Towards a New Delve

There is a bit of a tug of war about whether or not World War Bee is over.  PAPI is certainly keen to close the books on war now that they are headed home while the Imperium wants to keep counting coup as they clear out all the structures that Legacy in general, and TEST in particular, dropped in Delve.

Seriously, if anybody ever tries to dispute that Legacy was fully committed to moving into Imperium space to live there, the amount of stuff they anchored in Delve confirms their intention, misguided though it ended up.

At some point though, the current wave of destruction will wrap up, PAPI sovereignty will be taken and their structures all smashed and the war will be over in Delve.

And then there will be a new Delve to build.

The view from 1DQ1-A and old Delve

The old Delve, the Delve before the invasion, came about after our retreat from the north at the end of the Casino War, a conflict we unambiguously lost.

Back then citadels were new and lacked some of the modern conveniences which we have grown to expect in places where we dock up… things like the ability to insure your ship.  We had to go to a old style station to do that back in 2016.

So there was some learning to do and mistakes to be made as more structures were deployed in our new home region.

And then came the era of the Delve Time Unit and the Imperium went a bit crazy.  Mining and ratting was huge for a while and the wealth and resources led to a building boom where we were dropping new Keepstars just to say we had another one.  Every corp wanted to have their own.  It was chaos.

If was had come to Delve towards the end of that era, there might have been a different tale to tell.  I am not saying we would have lost, but we would have been a lot less ready to defend ourselves.

Oddly, a couple of things CCP did helped us prepare for war.

The first thing was the Drifter invasion.  We were in the midst of glassing Tribute and Vale of the Silent when CCP launched the Drifter event that had powerful NPCs attacking Upwell structures in null sec.

Drifter Forces Hitting a Raitaru

We bitched and moaned about that turn of events.  It decided the fate of that war, sending us home to defend our structures from NPCs.  It also looked like a heavy handed jab at the Imperium as the Drifters seemed to be focused on Delve to the exclusion of other null sec regions.  The Goon identity in EVE Online holds the belief that CCP is always ready to work against them, so there is nothing like a CCP launched event that seems to be targeting Goons to spur their already acute paranoia.

But there was an upside to the whole thing.  Having NPCs hitting structures, NPCs which could be defeated if the structure was setup right and a gunner could get in place, meant an overall review of structure requirements in the coalition.  There were standard fits laid out and every structure had to subscribe to the right access control list so that gunners could drop in at need, even if the owning corp wasn’t online.

Then there was the Forsaken Fortress update from CCP.  That still seems like a bit of a betrayal, the removal of asset safety, but the new abandoned state was necessary to thin out some of the structure spam that was becoming a blight in New Eden.

That led to another review and purge of structures in the coalition, as we went out to blow up our own abandoned structures before anybody else got the idea in their head.

So we had done a bit of work before World War Bee kicked off, but the structure situation in Delve was pretty chaotic, and 1DQ1-A was ahead of the pack in that department, with three Keepstars… expanded to five during the war… several Sotiyos, and a constellation of faction Fortizars, prizes from the war against Guardians of the Galaxy in 2018.

The 1DQ main grid with 4 Keeps, 2 Sotiyos, a Tatara, and some of the Fortizars

Outside of our final constellation everything that we couldn’t pull down was razed.  The one minor benefit was that a lot of the structures went down without cores, which made their loss a bit cheaper, but it was still a large hit.  If the PAPI war objective had been to glass Delve, they could have claimed victory in the war and gone away unassailable in their arguments.  Instead there was the whole war of extermination and Legacy moving into our space to live, which tainted their gains and gave the Imperium both an attainable win condition as well as plenty of targets to shoot in revenge.

But now that the cleansing of Delve is reaching is crescendo, with hostile Keepstars starting to fall, it is time to look forward to the new plan for Delve.

I had been thinking about what we would do after the war, long before The Mittani said this past weekend that things would be different in the region when it came to structures.  To start with, we are well past the era of the Delve Time Unit I linked above.  We have been in an era of scarcity and resources are no longer ready to hand the way they were back in that time, so there would naturally be a more conservative approach to structures going forward.

There are already some structures on the main 1DQ grid being unachored for deployment elsewhere in the region, a cheaper solution than building and deploying new ones.

But there are also the lessons of the war.  Loss teaches lessons that victory might otherwise hide, and we lost a lot in the war.  I am sure the big brains in the coalition have already worked out how to set things up more optimally for defense.  The Mittani promised a new plan that would make Delve even more difficult to attack should we face an invasion again.

And then there are the changes that may come from CCP.  PAPI blaming citadel mechanics in part for their loss is probably overstating the problem, but there are likely some changes in those mechanics coming in light of what happened.  It remains to be seen what conclusions, if any, CCP might draw from the war, but I might guess at a couple.

The first likely candidate would involved carriers and supercarriers and how they can stay safe and tethered on a structure while sending their fighters out to guard a gate, attack a fleet, or burn down a structure on grid.  Both sides used this in the war and it was one of the key defensive features of the final Imperium constellation in Delve.

A second might be another review of structure density, perhaps limiting the number of structures on a single grid.

And then there are the usual parameters around defense, offense, and cost that CCP might take a swing at as well.

But a new Delve is coming.  I will be interested to see how it shapes up.

Remembering Brian Green

The cascade of events, the non-stop drum beat of bad news that this year has been has made me more than a bit numb.  A person can start to feel like they cannot care any more, that so many things are going on that are beyond their ability to control that they just start to let events pass by like visions in a dream.

And then something closer to home hits and wakes you up.

Last night I was shocked to read that Brian “Psychochild” Green had passed away.   A tweet showed up, echoing around the people I follow, that announced his death.

Sad to share the news that Brian Green, game developer @Psychochild, passed away of natural causes in Rockville, Maryland. He was 46 years old, well known in the game developer community for running the early online multiplayer game Meridian 59 from 2001-2010. RIP, Brian.

— Elonka Dunin (@ElonkaDunin) August 12, 2020

My reaction was perhaps a bit blunt, but like I said, I was shocked to hear the news.

He was probably best known for being on the team at 3DO that developed Meridian 59, an early entry in the MMORPG genre and later, after 3DO shut the game down, how he and a partner obtained the rights to the game and relaunched it.  Their company Near Death Studios, ran the game as a viable business from 2002 until 2010.

Brian was a big believer in community and was involved in many, including what I tend to think of as the neighborhood of blogs that seemed to gel around VirginWorld about 15 years back.

Zenke’s representation MMO Blog island back in the day

He was as involved in that community as anybody and often made time to read and comment on blogs large and small that were interested in the genre.  He left a lot of thoughtful comments here, though for some reason the spam filter had something against him and I had to fish many out of there over the years.

And, of course, his own blog was often quite active.

A blog header from another time

His last burst of posts happened a year ago, when he joined in with the community once more (he was a mentor in the group) for the Blaugust celebration of blogging, writing up a series on role playing.  But his posts go back to 2004 on his site. (All backed up at the Internet Archive.)

I actually got to meet Brian a couple of times up at GDC in San Francisco when the VirginWorlds collective would get together for dinner.  Here we are back in 2010.

Dinner at Le Colonial

In that picture is Darren (The Common Sense Gamer), myself, Brent (VirginWorlds), Neil Kirby (who was speaking about AI at the conf), Karen (Journeys with Jaye and Massively), Shawn (former Editor-in-Chief at Massively), Sinea (GuildCast, RingCast), and Brian.

The last time I saw him in person was at GDC in 2011 when Potshot (Skronk in the instance group) and I hung out with him for quite a while.  While Potshot could not hang around for dinner, I tagged along with Brian as he went to meet up with Damion Schubert and spent the evening listening to development stories from 3DO, Meridian 59, The Sims Online, and a few things I had to sit on about the then in development Star Wars: The Old Republic.

At that point he stopped running Meridian 59 and was working on a few indie projects.  He was also involved with Namaste, the Storybricks product, their Kickstarter, and their dalliance with the EverQuest Next vision. (He wrote a series of posts about the whole thing later on.)

Later he packed up and left Salinas (of John Steinbeck fame and about an hour from where I live) and moved to the east coast to join the team Mark Jacobs was putting together to build Camelot Unchained.  At some point that ended, which gave him more time for other projects, streaming, and joining in on the Blaugust celebration for a few years.  He did not join in for Blapril this year, though he was logged into Discord every day so his name was always on the mentor’s list.

The last I saw of him online was on Twitter where he would announce his appearance on a weekly Twitch stream with Maulgrim, which often involved playing Warframe and talking about indie dev topics, the last one being on August 4th.  He passed just two days later.

And now I feel guilty that I never quite found the time to watch that stream, though some of the episodes are archived so people can go back and watch/listen to them.

His passing thus appears to have been sudden given he was streaming just a week or so back.   But natural causes covers a lot of ground.

The responses to the post on Twitter shows both how many lives he touched and the shock and dismay of the communities of which he was a part.  He is missed already.

Brian “Psychochild” Green : Nov 1, 1973 – Aug 6, 2020

Other remembrances:

• Facebook Obituary
• Chasing Dings
• Massively OP

The WoW Classic Name Reservation Run

The next step on the march to WoW Classic kicked off earlier with the opening of name reservations.

Get that name!

Blizzard has a long article about how to get yourself setup so you can log in and create up to three characters in order to hold names.

As it so happened, the whole thing opened up at just about the time I got home from work, so I was quickly to my computer to see if I could grab the name “Wilhelm.”  I rarely am ever able to get that.

I got the launcher going, which needed to download a small update for WoW Classic, after which I was able to log in and see the server choices, which lined up with what I posted last week.

At the server selection page

Skronk and Ula were also online and ready to go fishing for names.  Our plan was to roll up on Bloodsail Buccaneers, an idea reinforced by the fact that it showed as low population when the list came up.

However, things did not go as smoothly as one might have hoped.  While the world servers were up, logging into them was another thing altogether.  I took a few runs at BB that all ended up with the same error.

Oh the errors you’ll see…

I began to wonder if this was another form of load test, seeing if the login and world servers could work smoothly as people tried to pile in to grab names.  If it was going badly I half expected Blizz to announce additional servers in a couple of days.  Heck, I wouldn’t bet against that even now.

On Discord we started talking about backup options, but other servers were not responding for me either.  Then Ula got into Mankirk, but her name there was taken.

We took a run at Pagle, where she got here name but I was thwarted trying to get Wilhelm.  It had been scooped up already.  But I had backup names I am fine with… I have to be fine with other names since I so rarely get that one… and Pagle seems like a possible landing spot for the group.

Then, in trying servers again I managed to get into Bloodsail Buccaneers.  I immediately created a paladin and tried once more for the name Wilhelm… and I got it.  Ula got her name as well.  We were quickly back to our original plan.  BB would be our server of choice.  I put in a reservation for a hunter name as well and was set.

My reserved names

Not everybody was having as much luck as I was.  Streamer Asmogold, who has been getting throngs watching his streams of the WoW Classic beta, showed up only to find his name had been taken.

Somebody got there first…

But I was taken care of.

All I could have wished for at that moment was that the “Enter World” button was active so we could get started on this new venture.  But mousing over just told me how long I was going to have to wait.

I’ll be counting the hours… by tens at first probably

Oh well.  We still have plans to make.  If the historical record (read: the blog) is correct, it has been been almost 4.5 years since we last ran a dungeon together.  Some research and work ups might be in order.

The Last WoW Classic Load Test

We are wending our way the launch day for WoW Classic, passing one landmark after another.  The launch is just about two weeks away now.

Classic is as classic does

Later today the final servers will be up and people will be able to log on in order to attempt to reserve names.  We’ll see how successful people are.  One of the issues with higher density servers will likely be more competition for names.

But starting Thursday and running through the weekend was the final WoW Classic load test.  This was the fourth such test.  I got on and did the first three diligently in order to help Blizzard get things right for launch.  You can read about each here:

• First – Simulating the WoW Classic Opening
• Second – WoW Classic Stress Test Redux
• Third – WoW Classic Load Test Went So Well More Load Was Added

The first test showed some serious problems, but by the third test they were forcing people onto a single server just to load things up more.  That seemed to indicate that things had settled down.  So when it came time for this final load test I didn’t jump on immediately.  In part it seemed like Blizz had things down and in part because I didn’t want to wear out WoW Classic any more than I had to before the coming launch.

Still, as Friday rolled around I thought I would peek in to see how things were going.  I rolled up an orc this time.  I won’t be rolling Horde when this launches, so it seemed like a good plan to

tinker with something else.

Starting as an Orc

The orc starting area is clearly the most orange.

It also has one of the more amusing early quests that has you running around looking for sleeping peons.

Sleeping peon spotted!

You then run out there and beat them with a club supplied to you to wake them up and set them back to work.

Compliance achieved

It is also one of many examples of how WoW Classic is different than WoW today.  Not that WoW is ever above beating peons, but today the quest tracker would pop up on your screen and have a special item icon somewhere for you to click on in order to beat a peon.

In WoW Classic though, the club is just dropped into your bad… I hope you had space… and you have to know to target a peon, open your bag, and click on the club in order to administer the beating.  At least the club goes away when you turn in the quest.  Having leftovers from quests is part of the vanilla inventory management tradition.

I ran around the orc starter area.  It was crowded, but not as bad as the nigh elf starter area was the last time around.  Still, there was competition for mobs and the pain of quests that require drops vs simple kills was brought into focus.  I also explored a bit, just to look at a place I hadn’t visited in many years.

The back of the starter area overlooks Ratchet

The test capped player progress at level 15, but I wasn’t anywhere close to that with my orc.  I just wanted to look around a bit to get just a taste of the coming opening.

But one taste wasn’t enough.  On Sunday Skronk and Ula were logged in and getting their first look into the coming WoW Classic.  I didn’t have anything else going on… I am playing few other games currently… so I decided to log back in to the test.  And I even went with what will likely be my first character out of the gate, a human paladin.

It was more crowded around Northshire Abby than it was when I gave the orcs a try, though still nowhere as crowded as the first hours of the past load tests.

Landing in Elwyn Forest

It had been a long time since I had been in that area at all, even discounting the changes over the years.  I mostly just pass through on my way to Darkmoon Faire.  But it didn’t take long to find my bearings and start smacking kobolds with my big hammer.  I was keen to hear their signature line.

Say it for me! Say the line!

I was not alone it savoring that line.  I saw others reacting to it on multiple occasions.

All together now…

And I did indeed take many candles.

The candles are mine!

I was, however, reminded of the old ways when I found that candles were limited to five per stack.  Oh, the inventory management fun to come.

In addition to kobolds, I was also introduced to the other famous foe of the area, the Defias.

Your bandana, give it to me

That included the first of what will be several “collect the bandanas” quests, as well as the what is probably the first of the quests where you are sent into an area of hostile mobs then, when done, the quest giver sends you back to do something else there that you could have done while you were there the first time.

It was an interesting time.  There are some quests that are more difficult in a crowded zone.  The mob competition wasn’t fierce, but it was there, and being a pally with no ranged attack meant having mobs sniped from me as I plodded over to shake hands with them.

Other quests are much easier.  Need to go explore an area like the Fargodeep or Jasperload mines?  The path is probably clear, the mobs having been purged by the continuous flow of fellow adventurers.

I didn’t want to get too far into the experience or too attached to my character.  Each experience is different.  My orc got some seriously lucky bad drops early on.  My pally seemed to be hitting the gear jackpot.

It probably won’t be this good next time

So rather than carrying on I decided to explore.  I ran up to Stormwind from Goldshire, stopping at the visitors center to refresh myself on the idea of creating a guild.  The first thing I saw was that it costs 10 silver to create one.  That is a price trivial beyond belief in the current game, but I was standing there with a single silver in my pocket having felt lucky enough to have managed to pay for my skills.  I certainly didn’t waste that coin on any of the trade skills.  Money is going to be tight for a while, though I suspect that the auction house will be hilarious until people settle down into the reality of how little cash people have.

And then, of course, there are the signatures you need to form a guild.  I have already enlisted my daughter and her boyfriend to come sign for us, but we’ll need some more.

From there I took the Deeprun Tram over to Ironforge to run around.  I ran down from there to the gnome/dwarf starter zone to visit some old familiar places.

If it is a distillery why do they only sell beer?

Skronk and Ula, already well down the road for quests, took the bird back to Ironforge so we could meet up and take what will probably be the first of many group shots in the coming months.

Together in Dun Morogh

Ula did not get her name on the load test server.  Hopefully she will have better luck with the name reservation later today.

And that was about it for the last load test for me.  I was happy that Blizz let it run through the weekend in order to give people a taste.  There was some speculation as to how long it would go.  Blizz did not say and some people seemed convinced it would be shut down by the end of the day on Friday.  Instead it got a nice four day run.

In the hours I played I only ran into one problem.  There was a sudden disconnect that hit, which kicked me out of the game.  However, I was able to log right back in and carry on.  Otherwise things seemed pretty solid.

I am looking forward to the 26th when WoW Classic kicks off for real.

Honest Game Trailers – Fortnite Season 5

Honest Game Trailers already did a Fortnite video back at the start of the year, but that was before the game fully exploded across multiple platforms and put PUBG in the corner.  So now they are back to cover what has happened since.

I still haven’t given the game a try.

At one point my daughter tried to play Fortnite on her aging iMac and found it ran about as fast as a PowerPoint presentation.  I expect that she’ll be back to it with her new PC when school starts again and she wants to play what most of her friends are playing.

Tower Tour of New Eden

Player-owned starbases, the POS with its spherical shield and its central tower and its modules, have been a staple of New Eden.  They have long served as bases, manufacturing facilities, and moon mining platforms.

I didn’t really know much about the POS and its operational dynamics in my high sec days.  But once I moved to null sec back in December 2011, the POS became a regular feature of operations.  My first big op in the coalition had us forming up on a titan at one POS to be bridged out in order to shoot a hostiles POS, a tempo of events that would repeat itself many times over the years.

Attack on a capital building POS in 2011

However, the long serving POS is going away.  CCP has been transferring POS capabilities and bonuses to the new Upwell Consortium structures.  Come the Winter release and the introduction of drilling platforms the POS, made completely redundant, will be removed from the game.

I was thinking about this the other night in Hakonen.  We were making a sweep of moons to destroy towers left behind and it just so happened that we hit at least one tower from each empire.  Unlike citadels and the like, POS towers are like ships in that there is a flavor from each of the empires.

As we were shooting them I decided I ought to get a few last screen shots of such structures.  I will no doubt see more as the war goes on, but I might not see them all again.

They were mostly unfueled so the towers… often called “the stick” on ops… were just sitting there in space as we shot them.  Here are towers from the four empires.

Amarr

I actually didn’t think about taking screen shots until after we hit the one Amarr tower on the clean up op.  However, Amarr towers seem to be the most common in New Eden, so I can make up that deficiency with screen shots from recent ops.  Amarr towers show the same design characteristics as Amarr ships, with flowing lines and an affinity for beige.

Minmatar

These come up every so often, but not so much as Amarr does.  Again, the design aesthetic is that of the empire, in this case rust and raw girders.

Caldari

In the standard Caldari Gray #7, the Caldari tower is less common and more boring.  But it does show damage well.

Gallente

I cannot recall the last time I saw a Gallente tower, with its distinct semi-balcony top.  They are a rare find, so I was glad we got to blow up two.

And so it goes.  Blown up, but not too long before their extinction.

This post hardly captures the full variety of tower, which come in different sizes and have pirate faction versions available, not to mention the variety of modules, but it gives a flavor of what is out there in New Eden.

Soon ops will stage solely out of citadels and no longer will we be warped to a POS to get in range of a titan, trying not to bounce off the shield, waiting for the words, “Bridge up! Jump! Jump! Jump!” to be spoken over coms.

An performance recreated thousands of times

 

Friday Bullet Points – Numbers, Pokemon, and Phishing

Another Friday morning when I have a half a dozen almost done posts in my drafts folder, but no real drive to finish any of them.  So time for some bullet points.

Such Super Data

I do enjoy when SuperData Research puts out another blog post with titles ranked by revenue.  They just posted one for June.

SuperData Sez – June 2016

Of course, I enjoy their charts for odd reasons.  They are, in their own way, very effective trolling devices.  I can already predict a SynCaine response to this.

And then there are the questions raised.  What defines an MMO?  What defines a P2P MMO? (SWTOR claims to be F2P, right?) And, finally, how the hell is FarmVille 2 even a thing?  Is Zynga still a thing?

NCsoft Numbers

NCsoft put out their Q2 2016 earlier this week.  You can find them at their investor relations site.  The PDF summary is the usual 10 pages, with everybody’s favorite chart on page 4.

NCsoft revenue by title – Q2 2016

The surprise of the quarter is WildStar, which revived with a more than 40% boost in revenues over Q1’s all time lows.  Of course, WildStar’s revenue number is still pretty small.  GuildWars 2 dropped by more that 6.5 times the WildStar total and still pulled in 7 times as much revenue.

The numbers are in millions of South Korean Won (KRW), which makes the WildStar total about 2 million USD for the quarter.

Meanwhile, it looks like GuildWars 2 is going to be feeling some pressure to release another box and, as always, the 1998 title Lineage rules the revenue roost for NCsoft

(Hat tip to MMO Fallout)

Pokemon Nation Championship Restrictions

The 2016 Pokemon National Championships are being held not too far from where I live… just up in San Francisco… and Nintendo has asked me not to show up.

Pokemon come to Baghdad by the Bay – By Invite Only

Due to the limits of the venue and the popularity of the event, no outsiders or random visitors will be allowed in to view the competition.  So that is that.  Nothing can keep you from going up to SF to hang out, but if you think you’ll be seeing some sort of Pokemon competition, you had best plan on running it yourself.

Also on this front, the whole Championship series is undergoing changes for 2017 as well.

New Eden Phishing and Seabeasts

CCP has an alert out on a phishing scheme going about, with emails pretending to be from support asking players to log into their account via a dubious link.

Know your login pages

So, you know, don’t do the dumb.

On the upside, CCP also announced that the Matigu Seabeast SKIN is now available in the New Eden store for a variety of Caldari hulls.

And that is about it for Friday.  The weekend approaches.