59 Weeks and the End of World War Bee

One last weekly update.  There is rarely a clean transition from war to peace.  The Imperium will be clearing out left behind PAPI structures for a while still.  But the pace of things has wound down significantly over the past week.

PAPI forces are all returning to their respective homelands.  Brave is clashing with Psychotic Tendencies in Geminate, and I can only wish them the best in that fight.  And they have their first ihub in NBPH-N in the region.

TEST though seems to be struggling to get to its new home in Outer Passage.  They do not appear to hold any ihubs there yet.  The word is that they have made it at least as far as A24L-V in Insmother on their route home, but that fuel constraints are hitting hard.

TEST has also dropped out of the Alliance Tournament.  I hadn’t heard why… probably ISK… but when they were pulled by CCP in the Alliance Tournament Feeder draw stream (you can see that at the 30 minute mark when they draw for spot 17), CCP Aurora said that TEST had asked to be left out.  They are still listed in slot 17 (see brackets here), but I guess they have decided to forfeit.

Progodlegend got up at another TEST town hall to motivate the troops during their retreat.  He once again tried to sum up the war favorably, declaring that 4,500 Goons just sat in 1DQ for 13 months.  I guess the battles in NPC Delve and M2-XFE, and the Guinness Book world records that went with them, were all just some sort of collective Goon fever dream.

You tell yourself whatever story you need to in order to get to your objective I guess.

And the rest of the former Legacy coalition is scattered about, settling into new homes or looking for a couch to crash on.

The overall PAPI coalition looks to be breaking up.  Pandemic Horde reset a large number of other null sec alliances, while the PAPI Assemble Discord server looked to have been taken down.

No more honking

Without PAPI there is no blue donut to fight for now.

One Year Ago

Niarja fell to the Triglavians, and the WWB participants were involved.

CCP added metaliminal storms to null sec so we could have space weather to worry about.

We fought over the O-PNSN Keepstar and lost, but at the fight over the KVN-36 Keepstar it was a server crash that saved the day for the Imperium.

In my week seven summary I looked at what coverage the war was getting, our losses, and Legacy getting pushed back in Querious.

Imperium Space Cleanup

In the Imperium regions of Delve, Fountain, Querious, and Period Basis all of the ihubs have been retaken and we’re in the count down to when GSOL can start installing Ansiblex jump gates again to facilitate movement around our space again.  Right now, if you don’t have a bridger and a cyno handy, moving around means taking a lot of gates.

TCUs, or territorial control units, are getting cleared out as well.  Those are less critical as their primary function these days is to act as a flag on the map for a given system.  They are a legacy of Dominion sov.  If you go to the null sec influence map for yesterday you will see that Delve TCUs have been retaken, but that TEST and Warped Intentions still have some down in Period Basis.  Those will be taken care of soon enough, but the ihubs are what matter.

Delve is Goons, Anime is Cartoons

And now it is the rebuilding time.  Structures are being put down again.  ADMs need to be raised in some systems to support infrastructure hub upgrades.  A new standing fleet for home defense has been arranged.  A list of supplies went out that the coalition will need to help rebuild.  I got my Planetary Industry stuff rolling again to help fulfill a few items on the long list of needs.

There is a lot of work still to be done, but plans are rolling out to focus our efforts in building a new Delve.

My Participation

I went out on a few ops this past week.  The pace of operations definitely started to taper down as the week went along.  The almost constant tempo of pings showing up for structure shoots fell off noticably.  Still, I got in on a few of them.

An Astrahus blowing up

We also got to run out and blow up a Hel supercarrier, which was a fun distraction.

Hel tackled in Catch

I did lose one ship this week, a Purifier to a gate camp.  It was a dumb, avoidable loss where I immediately said, “Why did I do that?”  But I am not going to count it as a war loss because the group that got me, Pax Sex and his gang, are neutrals that used to hunt in Delve in peacetime.  Losing ships to them is a normal thing now and then.  So my total losses for the war are:

• 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

That is 86 ships and a deployable.  I am surprised I didn’t lose more really.

Other Items

CCP release the Monthly Economic Report for July, which I covered a bit.  It generally showed that July was kind of a slow month.

We also got a quick, three day login campaign for some skill points.  CCP hands those out like candy these days.

And CCP did the draw for the Alliance Tournament brackets.   The feeder round starts on September 4th.

The Final PCU Report

With each of the weekly updates I have reported the peak concurrent user count for that week, mostly as a record to see if those numbers tracked along with the intensity of the war.  There are a lot of other factors that play into online numbers, but they did seem to generally follow the war.  CCP reported that at one point during the second M2-XFE Keepstar battle more than one third of accounts logged into the game were in that system, T5ZI-S, or 1DQ1-A.

Anyway, I made a little chart out of the data with some annotations.

Over the timeline of the war

Over the 60 data points… I counted day one of the war as the “zeroth week,” which means that the numbers at the bottom of the chart are offset by +1… the following states can be derived:

• Average weekly PCU – 33,893
• Maximum weekly PCU – 40,359 (Week 15)
• Minimum weekly PCU – 24,262 (Week 52)
• Median weekly PCU – 35,075 (Week 9)

Weekly PCU isn’t all that accurate of an indicator.  It is more of a flavor for how each week went.  But it doesn’t reflect well if a whole week was busy or if we just had a busy day.  You can go to EVE Offline for a more granular look at the war.

The last year chart via EVE Offline

My chart lines up somewhat with that chart, though that cuts off the start of the war, which probably drops the average a bit when compared to mine.

And, of course, the final data set listing:

• 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
• Week 59 – 29,749

Related

• INN – Beeitman: Week 59
• INN – Horde Resets Dozens of PAPI Members
• INN – Progodlegend’s Disingenuous Test Townhall
• INN – PAPI’s Retreat: The Final Butcher’s Bill
• INN – Top Ten Things for the Imperium to Consider
• NEP – Legacy’s Breakup
• Polygon – Eve Online’s Yearlong War Ends with an Epic Retreat

Pandemic Binge Watching Part Two

I wrote up the first post about the shows we have binged during the pandemic, thinking I had this covered and that I had gotten them mostly in chronological order.

And then, of course, I kept remembering other things we had watched.  Like, a lot of things, which proved my ordering not very chronological at all.  So here, in part two, the things I missed in part one.

• Tiger King – Netflix

I am forgetful at times, but I think I am also a victim of the 2020 news cycle where there is some new horror every 15 minutes.  This is the only way I can explain having forgotten Tiger King, which was pretty much the seminal shared experience of millions of Americans of the “everybody stay home and watch TV” era in which we now live.

So you’ve probably seen this.  Or if you have not, you’ve probably sworn you’ll never watch it.  I get it.  It is an eight episode train wreck of people who, at times, have significant insight into other people, but a complete blind spot to the over the top crazy they themselves manifest.

The main problem is that it feels like they signed a contract for eight episodes and found they only had about five episodes worth of crazy on the main story thread.  So they go looking for some additional crazy… which wasn’t all that hard to find in the world of big cats.  As far as I can tell the whole Doc Antle thread had nothing to do with anything other than spectacle, but there it was.

Good for:  Really, nobody, but once you get past episode 2 you probably can’t stop. And it may end up becoming a touchstone, a point of nostalgia, for those early days of the pandemic when we thought we knew what the hell was going on.

• Dublin Murders – Starz

A psychological thriller murder mystery, where a young girl is found dead in a forest where two kids went missing 30 years earlier.  Everybody seems to have a dark secret they aren’t sharing.  A good atmospheric tale, though things do seem to be spinning out of control… and then comes the big reveal.

Good for:  People who are too good at solving TV mysteries based on the fact that the most famous actor that is a suspect inevitably did it.

• Outer Banks – Netflix

This was recommended by our neighbor across the street who came over to borrow some… sugar I think… or flour… something cliche… and started talking about what people watching on TV now that we were all stuck at home.  Look, we were desperate for any guidance.  They are really the most wholesome family, full on Cleavers, so they were not biting on Tiger King.  But they did like Outer Banks, though there were some bad words, so it was a bit risque.

It starts off okay, it is about a missing treasure, and some high school kids who look like they are closing in on 30 and there is a whole Veronica Mars “rich kids vs poor kids” dynamic and things kind of start spinning out of control.  But the scenery is very pretty, as are all the too old for high school “kids.”  Very light fare that won’t make you think too hard.

Good for: Somebody who wants an action based, southern coastal 90210 maybe?

Warrior Nun – Netflix

Dead orphan is brought back to life by a holy relic belonging to an order of ninja-nuns who do battle against evil unseen to most of us for the Catholic church.  Only, the order would like their relic back please, so she needs to sign up for the cause or return to her previously dead status.  Oh, and there is an corporation that may or may not be evil trying to create a portal to heaven and an archbishop who wants to be pope and who is probably evil as well.  Also, about twice as many coincidences than the human mind can generally accept before going all skeptical.

Still, fun enough not too deep, and everybody is young and attractive and in swanning about in sunny Spain.  You can guess what is going to happen next most of the time, but we watched the whole thing.

Good for: Somebody for whom Dan Brown novels are too mired in detail.

Peaky Blinders – Netflix

Technically we started watching this pre-pandemic, but finished it up after we were all staying at home, so I am counting it.  Good performances, based somewhat on reality, gets into the state of England in the interwar years, with the BUF and all that.  I tend to be somewhat less enthusiastic about shows where brutal criminals are cast in a sympathetic light, but they are also a product of their environment as well.

Good for: Anybody who wanted The Sopranos set in England in the 20s and 30s.

Perry Mason – HBO

Perry Mason was a staple of afternoon TV reruns in my youth and a cornerstone of early television, so there was a bit of a risk trying to start it over again.  But HBO did a credible job of it.  If Perry Mason was an MCU super hero this first of no doubt many seasons would be his origin story.

Set in 1931, with the Great Depression started and prohibition still in place, the series is alive in gritty details.  Everything is weathered and dirty and a bit sweat stained, just like Los Angeles for real, and the people are all flawed.  Perry is a private investigator in a case that will change his life.

The one nit I have to pick with the series involves the “release and episode a week” method of HBO versus the “give them everything at once” system that Netflix has adopted.  Perry Mason isn’t Game of Thrones, where everybody talks about it in between episodes, so it loses a bit of its edge in the wait between.  But now that it is out and done, you won’t have that problem because you can binge it all at once.

Good for: Gritty crime drama fans, 30s re-enactors, people patient enough to wait until the final episode credits to hear the classic theme from the original show.

Next time: Series where a new season has dropped

MER and the Blackout

Somebody finally got back from vacation and pushed the button to generate the EVE Online Monthly Economic Report for July.

This is the first report that reflects the Blackout and the VNI nerf.  The tax increase didn’t go in until August 1st, so that will be for the next report.

Anyway, there is an obvious graph to jump into first, so here we go.

July 2019 – Top Sinks and Faucets over time

It is easy to see what day the Blackout began on that chart as the yellow NPC bounty payout line, already down considerably from previous changes this year, fell off a cliff, no doubt contributing to an actual reduction in overall ISK in the New Eden economy.

July 2019 – Sinks and Faucets

The total bounties for the last few months:

• July – 29.1 trillion
• June – 48.2 trillion
• May – 55.5 trillion
• April – 57.2 trillion
• March – 71.4 trillion
• February – 69.8 trillion

But where did it hit hardest?  Last month the top 11 regions, since I wanted to include Delve, sorted out as follows.

1. Branch – 4.90 trillion
2. Esoteria – 3.56 trillion
3. Detorid – 2.88 trillion
4. Insmother – 2.71 trillion
5. Deklein – 2.70 trillion
6. Cobalt Edge – 2.15 trillion
7. Fountain – 1.96 trillion
8. Tenal – 1.80 trillion
9. Perrigen Falls – 1.70 trillion
10. Period Basis – 1.67 trillion
11. Delve – 1.57 trillion

Delve was way down because the Imperium was deployed to the north and attacking structures in Tribute and Vale of the Silent.  And then came the Drifters and the start of the Chaos Era and we pulled back home.  Being at home put the Imperium back on top of the NPC bounties rankings.

July 2019 – NPC Bounties by Region – Bar Graph

The top ten regions for July were:

1. Delve – 4.71 trillion
2. Esoteria – 1.77 trillion
3. Branch – 1.61 trillion
4. Detorid – 1.23 trillion
5. Deklein – 1.22 trillion
6. Insmother – 1.10 trillion
7. Tenal – 1.1 trillion
8. Fountain – 1.06 trillion
9. Omist – 0.85 trillion
10. Feythabolis – 0.81 trillion

Delve is at the top again, but that number is still below even the April number, which included a the start of the deployment north to Tribute.

So the Chaos Era has hit NPC bounties, though there was a bit of a bounce back up at the end of the month.  August will show if things continue down that path or if null sec adapts.

Then there is the mining front.  Last month the top producing regions in ISK value mined were:

1. Esoteria – 3.31 trillion
2. Detorid – 1.84 trillion
3. Insmother – 1.78 trillion
4. Domain – 1.31 trillion
5. Branch – 1.25 trillion
6. Querious – 1,19 trillion
7. The Forge – 1.16 trillion
8. Fountain – 1.12 trillion
9. Sinq Laison – 843 billion
10. Metropolis – 829 billion

Delve was down in 22nd place with a mere 276 billion ISK.  Again, June had the Imperium deployed to the north, so economic activity was down.  But in July everybody was back home to face the Blackout.

July 2019 – Mining Value by Region – Bar Graph

Delve was resurgent, with Rorquals out using tech II mining drones to combat attacks on excavator drones.  The top ten regions for July were:

Delve – 5.77 trillion
Querious – 3.18 trillion
Esoteria – 2.61 trillion
Syndicate – 1.99 trillion
Fountain – 1.92 trillion
Etherium Reach – 1.77 trillion
Domain – 1.69 trillion
Malpais – 1.64 trillion
The Kalevala Expanse – 1.61 trillion
The Forge – 1.47 trillion

Numbers were up in some places, including high sec, which remains a safe mining haven, and down in others.  But was there more necessarily more mining in places like Domain or The Forge?  Maybe not.  Since mining isn’t an ISK faucet, it is valued via the market prices, which change over time.  And July saw mineral prices going up some more.

July 2019 – Economic Indices

While not up as sharply as in June, mineral prices continued to rise.  That raises the value of ore mined for the purposes of the MER and encourages more people to mine.

And then there is destruction.  The Blackout was premised on greater destruction happening.  And, overall, there was more destruction in New Eden.  The summary of all regions in June showed 38.28 trillion ISK in destruction, while July saw that rise to 40.73 trillion ISK, and increase of 2.45 trillion ISK.  But where did that destruction occur?

Last month the top regions were:

1. The Forge – 3.46 trillion
2. Detorid – 2.31 trillion
3. Sinq Laison – 1.69 trillion
4. Tribute – 1.58 trillion
5. The Citadel – 1.54 trillion
6. Black Rise – 1.37 trillion
7. Delve – 1.28 trillion
8. Placid – 1.11 trillion
9. Lonetrek – 1.10 trillion
10. Vale of the Silent – 1.10 trillion

The chart for July shows the new ranking.

July 2019 – Destruction Value by Region – Bar Graph

The top ten regions were:

1. The Forge – 2.81 trillion
2. The Citadel – 2.33 trillion
3. Detorid – 1.86 trillion
4. Delve – 1.78 trillion
5. Sinq Laison – 1.47 trillion
6. Domain – 1.31 trillion
7. Lonetrek – 1.29 trillion
8. Metropolis – 1.17 trillion
9. Providence – 1.03 trillion
10. Cache – 1.00 trillion

Delve is up, but that was expected with everybody home again.  What is interesting is that there are now more high sec regions on the list.  There were four last month, but six on the list in July.  You might credit this to the alleged war on high sec, or maybe the less well known structure war in high sec, which is a topic for another post, except that not all the high sec regions saw more destruction.  The Forge, home of Jita, was more than half a trillion in destruction.

It feels rather that destruction was more spread out in July, that the increase was the result of a wider spread skirmishes rather than the destruction of ratters and miners due to the Blackout.  And, of course, the reduction in mining and ratting seems to indicate that many players simply declined to undock due to the Blackout.

All of which leaves me bereft of big conclusions.  But that is to be expected I guess.  The Chaos Era changes modified player behavior, but will it stick or are we just in a transitional period while people adapt?

For August we will have to see how the trend continues, along with what the change in tax rate does.  Plus we still have the coming cyno changes and something about wormholes that has some people freaking out, plus other things mentioned during the Fanfest Home keynote, which may impact the September MER.  We shall see.

Anyway, all the data and charts are available to download from the MER Dev Blog.  In addition, CCP has also introduced a Monthly Security Report about how many people they have banned and what they were banned for.

Blaugust and Burning Things Down

Here we are into the third full week of Blaugust and another topic of the week.

I have tried to keep up and do something on the right theme each week, though I failed a bit last week.  I mean, you got to know me some, but maybe that wasn’t what you were looking for.  And I felt, looking at the calendar, that this week was going to be another punt.

Blaugust 2019 Schedule

Developer appreciation things never quite resonate with me for a variety of reasons I’ve been over in the past.  I neither revere nor dismiss game devs or their work, or so I tell myself.

So I was going to give this week’s topic a miss… and then INN posted an article with the title, Why EVE or CCP Games Needs to Fail and I felt maybe I had an angle.

The basic premise is that CCP has done so many things wrong with EVE Online, made so many errors in the face of players telling them what would happen, been so tone deaf in their relations with customers, that the whole thing, game, studio, and all, should be burned down and scattered to the winds.

I have run across this attitude many times, the idea that things are so bad that we need to wipe the slate clean and start from scratch.  Only then can we get something good.

I think there is a class somewhere that instructs young developers, when faced with taking over somebody’s code, to say that it would be easier just to re-write it all from scratch.  (Oh cute little dev, if we trusted you to do that we wouldn’t have handed you that code to maintain.)  But even old salts fall into that trap, the idea that it would be easier to go back to a blank sheet rather than start with code not their own.

Starting from scratch is a hazardous path, one that I’ve been down before.  It can even kill whole companies.  Microsoft gets the attention for the fall of the Netscape Navigator web browser, but if Netscape hadn’t decided to rewrite everything from scratch… in Java… it might have remained viable, or at least capable of keeping up with the features of Internet Explorer.

I’ve watched devs get their wish to start from scratch only to have to spend their time on a long voyage of discovery as they have to relearn all the wisdom that went in to forming that mess of code they are trying to replace.  Instead of spending time adding to the product that dev is stuck redoing something we already had.

Which isn’t to say there is a lack of code that deserves a fiery death.  There was a fax form editor I had to work with about 20 years back that was so problematic that it might actually have been better to restart from scratch.  But you never know until you’re waist deep in things and begin to regret your decision.

Anyway, my point here is that EVE Online or CCP failing would not automatically result in something better coming along.  If anything, the opposite is likely true.  Who wants to create a harsh, dystopian internet spaceship sandbox game if the premier example of the niche has failed?

And what other options would former New Eden residents have?  Star Citizen is not ready for prime time, Elite: Dangerous requires docking skills I’m too old to want to work on, Prosperous Universe is all the bad UI and spreadsheets of New Eden without any of the pretty pictures, and the handful of spaceship MMO startups are so far from being anything close to the scale of EVE Online that we would all be clamoring for an EVE Online emulator five minutes after the game went down.

Appreciate what you have got.

That doesn’t mean you have to be satisfied with everything.  One of the more dynamic aspects of EVE Online is the discussion of what it is, what is wrong, and what it could be.  And it can be tough when “chaos” is the new flavor of the month.  But EVE Online with chaos is still better than no EVE Online at all.  Space is still pretty, the scale is still epic, fights still happen, and chaos cannot go on forever.  Maybe Hilmar will read Ringworld Engineers and become obsesses with stability.

Leave the wishes for financial failure, closure, and all that to the people who find the game’s mere existence to be an affront.  There is enough hate out there already.

WoW Battle for Azeroth Sales Stacked Up Against Past Releases

Fortunately I did some of the groundwork for this post back with the WoW Legion release.

It is here and it is selling

Blizzard announced today that the Battle for Azeroth expansion for World of Warcraft, which went live around the world on August 13th and 14th, sold more than 3.4 million copies.  From the press release itself:

Heroes everywhere turned out in force, and Blizzard Entertainment today announced that as of Battle for Azeroth’s first full day of launch on August 14, more than 3.4 million units of the latest World of Warcraft^®expansion had sold through worldwide—setting a new day-one sales record for the franchise and making it one of the fastest-selling PC games of all-time.^*

I was a little worried about that asterisk at the end, but that just points to this:

Sales and/or downloads, based on internal company records and reports from key distribution partners.

So nothing dramatic there, just a clarification without much information.

To put that number in perspective here is how it shakes out relative to past launches:

• Battle for Azeroth – 3.4 million
• WoW Legion – 3.3 million
• Warlords of Draenor – 3.3 million
• Mists of Pandaria – 2.7 million (first week)
• Cataclysm – 3.3 million
• Wrath of the Lich King – 2.8 million
• The Burning Crusade – 2.4 million
• World of Warcraft – 240,000

That bodes well for the expansion.

Of course, you have to have some perspective when looking at that list.  Back in 2004 people had to go buy a physical box to play World of Warcraft and it has only been over the years that the process has become mostly a digital download experience.  But back then even that 240K number set a record for single day sales.  That number could have been bigger, but they effectively ran out of copies.  At BlizzCon they told the tale of the truck load of collector’s editions meant for employees being diverted to the retail channel because the game had sold out.  And that was US sales only, as it didn’t expand to the rest of the world until later.

The Burning Crusade number is probably the most impressive on the list, since it is made up of people who went out to a store and bought a physical copy on day one.  I went down to Fry’s on launch day… not at midnight for the launch party event… that used to be a thing back in the day… but closer to noon, to find pallets of the expansion out in the front of the store.  Blizzard was not going to run short like they did with the initial launch.  The cashier told me that people had been lined up outside the store for a copy earlier, so it was a pretty big deal.

I think the last time I went to the store to buy an expansion was for Wrath of the Lich King.  It has either been digital or Amazon discounted pre-orders since then.  WotLK was also a big seller considering how much of it was physical boxes.

And then there is Mists of Pandaria in the middle there, which they extended out to the first week of sales because it had to fight against both the feeling of betrayal that some felt after Cataclysm and the lightweight perception that people had about it because it featured pandas as a race.  It turned out to be a fine expansion, but it had some work to do to overcome that.  I didn’t buy a copy until almost a year after it launched.

Anyway, the 3.4 million number is impressive, though the there ought to be an asterisk after it as well to remind people that the number includes all pre-launch digital sales.  You’ve been able to buy a copy of Battle for Azeroth since late January, so they have had a lot of time to pack in the sales, making the “fastest selling” claim a bit dubious.  (I am pretty sure that title really belongs to The Burning Crusade.)

But there were reasons to buy the expansion early, aside from the usual max level character boost (and mounts and pets if you bought the digital deluxe version).

There were four allied races to unlock (for which we received four more character slots per server) and level up, with special transmog gear if you hit level cap with them.  So, as a “giving people something to do” option it had some additional pull relative to past expansions.  And even that was only worth an additional 100,000 sales I guess.

The real number we’d all like to know, how many people are actually subscribed to World of Warcraft, remains hidden.  Once a staple of the Acitivision-Blizzard quarterly reports, they have kept it hidden since the dark days of late Draenor, when the number dropped to 2006 levels.  I suspect that if the subscriber base passed 13 million they would issue a press release, but the days of being able to track that quarter by quarter… or even pick out WoW‘s revenue from the financial statements… are long gone.  The irony of being a public company; they are required to report important data, but they get to decide what is important.

We will see how Battle for Azeroth does in the longer term.  A lot of people are very happy with the open world story and quest lines and the look of things in general.  But there is still the whole question of Sylvanas, a story line that upset some people in the pre-launch events. (#notmyhorde) And then there are the recycled bits from WoW Legion that pop up pretty quickly.  Those aren’t bad, but they aren’t new either.  Blizzard has had time to learn how to keep people engaged with an expansion.  They did well enough with WoW Legion, even if they did open up the Battle for Azeroth pre-orders seven months before it was done.  They will get to show us what else they have learned I suppose.

A Drive Down to Delve for Rats and a Raitaru

The early ping said that there was an op planned for 02:00 EVE Online time, which is just about the optimal time for me.  That left enough time to get home, take care of various tasks (it was garbage night, among other things), have dinner, and watch a bit of TV with my wife (Lodge 49) before wandering off to play internet spaceships for a couple of hours.

With all that lined up I seemed set for the evening.

Of course AMC doesn’t just keep you from fast forwarding through commercials when watching their programs on demand, they actually inject more commercials into the stream so the show episode we watched, Corpus, ran well over an hour and into the start time for the op.  I left my wife at the credits and strode over to my computer and started logging into voice coms and the game.

As I did that I noticed a fifteen minute old ping from Asher apologizing for the early start for the op.  I was late, and late enough that I considered just going back to the couch to watch another episode.  I might have done just that if I was more enthusiastic about Lodge 49, but as it was I had already logged in so I figured I might as well ask the usual late-comer’s question, “Can I catch up?”

And it turned out that I could.  The early form up was to cover a Raitaru that was anchoring just one jump away, so I undocked in my Oneiros and warped off to join the group.

There we sat tethered on the Raitaru for a bit until the repair cycle ended, after which we aligned for the gate through which we came.  Once through though we did not align for the station.  Instead Asher warped us to a POS where a titan was waiting.  As usual, being the non-GSF member in the fleet, I bounced off the forcefield and they had to give me the starbase password to enter.  I did that, warped off, then warped back to Asher to find myself in and on the titan ready for a bridge.

The titan sent us on our way, though we seemed to be going in an odd direction.  When we passed through J5A-IX, the gateway to Fountain and a scene of many of the early fights in the Fountain War, I began to wonder where we were headed.  But I was also distracted by a survey from Blizzard about the Battle for Azeroth expansion… which was asking for a lot of detail just a week into the damn thing… so I was mostly tabbing back and forth and not paying close attention.

The gate to ZXB-VC however triggered a something in the back of my brain.

I’ve been here before… I’m sure of it…

Then we jumped through and we were in Delve.

Delve, the highlight of every Monthly Economic Report, the home of excessive ratting, mining, and industry, and a place I had only been back to once since we deployed up to Pure Blind late last year.  You can rest assured that I have added nothing to those numbers that get reported for the region.

There it is, DELVE, and us spread out over the map

The question of the hour at that point was why couldn’t we just jump clone back to Delve?  Or, better still, wasn’t there somebody in Delve who could take care of whatever needed doing?  did we really have to fly all the way down from Pure Blind?

I guess we did.

We took a jump bridge to get deeper into Delve, but with the titan bridge and the jump bridge and a fleet that some people were on earlier, we had some jump fatigue to wear down.  Also, apparently we were early for whatever it was we had to do.  So Asher took us ratting.

Shooting up a Blood Raiders Sanctum

That went by quickly so we ended up in another anomaly shooting more Blood Raiders.

It was pretty, I will say that

We were hoping for a dreadnought spawn on it, but no luck.  After pottering around doing that… from which I walked away with a cool 807,000 ISK, so will surely skew the monthly totals… we were finally off to the real target.  This turned out to be a Raitaru anchoring in M5-CGW which NCDot had dropped.

The repair timer was running and had just five minutes left on it.

The timer paused

We paused the timer with our firepower almost immediately, then anchored up on Asher and followed him as he meandered through the structure, trying to wipe us off on various protuberances, before he finally settled into a pocket at the front of the model.

He is in there somewhere…

Most of the fleet was taken up with talk on various nerd topics, including video games, Magic the Gathering, and fantasy football.  As somebody observed, there was something there for everybody to roll their eyes and tire of quickly.

Nobody came to defend the structure.  NCDot was likely already sated having already wiped out a fleet from The Bastion earlier.  Dropping a 600 million ISK Raitaru to get nearly 30 billion in kills is a worthwhile investment.  So we just shot it until it blew up in that satisfying way that Upwell structures do.

The wreck in the midst of the receding explosion

We got a kill… and it wasn’t like our fleet was the one that got worked over.

There was some talk of blowing up the wreck to keep anybody from salvaging it, but we were already facing the drive home and decided to skip that step.  Instead it was back into Fountain where we caught a jump bridge that cut a good chunk off the trip.  From there we headed to a Fortizar that was within titan bridge range of our staging.

However, even with the reduced jump fatigue, having made a few jumps already during the evening, we still had a good fifteen minutes before we could be bridged.  We decided to wait it out on the titan, setting a timer to remind everybody to wake up again and be ready to jump.

At that point somebody joked about how funny it would be if, once we were all back on the titan, Asher mis-clicked and did the classic “jump instead of bridge” mistake and left us all behind.

Picture source: unknown

When the timer rang we all got back in front of our screens ready to go, watching the titan for the bridge effect to go up.

Waiting for the moment

And then Asher selected “jump” and disappeared.

Yeah, he was just there

Even though I was half expecting it I still missed the screen shot of the jump effect gathering about his Ragnarok as he jumped away.  He had also muted and deafened himself on Mumble, so we were all left there with the nervous, “Ha ha, very funny… uh… you’re coming back right?  We’re not stuck here, right?”

It might have been funnier if it hadn’t been spoken before the event.  On the other hand, if it hadn’t we might not have believed he did it on purpose.  An FC who makes that error ends up with that sticking to their reputation.

Thinking we might have to wait out his orange jump timer, we hung around on the Fortizar wondering if it was time to dock up and call it a night, just bite the bullet and burn to our staging, or wait.   But as we waited a cyno went up and another titan… or at least another titan pilot of Asher’s… landed back on us.

We got in range and he bridged us back to our staging where we docked up for the night.

The bridge up at last

Asher, who had already thrown us one PAP added another one as the fleet uptime had passed the three hour mark.

Not a bad evening.  Being fleet coms is the entertainment on ops like that.  And it certainly wasn’t the first time that I was in a fleet that went all the way down to Delve just to shoot a structure.  I wouldn’t want to make it a regular event, but I’ve certainly been on much worse ops.

As for Lodge 49, I am just not sure I am feeling it… though the extra dose of commercial interruptions isn’t helping either.  I am too used to straight through, commercial free binge watching with Netflix or HBO.