Gnomeregan, But with a Plan

Last week’s Gnomer run could be rated as a success.  We went in, worked our way through to Electrocutioner 6000, obtained the back door key, killed the bosses up to that point, had a couple of intense fights, only had one death, and had zero wipes.  Op success.

On the flip side, the five of us went into the instance with six Gnomer quests in our log and only one of us, Skronk, came out with even a single one of those quests completed.  That was not stonks.  I think the first time we did the instance back in 2006 we did better, but still came out with a lot of quests undone.  But we went on to Scarlet Monastery and deleted those from our quest log.

So over the course of the week Skonk looked into what we needed to do and came up with a plan.  It wasn’t a complicated plan.  It was more of a reminder of the things we needed to do to wrap up some of the quests we had.

On Saturday evening we assembled again in Ironforge, set to return and finish things off.  Our group was:

• Ula – level 30 gnome mage
• Viniki – level 30 gnome warrior
• Skronk – level 29 dwarf priest
• Obama – level 29 human warlock
• Moronae – level 29 night elf druid

Well, we sort of assembled in Ironforge.  Obama had logged off outside the instance the previous week, so we ran out to him.

Once more through the snow

For some reason he thought it wise to go into the instance, and did so before we grouped up.  Then he got aggro and died at about the time we arrived.  However, because he went in before he was in the group, entering Gnomer ourselves we did not see his corpse so could not ress him.  So he had to release and run back to the instance, go in, come back to life, then come back out to meet up with us.  There is always some complication.

He had to come back out because we had things to do outside the instance first.  We had to run around to where the side door is and find Techbot for the Save Techbot’s Brain quests.  That was a kill and loot.

Techbot’s brain saved, body slain

We also had to get our white punch cards update at the machine that is outside the instance as well.  Once we had done that, it was back to the instance itself. When we were previously at the instance there had something of a scene going on, with a group jumping out of the instance having gotten into some trouble within, only to get jumped by the mobs outside the instance.  This time around all was quiet.

Once inside things went pretty smoothly.  We cleared our way to the edge of the open area, jumped off the ledge, took on the ooze we landed on, then cleared a mob as the Viscous Fallout once again came up behind us mid-fight.

Here he comes, sneaking up again

As with last time, he may have been an add, but we still didn’t have much problem with him either.  However, he dropped the staff again, rather than the cloth boots the casters were coveting.  Such is life with RNG.

We went from there over to the ramp up to the dormitory and the room with the sloped walls where we had such a chaotic battle last time.  This time around we just needed to clear a couple of mobs to reach one of the punch card machines we needed for the second punch card upgrade.  We were on our way.

Then it was off to the gauntlet again, where we managed to clear through to the big room with the Electrocutioner 6000 in the middle.

We’re here already

Elapsed time in the instance at that point was 20 minutes.  We cleared around to the ramp, and got stuck in with the Electrocutioner 6000 pretty handily.

This time fighting in a lit section of the platform

At just past the 30 minute mark we were already up to where we made it last week.  Things were going smoothly as we cleared around to the tunnel that would take us to the Crowd Pummeler 9-60.  Moronae coveted one of the possible drops.

Again, clearing through to him wasn’t a big deal.  We were able to take groups out easily enough and were soon looking at our target.

The Crowd Pummeler 9-60 waits

Like many bosses, he doesn’t have a lot in the way of complicated mechanics.  He stands apart with an attack that throws you back, which could get awkward if you were fighting with your back to the ledge.  However, we had arranged ourselves in such a way that it was not an issue… totally by chance, yes, but it worked out.

At that point we were bopping along pretty well.  We cleared around to the elevator and then cleared the whole room below just to make sure we got all the “coke machines” that were down there for quest updates.

Then it was up the side tunnel that empties out into the ramp which leads down to the final boss, Mekgineer Thermaplugg.  We were pretty close to the end.  And then our troubles began.

Once again, there is something of a sudden ramp up in difficulty mid-instance.  As I have said before, vanilla WoW instances seem like a mix of experiments and assumptions about dungeon design.  And one of those assumptions was clearly that people were going to take multiple runs at instances.  While Gnomer doesn’t have the steep level ramp from start to finish the way Deadmines does, the key you get for the side door is an indication that they expected people to get that far, the work up a bit before going further.

So while things were very manageable so far, the moment we spilled out into the tunnel with the Dark Iron Agents and their mechanical friends, things suddenly got more difficult, though it would take us a bit to notice how much in over our heads we were.

The one wise thing we did was take out a small group that was up the tunnel from us, just to give ourselves more room before we took on the foursome of Dark Iron Agents in the direction we needed to go.  Not only were there four mobs to handle, all level 32 or 33 while we were still 29 and 30 as a group, but we totally forgot about the mines that the Dark Iron drop.  Add in an alarm bot that came up behind us and called in adds and the wheels came off pretty quickly.  We ended up with a wipe on that group, having taken down just one of them.

Dead on the ramp, mines about

But at least we got one, and Skronk had the soul stone ready.  We were not sure what the mines would do, there being one on either side of Skronk’s corpse.  He popped the soul stone and the mines immediately detonated, killing him again.

Strewn about sans mines now, Skronk face down rather than face up this time

That meant we had to release and run back.  In running back we decided to take the side door in, hoping to avoid the stuff we left behind.  We got to the door, over by where Techbot spawns, and found we could not use the key while dead.  Oh no!

And then one of use realize that, as ghosts, we could walk through the door and we were able to get back into the instance.  We buffed up and cleared our way ahead, hitting a second locked door.  I guess they needed a double door solution, the first to keep people from just wandering in if they didn’t have the key and the second to keep people from ghosting in the back door.

We were back and facing the three remaining Dark Iron, still marked with targeting icons.  Three should be easier than four, right?  So we checked our buff and got stuck in again.

And then something odd happened, which I still haven’t figured out.  Somehow we managed to draw what must have been 6-8 additional mobs, Dark Iron Agents and the mechs that are mixed in with them.  Maybe proximity to a group of two down in the lower part of the tunnel?  They swarmed in from up the ramp mid-fight, causing us to wipe again.

Everybody freakin’ shows up to kill us

On the bright side, the soul stone was up again, so Skronk had that in hand before the wipe.  But he was once again dead right next to one of the Dark Iron mines.  It seemed like we were going to have to do the return run again.  But, since the soul stone is “use it or lose it” he gave it a shot.  And, for no reason I can see, the mine didn’t go off.

Skronk escapes the mine

So he was able to ress us.  We buffed up again and carried on, trying to stick to the wall side of the ramp lest we draw a crowd again.

We were also becoming very diligent about zapping alarm bots when they showed up.  They only take a couple of hits, but if you don’t get them you’re going to have some adds.

The only good Alarm Bot is a dead Alarm Bot… from earlier in the instance

On we went, finally clearing that first group of four.  After that there were a couple smaller groups before we hit another group of four where things once again got our of hand and ended up in a wipe.  The soul stone hadn’t been ready yet, so we had to run back again, which is a bit of a pain since the closest graveyard is in Kharanos, which is a bit of a trot from the instance.

Skeletal remains of that wipe

We got one of the fours again though, which left us with a threesome that we could handle.

From there it was another clear and we were at the bottom of the ramp.  There four mobs wander.  As we were sizing that up I looked over the lip of the ramp to see what might wander up behind us.  There was a Dark Iron Agent there and as everybody piled over to look we proximity pulled him.  I figured we were toast yet again.

But he ran up the ramp, turned around and came up our ramp, just shy of where the mobs were roaming and didn’t bring anybody from the door with him. (Though he did bring his own friend.)  Some luck at last.  And then we found we could pull each of the mobs before the big door individually if we let them wander off by themselves.  We opened up the door and found a mixed group there, two elites and some non-elite helpers.  We took them on and managed to muddle through.  It turned out we could have taken each group individually, but I figured that out too late.  Ula went down in that fight, but Skronk was quick on the ress.

That left us looking at Mekgineer Thermaplugg, the big boss.

There he is

Moronae had something to do for a bit IRL, so we camped there at the edge of the big room and planned how to take on the final boss.  That let the soul stone timer run down, which ended up being handy.

As we sat there we saw the Dark Iron Ambassador wander by on his loop.  We would get him too.

We looked up how to deal with the big fight.  We all vaguely remembered something about bombs and buttons and such, but were pretty hazy on the mechanics.  The question was who to put on button patrol.  You have to push the buttons when the bomb towers get activated or they’ll keep unleashing mech bombs to come an disrupt the fun… and help the boss kill you.

There are six towers and buttons, and we decided that the two ranged DPS, Ula and Obama, ought to take three each.  They could run to buttons and cast in between.  I would stay in the middle with Mekgineer Thermaplugg and hold him there, Moronae would DPS, and Skronk would keep us all alive.

This was a tough fight.  The boss was level 34 and, Viniki had just made it to 31, but everybody else was still 30 save Obama, who was 29.  When you’re more than 2 levels below a mob, your attacks and spells and abilities become less effective and much more subject to resists.

So, while it started smoothly, the battle quickly devolved into chaos.  I had to work to build up aggro and two of my biggest aggro generators, sunder armor and mocking blow, were getting shrugged off and resisted more often than not.  With the damage I was taking Skronk drew aggro after not too long, leaving me to chase the boss around throwing a taunt at it every eight seconds, which it seemed to shrug off more often than not.

Skronk went down and I was left chasing Mekgineer Thermaplugg around the room as he went after the casters, then back to me, then after the casters again.  Skronk used the soul stone and got back in the fight again.  But, again, with him needing to pour on the healing… the boss chasing the casters drove them away from the buttons so as I chased the boss the bombs were chasing me… he drew aggro yet again as I tailed the target trying to get aggro back on me.

Skronk went down a second time.  The only bright side at that point was that Mekgineer Thermaplugg was down to his last sliver of health, so we were able to burn him down.  The fight was won.  Moronae used his ress to bring Skronk back.  It was a messy win, but a win none the less.  We took our traditional screen shot with the dead boss.

Victory over Mekgineer Thermaplugg

Thermaplugg dropped the Electromagnetic Gigaflux Reactivator, a very nice cloth head piece that went to Skronk on the caster roll-off.  He earned it with his extra deaths.

Then we went back out to the tunnel and waited for the Dark Iron Ambassador.  He takes a while making his rounds, but we had seen him come and go a couple of times, so we knew we just had to wait until he made his way to us once more.

The Dark Iron Ambassador approaches

As a fight he was pretty quick.  And he had the potential to drop a mace that would have been a serious upgrade for me… or a gun that would have been an upgrade for the one I use to pull.  Instead he dropped the leather wrist pieces, which went to the only leather wearer in the group.

It was a successful run, but not without its share of wipes.  The Recount total of deaths for Gnomeregan round 2:

Repair time

After that we ran around the boss room, there being a memory of a chest or something in there.  But there was nothing, so we all stoned back home to get on the quest turn ins.

All of us stoning out together

On the quest front we had done pretty well.  I managed to get them all done, and everybody else was just one shy.  We may need to go back to find a few more of the “coke machines” to wrap that up.

Quest log for Gnomer

Back in Stormwind I ran over to the Dwarven Quarter to find Shoni the Shilent.  Then it was into Deeprun Tram to get to Ironforge where a bunch of quest turn-ins awaited.

Right there in tinker town

Then from there is was a run down to Kharanos for the final turn in.  That one actually led to another quest back in Gnomer.  Given that, the fact that we need a few more items for another quest, and that a couple of us want boss drops that we didn’t get, and that we could all probably use a few more levels before Scarlet Monastery, we might yet return to Gnomer at least one more time.

I will likely get Viniki out and to level 32 before we go back in.  The final fight would probably be a bit less dramatic if I could hold aggro.

In case we don’t go, I’ll add in the part that links back to our past Gnomer runs below:

• Gnomeregan – Round 1 – Dec 2006 – Our first run, with an odd writing style. I was still figuring out how to write about instance runs.  Also, there was no “round 2.”
• Road to Gnomeregan – Dec 2009 – We go as our Horde group via the Booty Bay teleporter.  This was after Gnomer was refactored to be slightly lower level than in vanilla.
• You Brought Me Here, Now Give Me The Damn Quest! – Feb 2011 – We run the Cataclysm version of the instance.
• The Key to Gnomeregan – Nov 2019 – I might as well include last week’s post here for posterity.

Addendum:  Ula posted a pair of videos covering the run.  The first video goes up into the Dark Iron Agents.  You can see us jumping off the ledge to get to the Viscous Fallout through until our wipes.  You can see much better how many mobs came and swarmed us on that one wipe.

The second video carries on with the Dark Iron Agents, shows that proximity pull, the final clearing fights, and then the big battle Mekgineer Thermaplugg.

As always, excellent work by Ula!  Go follow her blog.

EverQuest II at Fifteen and the Memories of What Could Have Been

I am sure I’ve told this tale before… probably several times… but playing EverQuest II back at launch was really a last minute decision for me.  Meclin… or Gaff… or Rarik…  or whatever I call him these days… Tim I guess… with whom I had played Sojourn/TorilMUD on and off for the previous decade, was suddenly taken with the idea of playing EverQuest II.

An ad for EQII from the August 2004 issue of Computer Gaming World

I hadn’t really been paying attention.  I’d stopped playing EverQuest for a variety of reasons, gave my account to a friend who still played and was doing some multi-boxing (they never changed the password, so I checked back on that account and found all my chars deleted), and basically played single player games or online match-based games like Delta Force and Battlefield 1942.  I knew some people who played EQ or DAoC, but I wasn’t interested.  I had neither the time nor the inclination.

TorilMUD revived itself, after having gone missing for a stretch, in early 2003 which got some of the people I knew back together.  I dove back into that and for one last stretch it became my main game.  But after getting to level cap and getting into a guild and doing zones regularly, word started to get around about EverQuest II.

There was a strong tie between TorilMUD and EQ, with TorilMUD having been the home of a number of EQ devs, including Brad McQuaid, and having served as the basic template for EQ.  A lot of early EQ, from classes to the death mechanics, were rooted in TorilMUD.

So with an new EverQuest coming, it was natural for people to be looking into it.  Not me however, I wasn’t feeling any sort of itch.  Tim though, he was listening to the reports on the new game.  He even passed me a write up somebody had done in beta.  He wanted to get in on the new game, and all the more so since he missed out on early EverQuest.  So a bunch of people from our guild… him and Chandigar and Pril and Oteb and a few others… got on board with playing EverQuest II at launch.

Or almost at launch.

We didn’t get there for the first round of servers.  But the team at SOE had a plan for launch that included bringing new servers online as the current ones filled up.  So we joined in with the launch of the Crushbone server on November 13, 2004, fifteen years ago today.

My earliest screen shot of EQ2 – Nov. 14, 2004

We got in, got through the Isle of Refuge, made it to town, and eventually formed a guild the next day.

Our guild on Crushbone

The guild was a mix of TorilMUD players and some EverQuest players that included a friend of Tim’s.  We all joined together and became the Knights of the Cataclysm.

The EverQuest II lore is based on a cataclysm, the breaking of the moon that rained down debris on Norrath, sundered the lands, broke up continents, reworked the landscape, and basically provided a way to start from scratch to a certain extent.

The game, heir to EverQuest, the reigning champion of the fantasy MMORPG genre with more than 550K subscribers, was expected to carry on the tradition of the original.  The headline of the review by Jeff Green in CGW was The Once and Future King!

Unfortunately, cataclysm proved to be something of an apt metaphor for the game.  There was a lot wrong with it at launch.  For openers, the systems requirements were way too high, something that prevented much of the EQ base from even considering migrating to the new game.  And that migration was clearly central to the plan at SOE.

There were also a myriad of bad assumptions, bad features, and last minute changes… the game was already a year or so “late” so the need to launch seemed to be driving much of the process at that point… that hamstrung the game.

Some of it was self-inflicted.  There has long been the tale about how the EQII team felt they had to steer away from the original game and create their own lore.  Crafting, which had been its own class during the beta, because a sub-class for players, though retained the same advancement structure.  What it also retained was an overburden of complexity and interdependence between the professions.

Adventuring classes had the odd archetype system, where you chose fighter, rogue, cleric, or mage up front, then specialized at level 10, then again at level 20, at which point you were finally at your final class.  But there were really too many classes and too many races and not enough character slots (just 4).

Grouping was pretty much required if you wanted any sort of smooth ride while leveling.  Some zones were locked behind group quests, though only if you wanted to go there before a given level.  Afterwards you could just walk in.  And somebody at SOE had given too much ear to people complaining about twinking in the forums, so a lot of spells could only be cast on groups members, others had pitifully short duration, and some spells combined both.  Gone were the days of casting Spirit of the Wolf on grateful lowbies.

And then there were the core issues, like zones.  The market was moving towards the seamless world idea, but EQII still had you zoning.  And there wasn’t even the illusion of a single world as with EQ.  The place was chopped up into disconnected areas that you visited via a portal or a bell.  I am sure that some problems were solved with this approach, but it left the game feeling less like a world.

Add in the graphics, which were not bad if you had a rig that could display them, though the color scheme tended towards muddy, but when you did crank them up went a little too far into the uncanny valley when it came to characters, and the seeds of discontent had been sown.

Meanwhile the gaming market itself had changed.  When EverQuest launched in March of 1999 there were other MMORPGs, but they were pretty different.  Ultima Online had its isometric 3rd person perspective.  Meridian 59 was all about PvP.  When Asheron’s Call showed up it had a different advancement philosophy.  These were all distinctively different titles.

By late 2004 more games had appeared in the genre.  Dark Age of Camelot talked about being like EverQuest with PVP but without the “suck.”  There was already news coverage for other competing titles.  Guild Wars was in the offing.  Brad McQuaid had already left SOE with some of the original EverQuest crew and Vanguard: Saga of Heroes was vying for the successor to Norrath title.  And, of course, there was that title from Blizzard that was getting lots of coverage.

And so the cataclysm metaphor seemed apt.

Not that it was all bad.  The game’s housing system, and how well integrated it was to the game, including a trade profession dedicated to building furniture, still stands apart from any other MMORPG I have played.  Its free form decorating and the ability to hang trophies from your adventures on your wall, as well as being your in-game store front, worked very well.

As a group, as a guild, we stayed mostly pretty dedicated to the game for almost a year.  But we were something of the exception rather than the rule.  People who did not feel at home in the new world often went back to EverQuest.

But in a couple of weeks after we first logged in World of Warcraft launched, and a lot of people who didn’t go back to EverQuest moved on to WoW instead.

SOE knew they were in trouble pretty quickly after WoW launched, and the game started changing to adapt.  We got little quills and books over quest givers, the EQII version of the big yellow exclamation mark and question mark in Azeroth.  Trade skills got revamped.  We got offline selling.  The emphasis on grouping being a requirement after level 20 or so was relaxed somewhat.  A lot of those group encounters in the Thundering Steppes were made solo encounters.  Buffs got saner timers.  Travel was tinkered with.

Meanwhile, the SOE mania with more content lest we all leave… EQ was well into its “two expansions a year” era… meant that an expansion popped up before some of us were at level cap.

Within a few months people started to fade away.  On guild coms people were pining for Vanguard, which they were now sure would be the real EQ successor.  I went off and tried WoW. came back for a while, then a large portion of the TorilMUD faction in our guild went to WoW together, settling on the Eldre’Thalas server where I still play some of the characters I rolled up back then.

And now here we are, fifteen years down the road, and the game is still there.

As their splash screen proudly declares… though that is the original EverQuest box art

It has been updated, changed, and re-arranged over the years often, but not always, improving the game.  It still gets a new expansion every year, which is a lot more than many games in the genre get.  People still pine for an alternate universe where WoW never launched, but I don’t think that would have made the game any more popular.  It was a mess at launch, but has matured over time, so that the game today plays differently than it did way back when… though there are too many damn skills still.

Oddly, I think the fact that the game has changed so much, mostly for the better, is one of the reasons that the whole progression server idea isn’t nearly as popular for EQII as it is for EQ.

In EQ the old locations mostly look about the same.  Okay, they updated Freeport, but Qeynos and Faydwer still look as crappy as they did back in 1999.  Even if the progression server isn’t a pure 1999 experience, you can squint your eyes and pretend an mostly feel the nostalgia burn.

But EQII?  How the hell does Daybreak even begin to simulate the chaos and dysfunction that was early EQII?  So much has changed that there is no going back to 2004.  There simply aren’t enough free resources at Daybreak to re-create the original game.

Looking Back at BlizzCon 2019

BlizzCon 2019 was sure a hell of a lot better for Blizzard than BlizzCon  2018.

I watched some of panels I wanted to see, but not all of them yet.  So, while this isn’t quite a hot take on the event, it is my impressions about what was announced in a slightly more detailed fashion than my recap of the big four announcements post I did on Friday.  That post has links to all the cinematics and game play videos that Blizz posted as they announced things, if those interest you.

So, lets dive in by categories that almost line up by franchise.

World of Warcraft

A new expansion.  Pretty much a requirement at BlizzCons that fall on odd numbered years.  So they got that right.  But honestly, I am not sure how I feel about Shadowlands.

Part of that is just what you get when your game gets past maybe three expansions, they start to blur for all but the most hardcore.  There are some cool things in the plan.  The covenants things seems like it could make for interesting choices.  I like the return to a plan to focus on classes rather than specs.  A single narrative arc that drives you through four zones in order is back to the old school, and how alts will be handled seems innovative.

No more re-grinding

Better character customization is good direction.  Everybody can be a death knight now.  But the ideas for a new class… again, perfect chance for a necromancer class to show up… seems to have been bypassed.  And thus in its way it will be more of the same, more zones, more levels, more dungeons, more raids, and so on.  And it feels a bit like they were inspired by Stranger Things, which means we will no doubt run into plenty of references to the show.

It sure looks like the Azeroth Upsidedown to me

Wait, did I say “more levels?”  I meant LESS levels.  The level squish is coming.

Leveling up after Shadowlands

I said Blizz wouldn’t do it, so I have clearly been proven wrong on that front.  And my concerns from that post remain, though there are some updsides.  It sounds like they will rescale… again… all of the old content so you can get to level 50 playing through any previous expansion then head into the Shadowlands.  Still, it will be odd to have max level characters in WoW and WoW Classic at the same level.  There were more details about this in the deep dive, which I watched, and I will probably throw together another post just to look at how leveling is going to change with Shadowlands.  But the level squish is coming.

Overall though, you can color me somewhat interested in the expansion.   I am sure the fact that it was made available for pre-order will get hopes up that it will show up sooner rather than later, but I doubt it will show any time before June of 2020.

There is no doubt another post to be made in Blizz moving to three levels of expansion packages, especially just as Daybreak moved to four levels.  No level 120… eventually level 50… boost with the base package either.

MMO Champion has a good outline of the main presentation.  Or you can look at the pretty pictures on the official expansion page.

WoW Classic

We got the very bare minimum of news about WoW Classic, something I indicated might end up being the case back at the start of October.  There was a bit of “isn’t this great!” and the date for the phase 2 unlock (November 12th), and that was that.  No future plans, no talk about expansions, and nothing even daring to look in the direction of somebody low key hinting that there might be anything like original content for the WoW Classic path.

In fact, WoW Classic was stuck in the “oh, by the way” section of the keynote with StarCraft II and Heroes of  the Storm.  Talk about being put on the bench.  Even at the WoW Q&A session the question about future expansions for WoW Classic was pretty much deflected.

But Blizzard moves slowly, something I have to keep reminding myself.  I am sure they are still trying to figure out what to do with this unexpected success story.  We will likely have to wait until next BlizzCon to hear anything new I guess, but that will put it after the Shadowlands launch, so Blizz will be able to focus on it.

I will say though, at least we got a self deprecating crack from J. Allen Brack about serving vanilla ice cream at the BlizzCon concessions.  He didn’t think we would want it, but it turns out we did.

I don’t find Brack to be a particularly compelling or convincing speaker.  He lacks Metzen’s energy or Morhaime’s air of goofy humility.  And, of course, after the infamous quote, I associate him with a level of smug condescension, which biases my perception even when I agree with what he is saying.  We all see things through our own filters.  But at least he was willing to stand up there and remind everybody how wrong he was.

I previously wrote that if he said something about that quote I’d stop bringing it up every time I mentioned him.  I think I can stick to that now.  I won’t mention it every time, though I reserve the right to bring it up when it fits the situation.

Diablo

Diablo IV was announced, to nobody’s surprise.

It looks interesting.  I like the direction they are going.  Darker.  A more open world.  Mounts even.  No RMT auction house.  I have no doubt I will play it some day.  But that day will be… when?  2022?

I guess I can see why they didn’t want to announce it last year.

Basically, I will be a lot more interested in this when it seems like its launch is imminent.

Overwatch

Again, if even I was predicting something like Overwatch 2 more than a month ago, then having that announced was probably not a huge surprise.

I am not an Overwatch player.  I don’t even eat the cereal.  But I am interested in how they are handling Overwatch 2, which is more like an expansion than a new game.

If you own Overwatch, you can keep playing that and your play will overlap with Overwatch 2 players, which includes all the original content plus all the goodies you may have gotten.  Overwatch 2 players will get their own content as well, including a PvE campaign.

I think the latter, the PvE campaign, might be the key here.  The thing that the original lacked was new stuff to sell players… besides loot boxes.  And if loot boxes are you revenue stream it might be prudent to diversify that a bit.  But additional PvE co-op campaigns, that is something Blizz could sell people on.

It is interesting to see how they have chosen to go.  EA gets you to buy their latest Battlefield game by shutting off the servers to the past ones.  I assume Activision does something similar with their Call of Duty games, along with leaving a year gap between launches and trying to add new gimmicks with each annual generation.  In contrast, Blizz wants to keep people playing together.  I suspect that you won’t be able to buy Overwatch once Overwatch 2 is out.  But if you do have the original, you won’t be left completely out in the cold.

Hearthstone

A new expansion.  What a surprise!  It isn’t like we don’t get a few of those every year in any case.

The real surprise was that Blizz decided to take the Auto Chess/Auto Battler idea and integrate it with Hearthstone with their new Battlegrounds play mode.  That demonstrates some oddly un-Blizzard-like thinking, since the obvious route was to copy Teamfight Tactics and Dota Underlords and build it off of their MOBA.  I didn’t exactly get how this was going to work, in part because the description during the opening ceremony was pretty fast and in part because I have no interest in Hearthstone so I didn’t watch the panel where it would have been explained.

At least I haven’t watched it yet.  It was well down on my list of priorities.  I might still, just to get an idea where Blizz is going with this.

Warcraft III Reforged

The re-release of Warcraft III seems to be getting closer.  No ship date was announced, but they are spreading the beta further afield now.  If you were at BlizzCon or had the Virtual Ticket, you now have access to the beta and can download it from the Battle.net launcher.  I was actually in already, as I saw I was able to install it early last week, though I couldn’t tell you if that was because I was special or because they started opening it up to Virtual Ticket holders early.  Either way, it seems unlikely that I will download it to play before it goes live.

StarCraft II and Heroes of the Storm

A new commander and a new AI for the former, and new unit for the latter, all mentioned during what felt like an apologetic side bar in the midst of the opening ceremonies.  I was not expecting much, and so was unsurprised when that was exactly what we got.  Still, being in the same segment where they mentioned the Blizzard Arcade at BlizzCon, where you could go play Rock n Roll Racing and Lost Vikings, does tend to set a tone.

The Heroes of the Storm fans are probably happy for any scraps they get, but the StarCraft II playerbase has to have some mixed feelings, since SCII is still one of the Blizz esports titles.

Unmentioned

I did not hear anything about the remaster of Diablo II yet again.  It came up as part of the ideal for Diablo IV, but it was left out otherwise.  I still want this.  I would happily take a GoG.com version updated to run on Windows 10, though I would really like something more akin to the Warcraft III Reforged full remaster for modern screen sizes.  Maybe someday.

Then, maybe I missed it, but I didn’t hear anything about Diablo: Immortal.  Did fan reaction really bury that?  My complaint from last year wasn’t that it wouldn’t find an audience, just that it was presented to the wrong audience.  They put some updates on the official site… it was mixed in with the feed on their “all news” page… but they seemed loathe to mention it yet again in front of a live studio audience.

Also, any hope for a completely new game or IP was left in the dust.  Everything was an expansion or a sequel.  There wasn’t even a mobile version of any other Blizzard IPs mentioned.  Hearthstone might have had the only new idea… or, newly stolen idea, this being Blizzard and all… with it picking up the Auto Chess/Auto Battler idea.

Virtual Ticket

The Virtual Ticket plan still seems like an acceptable value to me.  There are still a list of panels I want to watch that I could not make time for over the weekend, so I am able to watch them at my leisure.  As I noted previously, this year Blizz has decided that access to the videos will remain up until March 2020.

One feature I noticed was that Blizz also gives access to the videos from the past two BlizzCons as well.  So you can, if you want, go back and watch the horrible Diablo: Immortal panel or the informative Play Nice, Play Fair panel that was completely bypassed by the gaming media that often rages about how companies like Blizzard do nothing to contain player toxicity.

BlizzCon Overall

This would have been pretty much the ideal BlizzCon for the company, with four big product announcements.  Back at the start of October it looked to be huge.  And then, of course, there was the Hong Kong thing, which necessitated the apology, which I covered in its own post.

After Blizz banned Blitzchung and the outrage was at its peak there were wild predictions that they might even cancel BlizzCon.  Or, if BlizzCon went on, it would be tightly controlled, a mirror image of the repressive Chinese state on stage in Anaheim.  Would Brack even get up in front of the audience live, or would he just appear on the monitor so the engineers could cut out the sounds of the crowd should they get 40,000 people chanting “Free Hong Kong!” or some such?  Would Blizzard be able to contain the outrage of the fan base?

In the end, things went mostly as they usually do.  The vast majority of the fans were there to see Blizz and to revel in the spectacle and be a part of the event.   Cheering was the norm.  And when, during the WoW Q&A panel, a questioner ended his interaction with a message about Hong Kong, he wasn’t cut off or ejected from the event.  People chanted a bit and Blizz let it all pass like the guy in the Winnie the Pooh costume, who showed up on camera at least once.

People will take whatever message they want from that.  You can read into that the promise of better behavior from Brack’s apology, or you can assume it is Blizz throwing a minimal bone to some fans that does not otherwise reflect corporate policy.  It still puts them ahead of the NBA in either case.

In the end though, Blizz clearly won the news cycle.  Every “What about Hong Kong?” story had to contend with a dozen or more “OMG! New Things!” stories out of BlizzCon.  With that and what will likely be a somewhat rosy Q3 2019 earnings report later this week (thanks to WoW Classic) and the 15th Anniversary WoW events coming up, the company seems to be well positioned for the balance of the year.

EVE Vegas 2019 Swag

When you get back home late Monday afternoon and are on the hook for work Tuesday morning, it can take a bit to get all your stuff together.  Writing a summary was actually easier.

EVE Vegas Invasion World Tour Shirt

But somewhere along the course of the week I did managed to collect everything… I think it is everything… together for a picture.

The swag collection

There are some more buttons and pins on my lanyard, which has been through five EVE Vegas events now.  You can see the very nice EVE Scout coin that Katia Sai gave me.  I also kept my record of getting an Open Comms shirt every year, along with the pin.  I didn’t have to hit up Dirk this time though, as there was one in my size up on the charity auction which had just a $10 bid.  I couldn’t let it go for that cheap, so I doubled the bid and walked away with it myself.

We shall see what happens in 2020, with a player run EVE Vegas returning and a CCP event in San Diego.