WoW Classic Season of Mastery Name Reservations Available Today

Blizzard’s World of Warcraft Season of Mastery, their return to the nostalgia well.  This is another fresh start opportunity for those wanting the day one WoW Classic experience, and the whole thing kicks off for real today… or tonight… or possibly tomorrow depending on where you live… with a name reservation event.

When you can get logged in to reserve a character name

There was a similar event for WoW Classic more than two years back, which turned into a bit of a fiasco because they hadn’t put up enough servers.  Not enough servers became a bit of a theme for the launch, with long queues and more servers being added and layering tech, which allowed more players to be on a server than it would otherwise hold, having to run much longer into the life of the game than Blizzard expected.

So I am sure that this time around Blizzard will be prepared.  That have had the big WoW Classic launch, back in 2019, and the Burning Crusade Classic launch earlier this year, to help them size things.

And with all of that experience, they have 13 servers setup for name reservations today, eight in the US and Pacific and five in Europe.

• U.S. East Barman Shanker PvP
• U.S. East Jom Gabbar PvP
• U.S. East Shadowstrike Normal
• U.S. West Mutanus PvP
• U.S. West Nightfall PvP
• U.S. West Obsidian Edge Normal
• Australia Lionheart Normal
• Australia Swamp of Sorrows PvP
• EU Bonescythe PvP
• EU Dreadnaught PvP
• EU Ironfoe PvP
• EU Kingsfall Normal
• EU Quel’Serrar Normal

That doesn’t seem like a lot of servers.

But I cannot tell if the Blizzard team feels that WoW Classic has been done once, so it won’t ever be as popular again so there is no need to plan on anything like the 80+ servers WoW Classic eventually needed the first time around, or if they feel that Blizzard’s bad odor in the news cycle means nobody will show up for their grand re-opening (though that certainly didn’t seem to be a problem for Diablo II Resurrected).

Now, I suspect that this event is as much to let people reserve names… though this time around you will be limited to one character on one server… as it is a way to test the popularity of the idea.  After the 2019 name reservation event Blizzard started adding a lot more servers.

So we will have to wait and see if Blizzard piles on some more servers between today’s name reservation event and next Tuesday’s launch of the WoW Classic Season of Mastery.

Watching Week One of Alliance Tournament XVII

The Alliance Tournament has returned, having been on hiatus since 2018, with ATXVII officially kicking off this past weekend.  It came out during some of the between match discussion that this was in large part due to the efforts of CCP Aurora.

Alliance Tournament XVII

I spent some time watching the first weekend of matches, though being on the Pacific coat means that they tend to start while I am still asleep.  I do want to say that I am happy the AT is back.  While I have my reservations about it and while it has not been without controversy, it does represent an aspect of the game that a segment of the player base enjoys, and in a sandbox game we’re all better off if groups can thrive in their part of the field.

That said, in watching this I am reminded once again what an abysmal spectator game EVE Online really is.  It can work for a streamer where you can see their modules and overview, but from a third party perspective viewing a battle it is tough to get anything from what is being displayed on the screen.

Though, honestly, that might be a true reflection of being in such a battle where the visual of the game are often just so much chaos, where the brackets merge and overlap into an unreadable mess at times, and where the overview is often the only thing delivering useful information at a given moment.  At that point as a viewer the match depends a lot on the announcers, and even the best of those can be wrong or off the mark in a game as complicated as EVE Online.  Of course, when so many matches are pretty much decided in the first 30 seconds, maybe complexity isn’t the biggest issue.

As usual, there were some interesting matches and some complete wipes.  I think the second match for What Could Possibly Go Wr0ng might have been the best morale wipe.  They went in with an artillery Maelstrom core against LAZERHAWKS and just got stomped.  One of several 100 to 0 results.  But I had just been thinking about arty Maelstroms because, as I am coming up on a decade in null sec I have been looking back at some old posts, and the Maelstrom based Alpha Fleet was the first doctrine I flew in way back then.  Greetings from 2011.

Probably the most exciting match for me was the second Goonswarm match against Deepwater Hooligans.  GSF got wiped in its first match, going down 100 to 16 against Psychotic Tendencies,  so everything was on the line for the second match.

I was away from my keyboard and missed the first five minutes of the second match, only pulling it up to find GSF down 55 to 18 with only two ships left on the field.  It seemed like things were a foregone conclusion.

This does not look good

And then ren taka and Dirk Stertille managed to rack up a series of kills as the clock counted down, knocking out both DWH Eoses .  If the Golem could have held on a bit longer it might have been the end for the Ishtars.  But it could not, and its explosion seemed to call the match.  But then the Navy Scorpion did kill one of the Ishtars and the score got close again, sitting at 72 to 70 in favor of DWH.  But Dirk couldn’t hold out for very long, and with less than a minute left in the match the Scorpion exploded and that was it for the match.  Goons knocked out early once again.

The final score for GSF vs DWH

That was probably not the absolute best match of the game (the Fraternity vs The Network match was something else) but it was a good one and one I was invested in.  I bet all my channel points on Goons twice and lost twice.

It is interesting to see what comps were popular this year.  There were a lot of command ships on the field.  The Sleipner is usually pretty popular, but the Eos and the Nighthawk saw a lot of usage.  There were also multiple attempts at battleship heavy compositions to try and bring as much damage to bear early in the match as possible.  That worked a few times, but the mobility of command ships seemed the better choice in the first week.

All of which is a reminder of the esoteric nature of AT fleet comp theory crafting, where both teams are limited to ten ships and have a 100 points to spend on hulls in a pricing scheme setup by CCP.  This leads to a very tight balance between hulls and fits and pilot skill to create a winning team, and the teams that spend the most time testing fits and practicing tactics tend to stand out as the tournament progresses. (And props to Arrival for putting a 22 billion ISK Barghest flagship on the field. The AT took place in TQ in the UUA-F4 system so you can see all the losses on zKillboar.)

So it was an interesting weekend for round one.  We even got to see some teams secure prize ships as this time around the top 16 teams will all walk away with at least a few.

Marring all of this a bit was the whole turning kill mails into NFTs thing that CCP announced at the last minute, which went over like the proverbial lead balloon.  Hilmar was out on Twitter hyping up the NFT aspect and meeting quite a bit of push back.  The big defense for him was that these NFTs were less environmentally harmful than competing NFTs, with the tech bros he contracted with throwing links to dubious charts in his wake.

It is one of those things where I understand somebody like the CEO of Electronic Arts saying that NFTs and blockchain are the future of gaming.  He is just jumping on the hype train to try and juice is stock price (and thus part of his compensation package) even as he admits in almost the next breath that he doesn’t know what his statement even means. (And even if they have no real benefit and plenty plenty of downside for video games.)

But Hilmar and EVE Online have a pretty small audience so it isn’t clear to me what benefit he thought he was bringing to the company by diving in with NFTs, which is currently little more than a haven for scams right now, and block chain, which represents the favored currency of criminals globally.  This might be taking that “Be the Villain” ad campaign a bit too far.  That 10% cut of all sales transactions for the kill mail NFTs seems more like an accounting encumbrance than a benefit.

But he was all in on VR to save the company too at one point.

Anyway, we’ll see what becomes of that in the long term as well I suppose.

Related:

• CCP – Alliance Tournament Week One Announcement
• CCP – Alliance Tournament XVII Brackets
• The Greybill – Killmails in a Blockchain

Carbot and Ideas for Diablo II

As we learned last Tuesday, Diablo II Resurrected was pretty much the one bight spot in Blizzard’s Q3 2021, lifting the studio through an otherwise difficult quarter where there wasn’t much else to talk about.

The return of the classic

Unfortunately for Blizzard, D2R is a buy and play game, so the majority of the income they will ever get from it came in one big bubble in September.  They will sell more copies over time, but it won’t have the legs to save Q4 2021.

One obvious thought is basically, gee, could we have some more D2R content?  That probably isn’t viable, at least in the short term.

But they could add a few things to make the game a longer term prospect.  Again, that won’t sell a bunch more copies, but making it a game with even more too it might sustain the remaining sales cycle longer.  And that is where Carbot comes in, because he has a video up about additions he would like to see for D2R.

The video kicked off with a bit of silliness with the first idea, but seems pretty solid from there forward.  I personally like the second idea about mercenaries, or at least having a way to put your mercenary away for a fight because the price of a ress starts getting a bit crazy at higher levels.

I am not sure how much more Blizzard can do with D2R.  But the original Blizzard North team seemed to think that a remaster wasn’t possible, much less porting it to consoles, so you never know what they might come up with.

Can Blizzard Do Anything That Doesn’t Look Bad Right Now?

Betteridge’s law of headlines suggests that the answer to this question must be “No,” unless we consider it an open ended question.  But the easy answer is “no,” and I’ll stake that against whatever Activision Blizzard announces in a few hours at their Q3 2021 investor’s call.

In advance of that however, we can look at the cat mount.  Did you know that you can buy a cat mount now, a flying cat mount no less, in World of Warcraft.  Well you can, and it is just $25 for the “Sunwarmed Feline,” described as the “fuzziest mount Azeroth has ever seen.”

It is admittedly very fuzzy

Now, even in the best of times, somebody would have been shouting “cash grab” or complaining about a subscription game padding their bankroll with cash shop purchases.

But that has died down somewhat, and you can usually predict the regulars who are going to show up with that complaint.  We’re kind of past the outrage era of the sparkle pony and the $10 horse I think.  Another mount in the cash shop is pretty much expected now and then.

Unless, of course, your studio is being investigated by the state for having been a hostile work place since forever ago and senior staff… who were already leaving rather regularly… begin getting the boot and even the CEO has to take a temporary cut.  Oh, and your studio is basically living off of nostalgia for games launched 15-20 years ago.

When that happens doing anything like adding a new mount to the online store is immediately greeted by rage.  How dare you continue to conduct business as normal!

I mean, look at this headline over at Massively OP:

Tell us how you really feel…

Not that I am holding up Massively OP as a beacon of temperate games journalism… I think one of the biggest arguments in favor of video games being art is the amount of ink spilled over opinions, and their site is driven by opinion as much as any… but a year ago that headline would have just been World of Warcraft releases a new cash shop mount and would have had maybe 20 comments split evenly between grumbles about corporate greed and joy about the cool new kitty.  Now the pitchforks and torches are out.

And that is pretty much the reaction to everything.  If they let somebody else go, change some NPCs name, cover up some cleavage, or remove a suggestive joke or emoji the crowd is angry because they aren’t doing enough, they are doing the wrong things, they should be focused on something else, or they are just doing some window dressing rather than fixing the main problem, take your pick.

And even things that might otherwise seem good get the veil of suspicion draped over them.  It is hard not to think that the whole WoW Classic Season of Mastery was a quick attempt to shore up Q4 2021 revenue and win some goodwill by feeding us some more nostalgia.

Even when the press release announced that Bobby Kotick had asked the board of directors to to cut his compensation, my gut reaction was to wonder aloud if they said yes.  Everything they say, everything they do, is under the microscope, so if the press release just says “asked” I want to know the response. I don’t want to hear that he asked, I want to hear that it was done.

This is what happens when people feel you have betrayed your trust, when you private reality turns out to be kind of shitty compared to your public persona, when you prove once again that corporations are not people so cannot be our friends, ever.  Our relationships with them are purely transactional and if we see them any other way we’re just kidding ourselves.

Of course, in the middle of all of this, are a lot of actual people who do the work that makes Blizzard go, most of whom probably just want to do their job in a safe environment where they can be themselves.  This has to be a miserable time for them.

But they have to move forward, the company has to move forward or a lot of people will lose their jobs, maybe jobs that they really love, jobs that they have worked many years to get to, and even if corporations done care about the individual, “Blizzard Lays Off Staff” would be another blow of a headline.

So I wonder what the other side of this looks like.  Ion Hazzikostas has an interview over at Venture Beat about trying to move forward.  Because they have to move forward, fixing things and shipping products, or they all go home.

And outrage has an expiration date, unless you keep feeding it, which has been one of the Blizzard problems; we keep getting new revelations.  The end doesn’t come until all the bad stuff comes out in the daylight.

There is a temptation to compare Blizzard to Riot, which went through its own series of damning revelations about being an incredibly hostile place to work if you weren’t a meat eating white hetro male.  The headlines for them dried up pretty fast after the initial revelations, though the state of California is still on them about working conditions.  The state will keep going until it stops getting complaints.

But Riot’s audience feels a little different than Blizzards.  Not that there isn’t toxicity in any large, popular online game, but League of Legends has a reputation in that regard above and beyond the likes of WoW.  And during the time when Riot was in the headlines they remained at the top of the monthly SuperData chart… I miss that bit of monthly insight… so the bottom line didn’t seem to be hard hit.

So I suppose we’ll see later today with the investor’s call how hard Blizzard is getting hit when it comes to the bottom line, though how much of that is outrage at the company and how much is the fact that Blizz just hasn’t been delivering much new in a while will still be up for debate.

The Summon the Swarm Update brings CRABs and Tax Changes to EVE Online

The previously announced capital ship ratting enhancement has finally arrived in New Eden.  With the Summon the Swarm update the CONCORD Rogue Analysis Beacons (CRAB) can now be built and deployed in the game. (“Crab” is the in-game vernacular for somebody who rats or mines or otherwise focuses on gaining wealth, with “crabbing” being the verb.)

Calling all CRABs

According to the patch notes these new deployables, which can only be activated from capital ships, have four phases of operation:

• 1 – Deployment
  • Anchoring III required to deploy, with restrictions in deployment locations.
  • Limited to Null and Low Security space.
  • Activation delay: 20 seconds
  • Maximum lifetime: 1 hour
  • Shield / Armor / Structure: 50,000 HP / 50,000 HP / 50,000 HP
• 2 -Linking
  • Once deployed, it will be globally visible via the Overview for anyone to warp to.
  • After its initial Activation phase, it can then be Linked to by pilots in the following ships: Carrier, Dreadnought, Supercarrier, Titan.
  • For the ship that begins the linking phase, it will be locked in place in space for a duration of four minutes.
  • While linking, the following will be in effect: Tether Blocked (Debuff), Cloaking Disrupted (Debuff), Warp Drive Disabled (Debuff), Resistance Bonus of 10% (Buff to all resistance profiles, Shield/Armor/Structure).
  • After linking the above four statuses will clear after a duration of 60 seconds.
• 3 – Scanning
  
  • After Linking, the CRAB will begin to broadcast a signal in the solar system that will attract the attention of Rogue Drone NPCs.
  • When Rogue Drones are in proximity of the CRAB, they will block the scanning progress and attack hostile threats in proximity to the CRAB.
  • The Rogue Drones must be destroyed to clear the perimeter so that the CRAB can continue its Scanning.
  • After 10 minutes of uninterrupted scanning, the CRAB will complete its analysis of the Rogue Drones and will have salvaged enough technology to reward players with new Mutaplasmids.
• 4 – Reward
  
  • After successful scanning, the CRAB will have mutaplasmids from Rogue Drones inside of its cargohold .
  • For two minutes after scanning, the ship that initiated the CRAB during its linking phase will have exclusive access to the cargo hold of the CRAB.
  • After these two minutes pass, the CRAB will self-destruct with the generated mutaplasmids always safely being found in the wreckage (it will be a 100% chance to drop its contents when it self-destructs).

In order to keep these new modules under control so they don’t get run constantly and lead to some sort of economic overload, CCP has added the following items to limit their use.

• Solar systems have a new property, “Signal Interference”.
  • Using the new CONCORD Rogue Analysis Beacon repeatedly in the same solar system will saturate a system with interference preventing the CRAB from being able to broadcast a signal that can be isolated. In practical terms, the CRAB will not be able to be linked to if interference is too high as the Rogue Drones cannot locate it.
  • Over time, Signal Interference will decay back down to a quiescent state. This state of decay is always ongoing and not attached to server downtime.
  • The time for a full recovery of a solar system with maximum signal interference is approximately 25 hours.
  • The User Interface has been updated to show Signal Interference in locations where appropriate.
• Capsuleers now have a reserve of Complex Encryption Qubits (CEQs).
  • CEQs are used when initiating a link to the CONCORD Rogue Analysis Beacon.
  • Over time CEQs will regenerate back to their full reserve, and the regeneration is always ongoing and not attached to server downtime.
  • The time for a full regeneration of CEQs is approximately 22 hours.
  • As CEQs are only required by the CRAB, your current reserves will be visible in a tooltip on mouse-over of the CRAB in your inventory.

Blueprints for the new modules are now available from CONCORD and DED LP Stores.  A 5-Run BPC costs 20,000,000 ISK & 20,000 LP.

These rewards from CRABs include new Rogue Drone Mutaplasmid technology.  These ew Mutaplasmids come in four variations (Durability, Firepower, Navigation, Projection). Each variation will favor positively one attribute, with all other attributes having unknown results.

They also are sorted out by drone type, with heavy, medium, light, and sentry drone variations.  In addition, there are two wildcard modifiers, radical variations, for drones and fighters.

In order to use modified drones players will need to train up the new drone skill introduced with last week’s patch. CCP changed the skill name from ‘Rogue Drone Specialization’ to ‘Mutated Drone Specialization’ with this update.

CRABs are the headline for this patch, but there is another sizable change in the patch notes as well.  The three month tax holiday for NPC stations, which came in with The Grand Heist update back in July, has concluded.

The new base tax rates will be:

• Sales Tax: 8%
• Brokers Fee: 3%

The change to base, unmodified tax rates are now (holiday -> post holiday (pre-holiday):

• Sales Tax: 2.5% -> 8.0% (Previously 5.0%)
• Brokers Fee: 2.5% -> 3.0% (Previously 5.0%)
• Total Taxes: 5.0% -> 11.0% (Previously 10.0%)

The minimum achievable tax rates for NPC stations, modified by skills, standings, etc, are now (holiday -> post holiday (pre-holiday):

• Sales Tax: 1.125% -> 3.6% (Previously 2.25%)
• Brokers Fee: 0.5% -> 1.0% (Previously 3.0%)
• Total Taxes: 1.625% -> 4.6% (Previously 5.25%)

Buying things in NPC stations is now more expensive, and the shift to favoring Sales Tax over Broker’s fees means that player owned structures like the Tranquility Trading Tower in Perimeter will no longer be as attractive for sellers or lucrative for owners.

So those are the big changes with today’s update.  There are a few minor fixes… well, maybe not minor when it comes to the MacOS client… but nothing that changes game design.

Related:

• CCP – Summon the Swarm Update Announcement
• CCP – Tax Restructuring Announcement
• CCP – Patch Notes

EVE Online Gets Another New Player Experience and Skill Training Updates as a New Quadrant Arrives

The summer vacations are over and CCP is back with a new Quadrant.  The Foundation Quadrant is over and the Gateway Quadrant has arrived.

Didn’t we all get stuck out here after that gateway closed?

And with that CCP is focused again on its favorite obsession of the last few years, the new player experience.  This time the NPE has been rebuilt around a new NPC faction, the Association for Interdisciplinary Research which will introduce new players to EVE Online.   The highlights from the dev blog are:

• More immersive experiences and faster iteration
• More dynamic visuals
• Gradual UI reveal
• Improved UI highlighting
• An integrated intro video
• Beautiful visuals

To the cynic in me that works out to “pretty,” “pretty,” “working with the UI we already have,” “working with the UI we already have,” “pretty,” and “pretty.”

I mean, there is room in there for real improvements, and maybe it is a better NPE, but CCP has chosen to emphasize the superficial and that the UI is too much for new players in its own description.  What is that supposed to tell me?

The new NPE is also said to be story driven, but so was the NPE two iterations ago, which was going to be a big new thing until they quietly ditched it, because everything PvE had to go into The Agency…. and probably also because once you got done with the story the actual game is nothing like that, bait and switch not being a great idea for player retention.  I hope CCP learned something since last time and aren’t just jumping back on the same idea they previously axed.

Though the NPE has been through the wringer more than a few times, CCP has been especially adamant about new player retention being an issue since EVE North back in 2019 when they gave us this chart.

How many new players log back in as time passes

As I noted at the time, that seems pretty dismal without any context.  But the one publicly available study on the topic I found seemed to indicate that those retention numbers are pretty close to the industry average for MMORPGs with a free to play option.  Given EVE Online’s legendary difficulty, obtuse UI, and open world PvP, that CCP does so well is probably an achievement.

So while I get that CCP likes to keep reminding us that new players are the lifeblood of the game… and I hope this next revision of the NPE helps on that front… farming the installed player base, the lapsed veterans and such, is how games like EverQuest and World of Warcraft have revitalized their bottom lines.  Here is hoping that another investment in another new NPE pays off.

The NPE is also emphasized in the trailer for the new quadrant.

I feel like I saw that launch sequence in the EVE Valkyrie opening… but I guess all tube launches feel kind of the same.  I’ll have to find some time to give it a try.

So that is the first thing on the list.

Next on the update front is skill training with the introduction of skill plans and a revamp of the training system UI.  This feels like a feature that benefits both new and old players alike.  Players will be able to create plans for specific goals, with milestones to mark improvements for specific configurations, and even certified skill plans aimed at new players to help them decide what to train.

There is also a revamp of the skill training UI.  Being an old fart that has finally gotten used to the current setup, I immediately wondered how badly could they screw it up? This morning already saw calls for the old UI on r/eve, but they hate everything there.  But here is the new UI on day one.

The New Skill Window – The red arrow thing is not part of the UI

For openers, skills now have their own window, no doubt because the game UI doesn’t have enough independent windows floating around, and it defaults to the new training plan UI, which I won’t even delve into right now, but it feels too big and not all that helpful.

For those of us who just want to see our current skills and queue together, the second tab has that, with all the skill groups now in alphabetical order finally.  I know, there is outrage that Spaceship Command isn’t in the upper left, but whatever, and my brain wants to read left to right along rows first, then down columns, and the sorting is by columns, but I’ll get used to all of that.

The window seems bigger than it needs to be.  It defaults to full screen, which is obnoxiously large on my 34″ monitor, but even when I make it a window it remains too wide for my taste largely due to the black dead zone between skills and queue (marked with the red arrow in the screen show above) that cannot be sized down by itself. (The gap between skill names and their states seems pretty wide as well.)

Anyway, there is always EVE Mon still if I need a more compact view.  Oh, and your character sheet is different now, lacking all those skills… and I hope you remembered to put pants on your avatar.

All of this comes with a couple of big changes to skills queues:

• The current limit of 50 skill entries in the queue will be increased to 150 for both Alpha and Omega clones.
• The current restriction of the Alpha clone training queue allowing only the skills that would start training within the next 24h will also be removed.

As somebody who came from the “one skill at a time and make sure you start a long skill the night before the next patch update” era, these seem huge.  150 skills in the queue will let you build up a might skill plan… I’ve bumped into the 50 skill limit a few times since it became a thing… and the removal of the 24 hour queue limit will be huge for new players.

And old players.  I can even now see people rolling up a new alpha, sending it the ISK for skills, setting up the desired queue, then letting it run for however long it takes until that suicide gank character or whatever is on the shelf and ready to use.  There is no improvement that EVE players will fail to exploit.

There are a few other items with today’s update.  A new skill points for sale pack is in the store.  EVE Online will be available in the Epic Store come September 23rd.  And, in a nod to the promise to relax the economic starvation plan (now planned for November), there was this tidbit slipped in at the bottom of the announcement:

More ice has been brought back into New Eden with its availability having doubled, and the availability of Mercoxit has also increased.

I wonder if the ice availability got boosted due to the jump drive fuel crisis that hit the game when World War Bee ended and PAPI had to move home?  Anyway, there is alleged to be more ice now.

So that is the what has come with the launch of the new quadrant.  Here are the related dev posts for today’s update:

• Gateway – New Quadrant Starts Today
• Improved New Player Experience
• Updates to Skill Training

Enad Global 7 Q2 2021 Financials and Concerning News

I keep having to remind myself that Daybreak’s parent is a public company once again, and a small enough one that Daybreak’s products aren’t hidden in the numbers but are big enough in the company to get highlighted at every report.  EverQuest is a big name at Enad Global 7.

Enad Global 7

Fortunately I have a Google alert setup for Enad Global 7 which, unlike some of my other alerts, has proven effective at catching updates about the company.  So early this week I got the nod that their Q2 2021 preliminary financials had been announced.  The statement was short and sweet:

During the second quarter, we delivered a net revenue growth of 179%, EBITDA growth of 360% and meanwhile having successfully integrated the acquisitions we closed in the first quarter of 2021. With our rapid acquisition growth, we have digested, integrated and built up the necessary processes to continue our strategic focus. I am delighted to announce that the relaunch of MechWarrior 5 was profitable already after a couple of weeks. It was a testament of the collaboration power between the subsidiaries of the group.

There was also a slide deck investor presentation to go with the announcement.  Quite a bit of the deck was information previously shared.  They did note that Daybreak’s seven titles account for 50% of the company’s revenue.

Daybreak, owner of 7 IP’s that are live and account for 50% of the revenue, mainly PC and Console.  Distributed mainly through our own platform.

Elsewhere in the presentation they say that live games make up 50% of the revenue for 2020, which includes My Singing Monsters as the 8th title, so I am not sure how that breaks out.

And, as always, the like to talk about the strong IPs and long running titles that came with Daybreak.

This slide from March was re-run, featuring 6 Daybreak titles in the highlights plus My Singing Monsters

Compared to that 16% of the revenue comes in via Innova’s 4Game platform which hosts titles licensed from other companies for distribution in the EU and CIS including Lineage II, Aion, and Ragnarok Online.

The presentation wasn’t big on news.  The previously announced plan to migrate all their titles onto the 4Game platform was reconfirmed.

We’ll all play on 4Game

Not a big news day for EG7 really.  A good financial report, some rah rah, and back to work.

As I was tracking down the financials I found that the same day a bomb dropped at EG7.  Robin Flodin, the chipper, young, and enthusiastic CEO of EG7 that gave us all such good feels when the Daybreak acquisition was announced, was being given the boot, with Ji Ham of Daybreak stepping in to fill the role as acting CEO.

The Board of Enad Global 7 AB (publ) and Robin Flodin have agreed that effective immediately Robin will transition away from his current role as CEO of EG7 and will be replaced by the current CEO of Daybreak Game Company, EG7’s largest subsidiary, Ji Ham. During this transition Robin will stay on for six months to assist Ji as he assumes his new role within the EG7 family of companies. Ji will be appointed acting CEO of EG7 as a search for a permanent CEO has been initiated. Ji has an extensive background in both gaming and finance and has for the last six years been the CEO of Daybreak. During his tenure at Daybreak Ji has overseen extensive growth and profitability of the company.

Of course, this made hearts sink, and not just because some of us had crushes on Robin.

Ji Ham should have an entry on the IMDB given his ongoing acting roles.  After Smed got the heave-ho from Daybreak, long time SOE exec Russel Shanks took over for a bit.  But that did not last long and Daybreak quietly updated its information to indicate that Ji Ham had stepped in as acting president of Daybreak.

Nobody outside of the company was quite sure who he was.  His profile over at Bloomberg, which has since been scrubbed from the site (classic Daybreak move), indicated that he was with Columbus Nova’s renewable fuels group, working closing with the Russian Renova Group, which owned Columbus Nova.

The profile probably disappeared during the 2018 panic when Daybreak tried to gaslight everybody , though “gaslighting” implies some subtlety and skill that was not present in the act, into believing that the company had never had anything to do with Renova, Columbus Nova, or any other Russians that might be facing sanctions from the US government.  And that is what the Daybreak era reminds many people of, a regime of obvious lies.

So why is Ji Ham in and Robin Flodin out?

I suspect we’ll never know the real dynamics of the situation, but looking at the slide deck from the quarterly numbers, Robin didn’t own a lot of the company.  The combined management and board of directors own 49% of the company, broken out like this:

EG7 board and management ownership stakes

I have pasted in the total ownership stake in the company for each individual (you might need to click on the image to view it full size to make those numbers readable) and in that mix that represents 49% of the company, Robin holds just 3.504%  That is a lot of shares, but not enough to maintain any sort of control

Meanwhile our old Columbus Nova friends, Jason Epstein and Ji Ham, own more than 9% of the company.  Add in the fact that Daybreak is responsible for 50% of EG7’s revenue and it probably isn’t a huge mystery as to how Jason Epstein and his partner Ji Ham got themselves in the driver’s seat again.

As for what it means… well, I am skeptical.  The press release says this about Ji Ham:

During his tenure at Daybreak Ji has overseen extensive growth and profitability of the company

That seems to be, from the outside, counter factual.

From the outside Ji Ham’s tenure was one of cancelling new titles, shutting down old titles, laying off staff, and tarnishing the reputation of the company with outrageous historical revisionism.  The company may have seen profits, but it wasn’t due to growth.  Growth didn’t enter into it.  Profits came by cutting costs and not investing in anything new, it came from maintaining the status quo at the cheapest possible rate.

Is that the future now holds for EG7?  Have they finished with their growth through acquisition phase and moved to consolidation and profit seeking?  Is Ji Ham being put on the throne to do to EG7 what he did to Daybreak?

Yes, I know he is “acting” CEO, but he was “acting” President and CEO at Daybreak too, and he had a long run in that role. He has recast his LinkedIn profile in the Daybreak tradition to indicate that he was CEO of the company since the date of Smed’s departure.  There was no Russell Shanks, only Ji Ham.  He did a modest attempt at downplaying the fact that he was deep in Columbus Nova, that company that never had nothing to do with Daybreak ever.

CN? What is CN?

I suspect he hopes people think he worked for Canadian Northern Railway and not a Russian oligarch investment front.

I might be borrowing trouble here, taking the dimmest possible view of events, but back in December, when EG7 announced their acquisition of Daybreak with a vision of growth and investment, a lot of optimism bubbled up for the future of the company and its titles.  That optimism came from the grim times that the Daybreak era represented, so bringing back the same actors to run the new show can hardly be expected to be received with enthusiastic applause.

Of course, some of that December optimism was likely misplaced, especially on the LOTRO front.  Making a console silk purse, as the initial announcements hinted at, out of the sow’s ear that is LOTRO now… and that, honestly, LOTRO has always been… would require an investment in funds that would likely never see a return.

And who knows, maybe EG7 is still looking to expand and grow.  Maybe Ji Ham will be given resources and instructions by the board to go in directions he could not when he was at the helm of Daybreak.  Hey, maybe the “acting CEO” bit isn’t a lie, maybe the company is really looking for a new CEO and Ji Ham will be just a caretaker… though why he needs a six month transition from Robin Flodin raises some questions on that front, though likely it means Robin gets paid as CEO for another six months while not having anything to do after a week or two.

But it is concerning.  It smacks of a return to the habits of Daybreak writ larger as they now apply to even more studios.  As I said with the initial burst of optimism about EG7 I will now say about this dark turn; we will have to wait and see.

Related:

• Contains Moderate Peril – LOTRO: We’ll Always Have the Books

Reconsidering My Paladin in Dire Maul

At some point last night we got the Burning Crusade Classic patch on WoW Classic… I think.  The downtime was supposed to be done at 3pm, then 7pm, and then 10pm and… well… some of us have to get up and go to work in the morning.

I suspect that database operations took much longer than expected, which is frequently a thing in my experience.

Anyway, when it it does go live it will be the day of the dividing of worlds and new specs and events and what not.  I’m sure I will have a post about that tomorrow.  This post was actually supposed to go yesterday, but then EVE Online blew up in three directions and that was the focus of Tuesday.  So maybe it is better that the patch is delayed as I can slip this post in now.

As we have run up to the last days of the pure WoW Classic, I have been reflecting on the last 20 months or so of this experiment in nostalgia.  Don’t worry, I’ll have a post about that too.  But one item I was considering this past weekend was my paladin.

He has made it to level 59, so I can move him on to Outland whenever I choose… once it becomes available.

Wilhelm the Paladin in Silithus

But getting him there has been a grind at times, both due to the nature of the class, the nature of leveling in the old system past level 40, and due to my reading too much into various bits of advice.

For example, I spent a stretch trying to level up based on a retribution spec from Icy Veins that was really for raiding.  I eventually found a spec better suited for leveling, which did make things more manageable.

Another bit of information I took to heart was the stated fact that paladins cannot tank in classic.  I read that a number of places and, based on that, I went with Viniki, my gnome warrior, to be the group tank when the group settled down to the four of us.

That was a good decision and it has worked out.  We have been able to manage most instances as a foursome without having to out-level them.  But every time we run into a multi-mob scrum and Viniki is trying to keep aggro on half a dozen non-elites I always think about how that wouldn’t be an issue if I had consecrate.  The pally comes with a lot of beneficial skills, though does lack that single target taunt.  And the tanking thing, like my first spec, was really meant for end game raiding.

So, this past weekend I decided to tinker with my paladin and the protection spec.  I went to the pally trainer and paid to reset my talent points… which was 10 gold because I’ve done that a few times now… and spec’d up the recommended protection talents, which were fairly obvious.  I probably would have gotten them right just doing them myself, starting with the need to spec into consecrate on the holy tree first.

That done, I went to the auction house to buy a sword and maybe a better shield.  The spec pretty much requires a one hander and shield.

As I wandered into the empty auction house… odd and prime time on a Saturday… I realized that this was the weekend when the auction house had been shut down to clear it our for the WoW Classic / Burning Crusade split.

Of course, I had already done the spec change, so I was kind of stuck.  I had a shield in the bank, but not a 1h weapon to call my own.  I had been sending green drops and such to Moronae to use for enchanting.

Trade chat, being trade chat, wasn’t helpful on this front.  At least not with my budget.  So I ended up with the best vendor sword that WoW Head could find me, the Falchion.

A common sword will have to do

With that in hand I went to go train up the sword skill.  I figured I could do at least that much as I was starting out with a skill of 22.  I hit some lower level mobs for a bit, but then went over to Felwood to pick on some mobs in the low 50s, just to see how I would do.

Of course, with a low weapon skill, even when I was hitting I wasn’t doing much damage.  But as the skill built up past 200 I started killing mobs.  Meanwhile, I wasn’t taking much damage.  Skill ups slowed down around 230, but I kept on killing.  I moved over to Winterspring to get some higher level mobs and seemed to be doing okay.

A lot of the pally’s damage is in his holy seals and judgements and I had beefed him up with plenty of +str gear to boost damage as well.  I was doing well enough with that common level sword that I wondered if maybe I shouldn’t have just gone with protection for leveling up anyway.  The kills came a little slower, but I took so little damage that downtime shrank to more than make up for the lower damage.  I wasn’t setting any records, but I was doing pretty well considering the weapon.

When Sunday rolled around we tried to get something going, but Moronae was not available.  Skronk and Ula were on, so I asked if they could help my pally finish up a quest in the Eastern Plaguelands.  Hameya’s Plea was probably something I could manage solo.  I did it with my hunter.  But it can get out of hand if you’re not careful.  So they flew out and we grouped up.  The quest was even shareable, so we could all get the reward.

As it turned out we did get a little sloppy and ended up with a mass of undead trolls around us, but a pally tank loves some undead to slay.

Hameya is on the left there

We were able to get in and out without me managing to mess up too much as tank.  Running back to turn the quest in, it got them an item to vendor for some gold and me a sword upgrade.

An improvement

Confusingly, they both have the same inventory icon, but I got the right one equipped.

That done, the next item on the list was the mooncloth robe recipe, which comes from a vendor in the library of Dire Maul.  So we headed to Feralas and into Dire Maul North.

We had issues doing Dire Maul North as a group of four previously, so going in hard with just the three of us, and with me trying to tank a with a new spec, seemed like a bad idea.  But you can get to the library with minimal mobs to kill.  We took down one ogre guard and then got onto the stairway that goes down to the center pit of the first big area.  Going down far enough that we could jump up on the banister (and waiting until the wandering pack of dogs passed) we were able to avoid the group of ogres in the center.

The stairs behind us

From where we are in the screen shot it is a straight run into the very long tunnel, which fortunately lacks and mobs, that eventually gets you to the library.

Welcome to the Dire Maul library

There Ula was able to able to buy the recipe.  She also picked up the Arcane Refreshment quest, which gets her the final drink spell for mages.  In order to complete it you need to slay Hydrospawn in Dire Maul East.  Since we were already in the neighborhood we thought we might give it a try.  We’ve done DME a couple of times already, right?

Getting out of DMN meant running back up the tunnel to the center area again, waiting for the dog pack to pass, then running up the stairs, which meant getting within aggro radius of the ogres in the center.  Ula and I made it, running for the door.  Skronk got caught and smacked down.  But we just met him over in DME since, as a ghost, you get revived in any of the Dire Maul instances.

There we cleared a couple of mobs then considered our options.  The plan was to avoid fighting our way all the way in to Hydrospawn, being a tough job for a group of three.  Instead, we wanted to drop into the middle area in the main room, the conservatory, which is where Ironbark stands.  From there it is possible to track back to Hydrospawn pretty easily… or so we hoped.

Considering the drop

It took us a few tries to get it right.  There are a couple groups of non-elites down there, but also some solo elites and the usual groups of treants that run back and forth across the area.  By the fourth drop we managed to get in and have a clear LZ from which to work.

There were issues on the first three tries

We then very carefully grabbed any stationary mobs that were in our way, timing our progress to avoid the mobile mobs.

Taking some refreshment while mobs run past

From where I am sitting in the shot above were were able to time it to run past the treants to the fallen column, then to the wall, and then through the archway towards the next area.

Safely through the conservatory

I will say that the draw distance issue, about which I have complained in the past, did not make that run any easier.  The treant groups would appear and disappear and what felt like very close ranges to us.

From there we had to slay a couple of Satyrs, but otherwise were setup with our eyes on Hydrospawn.  There we were able to pull him… and we almost managed it.  We had forgotten that Hydrospawn resists frost attacks, which is a really bad bit of news to recall mid fight when your DPS is a frost mage.  You’d think a water elemental would resist fire and be frozen by frost, but what are you going to do.

We made it through the part where he summons two helpers, but I ran out of heals, pots, and any other pally tricks very shortly thereafter and was down.  There wasn’t enough oomph left to finish him off.

Dead on the rock and Hydrospawn back in his pool

Still, it was a fun run.  We decided that was enough for the day, but we’ll be back again to get Ula her quest reward.  I wouldn’t mind another run into DME.  My pally has the quest the gets him a serious shield upgrade from the last boss and there are some decent drops.

But by the time we try that the Burning Crusade Classic pre-patch should be in place and I will have to roll with the new spec.  Having tinkered with it in beta, I know that at least I won’t have to go up the holy tree to get consecrate.  I can give him a trial run next time to see if I stick with my warrior, Viniki, or swap to my paladin, Wilhelm.