Friday Bullet Points From the Empty House

Summer must be coming to an end because the new semester starts for my daughter next week.  She and my wife left Wednesday morning to drive up to Oregon to get her moved into the dorm and settled, while I stayed behind.  It took about a day before working from home and having nobody to sync up with on meals before all structure fell away from my existence and I began to live like the cats.

My wife will be back tomorrow to help return me to a more normal cycle, but until then it is time for another nap.  But before I snooze, a few items that came up of which I wanted to take note.

• Designing Virtual Worlds

On Monday this week Richard Bartle announced on his personal blog that he had asked for the rights for his 2003 book Designing Virtual Worlds to be reverted to him and he has now made it available as a free download in PDF format.

Something like the book cover

I actually found out about this via a tweet from Raph Koster:

There is only one indispensable book on online world design, and it is Dr Richard Bartle's DESIGNING VIRTUAL WORLDS. It predates World of Warcraft, and yet is not obsolete.

As of today, Richard is giving it away for free here: https://t.co/B8gUksufWw

— Raph Koster (@raphkoster) August 17, 2021

Naturally I grabbed a copy as soon as I could.  Even if you are not interested in the design aspects, the book includes a run down of the history of virtual worlds from MUD1 up into speculating about the launch of EVE Online.

As is noted constantly, the whole thing predates the launch of World of Warcraft, but is still remarkably relevant 18 years down the road.

• Men Who Play Women

Nick Yee’s group, Quantic Foundry, emailed be about the release of a new publicly available report on the genders people choose to play when they have an in-game avatar.

home of gamer research

Among the findings were that while only 9% of women play male avatars, 29% of men play female avatars.

The report goes on to try and explain why men play female avatars and comes up with some good points.  But I suspect that the fact that so many games hyper-sexualize female avatars plays into it a lot as well.  The game designers are very much in on the objectifying of the female body.  I would be interested to see if there was any variation in the numbers between games that are all in on boob bounce physics and titles that don’t go down that path.

• Esports in Asia

Niko Partners, which covers the video game trends in Asia, has a new report on the size and trends in esports across Asia, which makes up 54% of the global market.  While the full report will set you back $5K, the intro page has some tidbits about the market that you might find of interest.

• EA Making Loot Boxes Suck Slightly Less

In their quarterly earnings call EA said that they were seeing more engagement and more spending when they let players peek at what was in a loot box via special “preview packs,” which you could open before committing to buy.  These were apparently received very well by the community and a lot of players who otherwise had not purchased loot boxes spent money on these new packs.

EA has literally discovered that if you tell people what you’re selling, more people are likely to actually buy.

• More Bonus Skill Points in EVE Online

A quick one to slip in because it is time sensitive.  CCP has a skill point login event going on this weekend.  For Omegas that log in  and claim the rewards on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, there is 50K skill points in it for you.  For Alphas, it is just 15K, but that is still better than nothing.

• Reminiscing About EverQuest and EverQuest Next

Finally, last week aLovingRobot had Jeff Butler, one of the original EverQuest team members, on the show where they chatted about EverQuest Next, EverQuest, Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, the early days of SOE, and the MMORPG market.

aLovingRobot’s channel has more than a few videos dedicated to the history and lore of EverQuest and related titles, so if the subject interests you, then you can certainly find some more to watch.  There are a number of names from the past that appear in the series.

Hat tip to Feldon for finding this.

Metaliminal Storms Arrive in New Eden

With the Thursday morning update, the patch notes indicated that the previously announced metaliminal storms were now on the scene.

Unusual subspace distortions have begun to be detected in nullsec space. The first Metaliminal storms will arrive soon.

For once in game development “soon” meant “now.”

They’re here

They were coy in the patch notes and the news piece they posted, but when you logged into New Eden there was already a storm brewing in Providence.  Like most in the Imperium, I had money on Delve being the first location, just to go along with CCP tradition, but I guess the rotting carcass of ProviBloc gets the first storm raining on it.  The storm started centered on KBP7-G, which is adjacent to high sec, so high sec systems get a bit of the new weather as well.

The good news is that nobody has to build a New Eden Weather site, because CCP actually took the time to add storms to the map.

Storm option on the map interface

They actually put it on both maps, the old map above, which is still the better of the two, and the new map, as shown below.

The storm option on the years old “new” map

I have to say that the storm shows up marginally more visible on the new map.

The new map shows the storm

While the old map is not quite as clear.

The old map shows the storm

Though, honestly, neither is as clear or useful as the logical map view that DOTLAN gives you of space or than more “shape of space” view that GARPA displays.  Again, how CCP can have gone 17 years and still not produced a clear and useful in-game map remains a mystery to me.

The map doesn’t tell you what type of storm however… so maybe we do new NewEdenWeather.com.  So I flew an alt out to take a look.  As it turns out, the center of the first storm is very close to Amarr, being just 10 jumps out.  When I got into the outlying systems of the storm, I discovered it was an electrical storm. (I wrote about all the storm types previously, and the stats do not appear to have changed.)  You get an indication of the weather above your capacitor display, just like in Abyssal space.

The storm is weak in outlying systems

Naturally, the first storm was an electrical storm, because that is the one that prevents cloaking, which is the only big deal about the storms so far.

Closer in, you get stronger storm conditions.

Towards the center, the effects get stronger

As I said previously, the knock to cloaking feels like CCP playing towards those who don’t like cloaky camping, throwing them a bone without really doing anything one way or the other about the issue.

I also don’t think people get how long these storms could potentially linger.  I seen some HTFU attitude on this front, but I will be interested to see how those same people will feel when a storm comes to their part of space and lingers for days, moving one system a day, with the effects out to five gates.  Wait until a storm gets caught up in your region in a dead end path and the RNG keeps pushing it back and forth.  It is all fun and games until the turd is on your doorstep.

CCP said there would be eight storms running, so seven more will likely be spawning as time runs along, with two of each of the four flavors in play at any one time.

And, as often happens, it feels like CCP has missed the risk vs reward when it comes to these storms.  The incentives are so paltry, and the penalties so annoying, that my bet is that most people will avoid the storms if at all possible.

They do have a nice storm effect in space though.

My Ares in the electrical storm

We shall see if that is enough of an attraction.

A Decade of Twitter

Twitter just reminded me this past week that I had been hanging around for ten years now.

I am sure this image was unique and exclusive to my anniversary

I want to say up front that I actually like Twitter.  I certainly enjoy it more than Facebook, which I mostly avoid.  I also have an Instagram account, but it somehow became dedicated entirely to posting pictures of our cats.  And I guess the blog is social media of a sort.

But I was little dubious about the idea of a 140 character… now 280 character… “micro-blogging” service back when it started to become popular, so I waited a bit before joining in.  But after ten years I will say that I am satisfied at what I get out of the service.

That, I would guess, is largely based on my use pattern and expectations, both of which are relatively low.

As of this moment, Twitter says I have made about 17,500 tweets, which feels like a big number, but really isn’t.  Divided over 10 years, that is about four tweets (including replies) a day.  Since I hooked up both of my blogs to auto-post any new article to Twitter, about 25% of my tweets are blog post links.

And of the other posts, most of them are pretty light.  Attempts at humor.  Responses to other people.  Nothing all that big, interesting, or controversial.  I often start replies then delete them because I don’t feel they add anything to the discussion or because I am sure somebody must have made the point I want to make already.  As my profile says, I try to keep things mostly about video games.

Twitter Me

I do try to steer clear of politics, but I also have no interest in having multiple accounts, so that does get mixed in there at times.  I follow a number of free speech advocates, which started with Popehat, whose blog I used to read back when he had time to blog.  That seemed safe to me as I view free speech as pretty non-controversial.  People who seek to limit speech are almost 100% interested in only limiting speech they disagree with and whine incessantly if they feel their speech rights are somehow being impinged upon, even when they are not.

Free speech is a root freedom which makes other freedoms possible.  Kill the root and the tree dies.

Of course, here in 2020, everything is now political, from anything that might help control the current pandemic to vaginal lubrication, and some things are just so stupid that I cannot stay away.  But it isn’t my normal mode.

Mostly my tweets, my non-blog post tweets, are interactions with people I probably have some other connection to… though that connection is likely the blog, so things do seem to come back to this site.

Part of my enjoyment of Twitter is probably also related to who I follow.  I think one of the keys to the platform is not following everybody who might say something in which you are interested, but finding people who do follow a lot of people and retweet only the interesting bits.  (A hat tip to Popehat for that yeoman effort.)

Having discovered that, I set an arbitrary limit of following only 500 accounts.  That seems to be, for me, about the threshold of my ability to read/care.  I would guess that maybe 400 of those accounts are very low traffic, made up of people I know and official game company accounts, along with a few key developers.  Some of those accounts generate no traffic.  I am still waiting and watching for any news about Planet Michael.   The last tweet there was in 2011, but the next one could be any time.

And, because I follow and interact with people in other forums as well, I don’t feel the need to follow everybody on every service.  If your Twitter feed is mostly blog posts and I already subscribe to your RSS feed in Feedly, I probably don’t feel the need to also follow you on Twitter.  It isn’t that I don’t like you, it is just an attempt to keep Twitter manageable and I already read your stuff elsewhere.

I am sure that not playing the follow back game religiously costs me some followers, but the people into that… and I get some follows from people obviously looking for that reciprocity… probably aren’t worth my time anyway.

I also very rarely block people on Twitter.  Blocking is an extreme measure in my view, they can no longer see your tweets and you can no longer see theirs, plus they get a notification about it I think.  It sends a strong message in my opinion, so I try to save it for those who really earn it.

I do mute people though.  That is a much softer touch.  I might do that to people who I follow and enjoy, but who are getting a bit spammy about something that isn’t all that interesting to me.  I declare a mute amnesty every once in a while and go unmute everybody again and start over.

I do not follow many big celebrities.  Or any, really, depending on your measurement of “big.”  Their accounts are inevitably disappointing.  They either have a social media person running their account, so their feed is safe and bland, or they don’t, and you quickly realize they live in a bubble so outside the experience of average people as to be bizarre.  The meme is “first world problems” but there is clearly a step beyond that with “rich people problems.”

So it goes.

In the last decade, my greatest Twitter achievement ever involved me tweeting the following:

65 Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser?

David Burge, whom I follow for his car pictures (and #DavesCarIDService) posted a few car pictures challenging his followers to do the identifications themselves.  I got the first one right.

I'm tired of IDing your car pics. It's time to test your ID skills with pics from my stash. pic.twitter.com/ItshNi973O

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) July 30, 2020

I imagine I will never top that.

(A neighbor years back had a 65 Oldsmobile hearse, so I knew the body style for that year, and Olds had a series of wagons with that popped up roof with the extra window under the Vista Cruiser name for about a decade, so it was right up my alley.)

So, as I said at the top, I like Twitter, but largely because I have found a way to get value out of it without expending too much effort.  There are times, especially these days, when I doom scroll with the best of them, rolling through all the bad news popping up.  But mostly I try to keep it light, just reading what comes by and not responding if I do not have anything to add. (Which includes checking to see if somebody has already replied with what I wanted to say.  No need to have it said twice.)  I mute the crazies, avoid the spammy, and try not to take it all that seriously.

And that is about it.  I have cranked out more than a thousand words about a service that limits you to 280 characters per message, which I am sure says something about me.

The WoW Classic AMA and Layering

Another day and more things to mention about WoW Classic.  Earlier today some of the WoW Classic dev team took some time out to do an Ask Me Anything event over on the WoW Classic subreddit.

I’m going to need a new default graphic in a week

You can find the whole raw AMA here, or you can go read the nice, clean summary that WoWHead put together.

There were quite a few short and easy questions thrown out there with clear answers that I might sum up with:

• No, you won’t be able to transfer from Live to Classic
• No, you cannot send gold from Live to Classic
• No, there won’t be character boosts
• Yes, I found code I wrote back in 2005
• Yes, we have contingency plans for crowding
• No, really, we have contingency plans
• Yes, we might consider transfers for Classic population imbalances, but we’d rather you pick a lower population server right now instead
• Hunters were the hardest class to recreate and required a huge amount of work

But things went deep quickly when the team was asked about the plan and functionality of the layering technology that Blizzard is using on the WoW Classic servers, such that I want to reproduce it here:

We’ve seen some confusion about layering, both about how it helps support our launch, and how it’s supposed to behave while its active, so I’d like to both speak to it and clear up some misconceptions about it.

First, we’re absolutely committed to reducing to one layer per realm before our second content phase goes live, and the sooner we can get there, the better. The reason we can’t do that initially is that on launch day, everybody will be clustered in the starting zones, and having players so close together causes an exponential drain on server resources. In fact, the same number of players cause more server problems crammed into Northshire than they do spread across all of Elwynn Forest. We expect that even after the first couple of days, we’ll need fewer layers than we need for the initial hours of launch, and our stress tests have confirmed that expectation.

A related concern that was raised during our pre-launch test was that capital cities felt empty, but that only occurred because we left the pre-launch test running two days past its original end date, and we didn’t reduce the number of layers at all during that test. During our launch week, as the players spread out across the world, we’ll monitor activity and reduce layers as necessary, so the world continues to feel full.

Some players have suggested using sharding in low level zones to address launch demand, both because we talked about that at Blizzcon, and because it’s what they’re used to from our modern expansions. Unfortunately, while modern WoW has content designed to work with sharding, WoW Classic does not. The most obvious example of incompatible content is Rexxar’s famously long patrol path, but there are lots of other examples throughout WoW Classic. Since we want all that content to work as it was originally designed, we’ve made sure that every layer is a copy of the entire world, so you can kite Anachronos all the way to Orgrimmar, and you can ride the boat from Ratchet to Booty Bay with the same people alongside you the whole way.

Some players have asked us to use realm caps and login queues to handle the demand, and while those are tools we have at our disposal, we don’t want to rely on them exclusively, because they keep people from playing the game.

One of the most frequently reported problems during our tests was players transferring to a layer for what seemed like no reason. There were several bugs that caused this, and we’re confident we’ve fixed them. At this point, the only thing that should cause you to change layers is accepting an invite from a player on another layer. Additionally, it should always transfer the player who was invited to the layer of the player who invited them.

Nonetheless, after accepting an invite, the layer transfer doesn’t always happen immediately, because we don’t want to transfer you in the middle of combat, or before you get a chance to loot. During our pre-launch test, we saw a few reports of what seemed like random layer transfers, but when we investigated, we realized this was due to us making that transfer delay too long. The delay was so long that players could unintentionally chain one delay into another by starting combat immediately after looting. Because of those reports, we’ve fixed the transfer delay to give you enough time to loot, without being so long that you’re left wondering why you can’t join your friend. We’ll keep an eye on that, and we may decide to reduce it further.

We’ve also seen reports of people transferring suddenly at the entrances to capital cities, which was related to the transfer delays. If you’re waiting to transfer to your friend’s layer, and you enter a capital city, we ignore the delay and transfer you immediately. The long delays were making it more likely that you’d enter a capital with a transfer pending, and now that we’ve reduced the transfer delay, it will be a bit more clear that your transfer was the result of accepting a group invitation.

Regarding PvP, we saw many posts from players wondering if getting invited to a party is a good way to escape from PvP combat. I’m pleased to say there’s actually a separate, longer transfer delay following any PvP combat. We know a lot of world PvP enthusiasts are excited for WoW Classic, and we don’t want the additional layers to feel like they’re robbing you of your kills. When the time comes to withdraw from the fight, you’ll have to escape from your enemies and get to a safe place before you’re able to join your friends on another layer.

I’d also like to clarify how multiple layers work with logout. Early in our stress testing, players reported that logging out and back in would let you hop to a new layer to farm the same mineral or herb node on different layers. That was a bug, and we’ve fixed it. Your layer assignment now persists for a few minutes between logouts, long enough that by the time the game would choose a new layer for you, that node would have respawned on its own anyway.

I hope that all makes things a bit more clear.

That is quite a bit more that I knew or considered about the layering plan.  And, of course PvP complicates everything.  But the overall goal is to get the population down into a single layer while making sure that servers have populations large enough to be viable over time.

Another item of interest to me was the question of player caps on dungeons, which got the following response:

This was indeed a bug that we have fixed and you should be able to enter most lower-level dungeons with up to 10 players, as was possible in Original WoW 1.12. There are some dungeons that had specific caps by the end of Original WoW however. To be specific, all lower level dungeons available through Maraudon should have a player cap of 10, with Blackrock Depths, Scholomance, Stratholme, and Dire Maul being capped at 5 players.

As was the case in Original WoW 1.12, Blackrock Spire should also have a cap of 10 players.

Somewhere in the back of my brain I knew that you could have 10 players in a dungeon, but that was so long ago that it ceased to be a thing to me.  Also, we were rarely ever in danger of having too many people to go do a dungeon.  Our primary problem was getting at least five together for an instance.

Finally, there was an entertaining bug mentioned, which I will reproduce since it involves Skronk’s favorite priest spell:

There was a bug when two priests mind control each other the mind control itself would cancel out but the camera would still switch to each other. The result is both priests would be stuck watching each other move around which hilarious and very confusing.

And so it goes.  As noted up at the top, you can find the whole AMA here, or the more concise summary over at WoWHead.

Addons and WoW Classic

As WoW Classic edges closer, the planning committee for the instance group continues its work.

Classic is as Classic does

Key items still to resolve include a time when we can all play together, which is proving trickier than I would have liked.  Getting older, having different responsibilities, and moving to another continent are all in the mix on that front.

Another item that came up was Addons.

I am torn on the subject of Addons.

On the one hand, I have run Addons of some sort for the vast majority of my time in WoW.  I think one of the first Addons I got was to speed up quest text, before Blizz put that option in the settings.  There was a time way back in the day where I ran one of those big combo packs that lumped together a whole bunch of Addons into a single unified project.

I have also spent periods of time with a very minimalist set of Addons.  That was especially true after support for the big combo pack I was using fell apart.  Addons are often the efforts of individuals, some of whom stop playing WoW and move on.

There have been points during the life of the game where Addons have seemed essential.  I remember a daily quest in Wrath of the Lich King where you had to run around a lab to find chemicals where the Addon that would highlight what you were looking for in the mess of the lab felt essential.  And then there was the Masterplan Addon, without which managing followers and their missions during Warlords of Draenor was a dreadful chore.  And then there are the Addons for pet battles, which make pet and team management possible without having to keep a spreadsheet open on a second monitor.

So I am hardly anti-Addon, though I do try to keep the number I use down to what I really need, if only to avoid conflicts, the pain of patch day incompatibilities, and the heartbreak that comes when support ends for one.

But, on the other hand, something about the spirit of WoW Classic, a sort of back to nature, seeing the game in a raw or primitive form, makes me feel like Addons might be a bit of a betrayal, a cheat, an option that would deprive myself of the full experience.

So I want to consider the whole Addon thing carefully.  I have almost a week left before WoW Classic starts, so I might as well take some time to think about it.  I’m not doing much else besides staring at that count down on the WoW Classic home page.

The Addon makers have been busy.  If you go look at just what is available for WoW Classic over at Curse, they are already into the 13th page of Addons, which at 20 Addons per page, is starting to add up.  And it was at page 11 when I started planning this post last week.  So that is well past 200 Addons and growing.

Addon makers have the experience of nearly 15 years of the game to look back on to decide what works and how things can be done.  And while WoW Classic won’t need Addons for things like pet battles or garrison missions, some things like Deadly Boss Mobs Addon have made the leap to WoW Classic.  I also see HealBot, TomTom, and some gathering and market Addons that sound familiar.

My gut says to start small, if at all, with Addons.  The only one I considered from the list immediately was one to auto-sell gray items at vendors, and even that one made me think twice.  There will be a point during the early game when gray items might be the best in-slot item I have, and any gear is better than no gear!

At some point I will no doubt consider something to help with buying and selling on the market.  Money will be a thing, especially if we plan to go through the full epic mount plan we did back in the day.

But some items I think I will avoid.  There are several quest trackers and Addons to speed your trip to level 60 by optimizing your route and telling you where to head.  But right now I am not worried about speeding through WoW Classic.  There is nothing much at level cap, save for an epic mount.  I won’t be raiding or anything like that, and there is no launch of The Burning Crusade in the offing.  At least not that Blizzard has announced yet… though if they are not at least thinking about how to get there, then they are making a mistake.

Anyway, that is my plan at the moment, six days before launch.  Keep it simple when it comes to Addons.

How about you?  What Addons do you think are essential for this journey, if any?

Focus on DW-T2I in Fade

After the climactic battle over the NCDot Keepstar in X47 the headline level events in the north dried up a bit.  The war carries on though and, while titans aren’t occluding the sun in mass blobs as often, things are happening.

Mostly docked up and waiting for that next apex battle

Things are once again focused on the Fade region where Circle of Two lives.  Given CO2’s position at the top of the list of Imperium enemies after their betrayal in the Casino War means that it is no surprise that we are camped on their doorstep.  The defection of The Judge and the subsequent downfall of CO2 in Impass, which included GigX being banned from the game, was not enough.  CO2 is back on the sov map and, more importantly, GigX is back, perma bans being transitory things I guess.

And so everybody is formed up in and around Fade.

Fade forces disposition

CO2 remains in DW-T2I with their Keepstar, which we failed to kill previously due to not understanding how cynojammers work.

Other northern forces are staged in DO6H-Q where NCDot now has a Keepstar.

The main Imperium staging is at the Keepstar in 6RCQ-V, planted there back in July.

And then there are the Imperium SIGs and squads in NPC Pure Blind, where we have been knocking about, dropping on local ratters and miners, and deploying structures since at least last November.  Longest deployment ever.  My annual Reavers review post is going to be all about Pure Blind.

The target for the Imperium remains, as I expected, the CO2 Keepstar.  But to be able to go after that we have to disable the cynojammer which means killing the infrastructure hub in DW-T2I so that our mighty blob of titans can drop on it the way it did in X47.

Doing that means entosis warfare and all which that entails.  The Imperium has been chewing on the near end of Fade, attacking both ihubs and TCUs.  If you look at the Fade map at DOTLAN you will see a couple more systems have been turned since I made the map above.  But all that has been a mere clearing of the brush between the Imperium and its target.  It is the ihub in DW-T2I that is the real objective, the necessary first step towards destroying the CO2 Keepstar.

We had a shot at the ihub on Saturday.  Early evening on Saturday EU time, and mid-morning Saturday at my end of the world, pings went out for form up for a run at the ihub.  It actually came about an hour earlier than had been announced, but I was up and wandering about the house, so saw the ping and was able to get into a fleet just before we departed.  The Baltec fleet was full when I got on, but there was also a Jackdaw fleet coming along, so I joined up there in a Jackdaw.  I had one of those handy already and didn’t want to buy a Scalpel just to fly logi.  I am already accumulating ships in 6RCQ-V, something that happens every deployment.

Anyway, I wasn’t in fleet for long before we were undocking and getting to a titan to bridge out towards our destination.

Watching the Baltecs bridge out as we approach

After jumping through we followed the Baltec fleet through a gate and into CR-IFM where a fight erupted around the gate.  The locals and their neighbors had formed up in greater numbers than we expected, their Muninns all over the place.

Battle around the gate, little Jackdaw sticks visible

While we were killing things, we were not exchanging well, and the Baltec fleet logi seemed to be taking an especially hard pasting.  Apple Pear, who was leading the op, had us align to a friendly Raitaru in the system and burn out of the bubbles, shooting any hostile interdictors that showed up.  We cleared out, leaving the field crowded with targets for a bombing run by pilots from Initiative.  That tipped the overall ISK exchange in the fight well in our favor accoring to the battle report.

Battle report header

However, any thought of contesting the entosis event for the DW-T2I ihub went out the window.  A weekend in the EU evening time slot was just about optimum for the defenders, who tend to be stronger than us in that time zone.

On the Raitaru Apple Pear had us dock up and log off.

Ships disappearing into the Raitaru

The plan was to go away for a few hours and then log back in to make our way back home when the system wasn’t camped and ready for us.  And so we logged off and went and did whatever it was we had planned for the day.

The ping for the extraction came a few hours later with a five minute warning to get in or be left to your own devices.  Of course, I only walked by my computer and saw that about ten minutes after it went up.  At that point I should have just kept walking and come back late in US time to fly out on my own.  But I thought that if the fleet was leaving then they would be headed towards Cloud Ring and our staging I might be able to head the other way towards Pure Blind and slip out.

I undocked and even as I started into warp I knew I had made a mistake.  Despite having a perch well off the gate already bookmarked I warped straight to the gate and landed in the bubble I fully expected to find when I got there.  Dumb once again yields a dead ship.  At least I had an empty pod and was sent home the fast way.

In any case, I was headed the same direction that the extraction fleet was, so all eyes were on my route and looking for stragglers, so it was a poor choice.  The nice, clean DOTLAN region maps don’t really show the distances between the systems in space.  If you using the jump planning map you’ll see if you’re going to bridge out there are places in Pure Blind closer to Cloud Ring that the systems at that end of Fade.

The morning’s operations were enough to put the system at the top of the list for kills in 0.0 space.

CR-IFM leads the way

Not a huge battle, but the biggest one on Saturday.

Operations picked up on Sunday where we repeatedly clashed with the locals, killing enough Munnins that I have to wonder if the price on those are going to start climbing.  In the end we managed to entosis the ihub in DW-T2I again, so we are set for another clash.  This time it will be on Tuesday in EUTZ, when I am at the office.  I will miss it, but I am sure everybody will carry on without me.  We will see if a weekday time slot works out better for us.  We only have to win the ihub fight once to move on to the Keepstar while the locals have to win it every time to keep it safe.

CCP Asks Vince Draken to Step Down from CSM12

CCP has asked CSM member Vince Draken to step down due to not being able to devote sufficient time to the council. Lack of activity can have valid reasons and we’re parting with Vince on good terms and with mutual understanding. CCP holds the obligation to ensure a fully engaged CSM at any given time which is why we are looking towards a substitute for the remainder of the term.

-CCP Guard, CSM Update

After the roller coaster rides of CSM9 and CSM10, with the leaks, the removals, and the recriminations, the two following councils have been quiet, almost dignified affairs.  CSM12 has been pretty quiet since its election earlier this year.

Round 12 in progress!

And even now, in the chill of the the last two councils, this barely qualifies as CSM drama.  The joke is that playing EVE Online seriously is like having a second job, and adding the CSM to your list gives you at least another part time job on top of the two you likely have.  So Vince Draken, already the leader of Northern Coalition, probably has enough on his plate already.  He’ll miss out on a week of sitting in a conference room in Iceland talking about various aspects of the game.

Meanwhile, there is a position to be filled.  CCP has said the following:

We will be calling in a substitute using the previously stated method of filling the spot with the last candidate eliminated in the election (the next in line without any recalculation of vote distribution). We’ll start there and go down the line if needed until someone accepts the spot and we will make another announcement once this is concluded.

Over at INN they quickly reported that the next in line for the seat is Sort Dragon, leader of the Darkness alliance.  Sort Dragon previously served on CSM10.

If Sort Dragon declines, next in line are Kalbuir Skirate of Pandemic Horde, followed by Killah Bee of Pandemic Legion, thus effectively keeping the seat both in the hands of a null sec representative and a member of the PanFam/NC/GotG coalition.  CCP will announce who will replace Vince Draken when they find somebody down the list who will take the job.

If none of those three take up the mantle, CCP will continue down the elimination trace.  The data they will use is available from the Dev Blog analyzing the CSM12 election results.

My Wife and Pokemon GO

My wife is not a gamer, and the fact that I am has caused some friction in our relationship from time to time.  I can sit for many hours at my desk playing or writing about video games, activities that neither involve nor interest her.  It can be the “sports widow” syndrome at times, though my games don’t have seasons.

We have adapted somewhat over the years.  I don’t spend as much time on video games as I did in past years and I hope I am a bit less oblivious.  And she shows a peripheral interest in what I and my daughter are playing, though I am not sure my daughter and I being the “gaming club” in our house and talking about them a lot was a big help there.  My wife went to EVE Vegas with me, though she was more about the parties and socializing.  Internet spaceships themselves aren’t of interest.

My wife and I at the party, Noizy Gamer behind us

My wife isn’t totally disinterested in video games.  But her interests are far more casual.  She plays Windows Solitaire and I keep a Solitaire and a Video Poker app on my iPad which she plays some times.

And then came Pokemon GO.

Back in early July, when the game showed up, she downloaded it to her iPhone so I could play it.  And I did create an account and got things rolling, and even picked Team Instinct for the account, mostly because it seemed to be the downtrodden group.

General view of Team Instinct – July 2016

But the app was on my wife’s phone, and she uses her phone a lot.  She is on her third iPhone and it is clearly part of her life and/or lifestyle.  So the idea that I would be spending a lot of time playing Pokemon GO on her iPhone was probably a non-starter.

So she began to play for me.

At first it was rolling by the local Pokestops.  Then catching the occasional Pokemon.  And soon I was getting texts with screen shots of new catches or of the account leveling up.

At the same time our daughter was also playing, but she wasn’t as into it after a couple of weeks.  So while she was out in front in levels, her motion forward had slackened dramatically… at which point my wife’s competitive nature kicked in.

There is a reason we no longer play Scrabble after Thanksgiving dinner, and it has something to do with my wife’s family having very faint understandings of the concepts of being a “good winner” or a “good loser.”

My mother-in-law would sit at the table and trash talk, brag about every play, demand constant audits of the score, abuse the rules with half-assed challenges like “use it in a sentence,” and whine about how this wasn’t fair because she was born in Germany, to the point that I stopped playing to win and started playing to ensure she would lose.  If she was downstream of me I would leave her no good scoring opportunities, and if she wasn’t I would feed whoever was a series of double and triple word scores.

I may have lost more often that I should of, but she never, ever won, and so we were all spared the stream of trash talk that would have come from such an event.

(I am exaggerating a bit on that story, but not by as much as I wish I was.)

Anyway, since my wife will read this, let me say that this sort of competitive behavior was perhaps passed on to her to some slight degree, which drove her to catch up to, and then pass my daughter in Pokemon GO levels… and not quietly, to my daughter’s annoyance.

So the Pokemon GO champion of our house is my wife.

And then I went and got an iPhone last week and she wanted to know pretty quickly if I had installed the game yet.  I hesitated for a couple of days, but eventually installed it… and then made a new account.

My first account is now her account.  She did all the work on it.  So she changed up the avatar to be her rather than me and is still pondering names for the one-time name change option Niantic has given players.

On my account, I hit level 5… largely thanks to the fact that my desk at work is within range of a Pokestop, so a few times a day I look in on it… and went with Team Mystic.  So now my daughter is Team Valor, my wife Team Instinct, and I am Team Mystic.  We now cover all the teams.

Artist’s concept of our family group

Now to see how the game will develop.  Right now “catching them all” is a sufficient goal for both my wife and I, but the game lacks so many of the features of the core Pokemon RPGs that I hope more is planned for it going forward beyond simply adding new Pokemon now and again.