58 Weeks of World War Bee

The week of maximum Imperium smug may have passed, what with all the PAPI structure kills being racked up.  The main battles have been fought, the outposts of our foes that haven’t been destroyed yet are on their way to that fate soon enough.

The war is starting to feel over.

The enemy has fled, the invasion is no more, and the coalition that joined together to attack us hangs together loosely at best.  I might be at the last weekly update.  We’ll see what happens in the coming week, but I could be done.

Not that I ever meant for this weekly post routine to become a thing.  It sort of just happened and, once it started, it seemed like a good idea to just carry on.

There is still a lot going on.  PAPI forces are bunched up in a few systems trying to get out and have moved at a slow enough pace that, thanks to CCP having systems with very similar names in Catch, other groups have been able to setup bait cyno beacons that continue to provide juicy targets like this FinFleet Ragnarok.

And, with thousands of capital ships in motion across null sec, there is now apparently a jump fuel shortage with isotopes of all four flavors being scarce, which has caused prices to jump dramatically. (It isn’t all Imperium spies in Pandemic Horde relisting things on the market.)  The CCP scarcity drive made ice mining less productive and broke ice belts in some places so that there just isn’t anywhere close to enough supply arriving on the market to cope with the huge demand.

The PAPI trail of tears back to the Dronelands may be an extended journey.

Then there are the organizational shakeups underway as various groups shed members or recruit from traumatized alliances whose members are fed up.

Sov losses and member movement

There will also no doubt be a shift in the alliance coalition structures as PAPI breaks up into smaller regional groups.

The Mittani announced a general moratorium on accepting members of PAPI alliances into the Imperium for the next couple of months.  We are not seeking fair weather friends.  I am not sure how diligently this will be enforced, but you can expect that if you were in PAPI then KarmaFleet won’t be recruiting you for the time being. (Unless you made the Operation PAPIclip list.)

One Year Ago

The CCP update included armor plate tiericide and EDENCOM turned hostile towards anybody supporting the Triglavian invasion.

We lost the Keepstar in IGE-RI in Fountain and our tactics did not extract much of a penalty from the attackers.

When we got to the Y-2ANO Keepstar we had changed up enough to make PAPI pay for reinforcing it.

In the Week 6 Update I noted that Fountain was almost completely lost to the Imperium, that Legacy was getting pushed back in Querious, and we dropped 70 Athanors in Esoteria just to annoy TEST. (68 anchored successfully.)

Delve

As I mentioned last week, all the ihubs in Delve have been taken and the focus has turned to clearing out structures left behind by PAPI in their retreat.  There have been lots of structures to kill, with resistance by PAPI tapering off to almost nothing.  There are a few PAPI members who are out there trying to grab the cores when the structured die, and they have had some success, but mostly it is just things getting blown up.

Of course, the big kill of the week was the Tower of Legends, the primary PAPI staging Keepstar, but it was hardly the only Keepstar to die this past week.

The Tower of Legends brought down

The Delve campaign report shows this, with more than 3.5 trillion ISK destroyed in the region over the past week, 94% of which has been PAPI ships and structures.

Delve Campaign Report – Week 58

Listing out just the PAPI losses by type, you can see that structures dominated the list.

Week 58 – Top 15 PAPI Losses by Type

That is a lot of structure bashing that went on in Delve, including 7 Keepstars… and apparently a lot of expensive capsules.  I read somewhere that defense was so easy that nobody should ever lose a Keepstar.  Maybe TEST will defend some of theirs.

Other Theaters

Fountain has been purged of PAPI ihubs, save for the constellation that LowSechnaya Sholupen (LSH) has.  They should not be confused with NullSechnaya Sholupen (NSH) who were part of the PAPI coalition.

Querious has been getting cleared out.  Brave still holds some ihubs and has structures all over… again, they were clearly committed to living there… but have mostly fled the region.  There are unreinforced Brave structures in Querious just sitting there, not unanchoring, waiting to be blown up.  We even got on in an abandoned state the other day, an Athanor, which turned into a 3 billion ISK loot pinata for GSOL.

Period Basis has also been getting some attention, but a lot of the focus has been on Catch, where TEST had to retake an ihub in a system where they had a Keepstar for the evacuation route.

Catch – Aug 15, 2021

I’ve marked the travel waypoint and the system with the bait beacon, CCP having nicely put two systems in the same region that have very similar names to help make this possible. (There are also two systems that start with “GE-” in Catch, so CCP had something in mind or the random name generator blessed the region twice.)

My Participation

I went on quite a few fleets this past week.  As I have said, there were a lot of structures to kill.  While I was out in my Bhaalgorn a few times, most of the week was work for bombers and blops.  My Purifier undocked over and over.

Another structure out there to bash

And then there were the blops pilots who were ferrying us all over Delve and Querious.  I will say that conduit jump, where the black ops battleship and 30 bombers go in one jump, has become a useful features.

A Redeemer blops lighting a covert cyno

While there were a few attempts to interfere with our shoots, I made it through the week without loss, leaving my war time total as:

• Ares interceptor – 18
• Malediction interceptor – 7
• Drake battle cruiser – 7
• Atron entosis frigate – 7
• Cormorant destroyer – 5
• Purifier stealth bomber – 5
• Crusader interceptor – 5
• Rokh battleship – 5
• Scimitar T2 logi – 5
• Ferox battle cruiser – 4
• Jackdaw destroyer – 4
• Scalpel T2 logi frigate – 3
• Guardian T2 logi – 2
• Sabre interdictor – 1
• Eagle heavy assault cruiser – 1
• Scythe T1 logi – 1
• Raven battleship – 1
• Crucifier ECM frigate – 1
• Gnosis battlecruiser – 1
• Bifrost command destroyer – 1
• Hurricane battle cruiser – 1
• Sigil entosis industrial – 1
• Mobile Small Warp Disruptor I – 1

Other Items

The propaganda party never stops as Srsli put together another music video for the Imperium.

CCP has gone into its August hibernation mode and the patch update for August so far was pretty minor.  They haven’t mentioned the war lately, but they only seem interested in it when it produces a couple of Guinness Book world records, which happened at FWST-8 and M2-XFE.

This is in contrast to the Casino War where CCP covered events, mentioned it in their video series The Scope, and even tried to name the war.  Now CCP seems more interested in stagnating the game by strangling the economy.

On the weekly peak concurrent user numbers we crossed the 29K line again.  Oddly Monday was close to that peak number, hitting 29,033.  It wasn’t a holiday anywhere that I can recall, so it must have been the continuation of the Sunday peak and the orgy of entosis and destruction that was going on as the Imperium worked on clearing out Delve, Fountain, Querious, and Period Basis.  But Sunday just eked the top number for the week, hitting 29,111.

• 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)
• Week 41 – 33,708
• Week 42 – 33,521
• Week 43 – 33,731
• Week 44 – 33,742 (Saturday)
• Week 45 – 33,758
• Week 46 – 31,768
• Week 47 – 29,898
• Week 48 – 31,462 (Monday)
• Week 49 – 27,914
• Week 50 – 26,045
• Week 51 – 25,661
• Week 52 – 24,262
• Week 53 – 24,290
• Week 54 – 24,922
• Week 55 – 26,259 (Saturday)
• Week 56 – 27,176
• Week 57 – 29,953
• Week 58 – 29,111

Related

Surprise! The change in fortunes in the war generated a lot of writing!

• INN – Beeitman: Week 58
• INN – PAPI’s Retreat Daily Report: Day 8
• NN – What Daedalus Can Teach Us
• INN – PAPI’s Failure to Rationalize Defeat
• INN – PAPI’s Retreat Daily Report: Day 9
• INN – Vily, Manny, the Council of Wardens, and the Lies That Led to Beeitnam
• INN – The End Is Here: Three Reasons Why
• TAGN – Destroying the Forge of Heroes
• INN – PAPI’s Retreat Daily Report: Day 10
• PC Gamer – EVE Online’s record-setting war ends with a whimper
• Reddit – zKillboard Number Crunching (The WWB ISK War)
• INN – How to Win a Narrative War
• TAGN – Towards a New Delve
• INN – The Tower of Legends Falls
• TAGN – The Downfall of the Tower of Legends
• TNG – EVE Online ACU/PCU Climbs as War Activity Continues
• INN – PAPI’s Retreat Daily Report: Day 11
• INN – Dreadbomb Dreadbombs
• INN – The Battle for Hearts, Minds, and Butts
• INN – Joining EVE In Wartime: Fluffeh’s Story

Defending the Y-2ANO Keepstar

The war over the ihubs in Fountain, such that it was, is over.  PandaFam took the final one this past week.  Now there is just the structure in cleanup.  And that too has gone well for the attackers so far.  There were six Keepstars, the big targets, in the region and they have blown up three of them so far.

Three Keepstars Down

The remaining three Keepstars, located in O-PNSN, KVN-36, and Y-2ANO, were the next obvious targets.

PandaFam chose to go after the one in Y-2ANO, which is also the closest one to Delve, being on grid with the region gate to ZXB-VC.  The theory I have heard regarding the choice is that, in taking away the Y-2ANO Keepstar, they would hinder our ability to defend the other two.  We could not just undock a titan and use it to bridge fleets to help with the defense of the Keepstars deeper in the region.

This past Thursday they began their assault by hitting the Keepstar in order to set the first timer.  This involves knocking down the shields, after which the count down starts for the next round, the armor timer.

I missed the start of that fight, but showed up later in an interdictor to help out.

It seemed to go about the way it went back at armor timer in IGE-RI.  The enemy brought subcaps and carriers.  The fighters from the carriers were used to attack the Keepstar while the subcaps fought.  There were a few more people involved, but things played out as before.  The attackers managed to set the timer at a cost in ISK in time.  The battle report shows we did much better on the ISK war, but we lost the objective, and the objective is what matters most on defense.

Shield fight battle report header

It also took them almost three hour to finish the job, and the shield timer is the easy one.  When the fight was over and we left, we could see the clock counting down for the next fight.

The timer to the next fight

The timer was set to come out on Saturday in EUTZ prime time and early USTZ time.  Given that, the fight was expected to attract a lot more pilots.  And the Keepstar itself was said to have tech II armor plates installed, meaning that it would take longer to get through the armor layer and set the final timer.  The expectation was set that it might be one of those fights that goes on all day long.

In the mean time, both sides got ready.  At our end, the night before, I was along for a fleet that moved some resupply ships to the Keepstar, so that if people lost a ship during the fight, they could dock up and reship.  There was some talk about when the ping might come for the fight as the hostiles were looking to get there first to try and hold us off, so we might have to counter by showing up earlier.

Fortunately for me, I wake up by 6am no matter what.  It is part of getting old.  I used to wonder why my grandfather never slept in, and now I have become him.

So I was on and able to do a bit more prep work long before the first fleet pings landed.

I was actually concerned that there were zero Tracking Computer II modules listed on the market at our home Keepstar.  They are part of the extra fit you need to get a Ferox or Megathron set to shoot fighters.

So I ran out in an interceptor to NPC Delve where there were 60 up for sale at around 1.7 to 2 million ISK.  I bought them all up and flew them back.  19 would fit in my cargo hold, with another fit and offline in an empty mid slot.  I listed most of them on the market back at home for 2 million ISK each, where they sold out very quickly.  I hope they went to good use.

The first ping came over Jabber at 14:38 UTC (7:38am my time).

There were three initial fleets flying Megathrons, Feroxes, and Jackdaws.  I had hauled out a replacement Megathron the night before, so that was probably the right choice as I had a reship ready.  But Asher was leading the Ferox fleet, so I went with that instead.

We managed to put 1DQ1-A into 10% tidi just with people logging in, getting in fleets, and undocking.  2,000 people in motion will do that.

Staging slow down

We undocked and and took a titan bridge to the Keepstar in ZXB-VC where the fleets gather up for the push into Y-2ANO.

Megathrons and other Baltec ships bridge in

From there we warped to the gate and started to push through all together.

A clump of ships on the gate

It was there that I ended up getting disconnected.  The Ferox fleet went through and I could hear Asher giving orders and could tell that the fleet was in motion, but I was stuck in the tunnel animation.  There was tidi on both sides of the gate, so I could tell when things went wrong because the animation suddenly started running at full speed rather than the slow rate that indicates tidi.

I closed the client and tried logging back in.  The character screen indicated that I had made it into Y-2ANO, another sign that my client wasn’t in sync with the server, but there was so much going on that it took a long to get on.  I hit the jump button on the gate at 15:12 UTC, but didn’t load grid after logging back in until 15:35 UTC, by which time Asher’s fleet had made it away from the gate.

I had been watching some of the INN Twitch stream of the fight and could see that PandaFam had changed their plan from the first attack.  They had decided to try and keep us out, so they put the fighters from their carriers on the gate along with some subcaps, no doubt with the intent of trying to thin us out as we tried to get through the bubbles around the gate.

My lone Ferox trying to escape the bubbles

I was a big of an obvious target out by myself and was primaried by a Munnin fleet that was part of the group guarding the gate.  The game was moving so slowly that I saw my pod get ejected and got to watch the ship fly off for a bit before it finally exploded.

Bye-bye Ferox!

I got to watch that as I tried to motor out of the bubbles, but they popped by pod as well, sending me back to 1DQ1-A.

Back home, I hopped in a travel ceptor and headed back towards the fight.  I dropped fleet, thinking that I might have to get out the Megathron and join that fleet.

Getting back in the second time was much quicker and, of course, I could just warp out of the bubbles in my Malediction.  I docked up in the Keepstar and checked what was on alliance contract.  I was worried that I might not have the right fit if I grabbed a Ferox (those Tracking Computer II modules came to mind), but there were a bunch there that were the correct Keepstar defense fit. (Which probably explains why the market was dry of them.)  So I bought one of those, got into that ship, and rejoined the fleet, all of which took a lot longer at the time it took to type that out.

While I was doing all of that, the plan of the attackers started to unravel.  The plan, I gather, was to use the carriers and subcaps to kill us on the gate while a TEST Raven fleet kept the Keepstar timer paused.

However, two bombing runs later, the first led by DBRB and the seconds by Sister Bliss of The Initiative, left 200 Raven wrecks in their wake, allowing the Keepstar to continue its repair cycle.

Undocked on the Keepstar we could see the hostile fighters, which had been engaged elsewhere, now turning our way to try and hit the Keepstar.  We took them under fire as they hove into range, but they were too few and too slow.  The timer ran down below a minute and it looked like we were going to win.  We all keyed up and counted down the last ten seconds as there was nothing in range than could stop the clock.

The repair timer hits zero

After that, the attackers were back to where they were on Thursday night.  The would have to shoot the shields again to set a new timer and come back again at a later date.  They did not seem inclined to do this and the next couple of hours were spent skirmishing and trying to extract.

The final battle report shows losses fairly evenly split.

Armor timer battle report header

Given that they had 800 more people than us on the report… more than three fleets worth of pilots… we did pretty well.  But fighting on your own Keepstar is a big advantage (something we’re just learning, as our history is attacking them, not defending them), as is the fact that the timer is not affected by tidi as it runs down, but runs in real time. (Something that bit us back during the so-called Million Dollar Battle a few years back.)  Imperium institutional paranoia expects CCP to change that now that it is helping Goons.

The battle report shows the whole thing lasting more than three hours, but the Keepstar had been saved in under two, so the objective was won in a shorter time than the initial attack that set the timer.

Meanwhile, as that was going on, some Legacy pilots not involved in the fight used this as an opportunity to set some ihub timers and reinforce a couple of Ansiblex jump gates.  Well played, but the war so far shows they are not very good at following up on such ventures.

We’re certainly not done in Fountain.  The attackers will be back.  There are three Keepstars sitting out there still.  If they cannot kill those in a situation where our titans and supers are not in play, then they are going to have a really rough time when they try to cross into Delve and hit Keepstars there.

Other Coverage:

INN – Live Blog of the Battle

WoW Classic and What You Need to Know

Blizzard continues to wind its way to the launch of WoW Classic, now just 10 days and 45 minutes away from the time this post goes live.

Classic is as Classic does

A new FAQ has been posted summarizing all the details Blizzard has announced for the WoW Classic launch and what to expect when it comes to content and functionality.

WoW Classic FAQ

It collects together a lot of items that have been covered before, such as:

• WoW Classic primer about running WoW Classic
• The launch time for various world wide time zones
• Number of characters you’ll be allowed
• A link to the current list of realms
• The six phases of content unlocks (still no dates though)
• The status of battlegrounds
• A link to an article about itemization in WoW Classic

Some tidbits in the mix include the fact that if you bought the original WoW Collector’s Edition and are using the same account on which you activated it, you will get the pets from the CE.

In hindsight I regret not buying the WoW CE, which is a turn around from my usual feeling of regret when I do by the CE.

However, codes from the WoW Trading Card Game will not be valid for WoW Classic.

If the FAQ and subsidiary articles do not answer your questions about the launch, Blizzard has announced that they will also be holding an Ask Me Anything event in the WoW Classic sub-reddit on Tuesday, August 20th and 10:00 PDT, which is 17:00 UTC.  Expect queues for questions I bet.

Speaking of queues, there was an update in the forums specifically about the Herod (US) and the Shazzrah (EU) realms, both of which Blizz is estimating will face login queues in excess of 10,000 users come the launch based on the name reservation traffic they have seen so far.  Blizz would like people to swap to the two new realms they opened on Wednesday, and have said they will not open up new PvP realms until those two have filled up.

Finally, if you were wondering how the beta was going, the QA team at Blizzard posted a list of player reported bugs that were fixed over the last three month.

That is all I have.  I guess I can go back to pining for the launch.

Three Years of Pokemon Go

Pokemon Go celebrated its third anniversary last month, but I started playing a month late.  That was still early enough to have witnessed the huge initial popularity of the game, though possibly without a few of the initial teething issues.

And I have been playing it pretty much daily ever since.  Granted, it probably helps that our office campus has five Pokestops and a gym, which makes playing daily pretty easy.  The field research thing also puts a little pressure on to play daily as well, so my wife and I still go out on weekends together to go do a raid or two or to spin some Pokestops downtown or around the community center.  That my wife plays too has also helped its longevity around here, especially since we’re now on the same team.

As a game it has evolved and grown over the last three years, mostly for the better.  The change up to gym battles and the expansion of gyms to more locations was a pretty big deal when it hit… almost two years ago now wasn’t it?  And the events have gotten better over time.  The recent Team Rocket event was interesting, if a bit confusing for me at times.  I spent some of my Pokecoins on the Team Rocket outfit for my avatar, so there were a couple of times where I was wondering why there were two Team Rocket grunts hanging out by a captured Pokestop.

Oh yeah, that is me

One thing that Pokemon Go has that will be familiar to MMORPG players is inventory management.  You have limited bag space, though it can be expanded by spending coins.  Yet somehow, no matter how much bag space I have, I always managed to fill it all up.  I am currently at 950 slots and I still end up getting a message about my bag being full when I spin a Pokestop now and then.  Oddly, I don’t have a similar problem with the Pokemon storage, which likewise has limited space.  I have upgraded that a couple of times, but mostly I am pretty harsh about who gets to stay and who gets transferred.  But in my inventory, I cannot bring myself to delete  any of my huge pile of full revives and full heals.  I might NEED those some day!  As it always goes with inventory management.

What I haven’t managed to to in three years it get to level 40, the level cap for the game.  It took me a bit over a year to hit level 30, but as I pointed out in a post about that, the exp required to get there was only 10% of the total required to get to level 40.  At that pace, getting 10% of the way in 14 months, it should take me nearly twelve years to get to level 40.

I think I am a bit ahead of the twelve year pace though.  I currently stand at about 10% of the way into level 37.  That is largely due to Niantic adding in additional ways to earn experience.  The friends list, where you can exchange gifts with your friends daily, is of particular note, since you earn 100,000 exp when you achieve maximum friendship.

I don’t really focus too much on exp.  I remain, as in the core Pokemon games, focused on catching and evolving Pokemon.  My stats there are not too bad, since the other thing I don’t do much of is big raids.

Pokedex Stats

The game also gives you a bunch of other stats, which I suppose you can compare with my one year post.  Where I stand.

• Level – 37
• Total XP – 9,710,552
• Pokedex – 436 unique caught
• Pokedex – 460 unique seen
• Total Pokemon caught – 8,721
• Highest CP Pokemon – Slacking, CP 4,163
• Total Pokemon evolved – 1,157
• Pokestops visited – 9,401
• Distance walked (with the app open) – 1081.7 km
• Eggs hatched – 858
• Gym Battles won – 1,638
• Hours of Gym Defense – 4,462
• Berries fed at Gyms – 1,884
• Field Research Tasks Completed – 430
• Best Friends with – 9 trainers
• Gym Raids won – 100
• Pikachu caught – 119
• Pokemon Traded – 18

I suspect that my wife and I will carry on until we at least hit level 40 due to habit or sunk cost theory or some such.

We did consider jumping on Niantic’s latest game, Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, but the large similarity to Pokemon Go, including the need to keep the game open on your screen in order to play, pretty much meant choosing between one or the other, so we decided to stick with Pokemon Go for now.

The First EverQuest II Progression Server is Coming to an End

Just a little over three years ago I was writing about the launch of the Stormhold and Deathtoll servers, Daybreak’s first run at the time locked progression server idea with EverQuest II.

That is Daybreak’s graphic for the idea

The idea has been an ongoing success for EverQuest, but there was still an outstanding question as to whether or not the original was uniquely qualified for that sort of thing of if Daybreak could make the magic happen with the never-quite-a-successor.

There had been polls and a bunch of details about what to expect when it launched.

Missing from my lauch day post was the last minute surprise about Daybreak bringing back the Isle of Refuge as the starting zone for the new servers.

Subscribers Only

I was excited to see how this played out and signed up to give it a try.  However, like the game at launch, going back to something akin to its origins wasn’t a very satisfying solo affair.  Like a lot of my EverQuest memories, my good times in EverQuest II were as part of a guild that played together.  Wandering solo at a slow pace meant not keeping up with expansion unlocks and the mass of players, so I did not stick with it for too long.

I kept an eye on the news as things progressed through the first few expansions, but even that tapered off after a while.

I was still watching when Deathtoll, the PvP server, was shut down due to low population, ending the history of PvP servers for the game save for the Russian server.  It was gone before the Echoes of Faydwer expansion was up for a vote.

After that I didn’t hear much about it and didn’t pay it much mind.  Daybreak did other special servers, the Race to Trakanon event server, the Free Trade server, and the second round time locked server, which opened a little over a year ago, Fallen Gate.

Today, however, I saw some news about the Stormhold server.  It has apparently run its course.  Unlike the many expansions of EverQuest, which has kept the Fippy Darkpaw server, which launched in February 2011 (last time line here), up and running with things to unlock to this very day, the plan for Stormhold only had a dozen transitions planned.  Even at a leisurely four unlocks a year, possible with the short voting windows, Stormhold could have easily run its course by now.

And so, come September 4th of this year, the Stormhold server will be merged into the Antonia Bayle server.

I am curious as to why they chose that server.  It used to be the popular server, the cool kids server, where events and such happened.  It was the server that was passed over when server merges hit the other live servers back in November of 2015.  But now it seems to be in need of a bit of a population boost.

Of course, this is just my sort of luck.  When the server merges happened before no two servers that I had characters on were merged together.  The server count went from ten to four and I still had characters on three different live servers.  Well, now it will be four.  I have a couple of characters on Stormhold and soon they will be on Antonia Bayle.  Just what I needed.

The August 2017 EVE Online Update brings the Lucky Clash Event

We are getting an August update this year, which I found a bit surprising.   And they even kept the naming consistent for three months running.  If they hit four that might be a record.   Anyway, lots of people at CCP are generally on vacation during July and August, so the month has been skipped at times for lack of content to deliver.

Not this August though, this August we’re getting some… stuff… I think… even if it was delayed a day.

We got a new event.  As a follow on to The Agency event, we got the Lucky Clash event starting today.

I want to say Lucky Cash… or LSMFT

This event pits the Independent Gaming Commission against some pirates known as the Redtail Sharks, and the IGC needs your help fighting them off.  So from now through August 23rd you can join help defend the various IGC gambling dens around New Eden from the Redtail Sharks.

So now we’re defending casinos again?  I wonder if that was accidental or deliberate irony.

Anyway, check your overview… and then go fix the settings… to find a site to defend near you.

After that, well, CCP giveth, and CCP taketh away.  The other big item in the August update, as CCP announced last month, is the removal of the Captain’s Quarters from stations in New Eden.

Me in the Captain’s Quarters back in 2011… the last time I used them

The source of much of the Incarna drama, the captain’s quarters were too much or not enough of something, depending upon whom was speaking.  In the end, walking in stations ended with the rejection of the Incarna release and the Captain’s Quarters have been mostly lingering ever since.

No, six years later, they are being removed from the game.  CCP posted a dev blog as to why they were doing this, but the upshot is that the code takes dev time to maintain and it is standing in the way of a 64-bit client.

As somebody who went through three Fortizar fights in the last week or so, each of which would have been made better by having a 64-bit client… unless you turn down graphics the current client is likely to access all the memory it can and then crash… I applaud this decision.  We’ve had 64-bit processors and 64-bit operating systems for a decade now, time to move the client forward.

I know, somewhere, somebody is really mourning the passing of the Captain’s Quarters.  One of my iron laws of MMORPGs is that any feature, no matter how bad, tangential, or useless, is somebody’s absolute favorite feature, and you’ll find out who the moment you remove it.  Sorry you have to take one for the team, but dealing with what tends to be called the “technical debt” of old features is painful, and sometimes you have to drop a feature to move forward.

And so it goes.

After that the August release is just fixes and adjustments to things already in the game.

There were some tweaks to how citadel launched void bombs work:

• Reduce the rate of fire of the Structure Guided Bomb Launcher from 20 seconds to 40 seconds
• Reduce the area of effect of Guided Void Bombs from 40km to 20km
• Reduce the neut amount per second of the Guided Void Bomb by 25% (6000GJ every 40 seconds as opposed to the previous 4000Gj every 20s)
• Reduce the velocity of the Guided Void Bomb by 20% (increasing flight time to keep the range the same)

That, however, is not going to be enough to change the structure shooting meta.  You will still have to attack them with a fleet doctrine that can shoot when neuted out, so armor tanked Typhoons or Machariels or Hurricanes supported by cap-chaining Guardians will still likely be the only options against slower shooting, but harder hitting, void bombs.

Meanwhile, deploying Upwell Structures has been made a bit easier, and using them has been made more attractive as some of the bonuses for the soon-to-be-removed player-owned starbases have been removed.  Industry and reprocessing bonuses are gone.

There were also updated for the standings, scanning, and beta map as covered by a recent dev blog.

The beta map is another one of those features that makes my head hurt.  One of my long standing gripes about EVE Online has been that the in-game map isn’t very useful.

It is pretty, and hella impressive to show your non-playing friends, but it just isn’t very practical as an in-game tool.  And I say that even today, with the current map, which is a vast improvement over the state of the map back when I started playing EVE.

Seriously, I went to DOTLAN yesterday and got a database error when I tried to look up a system and my heart about stopped.  The idea of not having that out-of-game map resource, and being stuck with the in-game map, was painful to even consider.

And then came the beta map, the plan for which seemed to me to be “let’s make something prettier and more impressive to look at, but even less practical to actually use.”  And so the new map has lingered as the beta map for a few years now, because it was clearly a step back from the already impractical in-game map in terms of usefulness.

But CCP seems to have decided to get back to work on the long neglected beta map.  The list of changes is long and impressive.  Somebody spent some time on the project recently.  But is that enough to make the beta map useful?

There are a pile of other small fixes that have gone into the August update.  Details are available via the Patch Notes and the Updates page.

The update has been reported as successfully deployed, so it is all there waiting for us.

Still no music though.  I guess the days of a new song with every update are over.

 

Blogger Fantasy Movie League – Week Eleven

When things start falling apart.

The edge was clearly coming off the contest.  Not only was Liore so far out in front as to be unassailable, but even in the pack changes in overall standings seemed unlikely.  Add in a week with no blockbuster launches and it was no wonder that two people forgot to even make their picks for the week.

Yes, there were a few new movies this past weekend, but when you have been through weeks with 50, 70, and even 100 million dollar openings, the opening of Annabelle: Creation, predicted to be in the $25 million range isn’t exactly stirring.  Plus I knew nothing about the film.  Still, I had a $1,000 budget and eight screens to fill, so I went down the list trying to make a stab at some sort of line up.

 Annabelle Creation $380
 The Nut Job 2      $176
 Dunkirk            $143
 The Dark Tower     $106
 Girls Trip         $89
 The Emoji Movie    $77
 Spider-Man         $75
 Kidnap             $72
 Detroit            $56
 Atomic Blonde      $54
 The Glass Castle   $52
 Despicable Me 3    $44
 Planet of the Apes $43
 Baby Driver        $21
 Wonder Woman       $20

In the end, for no good reason, I decided an all female leads theme was the way to go, so I went with two screens of Annabelle Creation, a screen of Kidnap, two screens of Atomic Blonde, and three screens of Wonder Woman.

As the weekend estimates came in, it looked like Liore was going to win another week.  She only went with one screen of Annabelle Creation, but she had three screens of The Glass Castle, which looked likely to get the best price/performance boost of $2 million per screen, enough to boost Liore ahead of the pack yet again.

And then the final numbers came in and Annabelle Creation, which beat estimates by $10 million, ended up being the best price/performance pick of the week, bolstering my selection and pushing Liore down into third place for the week, behind myself and Ocho.

My Week 11 Picks and their Revenue

I won the week, the rankings shaking out as:

1. Wilhelm’s Clockwork Lemon Multiplex – $92,413,326
2. Ocho’s Octoplex – $91,063,841
3. Dr Liore’s Evil House of Pancakes – $85,743,232
4. Braxwolf’s Waffleplex – $77,611,192
5. Void’s Awesomeplex – $75,807,974
6. Pasduil’s Popcorn Picturehouse – $74,817,084
7. Moderate Peril’s Sleazy Porno Theatre – $74,252,899
8. Syl’s Fantasy Galore Panopticum – $66,138,438
9. Bel’s House of Horrors – $26,866,850
10. Murf’s Matinee Mania – $14,924,605

Bel and Murf both failed to pick, so rolled with the previous weeks picks, which left them each with two empty screens as some of their picks were no longer on the list.

Nobody in our league got the perfect pick of the week, which consisted of two screens of Annabelle Creation, three screens of the Glass Castle, a screen of Planet of the Apes, and two screens of Wonder Woman.  261 people managed to get the perfect pick overall on the site, which netted them $99,547,100.

Perfect Picks for Week 11

As noted, there isn’t much that can be done at this point to shake up the rankings, save forgetting to pick for a couple of week.  At the end of week 11 the overall seasonal rankings looked like this:

1. Dr Liore’s Evil House of Pancakes – $1,179,773,786
2. Wilhelm’s Clockwork Lemon Multiplex – $1,099,976,348
3. Ocho’s Octoplex – $1,015,911,862
4. Void’s Awesomeplex – $983,919,075
5. Moderate Peril’s Sleazy Porno Theatre – $959,423,735
6. Pasduil’s Popcorn Picturehouse – $944,970,871
7. Braxwolf’s Waffleplex – $926,427,978
8. Syl’s Fantasy Galore Panopticum – $853,353,980
9. Murf’s Matinee Mania – $833,121,646
10. Bel’s House of Horrors – $799,170,850

The only change in ranking was Syl climbing up another spot after Murf failed to do his picks.

Beating Liore by about $7 million this week still leaves me $80 million behind.  That is way too much ground to cover with only two weeks remaining, and all the more so when one looks at the week 12 line up.

Hitman's Bodyguard $254
Annabelle Creation $216
Logan Lucky        $184
Dunkirk            $98
The Nut Job 2      $62
Spiderman          $58
The Emoji Movie    $52
Girls Trip         $50
The Glass Castle   $48
The Dark Tower     $48
Wind River         $43
Kidnap             $38
Atomic Blonde      $34
Planet of the Apes $29
Despicable Me 3    $28

On the bright side, I suppose, there are no $5 titles on the list.  However, there also isn’t a single title ranked over $300 either, making it look like a pretty thin week.  I’ll be lucky to get $80 million out of these picks, much less close the gap between Liore and myself.

So there we stand with two weeks left to go in the season.

Committed to Delve Now

When move ops were announced late last week and over the weekend I was a little confused.  Were people still back in Saranen?  Was the Rakapas Cartel getting anxious?  The pings were a little vague about the end points of these ops.

However, when I actually looked into what was going on, it turned out that this wasn’t about the move down from the north.  This was another move.  We were giving up our low sec staging base in Sakht and moving into Delve proper.  We were moving to D-W7F0, highlighted below on the map of the Delve region.

Delve – August 16, 2016

At a glance the system doesn’t look to be the worst spot on the map, but it seems like one might choose better when it comes to a staging system.  There isn’t even a station there.   However, this is one of those instances where Wollari’s wonderful maps do not really reflect the shape of space.  The region maps on DOTLAN are setup to show all the systems and the interconnection of gates between them.  These maps do not show the actual distance or relative position of systems in space.  For that you need to use the Range option under Navigation over at DOTLAN, which will show you a different map.

Where can I jump from D-W7F0

That map shows the relative positions of the systems in the game, and every one of them in red is within 5 light years of D-W7F0, which means a capital ship can get there in one jump.  There are 72 systems within jump range of D-W7F0 and, while eight of those systems are in Querious, that still covers a substantial number of the 97 systems in Delve.

As for there being no station in D-W7F0, we look to be living out of citadels now.  There are three Fortizars and a couple of Astrahuses setup in the system for us to dock up in.  One has been designated as our staging citadel and, thanks to last week’s update, which added contracts to citadels, pre-fit doctrine ships are available in addition to the market getting stocked.

Now all we lack is the ability to insure ships in a citadel, which seems like something that ought to have been added already, but who knows what the code looks like or what CCP’s reasoning behind its absence might be.

That is home now, which meant getting stuff out of Sakht.  For me that includes a carrier and a bunch of sub caps.  I took care of the carrier first, loading it up with all the ships I could cram into it, grabbing about fuel for a couple of trips, just in case, and undocking.

Carrier on grid!

This was between the Astrahus busting fleets on Saturday night when Asher setup a move up for us.  It was supposed to be for subcaps only.  He has setup a bridging titan in 1-SMEB while RatKnight1 (of the Ratkingbois meme from our Wicked Creek deployment) kept a cyno going at the Fortizar.  But with lots of ships covering and a cyno in place, he said we could take our chances if we wanted to move a capital via the cyno in fleet.

This meant doing things with my carrier that I had not done before.  So far, I have only ever jumped station to station, with the exception of that jump to a citadel from Rakapas.  I actually had to warp the carrier.

And it warps slowly

At the end of the warp, I had to take the gate from Sakht to 1-SMEB.

How do supers fit through this thing?

I had to do this because the jump gates between Sakht and 1-SMEB are of the very long range region connecting variety, so the distance covered is well beyond the 5 light year range limit.  Again, the DOTLAN route planner illustrates the path you would have to take to bypass the gate.

So I took the gate and jumped to the cyno once I was clear.

On the Fortizar

Then it was time to move some subcaps.

I remember back around the Phoebe release CCP was expressing concern that we might simply all use death clones to move about to bypass jump fatigue, especially after they removed clone costs.  It was part of the justification for restricting how one could set their home station. (Which also happens to be in the same time frame when we left Delve back in 2014.)

But if you are moving a ships between two points, death clones make it easy.  After docking up my carrier, I got out of it, undocked, and set my pod to self-destruct.  Upon my destruction, my death clone was activated in Sakht, where I boarded a subcap, took the gate to 1-SMEB, then Asher’s titan bridge back to D-W7F0, where I docked up, got out of the ship, undocked, and kicked off the self-destruct yet again.

Rolling up to a titan for a bridge

A few rounds on that with both my main and my alt… and a little jump fatigue… and I was pretty quickly out of Sakht.  Everything I moved south is now in a Fortizar in the middle of Delve.  Time to settle in, evict the current residents, and help put down the natives.  It is no longer the Guristas for ratting, but Blood Raiders instead.

Blood Raiders use lasers

I just have to remember to not to go AFK in an anomaly when the doorbell rings.  At least I had gotten a couple of runs out of that Myrmidon and remembered to insure it.

So I am fully committed to Delve.  All my stuff is there now.

And it seems as thought TEST might have some commitment to Delve as well.  According to their latest (and very short) state of the alliance recording, they are being paid to come down to Delve and shoot Goons.