40 Weeks of World War Bee

40 weeks is considered a full term pregnancy in humans, so if you or somebody you know happened to become pregnant back on July 5th, when the war started, you’re probably having a baby about now if everything went well.

The war remained somewhat low key for another week.  The march of structure kills remains, with PAPI knocking down some more Keepstars in Delve and Querious under the cover of cyno jammers, blocking any chance of engagement with Imperium supers and titans.

Keepstar Kills for Week 40

Of course, PAPI lost a Keepstar too, just in transit rather than one already deployed.  They’re much quicker to kill that way.

Delve Front

The Delve maps remains unchanged from last week, though for the moment there are no ihubs or TCUs being contested, so I’ll update the map just to have a clean layer.

Delve – Apr 11, 2021

The metaliminal storm has seated itself firmly in the O-EIMK constellation, denying cloaky eyes to our enemies, but otherwise not much has changed.  Not that there aren’t a constant stream of skirmishes going on in the region, especially across the 1DQ-T5Z boarder.  A glance at the Saturday night stats shows quite a few ships blowing up, though mostly on the PAPI side of the fence.

24 hour kill stats taken at 16:00 UTC on Sunday

While there has been an ongoing attempt to claim that 1DQ is under siege or interdicted, PAPI also has to jump some supplies in, leading to the usual sort of losses like this Charon.  I wonder if they were just hauling across the system.

I ask because somebody pointed out that a lot of manufacturing has been going on in Delve, with 1DQ and T5Z again being the competing poles in the region.

1DQ vs T5Z manufacturing jobs starts

Just for comparison, the jobs starts in Jita and Perimeter, the former being the top system in New Eden, looked like this in the same Saturday time frame.

Job Starts in Jita and Perimeter

So there is plenty of activity going on in Delve, just no large fights for the moment.

Other Theaters

As I mentioned last week, Querious seems settled for now, Brave having moved in.  Just to carry on with industry, the new Brave capital in P-ZMZV has production up and running as well.

How to tell where Dunk Dinkle lives

Likewise mentioned previously, Catch, Impass, and Immensea are pretty much done as far as Legacy is concerned.  No manufacturing going on there, though The Initiative has been posting links about how much loot they have been pulling out of those regions as they have been burning them down.

The new target for burning down appears to be Feythabolis, where Brave and TEST systems are under siege.

Feythabolis – Apr 11, 2021

Esoteria remains in a tug of war over the remains of TEST’s holdings in the region between The Bastion and its allies and Army of Mango and Evictus.

Esoteria – Apr 11, 2021

And then there is Fountain, of which I see little mention elsewhere.  There Federation Uprising continues to take ihubs, though I am not sure if anybody is defending on the Imperium side, as the groups there like The Initiative have been focused on burning down the old Legacy regions.

Fountain – Apr 11, 2021

My Participation

Another slow week for me, though I did manage to undock a few times.  Once again the biggest success was on a Mister Vee op.  He took us out in Harpies to cover another fleet and I managed to get on a kill mail.  The kill is not significant, but I like to get on at least one kill mail a month to prove I am still alive and playing.

Harpy out by a friendly Fortizar and Keepstar

I also got to warp around in various formations with Dave Archer when PAPI started shooting our cyno jammers then ran off before the response fleet even undocked.

A plane of tethered Baltecs

One kill mail and no losses leaves the cost of the war for me as follows still:

• Ares interceptor – 17
• Malediction interceptor – 7
• Crusader interceptor – 5
• Atron entosis frigate – 6
• Rokh battleship – 5
• Scimitar logi – 4
• Ferox battle cruiser – 4
• Drake battle cruiser – 4
• Purifier stealth bomber – 3
• Guardian logi – 2
• Scalpel logi frigate – 2
• Raven battleship – 1
• Crucifier ECM frigate – 1
• Gnosis battlecruiser – 1
• Bifrost command destroyer – 1
• Cormorant destroyer – 1
• Hurricane battle cruiser – 1
• Sigil entosis industrial – 1
• Mobile Small Warp Disruptor I – 1

Other Items

This is the last day of The Hunt event in New Eden.  If you want to shoot some Guristas you had better get on it.

As I mentioned on Friday, the new head of the London CCP studio was talking about the shooter formerly known as Project Legion and Project Nova despite CCP previously saying that they weren’t going to talk about it until they had something to talk about… and the interview was all bluster, so they clearly had nothing to talk about and talked about that.

Tomorrow will likely see the first round of patch updates for April from CCP.  As of this writing I have not heard what might be coming, but it could include the industry update that even CCP says will cause economic chaos for the next 4-6 months and put battleships out of the reach of normal players when it comes to pricing.  Looks for a post on that tomorrow once we get some details.

And on the peak concurrent front the game made it past 35K again on Saturday:

• Day 1 – 38,838
• Week 1 – 37,034
• Week 2 – 34,799
• Week 3 – 34,692
• Week 4 – 35,583
• Week 5 – 35,479
• Week 6 – 34,974
• Week 7 – 38,299
• Week 8 – 35,650
• Week 9 – 35,075
• Week 10 – 35,812
• Week 11 – 35,165
• Week 12 – 36,671
• Week 13 – 35,618
• Week 14 – 39,681
• Week 15 – 40,359
• Week 16 – 36,642
• Week 17 – 37,695
• Week 18 – 36,632
• Week 19 – 35,816 (Saturday)
• Week 20 – 37,628 (Saturday)
• Week 21 – 34,888
• Week 22 – 33,264
• Week 23 – 33,149
• Week 24 – 32,807 (Saturday)
• Week 25 – 31,611
• Week 26 – 39,667 (Saturday)
• Week 27 – 34,989 (Saturday)
• Week 28 – 34,713
• Week 29 – 35,996
• Week 30 – 38,323
• Week 31 – 38,167
• Week 32 – 37,259
• Week 33 – 35,886 (Saturday)
• Week 34 – 35,626
• Week 35 – 35,379
• Week 36 – 35,085
• Week 37 – 34,394
• Week 38 – 36,319
• Week 39 – 35,597 (Saturday)
• Week 40 – 35,384 (Saturday)

Related

• INN – World War Bee: Week 40
• INN – USTZ Border Skirmishes in O-EIMK
• INN – The Serenity Superstition
• INN – The Serenity Certainty

Pandemic Pushes New Eden PCU Past 40K

I kicked off the EVE Online launcher yesterday morning to find that the online player count was past the 39K mark.  That later pushed past the 40K mark, peaking at 40,293 before the EUTZ players started logging off according to EVE Offline.

April 11 Peak Concurrent Users

It was almost there last week, capping out at 39,376 last Sunday, but when Saturday hit it made it.

A lot of online games are seeing a surge of players.  World of Warcraft has been perking up, WoW Classic has queues again on some servers, and physical copies of Animal Crossing: New Horizons are tough to find in some jurisdictions, so it probably isn’t a huge shock to find EVE Online is also benefiting from all of us staying home.

And today, Sunday, which is traditionally the day of the week when the population is the highest, the count again made it past the 40K mark, hitting 40,597 players shortly after noon my time.  I am not sure if Easter helped or hurt that number, but it made it past the Saturday peak.

Sunday beats out Saturday by a bit

Is passing 40K a big deal?  Sort of.  Yes, that falls well short of the 2013 all time PCU number of 65,303, set back on May 5, 2013.  And even as late as 2017 the peak was closer to 50K than 40K.

PCU for 2016 through 2019

On the other hand, this is the first time since December of 2017 that the PCU has passed the 40K mark.  It is also a considerable step up from the Chaos Era (highlighted in red) when the Sunday peak numbers dropped well below 30K range.

And if you look at the chart that covers the life of the game, I rolled in back in 2006 when hitting a 30K PCU on a Sunday was kind of a big deal.  So it is always about perspective I suppose.

EVE Online isn’t what it once was, but it is still a long way from the crater some were predicting.

Related posts:

• The Nosy Gamer

Battle for Azeroth Flying on the Horizon

We have had the World of Warcraft 8.1.5 update in our hands for a little while now, so Blizzard has started telling us about the 8.2 update, Rise of Azshara.  They had a half hour stream on Twitch yesterday that gave an overview of what to expect.

The 8.2 update splash screen

We are slated to get a lot of things with 8.2 and a 30 minute presentation gave just a brief overview of a lot of what to expect.

Rise of Azshara Features

I have not been very engaged with the Battle for Azeroth expansion.  Some aspects of it seemed almost designed to discourage and dismay all but the most determined.  And, as with Legion, it wasn’t a particularly alt friendly design to get into.  It is a better plan to pick one character and do all the things first.  And so I have pottered about, playing then falling by the wayside off and on since the expansion dropped.  But the first ray of light for alts came with this update with the announcement that the unlock for flying will be part of the 8.2 update.

Flying is Coming

We knew it would be coming, though that hasn’t stopped some people from being angry it hasn’t been in since day one.

Flying will be unlocked for your account when you finish the Battle for Azeroth Pathfinder Part Two achievement.  You will get that nice mechanical parrot mount pictured above for your efforts as well.  As for what will be required for that achievement is not yet certain, but now I at least have a mission; get the Battle for Azeroth Pathfinder Part One achievement complete.  I’m lagging on that.

Where I stand today

Still, I can wrap up part one with a little effort I think.  The exploration achievement is easy enough and I am only one faction shy on the diplomat front.  With those, and four more war campaigns to finish for the Ready for War achievement, I will be there.

Also on the topic of mounts, the 8.2 update will also introduce an equipment slot for your mounts in order to give them a special ability.

Mount Equipment

There are three options which will give all your mounts water walking, resistance to being dazed, or a parachute to deploy if you are dismounted in the air.

It was openly stated that this was in reaction to the Azure Water Strider mount, which has the innate ability to walk on water.  Putting this in the game during the Mists of Pandaria expansion was almost as big of a change as when they put in flying.  Being able to ride on water at will is such a huge boon that I use this mount all the time, both on alts and any place where flying is not available.

An alt riding on water

And apparently I am not alone.  This mount gets used everywhere and I see other people on it all the time.  So Blizz, realizing they let the water walking genie out of the bottle, is going to make it so any of your mounts can walk on water if you so desire.

What was left out was whether or not the water strider would keep its innate regardless of what was equipped.  I suspect it won’t, but if it does I don’t expect that usage of the mount will go down since you’ll be able to have water walking with that AND one of the other buffs as well.  We shall see.

Empires of EVE Vol II Kickstarter

While I was sleeping in a bit this morning EVE Online Fanfest was kicking off in Iceland.  Expect a pile of EVE Online news to show up from various outlets.

The first bit of news I caught was Andrew Groen’s announcement that he was launching a Kickstarter campaign to fund another book about EVE Online.  Called Empires of EVE: A History of the Great Wars of EVE Online Volumne II, it picks up where the last book left off.

Book Title

I am really excited to see this come out because this gets into my era of null sec.  The first book was about null sec forming into factions and having its first great war.  After that is the era of fallout from the war, changing alliances, as well as the biggest battles and wars seen in the game.

Definitely of personal interest to me as I was in some of those wars and many of those battles.

Of course, Andrew Groen knows his stuff, both when it comes to writing such a book and promoting a Kickstarter campaign.  Having announced the campaign on stage at Fanfest earlier today, the modest $12,500 goal, as SynCaine noted, was reached very quickly, then doubled, and is past being tripled as I write this, with 28 days left to go.

That is how you get it done, parade it out in front of the core audience.  If that World of Warcraft Diary Kickstarter campaign from last month had been announced on stage at BlizzCon it might have succeeded even at its rather aggressive funding level.

Anyway, I was in with a pledge as soon as I could for a hardbound copy of the book.

This comes at a point when I was wondering what Andrew Groen might be up to.  The first Empires of EVE book was a success, selling over 15,000 copies in various formats, with the audio book version coming out last summer to help bolster that number.  (I own it as a hardback and an audio book, so put me down for 2 copies I guess.)  Not bad for a book about a niche title in a niche genre.

Since the book first shipped he has talked about other projects.  There was an Empires of EVE Lectures podcast series that was going to fill in some of the gaps left by the book.  Between September of last year and January of this, that put our five episodes then stopped.  There was talk of a project to expand it scope, to maybe talk about other games, but I never saw anything come of that.  So I was wondering if he had finally had enough of New Eden.

I guess not.

Now for the worst part, waiting for the book to be done.

Notes from the Pure Blind Front

We’ve been out on this deployment to the north for a while.  I do not think my main has been back to Delve since some point in November of last year.  Back at the start we were running around in VNIs shooting ratters with the same ships they were using.

VNIs leaving the station

I haven’t written that much about the deployment as this sort of guerilla warfare doesn’t always make for interesting tales.  We go shoot structures and drop on miners and ratters.  There are a few posts if you click on the Reavers tag and scroll down the posts, but that does not represent our level of activity.

However, recently a few things have happened, not all of which I was there to see first hand, so I thought I would sum up a bit of the situation.  A year from now we’ll see how all this played out, but for the moment this is what has come up.

Changes Over The Last Month

As I noted previously, Pandemic Horde moving to Geminate left something of a hole in the north that the Guardians of the Galaxy coalition was looking to fill.  They started off right after the whole million dollar battle thing by clearing all of our structures and aggressively camping our staging station, keeping it bubbled and watched.

This is a bubble camp

They seemed to tire of that after a few days and we were soon able to undock to clear the bubbles and kill some of their forces.  Eventually they gave up on that, but would aggressively defend the structures they had planted all over the system and attack any that we dropped.  Then they lost some titans and seemed to give up on activity in our staging system.  We have since been able to drop structures and chip away at theirs in system.

The New Normal

Recently we have had to go into GotG space to get them to form up, since they mostly leave our staging system alone.  We have been into the Darkness capital system to drop structures, or to reinforce their structures, on grid with their Keepstar, acts that don’t always get a response.

Shooting one of their structures, Keepstar visible

We’ve been into Deklein drop structures and reinforce their stuff to see if we can get a rise out of them.  We don’t always form up to defend what we drop or reinforce.

Deploying a Raitaru, visible between the Keepstar uprights

There was a Sotiyo engineering structure we hit, setting a timer.  A Sotiyo is where you build capitals and super capitals.   That they formed up to defend, but when the timer hit we were nowhere to be seen.  Depending on who is telling the tale, one of the titan pilots that formed up either blew up his own titan by playing the self-destruct dare game because they were bored or self-destructed and rage quit the game because they were assured we would show and we didn’t.  They self-destructed a super carrier as well.

Either way, reinforcing that Sotiyo ended up costing them a titan.  So we went back and reinforced it again, along with other structures.  And when we’re not doing that people are still out hunting miners and ratters.

A Rorqual we got after reinforcing that Sotiyo again

The Strange Tale of Bad Juice

At one point in a prod at GotG Reavers chief Asher Elias went to Reddit and posted a link to an enthusiastic video showing the locals shooting a small, undefended Imperium tower.  It was very much in the usual spirit of what happens in /r/eve, a bit of a laugh about them posting that but not fighting us.  Golf clap level stuff.  The video itself got some extra views and a few wry comments and the person who made the video, who we saw in space later that day, seemed chill about it.  More views are better, right?

Then the video maker freaked out, posted another video accusing Asher of cyber bullying for posting the link which ended up bringing legions of haters to his video and declaring that Asher could be facing up to 10 years in prison (according to Texas law).  And then there was the declaration that he wanted to face Asher in an MMA style cage match, a post which he took down because he said CCP Scorpion threatened him with a ban if he did not.  CCP Falcon showed up in that thread to say there was no CCP Scorpion and that he didn’t know anything about any of that.

The drama seemed to be too much for all concerned and the pilot ended up the week looking for a new home.

A MOA Defection

Mordus Angels, who long waged a low key guerilla war against the CFC then the Imperium when we lived in the north.  While their solo war was never more than a nuisance, once the Casino War opened up they found themselves with many allies as we were swept from our space and, in the aftermath, found themselves holding sovereignty.  They soon became part of the GotG coalition, “blue-trals” to their neighbors, and open to ratters and miners and getting fat on the bounty of null sec space.

Now it is us sitting in an NPC station waging a guerilla war against them and their allies.  Despite the occasional hysterical cry that we’re there to invade, we’ve just reversed things.  We just happen to have the economic power behind us to drop suicide dreads.

As the Monthly Economic Report earlier this week indicated, ratting and mining is down and not so very lucrative in Fade, Deklein, and Pure Blind where a lot of GotG lives.  Up in Branch however, some of the coalition are working away relatively unmolested being out of easy bridge range.

That MOA was suffering while others were making bank seemed to set off one of the MOA corps who defected to The Imperium, bringing with them some assets and snapping the local MOA owned jump bridge network.

Anyway, having been in our coalition for almost six years at this point it is bizarro world strange to have a MOA corp defecting to us.  But then, the MOA that lives in Pure Blind now is hardly the MOA that used to live in 5ZXX-K for all those years. (And a couple more corps, FWCEF and FWS, left MOA after A.N.D defected.)

Space Violence Arrives

While a couple of Imperium SIGs have been wandering the north for a while looking to harass and interdict the locals, it has often been a low key affair.  And then the Space Violence SIG announced that they had arrived with ~400 dreadnoughts and were looking for trouble.

The thing with low key is that, while the locals know you’re around and can guess pretty accurately what you can muster (and what it will take to counter), but the rest of New Eden is pretty oblivious unless something big happens, and then they only know after the fact.  That is too late for third parties.

Will a big splashy announcement about Space Violence’s arrival in the north shake things up?  NCDot has come over from Tribute to support GotG on occasion, but they know the drill, that we’ll just fade away if they bring enough supers.

Response by the Locals

Confirming what I mentioned up a way, the GotG response to our presence has gone from aggressively going after us to not forming to fight, this coming from a leak from GotG leadership.  The expectation is that they can time zone tank their structures and we’ll get bored and go away. As Asher notes, not fighting is a legit tactic, and one we have to use ourselves up in the north where we can easily find ourselves outnumbered if the locals form up.  But given our past, I think it will take a while before we tire of shooting structures and dropping our own.

Anyway, unless a war involving us breaks out somewhere in New Eden, I think we’ll be the north for a while longer.

A Barrier to My Eventual Return to Azeroth

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, what I am playing is driven as much by what I am in the mood for as anything.  No amount of “I should be playing…”  will get me to launch a game.

And moods come and go.  Today I am playing a lot of Pokemon.  Next week I might tire of that and move on to something else.

But mood alone can only go so far.  Mood gets me to log in, sets up the scenario.  Then I need a task, a direction, a place to go.  I can be very task oriented, so I need a plan or a goal to work towards.  I was in the mood for EverQuest II back in December, but the plan for progress never solidified and I walked away.

All of which brought my thoughts to World or Warcraft.  I am not playing it currently, but I expect that I will eventually.  Curse has been keeping my addons up to date.  The Legion expansion lost my interest after running through all the zones and finishing up the quest lines.  Beyond that and hitting the level cap I ran out of goals there.

But the 7.2 update introduced both new content and a good goal.

now running in Azeroth

Unlocking flying in the Legion expansion is the sort of task I could see myself coming back to the game to run down.  It requires a lot of work, but the tasks themselves are not insurmountable on their own… they were even reduced in scope… and knocking them out as I went would provide a feeling or progress.  Progress feeds the soul of the MMORPG achiever.

The problem is that Blizzard threw a monkey wrench in the gears for me with the 7.2 patch.

The new feature where mobs scale to your item level seems bizarro world bad.

Yes, I know they cut it back a bit.

And I even understand the problem they are trying to solve, a problem I have bitched about myself, the trivialization of content.

You can see that issue just by starting a new character in WoW and running up to level 30 or so.  If you insist on running all the quests… which is to say, you want to consume the actual content and see the various zone story lines through to their conclusion… you will soon find you have out leveled the quests as they go gray on you while any foes are now so weak in comparison that Blizzard actually made a piece of gear that was effectively the “false swipe” move from Pokemon that would not kill mobs so you wouldn’t sneeze and slay an NPC you needed alive. (I think it was the toy foam sword, though I could be wrong.)

So there is an issue there.  This was addressed to a certain extent in the Legion expansion at launch by making the initial set of zones auto-scale to your level.  After you were done there, everything else would be at level cap.

You still had to keep up with gear progress.  But that wasn’t so bad, and gear progression is one of the things in WoW that makes you feel good, especially in the case of weapons.  Few things make you feel like you’ve grown stronger than being able to smite down a foe more easily than before.

But now when that hot new piece of gear drops and your item level count goes up, your foes get tougher as well.  That effectively kills the good feeling you get with gear progression, at least out in the open world.  If you’re running instance or raids it is a different story.  And, as somebody with a strong achiever streak in them, this rains on my achiever parade.

In an attempt to solve what I will cop to as a legitimate problem it feels like they have just made a new one.  It reminds me of the tale where a guy gets cats to chase away the troublesome mice, then dogs to chase the troublesome cats, and so on until he ends up with elephants and has to get the mice back to rid himself of the pachyderms that are literally knocking his house down; it feels like a solution that just changes the problem rather than solving it.

Of course, I haven’t actually resubscribed and logged back into WoW to give it a try, but the feeling that this may suck makes that less likely to happen.  And all the more so since I haven’t seen much about the topic of late.  Maybe it wasn’t that bad.  Maybe people quit and left over it.

So how bad is it, or is it that bad at all?

FCON Leaves The Imperium

It was announced in a broadcast this past evening that alliance Fidelas Constans, or FCON, would be leaving The Imperium.

FCON – April 13, 2016

While FCON still holds two thirds of their sovereignty, it is up on the north flank of The Imperium, in the Branch region, beyond the range that the coalition can possibly defend from it staging system in Saranen.  With The Initiative and Razor space in neighboring Tenal having been almost completely overrun by this point, FCON could no doubt see the writing on the wall.

FCON is the third alliance to leave The Imperium during the war.

The Imperium – April 13, 2016

As with SMA, which announced its departure earlier this week, FCON leaves The Imperium on good terms and with blue standings.  FCON takes with it ~3,500 capsuleers, down from ~4,200 at the start of the war.

FCON’s plans have not yet been announced/leaked, but one can presume that they, like SMA, will look for a more quiet slice of space in which to regroup and decide what is next for their alliance.

Meanwhile, The Mittani has put out a war update entitled Forging of the Goonhammer which lays out the plan for continuing the struggle against those who would oppose The Imperium, with CO2 topping the list of traitors to be dealt with.  FCON members and corps can join GSF if they wish to continue the fight, though the declaration of a “hellwar” means a protracted struggle with no sign of a  return to happier times for the foreseeable future.  FCON, being a different culture than GSF (for example, FCON members were not allowed to participate in Burn Jita/Burn Amarr), it seems unlikely that there will be much movement between the two.

Addendum: FCON’s alliance announcement has been posted over at TMC.  Their plan is apparently to conquer sov elsewhere in New Eden on their own.

The Russian Complication – That Escalated Quickly

Yesterday I wrote about Legion of xXDeathXx and their to declaration of war against the Drone Walkers, a group that developed under its wing. (EN24 has a post about this now as well.)  I was curious to see how that would work out, whether Legion could keep the conflict between just itself and its progeny or if the whole thing would get mixed into the wider war in the North.

I still don’t know if this conflict will link up with the main war, but the Drone Walkers and their allies were quick to turn their focus on their erstwhile benefactor, going directly after the Legion’s rental space that resides under the Shadow of xXDeathXx banner.

The xXDeathXx empire as it stands

Basically, “Entosis all the things!” seems to be the quote of the day.

A peek this morning showed lots of activity in the Oasa region, where Shadow was losing most of the Fozzie Sov tug of war events:

Ugly in Oasa for xXDeathXx

Likewise, the Cobalt Edge region looked to be aflame as well, with events going against the defenders:

Cobalt Edge on fire

The Perrigen Falls region was likewise heavily hit, but being closer to the Legion core, the events seem to be going more the way of the defender:

Perrigen Falls events

Systems in Etherium Reach and The Kalevala Expanse have also been hit, but not to the same degree, while the Legion’s home in Geminate appears to have remained untouched, perhaps indicating that the Moneybadgers haven’t turned their gaze in the Legion’s direction.

These are, of course, early results.  The Drone Walkers and their allies were clearly mobilized and ready and the ferocity of their attack appears to have caught Legion and its renters by surprise.

There are a lot more Fozzie Sov entosis events queued up and it is possible that the Legion might rally against its foes.  But it looks like the Legion has its hands full even without the Moneybadgers getting involved in this part of the conflict.  Has the Legion made one of the classic blunders and gotten itself involved in a land war in Asia?

The Pokemon 20th Anniversary Continues with a Jirachi Download and More

The celebration of the 20th anniversary of Pokemon continues.  This month’s legendary Pokemon is Jirachi.

Jirachi time

Instructions on how to download Jirachi to your copy of Pokemon X and Y or Pokemon Alpha Sapphire and Omega Ruby are available on the Pokemon site.  You have until April 2

In addition to additional Jirachi related items, Nintendo is also prepping people for an extra giveaway next month, when you will be able to get Articuno, Zapdos, and Moltres.

May is for rare flying Pokemon

Codes for those three Pokemon will come via email in the May Pokemon Trainer Club newsletter.  Of course, to get the newsletter you have to sign up for the Pokemon Trainer Club, detail for which are available on the site.

That is this month’s anniversary news.  The upcoming download events for the remainder of the year as we count down to the launch of Pokemon Sun & Moon are:

• May – Darkrai (GameStop)
• June – Manaphy (Nintendo Network)
• July – Shaymin (Nintendo Network)
• August – Arceus (GameStop)
• September – Victini (Nintendo Network)
• October – Keldeo (Nintendo Network)
• November – Genesect (GameStop)
• December – Meloetta (Nintendo Network)

Still plenty of rare Pokemon to collect.  More information is available at the Pokemon 20th anniversary site.