, was auto pilot warps now landing at 10km off their destination, down from 15km.  That number has been at 15km since I started playing EVE Online back in 2006. (Obligatory “I played before ‘warp to 0’ was a thing.”)  It has been that since forever so far as I know.

So what will that change mean?

Yes, auto pilot trips will now be shorter in duration.  Ships on auto pilot will now be exposed to attack for less time on each gate.  I suppose that will give scouts less time to scan them for ganks in high sec, though the window is still pretty large for that and ganks themselves seem to happen on the other side of the gate when ships are preparing to warp and bumping them can delay their departure.

Anyway, something new in New Eden today.

Blizzard Speaks

Friday at approximately 5:20pm Pacific time Blizzard start pointing towards a statement “Regarding Last Weekend’s Hearthstone Grandmasters Tournament” on their various social media accounts.  I saw it just as it popped up on Twitter where it appears just ahead of when the press release site was ready to serve it up, leading to about a minute of people getting the amusing Murloc 404 error for Blizzard’s site.

Just looking at the timing of the press release made me a bit skeptical.  There is a long tradition in US business and politics of making announcements you think will damaging or not received well after business hours on a Friday.  The hope is that the story will get lost in the mix before Monday comes around.  I’ve poked Daybreak about doing this in the past.  But the internet news cycle knows no weekends and Blizzard has a much larger profile than Daybreak, so the timing of the release probably doesn’t have much of a message in it unless Blizzard expects everything to die down.  It won’t.

Going to the statement, the changes that were announced:

• Blitzchung’s winnings will not be “rescinded,” so he gets to keep any prize money he won
• Blitzchung’s suspension has been reduced from a year to six months.  He will be able to compete in the 2020 Grandmasters tournament if he so desires
• The two casters of the show are suspended from working on Blizzard tournament for six months, reduced from “forever” I guess, for failing to keep the show on topic

The first covers what I felt was the most egregiously unfair aspect of the affair.  So good on Blizz for that.

The second… well… I’m not happy, but it is better.

And the third, if you’re running a broadcast for Blizzard you’d best be running on a delay and be ready to cut out the feed if things get out of hand I guess.  But at that point you’re a Blizz contractor, so you serve at their pleasure.

Blizzard also strongly reiterated its stance that when you play in their league you agree to their rules.  If you express views within the context of the tournament, they had better remain focused on the game.  Some people have tried to make hash out of the fact that Blizzard, as a company, can express political views, and has done so about “controversial” things like being against discrimination in the work place, but that doesn’t mean that Blizz has to provide a forum for political speech for anybody under its own banner.  Blizzard can speak for Blizzard.  But when you speak under the Blizzard banner at a Blizzard event, you too are speaking for Blizzard and they get to make the rules.

When it comes down to it, we liked Blitzchung’s message, so we feel he shouldn’t be punished. But it doesn’t take much mental rigor to imagine other messages we would not agree with.  You think if somebody got up and echoed Ward Churchill we would be having this issue?  We love free speech when we agree with the speaker, but lose our minds when we do not.

That Blizzard did not similarly ban a US team for holding up sign supporting Hong Kong late last week remains problematic.  You are sending a message if rules are not enforced uniformly.

And Blizzard failed completely to address the statements made in China by their partner NetEase on the Weibo platform about respecting and defending the pride of China.  Therein lays the rub for many.  As I noted elsewhere, to business in China you must partner with a Chinese company in a joint venture.  For Blizzard their partner is NetEase.  That partner must have a controlling stake in the venture.  To do business in China you have to hand over the rights to your product and messaging there.  So Blizz may not have any control over what NetEase says in their name and certainly no control over what NetEase says under its own banner.

But, as I wrote on Friday, I am not sure that matters.  When you make the deal you get what comes of it, good and bad.  So while Blizzard says Blitzchung’s ban was not specifically due to his message and that Blizzard’s relationship with the government of China had nothing to do with the ban, the words of their partner do not line up with that.  I do not think it is excessive to insist that Blizzard reconcile what they are saying to their Western audience with what is being said in their name in China.

Given all of this, am I happy?  No.  But I wrote on Friday that I doubted Blizzard could to anything that would make anybody happy, much less everybody.

And if you were already angry at Blizzard for whatever reason before this occurred, it is very easy to mine their statement for more flaws.  You can see perennial axe grinder and self-promoter Mark Kern out there on Twitter trying to make himself the head of the anti-Blizzard faction.  That he goes to such ridiculous lengths to find fault (How dare Blizzard describe what a shout caster is!) makes him look like a buffoon yet again, diluting his message the trivial.  But I expect no less from him.  Mark Kern is just going to be Mark Kern.

Anyway, Blitzhchung getting his prize money makes me feel better, as does the reduction in his suspension, which will allow him to compete in next year’s tournament.  We will see if he has the liberty in Hong Kong to do so a year down the road.  Chinese President for Life Xi Jinping was ratcheting up the rhetoric this past weekend in what sounded very much like a warning that repression was coming.  We’ll see who wants to do business in China if that comes to pass.

I am not happy with Blizzard’s failure to own up to the dichotomy of its China situation.  I don’t expect them to divest fully from China right now, as I have seen some demand.  China is alleged to be only 5% of Blizz’s revenue, but you may have noticed that Acti-Blizz has been selling Monthly Active Users as its success metric since they decided never to speak of subscription numbers again, and China is a very large source for that metric when it comes to games like Hearthstone.

But some clarification of the situation and some ownership of what it means might be helpful… or it might not.  I’m not sure most people get the reality of doing business in China.  Seeing just how compromised Blizz is may not help.

So, after their statement, have I run back and re-subscribed?  No.

Blizzard hasn’t done anything to earn my adoration with this, but I still have some time to think about this.  Certainly what comes to pass at BlizzCon will influence my thoughts, and that is less than three weeks away.  Some people already have plans it seems.

My Gamer Motivation Profile Once Again

I was tagged for something for Blaugust, and right at the last minute too, so I am going to have to squeeze in just one more post in the month.

Angie at Backlog Crusader did the Quantic Foundry Gamer Motivation Profile survey and then tagged some other bloggers to give it a try.  I’m game… so to speak… but here is the thing.  I’ve done this before, back in 2015 when the survey was new.  Still, I figured I could go through the questions again.  The test itself is built around some assumptions about gamer behavior.

The Motivation Model Overview

As I said previously, it reminds me of the Bartle model, with a few more dimensions.  It does rely on the common personality test dynamic of paired behaviors that are placed as poles in a given motivation.

I had even made a profile back in 2015, so was able to log in and go through the test again.  It remembered my answers from back then, though a couple more questions had been added.  I also changed some of my answers, ending up with a chart that looks like this:

My profile summary graph – 2019

You can compare that to the last time around.

My profile summary graph – 2015

In 2015 there were only five factors, now there are six.  If you want to see how the test has changed you can compare my 2015 post, where I wrote about each of the factors, and my 2019 results available here.

In 2015 I was “Calm, Spontaneous, and Grounded.”

In 2019 I am “Calm, Driven, Gregarious, and Grounded.”

The problem I have with this sort of test is the somewhat generic set of questions asking how important certain things are to me.  I sit there and read the question and think, “Well, this is important to me under specific circumstances, but at other times I could care less.”  So the strength of my answers is not very strong at all.  I went through and changed a good chunk of them as I passed through the quiz once again, but never by more than one notch either direction.

Basically, my mood at the moment could alter many of my answers at least somewhat, to the point that I am pretty sure if you wiped all my answers and had me take the survey again in a week, the results would change some.

But for an afternoon in August, that was how I was feeling.

And at the end of the survey the site offers up some games that might appeal to you based on what other people taking it who scored similarly to you ranked as their favorite games.  My top game was No Man’s Sky.

Seems appropriate.  I actually own it, having picked it up in a Steam sale.  Couldn’t get past the forever loading screens though.  Maybe that has gotten better.

The game recommendations come in three levels.  To get an MMO result I had to select “niche” as a parameter, because MMOs remain a niche genre.

WoW Classic First Night Fun Complete with Queues

I will be the first to admit that my own WoW Classic first night experience may not be representative.  I know a bunch of people who saw this on their screens.

Taken from Asmogold’s stream at 9pm PDT last night

Blizzard even opened up more US realms, a couple of more EU realms, and even a new Oceanic realm. (And another)  We’re now around 50 WoW Classic realms.  Demand was high.  Time to update my realms list post.

But there were no queues for me.  Not right away.

I got home from work about 15 minutes before the servers were set to unlock.  I booted up my computer, switched into shorts (because it was 95 degrees out and we have no AC), and got myself logged in.  Skronk and Ula were already online and logged in and we got onto a voice channel in our Discord.  Our first choice, Bloodsail Buccaneers, still looked good.

US Server Choices

I made a character on Old Blanchy as a backup, but went back to BB and got on the character screen, where the “Enter World” button was still gray.

Skronk and Ula were a dwarf and a gnome respectively, so I set aside Wilhelm the human pally for a bit and went with Tistann, my dwarf hunter, so we could all start off together.

And then the “Enter World” button went live right on time… give Blizz some credit there… and we all hit it. After a moment or two, we were dumped into a mass of dwarves and gnomes.  It was a sea of new characters.  We quickly grouped up and were pulled together into the same layer.  We managed to find each other for our first group selfie of WoW Classic.

Arrival in Azeroth – Priest, Hunter, Mage

Then we got ourselves oriented, made the usual changes to the settings… must have fast quest text or die… and launched ourselves into the game.  And it was a crowded game, with everybody right there in the starter zone.

We’re all in this little valley

It was time to look for mobs.

Oh man, that is a lot of dead wolves

Wolves, the first of the stock bear/boar/wolf quest trifecta to hit us, were being slaughtered en masses and for a few minutes it was a tough call to tag one before somebody else grabbed it.  The slight delay as a hunter in getting a shot off felt very long.

But the edge of the wave of new players passed beyond the wolves pretty quickly.  Not that the wolves were not still being hunted like crazy, but after not too long it became fairly easy to pick off a wolf now and then to advance our quests.  During that we leveled for the first time, as a group, about 22 minutes after the server went live.

Leveling together

We turned in that quest and got sent to Anvilmar to meet our class trainers for the first time, to get our first new skill.  Mine was track beasts, which was not all that useful, but you take what you can get.

Then it was off into the zone again for some boars… naturally… and a delivery quest which led use from camp to camp.  While the dwarf/gnome starter zone was the one alliance area I had not done during the stress tests, all of this was still oddly familiar despite it having been years since I had been here.  As Skronk noted, our memories of a lot of this very old content was better than more recent expansions.

We were given a few more tasks, including picking up the lost belongings of Felix Whindlebolt.  In searching for those we ran into our first server queue… a queue in the game.

There is a line! Maybe they have toilet paper!

The gear Felix was missing were all items you had to click on the retrieve, after which they would disappear for a moment before appearing again.  Old WoW tech.  In order to facilitate everybody getting their quest item, people nicely queued up and waited their turn.  So we joined in.

Waiting in line in the snow

I don’t know if this was simply RP server behavior… lots of people in line had set themselves to walk rather than run, so we did so as well…or if this was a manifestation of what I have observed in other retro server experiences, where everybody is simply so happy to be there that they feel cooperative, but we were willing to go along with that.

No so Poncho, whose legend began right there before our eyes.

Poncho cut the line.

And at that point people began booing Poncho, shouting shame at him, and generally haranguing him.  As soon as could be, Poncho because the byword for a bad player and for the rest of the evening Poncho would remain a topic of conversation in general chat.  There was even a guild formed with the name “No Ponchos” in response to his actions.

We carried on.  The first line was long, the second was shorter, and there was no line for the third item Felix was missing, so we returned that, hit level 4, and ended up heading back to Anvilmar again.  There we were treated to the an aspect of the classic WoW experience, not having enough coins to buy all your skills.  We all had two skills to buy, at a price of 1 silver each, but we didn’t have even five silver all combined.

29 copper short

Ah well, living the WoW Classic lifestyle.

Then it was time for our final queue.  The big quest in the zone is The Stolen Journal, where you have to go slay a named troll in the troll cave.  That meant another queue.  But this time people queued by groups, as one of the early innovations of WoW over EverQuest was making sure everybody in your group got the drop for certain quests.  If you had to bring back somebody’s head, then all five of you got a head from the kill.

So groups, standing abreast, lined up, one after another, to take their turn to slay Grik’nir the Cold in order to retrieve the journal.

Our group in the line of groups

A couple of times people looked like they were going to try to cut in line, but they were shouted at, advised not to be a Poncho.  We only had three in our group, so invited a couple of singles to join in.  It was like being at the ski lift on a busy weekend.

We got the journal and headed back out to Anvilmar.  The quest reward was enough to buy us all our missing skills.  The next steps sent us out of Coldridge Valley, through the trog cave… which seemed a lot shorter than I remembered it… and into Dun Morogh proper.

On the far side of the cave we saw Syp standing AFK, so we took a quick passing selfie with him and moved on.

Random picture time

Out in Dun Morogh things remained crowded, but never quite as crowded as it was in a few of those opening quests.  The queues seemed to act as a meter to dole people out into the world in little groups, spreading them out just enough that we ran into no more queues.  Or maybe Blizz added more layers.  I saw some people disappearing for a while.  Maybe they were grouping with people in other layers, or maybe Blizz was evening out the load.

We hit the old points out in Dun Morogh, remembering some quests in full, forgetting steps in other quests.  We ran all the way to Rumbleshot before we remembered we were supposed to pick up a box of stuff for him along the way.  And we spent some time in the Wendigo cave competing for mobs, though the spawns were plenty.

So many unskinned wendigos

We ended up at level 7 then took a bit of a break for dinner.  My wife had brought me something, so while Ula and Skronk idled I ran up to Ironforge and trained skinning and leatherworking, the went back to the wendigo cave and quickly got my skinning skill up past 50.

When they got back Bung and his son, who hadn’t even been born when WoW came out, got on Discord with us and said they were in the queue for the server.  It was a few thousand deep, but the estimate was only 20 minutes or so, though that did bounce around quite a bit, like they had hired the person who did the time estimate for Windows file copy to do the queue time estimate.

They got in, but rolled up humans, so were over around Northshire Abby.  We logged out our dwarves (and gnome) and grabbed humans as well to go hang out with them.

The human starter area was crowded of course, but as with Dun Morogh, it felt like the big wave had passed and we were in the midst of a those behind the wave.  There was competition for mobs, but not like the first ten minutes we were out there struggling to tag a wolf.  I even saw a familiar name.

Didn’t I see you in Norrath before?

We wandered about, grouping up to go take on the Defias in the first of the bandana collection quests.  I was on as a pally, and I did sorely miss the ranged ability of my hunter.  But we got through the Northshire Abby quests.  There was barely a line for Garrick Padfoot, the named Defias whose head we all needed.  There were two other groups hanging around him, so we waited our turn for his spawn, then went on our way.

The only problem of the evening occurred while we were out among the Defias.  Word was that Blizzard was having some problems with layers crashing now and then.  There had been reports of BB being down while we were on and happily questing away.  But then it came time for our layer to crash and we were kicked out.  But the queue was “only” about 3,500 deep for me, which only took a few minutes to work through until I was back on again.

I stuck it out until we got to Goldshire, then I decided to call it a night.  I had been on for more than five hours straight on a week night after a full day at work and with another looming in the morning and this blog post to finish up.

We still have a lot ahead of us.  We have to form a guild… because, of course we must… and we’re still working on a name.  We have to sort out our group a bit.  And we have a determination to go and do Ragefire Chasm at level, which means getting through Orgrimmar naked at around level 15 or so.  But there is plenty of time for that.  We had what I would have to consider a first good night, which hopefully portends more.

So did anybody get to level 60 yet?  I am going to have to score myself on my predictions.

Others writing about the first night:

• Hardcore Casual
• Tales of the Aggronaut
• ECTMMO.com
• Deez Words
• GamingSF
• Bio Break
• Parallel Context
• I’m Not Squishy
• Galumphing
• WoW Misadventures
• Endgame Viable

Blaugust and Burning Things Down

Here we are into the third full week of Blaugust and another topic of the week.

I have tried to keep up and do something on the right theme each week, though I failed a bit last week.  I mean, you got to know me some, but maybe that wasn’t what you were looking for.  And I felt, looking at the calendar, that this week was going to be another punt.

Blaugust 2019 Schedule

Developer appreciation things never quite resonate with me for a variety of reasons I’ve been over in the past.  I neither revere nor dismiss game devs or their work, or so I tell myself.

So I was going to give this week’s topic a miss… and then INN posted an article with the title, Why EVE or CCP Games Needs to Fail and I felt maybe I had an angle.

The basic premise is that CCP has done so many things wrong with EVE Online, made so many errors in the face of players telling them what would happen, been so tone deaf in their relations with customers, that the whole thing, game, studio, and all, should be burned down and scattered to the winds.

I have run across this attitude many times, the idea that things are so bad that we need to wipe the slate clean and start from scratch.  Only then can we get something good.

I think there is a class somewhere that instructs young developers, when faced with taking over somebody’s code, to say that it would be easier just to re-write it all from scratch.  (Oh cute little dev, if we trusted you to do that we wouldn’t have handed you that code to maintain.)  But even old salts fall into that trap, the idea that it would be easier to go back to a blank sheet rather than start with code not their own.

Starting from scratch is a hazardous path, one that I’ve been down before.  It can even kill whole companies.  Microsoft gets the attention for the fall of the Netscape Navigator web browser, but if Netscape hadn’t decided to rewrite everything from scratch… in Java… it might have remained viable, or at least capable of keeping up with the features of Internet Explorer.

I’ve watched devs get their wish to start from scratch only to have to spend their time on a long voyage of discovery as they have to relearn all the wisdom that went in to forming that mess of code they are trying to replace.  Instead of spending time adding to the product that dev is stuck redoing something we already had.

Which isn’t to say there is a lack of code that deserves a fiery death.  There was a fax form editor I had to work with about 20 years back that was so problematic that it might actually have been better to restart from scratch.  But you never know until you’re waist deep in things and begin to regret your decision.

Anyway, my point here is that EVE Online or CCP failing would not automatically result in something better coming along.  If anything, the opposite is likely true.  Who wants to create a harsh, dystopian internet spaceship sandbox game if the premier example of the niche has failed?

And what other options would former New Eden residents have?  Star Citizen is not ready for prime time, Elite: Dangerous requires docking skills I’m too old to want to work on, Prosperous Universe is all the bad UI and spreadsheets of New Eden without any of the pretty pictures, and the handful of spaceship MMO startups are so far from being anything close to the scale of EVE Online that we would all be clamoring for an EVE Online emulator five minutes after the game went down.

Appreciate what you have got.

That doesn’t mean you have to be satisfied with everything.  One of the more dynamic aspects of EVE Online is the discussion of what it is, what is wrong, and what it could be.  And it can be tough when “chaos” is the new flavor of the month.  But EVE Online with chaos is still better than no EVE Online at all.  Space is still pretty, the scale is still epic, fights still happen, and chaos cannot go on forever.  Maybe Hilmar will read Ringworld Engineers and become obsesses with stability.

Leave the wishes for financial failure, closure, and all that to the people who find the game’s mere existence to be an affront.  There is enough hate out there already.

Summer Movie League – A Good Week for Good Boys

Week eleven of our Fantasy Movie League went on past and it is clear that I should have been paying more attention.

Being the leader overall I sought to play something of a conservative lineup.  Back on Monday night that meant 3x Hobbs & Shaw and 5x Hollywood, because the early estimates put that as pretty safe.  The was even a hint that it might be the top earner again, confidence in the new titles being somewhat sketchy.

And then… well… I am blaming the coming of WoW Classic for distracting me because I didn’t really go back and look at forecasts or which way the wind was blowing for the weekend.  And given that everybody else seemed to have picked up on where the week was headed… well, it was a bad week for me.

Bhagpuss even gave me a hint, mentioning that Good Boys seemed to be looking very good on Wednesday of last week, but I didn’t take the clue, so when the league locked and became visible on Friday, I was clearly the odd man out.  Everybody else who picked had at least one screen of Good Boys.

When the Saturday estimates came it, I was in 7th out of seven who picked, a situation that only got worse come Sunday.  The final results did not make things better, with Good Boys piling up $21.4 million, well past all estimates, so the results for the week ended up looking like this:

1. SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights – $128,365,213
2. Po Huit’s Sweet Movie Suite – $125,762,910
3. Too Orangey For Crows – $125,633,270
4. Conical Effort – $107,071,667
5. Cyanbane’s Neuticles Viewing Party – $89,391,600
6. Joanie’s Joint – $86,197,240
7. Wilhelm’s Qeynosian Kinetoscope – $80,944,180
8. grannanj’s Cineplex – $44,487,408
9. Miniature Giant Space Hamsterplex – $30,509,473

Remember week 4, where I was the only one who went all-in on Yesterday?  Well, this was the opposite of that week.  A least I stayed ahead of the two people who did not pick but still had some viable screens carried forward.

The perfect pick for our league was 5x Good Boys, 1x Lion King, and 2x empty, worth a little over $134 million, which made it more valuable than the perfect pick for the standard rule set, which rang in a million behind.

But nobody got the perfect pick, though SynCaine was close.  The scores then go down based primarily on how many screens of Good Boys people went with, with filler separating the close picks.

All of that left the the overall scores looking like this:

1. Wilhelm’s Qeynosian Kinetoscope – $1,051,585,775
2. Too Orangey For Crows – $1,031,812,091
3. SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights – $941,115,614
4. Cyanbane’s Neuticles Viewing Party – $918,351,656
5. Conical Effort – $873,997,889
6. Joanie’s Joint – $871,510,090
7. Miniature Giant Space Hamsterplex – $848,776,622
8. Po Huit’s Sweet Movie Suite – $826,649,988
9. grannanj’s Cineplex – $731,422,446
10. Goat Water Picture Palace – $557,351,870

I stayed in the lead, but Bhagpuss is now less than $20 million behind me and, as we just saw, during a chaotic week jumps of that amount are totally possible.  He just closed the gap between us by $40 million after all, so I need to pay attention.

SynCaine got a solid jump as well.  He would need another big week to be a threat to first place, but it could happen.  Without any big moves, the nearest fight seems to be for fifth position.

The alternate scoring looks like this:

1. Wilhelm’s Qeynosian Kinetoscope – 80
2. Too Orangey For Crows – 77
3. Cyanbane’s Neuticles Viewing Party – 64
4. SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights – 62
5. Miniature Giant Space Hamsterplex – 59
6. grannanj’s Cineplex – 52
7. Conical Effort – 48
8. Joanie’s Joint – 48
9. Goat Water Picture Palace – 45
10. Po Huit’s Sweet Movie Suite – 41

I did make the executive decision that I would award no points for a zero score, which means that Goat is no longer accruing alternate scoring points.

Bhagpuss closed the gap between us here as well and, frankly, could have made it a tie race if he had made it to first.  The buffering effect of the alternate scoring means that there is still a tight race for third place, with Cyanbane holding onto that spot for the moment.

And so it goes.

All of which brings us to week twelve, the next to last week, and a lineup of choices that looks like this:

1. Angel has Fallen – $253
2. Ready or Not – $175
3. Good Boys – $167
4. Overcomer – $148
5. Hobbs & Shaw – $114
6. Lion King – $114
7. Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark – $81
8. Angry Birds 2 – $78
9. Dora and the Lost City of Gold – $71
10. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood – $69
11. 47 Meters Down 2 – $59
12. The Art of Racing in the Rain – $38
13. Blinded by the Light – $33
14. The Peanut Butter Falcon – $26
15. Spider-man: Far From Home – $25

Gone from the list are Toy Story 4, The Kitchen, The Farewell, and Where’d You Go, Bernadette, while last week’s top priced picks are decidedly mid-pack, save for Good Boys, which got the usual pricing punishment that best performers tend to receive.

At the top of the list this week is Angel has Fallen, which is the sequel to London has Fallen and Olympus has Fallen, though the films have been so chaotic that, despite having seen both, I did not realize that London and Olympus were actually connected movies.

Shows what I know.

Olympus grossed $30 million its opening weekend, while London hit $20 million.  The LRF puts Angel has Fallen at around $18 million.  That seems a little optimistic for a third sequel, but it is also opening up against less direct competition than the previous two titles.

Next up is Ready or Not, a “black comedy” that sees a possibly Victorian era bride (just judging by the poster) who realizes her soon-to-be in-laws’ plan for a game of hide-and-seek has turned into a game to hunt and kill her.  She turns the tables and hilarity ensues.

Didn’t we have another Most Dangerous Game rip-off already planned for this summer? The Hunt I think?  It was pulled due to recent mass shootings, or because the president criticized the idea, or possibly because preview audiences didn’t like it.  But Victorians killing each other is fine.  Most people killing each others in movies is fine I guess.  I’m sure Angel has Fallen will be knocking off more than a few.

There is no LRF for Ready or Not, but given the Angel estimate and the FML pricing, $12-13 million seems like what somebody thinks it ought to do.  I guess.  There are B-list names in the cast, but nobody who is a draw in and of themselves, so I really don’t know.

Then there is the Overcomer, a Christian faith-based drama about a high school basketball coach finding himself in Christ.  Written, directed, and starring a former pastor who is on his sixth such film, the LRF is calling for $3-8 million depending on how things play out.  The films by this group have never done less than $6 million, while the FML pricing seems to indicate $10 million is expected, so maybe count on that end of the spectrum?

And, finally, there is The Peanut Butter Falcon, a retelling of Huckleberry Finn staged around a man with Down’s Syndrome who runs away to achieve his dream of becoming a professional wrestler.

Already in limited distribution in 47 theaters, it is expanding this week.  The theater count will influence this.  The reviews are excellent, so it is a wild card, though the name might be fighting against it as much as anything.  It’s position near Spider-man: Far From Home seems to predict at least a $1.5 million box office for it, and its low price means that it doesn’t need to go beyond $2 million to be a best performer contender.

So what to pick?

Safe seems to be an anchor on Angel, but there is a gap where Ready or Not could under-perform just enough, around $11 million, to grab worst performer, which would ironically make it an excellent choice.  Good Boys could pull that off as well, thanks to the rules of the league.  But that is a pretty thin line to walk.

(Also, I was wrong previously, or it got changed, but the FML Cineplex Builder takes the odd rules of our league into account so long as you select our league from the drop down.)

A mix between Angel and Peanut Butter could work, if you believe the latter will break out.  That is my Monday night lineup.  We’ll see if I stick with that.  All I know is that I need to pay more attention this week.

Anyway, get your picks in soon.  The league locks late tomorrow night.

EVE Online Summer Season of Skill Points

CCP once again proves they think we’re all about out skill points… and they are probably not wrong.

Login rewards in the form of skill points return to New Eden as CCP announces the Season of Skills event.

Things capsuleers do to themselves…

Unlike the 16th Anniversary event earlier this year, where you had to log in for 16 days during the event to claim all your skill points and other goodies, the Season of Skills event will be broken up into three parts.  But each part will reward you with skill points, and an Omega character can come up with at least a million it seems if they actively peruse things.

All date ranges are from downtime to downtime, which means they start on the first date after 11:00 UTC and end on the second date before 11:00 UTC.

Bonus Skill Point Week – July 17-25

Log in every day throughout Bonus Skill Point Week and get free Skill Points.  The traditional split between free and subscribing players will be in force.  Alpha pilots can claim up to 200k skill points over the week, while Omega will get up to 650k skill points.  Cerebral accelerators, which speed up skill training will also be awarded.  I hope we get a SKIN or two along the way as well.  Some SKINs will be on sale, but I want more.

Skilling Spree – July 24-August 21

Get rewards ranging from 10,000 to 50,000 skill points for killing Triglavian invaders.  A single kill each day is worth 10K skill points.

Bonus Skill Points Weekend – August 23-26

Log in each day over the weekend  even more skill points.  Alpha clones will get 75,000 skill points  while Omega clones will get 250,000 skill points if they log in all three days.

What Does It All Mean?

I guess it means that we love it when CCP generates skill points out of thin air and simply gives them away, but hate when they generate skill points out of thin air and sell them.

At least we hate it in the short term.  Three weeks later and CCP is still selling that starter pack that got so many people so bent out of shape, but it doesn’t seem to bother anybody now.

Anyway, I won’t say “no” to most of these free skill points, though I doubt I’ll be killing Triglavians for the middle segment of the event.  I honestly have no insight nor idea what is going on with the high sec end of the invasion event.

Meanwhile, in an attempt to draw a constraining circle around a few things, it sounds like the invasion events might be resolving towards the end of August, so that might also be the point when we hear what CCP has become definite about the null sec blackout as well.

Other coverage:

• Evehermit – Skill Point Explosion

The Minecraft Village and Pillage Update Lands

The Minecraft 1.14 update, the “Village & Pillage” release landed, for both the Java (old school) and Bedrock (Win10 and consoles) editions this week.  It has been described by the team as the biggest update to villages ever.

Villagers and Pillagers

And, given the list of new items and changes, I won’t argue with that description, even extending it to the biggest update overall I have seen for the game.

The list of just “new” things added to the game is already pretty impressive:

• Bamboo jungles with bamboo trees and pandas
• Barrels
• Berries
• Blast furnaces
• Town bells
• Campfires
• Cartography tables
• Composters
• Crossbows
• Fletching tables
• Foxes
• Leather horse armor (dyeable)
• Lanterns
• Lecterns
• Looms
• Pillagers
• Raids
• Ravagers
• Wandering Traders
• Scaffolding
• Smithing tables
• Smokers
• Stonecutters
• New flowers
• New dyes
• New decorative blocks

Back over the summer, when they first started talking about this update I thought pandas were going to be the big deal.  But now there is so much more.

And those are just the new things.  The Minecraft team has also changes up how a lot of things work in the game.  Cats are now their own thing, separate from ocelots, villages now work differently, and all of that new stuff has it own mechanics as well.

In addition, textures were updated as well, so the world even looks a bit different.  And all of that is just scratching the surface of what is listed out for the update.

As usual, I face some of the “old server” problems.  New biomes do not appear in already discovered areas, so if I want to see pandas I am going to have to mount an expedition to find one, the way I did for the warm ocean.

However, this time around a lot of the new stuff is right there in front of me.  I went to a village near our server spawn point, literally the first village we discovered almost four years ago when my daughter and I started out with a fresh server, and found the newly updated villages… well… making new villagers I guess.

Love is in the air

The villagers have new textures, as do a lot of things in the game.

Villagers doing it in the new wheat texture

They also have some new behaviors.  They need some of the new work stations to go about their business, which will appear automatically if you discover a new village but which you need to build for them in an old one.  The villagers also all now sleep in beds, which I discovered when night fell and I went to use the one bed in the village only to find it occupied.  So I had to make beds for everybody.  It is a good thing I had some sheep within the walls of that village.

Young villagers, without occupations, sleeping in the new dorm

I also collected a few cats.  Cats are now strays and they spawn around villages.  You have to sneak up on them and give them fish to tame them.  The wall around this village helped me corral them as they couldn’t wander off, but I understand that if you village is open they will spawn and move away.

A calico kitty caught

There is still a lot to do and a lot to explore with this Minecraft update.  There were some initial problems with people logging in and, as is often true with new updates, Minecraft Realms servers seem to be struggling under the weight of the changes… taking a mine cart anywhere leads to some ragged movement… but the update is live.  Time to go play.