Hunting for Disenchants in Blackrock Depths

After our Hellfire Ramparts run Ula announced that she had finally made it up to 301 in enchanting and wanted to know if there were any gear enchants we might want.

Fergorin started looking at enchants that would be available to us at that skill level, and the common denominator seemed to be large brilliant shards, with a couple to a dozen being needed depending on the specific enchant.  Some investigation over at WoW Head showed that we might be in luck for some of those shards if we were willing to go back to Blackrock Depths to kill a few bosses.  And why not.  We’ve been there a dozen times in WoW Classic already, it isn’t like we don’t know the layout by now.

But it was Sunday and there was only three of us, so we’d have to see how well we could manage against bosses in the low 50 level range.  Our group was:

• Ula – level 62 gnome mage
• Wilhelm – level 63 human paladin (protection)
• Fergorin – level 63 human paladin (holy)

We met up at Thorium Point and rode the familiar path to the instance.

Off towards Blackrock Depths

There was a question as to where we ought to go first… and if we even had the keys to the place.  Both Fergorin and Wilhelm are Outland replacements, so neither of them were on the dozen BRD adventures, and so neither of them have the Shadowforge Key.  Fortunately Ula had it, so we were able to move about.

The nearest boss seemed to be Lord Roccor, who wanders around outside the Ring of Law.  Fortunately for the sake of speed, our aggro radius was small enough to allow us to thread the needle and bypass a lot of mobs, though we had to knock out a few groups.  We were able to grab Lord R in between two groups who just sat there and ingnored the fight.

After Lord Roccor

His drop only yielded a small brilliant shard, not a large.  We went into the Ring of Law and did the event there, drawing the big spider, whose drop also disappointed when disenchanted.  Still, we pressed on, heading around the corner to find Pyromancer Loregrain.  His loot included the recipe Enchant Weapon – Fiery Weapon.  Not a shard, but something pretty cool for Ula. (Moronae got that last time we found Loregrain, but I don’t think he ever got his enchanting high enough to use it before he swapped out to Beanpole.)

From there we wound our way back, set the bridge/gate so we could cross it, and went looking for General Angerforge next.  He was a bit of a pain at level back when we did him.

There is General Angerforge

At level 63 and geared up from Outland, the three of us were able to handle him, with AOE taking down his non-elite minions when he summoned them to fight.

Then it was across the way to Golem Lord Argelmach.  Here we had a bit of trouble.  We were able to slip through the manufactory well enough, but we had forgotten that if you don’t clear it out, Argelmach runs out there and summons help.  So the fight seemed to be going off the rails pretty quickly.  But we held it together and were able to muscle through the boss, his two minions, and the adds he summoned.

Golem Lord Argelmach’s golem friends down

That goes us a good shard plus, on the ground near where he spawns, was the engineer recipe for the Field Repair Bot 74A.  You cannot even pick it up unless you’re a level 300 engineer, but Wilhelm was at 305, so a happy new recipe for him as well.  While the bot is one use and a bit pricey, requiring a dozen thorium bars and two fused wiring, the latter being the more painful item to provide, having one along if we need to repair or sell to empty bags some day may well save us some day.  I’m working on sourcing more fused wiring so I can make backups.

From there it was over to the Grim Guzzler, where we picked off Ribbly Screwspigot and the mobs that show up to defend the kegs when you break them.  The drops were now starting to disenchant nicely into the shards we wanted.

At the far end of the Grim Guzzler I bought the ale to feed to Private Rocknot to get him to start the fight with Phalanx when we had ran into a bit of trouble.  Once Phalanx went active I hit him with my taunt to pull him onto me, but it has a 15 second cool down, and in that time Ula unloaded on him, pulled aggro, then did her AOE freeze to hold him down so she could step away, not remembering that bar patrons were right behind her.  So the bar went aggro on us.

Melee in the Grim Guzzler

Ula got stomped and, as things started to really go bad, Fergorin pulled out the Divine Intervention card, sacrificing himself to bubble me, take me out of combat, and let me walk off to ress and restore the situation.

Time for a ress

We were able to get back together and slay Phalanx and move on around the corner to knock out Ambassador Flamelash.  He was another one that summons a bunch of minions where consecrate takes care of business.

We were not keen to go much further in.  The lyceum felt like more work that we wanted to do, though I suppose we could have tried threading the needle again.

So we turned around and jumped off the platform we were on to go after Lord Incendius.

Lord Incendius down again

After that we went up the ways a bit and knocked out Fineous Darkvire for good measure.  That done, we had the vault and a couple more small things we could have done, but it felt like enough for the afternoon.  I had a couple of real life chores calling, so Ula got us a portal to Ironforge.

Once there I asked about what materials were needed for the Fiery Weapon enchant.  It needed different shards and an essence of fire.  I bought the shards off the auction house and had the essence of fire handy, so she enchanted my blade.

Fiery Enchant Active

That is a good looking enchant.  I had just upgraded my weapon earlier, so I will get to see that fiery glow for a while.  And, of course, it throws an extra 40 points of fire damage regularly, which means it both looks good and is a practical addition.

We might have to go back for some more shards, but that was a pretty nice run back… again… to old Azeroth.

A Year of WoW Classic

It is hard to believe it has been a year.  It feels like it has been both much longer and no time at all since WoW Classic launched.

Classic is as Classic does

Last year we were standing around in queues in the very crowded starter areas politely waiting for our turn with a quest mob.

Waiting in line in the snow

Of course, it isn’t like I have been in any hurry to get to the end of the game.  I have a couple characters in the mid-50s and a couple more in their 40s and we’re just now tackling Sunken Temple.  Some short breaks have happened.  But we have kept plugging along.

And it has been good.

I know, back in the build up to the launch, I was pretty starry eyed about the game and its potential.  I literally have a post from last August, after the final load test, with the title “All I want to do is Play WoW Classic.”

But I was also a bit worried.  When I get heavily invested in something coming down the pike it often leads to disappointment when reality fails to live up to expectations.   And I was so very invested in WoW Classic.

But here’s the thing; I was not disappointed.  Things were and remain good.

Sure, they were not perfect.  The recreation is not exact.  There have been issues.  Issues are part of the MMORPG experience.   But the popularity of WoW Classic keeps getting proven.  Blizz removed layering again last week and and queues returned.

Arugal is experiencing 4-hour queue times on a Saturday night after all #WoWClassic realms were delayered. https://t.co/3HAENfLj1K #Warcraft pic.twitter.com/Kbhayd6sfL

— Icy Veins (@icyveins) August 23, 2020

That is a sign that things are still rolling pretty strong.

Overall, I think the game has lived up to my desire of last year.  I have done things other than play WoW Classic, but it has also been part of the bedrock of my rotation.  The instance group being back together is great and we all seem to be having a good time reliving our early days in the dungeons that were there for us back then.

I just hope Blizzard has a long term roadmap for the classic idea.  Maybe we’ll hear something at virtual BlizzCon this year.  But they really need a plan.  Even if Shadowlands does very well Blizzard has shown in the past that they really need something to boost subscriptions after about a year.

 

WoW Classic First Night Fun Complete with Queues

I will be the first to admit that my own WoW Classic first night experience may not be representative.  I know a bunch of people who saw this on their screens.

Taken from Asmogold’s stream at 9pm PDT last night

Blizzard even opened up more US realms, a couple of more EU realms, and even a new Oceanic realm. (And another)  We’re now around 50 WoW Classic realms.  Demand was high.  Time to update my realms list post.

But there were no queues for me.  Not right away.

I got home from work about 15 minutes before the servers were set to unlock.  I booted up my computer, switched into shorts (because it was 95 degrees out and we have no AC), and got myself logged in.  Skronk and Ula were already online and logged in and we got onto a voice channel in our Discord.  Our first choice, Bloodsail Buccaneers, still looked good.

US Server Choices

I made a character on Old Blanchy as a backup, but went back to BB and got on the character screen, where the “Enter World” button was still gray.

Skronk and Ula were a dwarf and a gnome respectively, so I set aside Wilhelm the human pally for a bit and went with Tistann, my dwarf hunter, so we could all start off together.

And then the “Enter World” button went live right on time… give Blizz some credit there… and we all hit it. After a moment or two, we were dumped into a mass of dwarves and gnomes.  It was a sea of new characters.  We quickly grouped up and were pulled together into the same layer.  We managed to find each other for our first group selfie of WoW Classic.

Arrival in Azeroth – Priest, Hunter, Mage

Then we got ourselves oriented, made the usual changes to the settings… must have fast quest text or die… and launched ourselves into the game.  And it was a crowded game, with everybody right there in the starter zone.

We’re all in this little valley

It was time to look for mobs.

Oh man, that is a lot of dead wolves

Wolves, the first of the stock bear/boar/wolf quest trifecta to hit us, were being slaughtered en masses and for a few minutes it was a tough call to tag one before somebody else grabbed it.  The slight delay as a hunter in getting a shot off felt very long.

But the edge of the wave of new players passed beyond the wolves pretty quickly.  Not that the wolves were not still being hunted like crazy, but after not too long it became fairly easy to pick off a wolf now and then to advance our quests.  During that we leveled for the first time, as a group, about 22 minutes after the server went live.

Leveling together

We turned in that quest and got sent to Anvilmar to meet our class trainers for the first time, to get our first new skill.  Mine was track beasts, which was not all that useful, but you take what you can get.

Then it was off into the zone again for some boars… naturally… and a delivery quest which led use from camp to camp.  While the dwarf/gnome starter zone was the one alliance area I had not done during the stress tests, all of this was still oddly familiar despite it having been years since I had been here.  As Skronk noted, our memories of a lot of this very old content was better than more recent expansions.

We were given a few more tasks, including picking up the lost belongings of Felix Whindlebolt.  In searching for those we ran into our first server queue… a queue in the game.

There is a line! Maybe they have toilet paper!

The gear Felix was missing were all items you had to click on the retrieve, after which they would disappear for a moment before appearing again.  Old WoW tech.  In order to facilitate everybody getting their quest item, people nicely queued up and waited their turn.  So we joined in.

Waiting in line in the snow

I don’t know if this was simply RP server behavior… lots of people in line had set themselves to walk rather than run, so we did so as well…or if this was a manifestation of what I have observed in other retro server experiences, where everybody is simply so happy to be there that they feel cooperative, but we were willing to go along with that.

No so Poncho, whose legend began right there before our eyes.

Poncho cut the line.

And at that point people began booing Poncho, shouting shame at him, and generally haranguing him.  As soon as could be, Poncho because the byword for a bad player and for the rest of the evening Poncho would remain a topic of conversation in general chat.  There was even a guild formed with the name “No Ponchos” in response to his actions.

We carried on.  The first line was long, the second was shorter, and there was no line for the third item Felix was missing, so we returned that, hit level 4, and ended up heading back to Anvilmar again.  There we were treated to the an aspect of the classic WoW experience, not having enough coins to buy all your skills.  We all had two skills to buy, at a price of 1 silver each, but we didn’t have even five silver all combined.

29 copper short

Ah well, living the WoW Classic lifestyle.

Then it was time for our final queue.  The big quest in the zone is The Stolen Journal, where you have to go slay a named troll in the troll cave.  That meant another queue.  But this time people queued by groups, as one of the early innovations of WoW over EverQuest was making sure everybody in your group got the drop for certain quests.  If you had to bring back somebody’s head, then all five of you got a head from the kill.

So groups, standing abreast, lined up, one after another, to take their turn to slay Grik’nir the Cold in order to retrieve the journal.

Our group in the line of groups

A couple of times people looked like they were going to try to cut in line, but they were shouted at, advised not to be a Poncho.  We only had three in our group, so invited a couple of singles to join in.  It was like being at the ski lift on a busy weekend.

We got the journal and headed back out to Anvilmar.  The quest reward was enough to buy us all our missing skills.  The next steps sent us out of Coldridge Valley, through the trog cave… which seemed a lot shorter than I remembered it… and into Dun Morogh proper.

On the far side of the cave we saw Syp standing AFK, so we took a quick passing selfie with him and moved on.

Random picture time

Out in Dun Morogh things remained crowded, but never quite as crowded as it was in a few of those opening quests.  The queues seemed to act as a meter to dole people out into the world in little groups, spreading them out just enough that we ran into no more queues.  Or maybe Blizz added more layers.  I saw some people disappearing for a while.  Maybe they were grouping with people in other layers, or maybe Blizz was evening out the load.

We hit the old points out in Dun Morogh, remembering some quests in full, forgetting steps in other quests.  We ran all the way to Rumbleshot before we remembered we were supposed to pick up a box of stuff for him along the way.  And we spent some time in the Wendigo cave competing for mobs, though the spawns were plenty.

So many unskinned wendigos

We ended up at level 7 then took a bit of a break for dinner.  My wife had brought me something, so while Ula and Skronk idled I ran up to Ironforge and trained skinning and leatherworking, the went back to the wendigo cave and quickly got my skinning skill up past 50.

When they got back Bung and his son, who hadn’t even been born when WoW came out, got on Discord with us and said they were in the queue for the server.  It was a few thousand deep, but the estimate was only 20 minutes or so, though that did bounce around quite a bit, like they had hired the person who did the time estimate for Windows file copy to do the queue time estimate.

They got in, but rolled up humans, so were over around Northshire Abby.  We logged out our dwarves (and gnome) and grabbed humans as well to go hang out with them.

The human starter area was crowded of course, but as with Dun Morogh, it felt like the big wave had passed and we were in the midst of a those behind the wave.  There was competition for mobs, but not like the first ten minutes we were out there struggling to tag a wolf.  I even saw a familiar name.

Didn’t I see you in Norrath before?

We wandered about, grouping up to go take on the Defias in the first of the bandana collection quests.  I was on as a pally, and I did sorely miss the ranged ability of my hunter.  But we got through the Northshire Abby quests.  There was barely a line for Garrick Padfoot, the named Defias whose head we all needed.  There were two other groups hanging around him, so we waited our turn for his spawn, then went on our way.

The only problem of the evening occurred while we were out among the Defias.  Word was that Blizzard was having some problems with layers crashing now and then.  There had been reports of BB being down while we were on and happily questing away.  But then it came time for our layer to crash and we were kicked out.  But the queue was “only” about 3,500 deep for me, which only took a few minutes to work through until I was back on again.

I stuck it out until we got to Goldshire, then I decided to call it a night.  I had been on for more than five hours straight on a week night after a full day at work and with another looming in the morning and this blog post to finish up.

We still have a lot ahead of us.  We have to form a guild… because, of course we must… and we’re still working on a name.  We have to sort out our group a bit.  And we have a determination to go and do Ragefire Chasm at level, which means getting through Orgrimmar naked at around level 15 or so.  But there is plenty of time for that.  We had what I would have to consider a first good night, which hopefully portends more.

So did anybody get to level 60 yet?  I am going to have to score myself on my predictions.

Others writing about the first night:

• Hardcore Casual
• Tales of the Aggronaut
• ECTMMO.com
• Deez Words
• GamingSF
• Bio Break
• Parallel Context
• I’m Not Squishy
• Galumphing
• WoW Misadventures
• Endgame Viable

How Many People Play EVE Online?

If we still had Blog Banters going, this is one I would throw out as a topic because it is an exercise in estimation given incomplete data.

This is a question that came up in an email exchange with Bhagpuss.  I do, on occasion, communicate with people via sources other than the main page of this blog.

I dropped him a note about something I heard on fleet coms a while back.  A player opined rather firmly that EverQuest currently has more players than EVE Online.  I have reason to believe that the player in question is/was in possession of information that indicated this, that it wasn’t just BS on coms but somebody with enough connections in the industry to know.

I shared this with Bhagpuss because we both enjoy these sorts of informational tidbits, but I wasn’t sure it was worth a blog post.  And it probably isn’t.  If it was I would be done writing by this point.  Instead Bhagpuss asked the pertinent question, which is the headline for this post.

Neither of us has any insight or information as to how many people play EverQuest these days.  The game is coming up on 20 years in age and in many ways feels its age.  But a lot of people played EverQuest back in the day.  It was the gateway drug into MMOs for a lot of people and it retains a lot of nostalgia value.

However, Daybreak is a private company so we don’t get any financial numbers, much less subscriber or player numbers. Even when it was part of Sony its numbers were buried so deep in the financials of its various parent organizations as to be invisible.  All we really know are some estimates based on press releases and various guesses and whispered information.

Subscription estimates – 150K to 1 million

There is that old chart.  Click on it to make it bigger/legible.

It shows EverQuest peaking at 550K subscribers and then dropping down, with the last number being 100K at some point during 2010.  After that the estimates stop.

EVE Online is also on that chart and it peaks at 500K worldwide some time at the end of 2012, which coincides with the peak concurrency event for the Serenity server in China.  The Serenity server’s brief moment of popularity fell away rather quickly if you go and look at the numbers at EVE Offline.

The numbers for Tranquility, which hosts the rest of the world, peaked around 350K at about a year before, after which there is no further data.  I suspect that CCP switch to world wide data during the Serenity surge because that sounded better.

There is also the theory that some put about that the player numbers for DUST 514 were being folded into the overall EVE Online numbers because we were able to drop rocks on them from space and possibly see them in our in game chat.  The only issue there is that I don’t think that DUST 514 numbers were enough to influence the total that much.

Anyway, by the time we get to 2014 we are out of even estimates as both companies had clammed up.  There are no press releases for dropping customers, only for hitting new peaks.  And since the end of the data points for both EverQuest and EVE Online both have gone free to play in their own way.

For EverQuest went free to play back in 2012 for its 13 birthday.  Some bar mitzvah present.  At that point the live servers were free but you needed to buy at least the latest expansion if you want to play the new stuff and if you wanted to play on one of the nostalgia servers you had to subscribe.  This was a somewhat traditional free to play, with the nostalgia server bonus for Daybreak.

For EVE Online the free plan meant the introduction of Alpha clones with the Ascension expansion back in November 2016.  Alpha clones were free, but could only use a limited skill set and the client blocked you from multi-boxing Alpha clones.  They couldn’t cloak, run a cyno, or fly anything beyond a cruiser of their racial choice initially.  That loosened up with the Arms Race expansion last December, but you still can’t log in more than one unless you’re tricky.

Industry wide there has been the claim that going free increases the player base of an MMORPG, but we have to stop talking about subscribers and just talk about players, since not everybody who is playing is necessarily paying.

For EverQuest that is all interesting, but doesn’t help us much.  For EVE Online though we have the data points referenced above at EVE Offline.

Lots of data

The question is, how does concurrency map, if at all, to the player base.

We know that the player base is greater than the concurrent users online because not everybody is logged in together, and all the more so for a server that hosts a world-wide player base.  So the simple answer seems to be to find the ratio of concurrent users to know player base from the past to see what numbers that gives us now.

Looking at the late numbers for Tranquility in 2012, we have 350,000 users.  It is a little more, but I will take the round number for ease of use.  The average concurrent users number for 2012 was 43,000.  That gives us a ratio of 8.14 to 1.  One concurrent user equals about eight total users.

If we use that number and multiply it by the average concurrent users for the last 12 months, which is 33,000, we get an estimated player base of 268,604.

That number seems problematic to me.  I guess you could convince me that EVE Online has that many players, absent other data.  But if we are buying into the statement that EverQuest has more players, then that is where I stumble.  It might be just me, but I have trouble with the idea that the EverQuest population jumped so much with free to play that it is 2.5x its last subscriber entry six years later.  Is there that much nostalgia for Norrath?

Maybe 2012 isn’t the right year to go to for the ratio.  Let’s back off to 2010.  The subscriber number on the chart is 300,000 for that while the average concurrent users number is 47,000.  That gives us a ratio of  6.38 to 1 and a possible user base of 210,638 players.  That gets us closer to reasonable, but it still seems like a big number for EverQuest, beloved though it might be.

If we go back another year to 2009 the subscriber number seems to be about 225,000 and the concurrency number 44,000.  That gives us a 5.11 to 1 ration and a possible player base of 168,750.

Now I have three numbers with a range of 100,000 players and my like or dislike of them is based solely on my gut feeling for how many players EverQuest might have these days.  The lower the number gets the more comfortable I am with it for EQ, but the smaller the ratio gets the less likely it seems to be accurate.  Again, that is my gut speaking, but 20% of the EVE Online player base being logged in at any given time seems like a lot.

And I can keep moving around the years and getting different numbers.  2008 gives a ratio of about 5.71 to 1, so more, while 2007 sums out to an even 5 to 1, making for less.  The subscriber base is between 150,000 and 225,000 for those two years, while the average concurrency is 30,000 and 35,000.  The average concurrency for the last twelve months sits between those two numbers, so perhaps the current number is also between 150,000 and 225,000.

But with free to play the ratio ought to be higher, there ought to be more casual players on as Alpha clones.  After all, we have been told time and again that a free option increases the player base.  Then, however, I get back to the “must be less than EverQuest” parameter which seems less likely to me the more the current player base estimate grows.

So I don’t really know.

The initial assumption could be wrong.  Those old subscriber number charts could be wrong.  And what constitutes a “player” in any case?  There is always the differentiation between subscribers, players, and active accounts.  Few games reward players for running multiple accounts the way EVE Online does, so the ratio of players between EQ and EVE might be different enough from the ratio of active accounts as to be significant.

In the end, all of this is just food for thought as I don’t think anybody is going to give us any real numbers, but I’d be interested if anybody could come up with another way to try an get an estimate on numbers.

Replacing the G15

In what will probably come as no surprise to any regular reader of the site that I have had my current keyboard for more than a decade.  The keyboard, a Logitech G15, appears in a picture I posted of my desk back in middle of 2007, while Amazon says I purchased it in 2006.

The table is unusually clear in this picture

As noted every time I use this picture, not much has changed.  The headphones have been updated, the iPod dock is gone, a second, even smaller monitor has appeared, and a lot more crap has managed to accumulate.  But the monitor, keyboard, trackball, and speakers are all pretty much as they were ten years back.

Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.  The G15 has been a solid keyboard and, while I haven’t taken full advantage of every feature of it, I have grown used to some unique aspects of the keyboard.  Chief among them is the LCD display.

In the picture above you can see the LCD display, nicely back-lit with a blue-ish tint, at the top center of the keyboard.  Not a huge piece of display real estate, but I have grown used to having it there.  As it turns out, quite a few games and applications wrote out to Logitech’s display API.

Not that everybody uses the LCD well.  I posted back in 2007 asking what would be useful to put on the LCD display.  You can’t put anything there that won’t otherwise be available in game, but you ought to put something useful on it.  Games, like WoW, LOTRO, and EQ2 default to putting your character attributes, hit points, and maybe mana/power/whatever on the screen.  But things like hit points are already better represented in the main UI, while your stats like strength and what not aren’t generally something you need to be updated on constantly.

Still, some games, like World of Tanks, use the display well.  And I can always swap the LCD back to the default clock display, which is handy when playing games that do not have real world time somewhere in their UI.  Or it can show me what I have playing in iTunes currently.

EVE Online does not support the display, but Mumble and TeamSpeak do, showing on the display who is currently speaking.  That is probably more useful than any in-game data I might want.  I know many people by the sound of their voice on coms, but there are still a lot of strangers out there, or people who sound very much like other people, so having that name up without having to use the wonky (and, to me, annoying) in-game overlay running is of value.

Basically, I’ve gotten used to having that display.

However, wear and tear has worn down the keyboard.  After more than a decade of heavy use, the back lighting on the LCD has failed, I’ve worn through a couple of the key caps, the back lighting on the right half of the main keyboard flickers and goes out regularly, and I have to hit the space bar at the left end because the senor doesn’t register if I hit it on the right.

So I went to the Logitech site to find a replacement.  I knew the G15 itself was long gone, supplanted by new models and, as I recalled, even a color LCD display.  But I was sure the LCD display would still be a thing, given how many apps support it.

However, the LCD display on keyboards seems to be a thing of the past at Logitech.  Technically it is still supported via their G13 Gameboard accessory, but the keyboard they offer are all LCD free these days.  I suppose the list of titles supporting their game panel LCD is a bit of a clue as to how long gone the display might me.  Some selected historically interesting entries:

• America’s Army
• Duke Nukem Forever
• Everquest II: Extended
• Hellgate London
• Neverwinter Nights 2
• Star Wars Galaxies
• Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning
• World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King

I think you could pin down when that list was written based on when those titles were all viable.

Logitech does have some new technology called Arx Control, which can put up a panel on your smart phone or tablet.  I tinkered with that for an evening, wondering if they would be able to  just pipe things from their older game panel API to it.  I have seen posts saying that this is possible.

However, most of those posts are a couple of years old, so if it was once the case it does not seem to be that way any more.  Arx only appears to work with items specifically built for it, which appear to be few and far between.  World of Warcraft was the only supported title I could find, and I couldn’t get it to do anything that made WoW appear to actually connect and display something via Arx.  All it could do was launch WoW, which isn’t all that useful a feature, especially since it launches it directly and not through Battle.net.

So Arx seems to be a complete bust.

If I want the Logitech game panel support, it looks like I have to go shopping for a vintage Logitech keyboard with an LCD.  However, I distrust used ones and the few new-in-box- models I have seen are priced pretty high.

And if I am willing to let go of the LCD panel, then I have a plethora of keyboard choices to wade through.

For now though, the G15 on my desk continues to soldier on. The back lighting flickers, and I can feel the “a” and “e” keys due to their tops being worn off, but it still does what it needs to do.

 

Quote of the Day – The End of Legends

Within the Daybreak family, LoN seemed to be that uncle that, while still part of the family, no one ever talked about. He was always just hanging around creepily, standing in the corner sipping on a bottle of who-knows-what out of a brown paper bag.

Dellmon, Guest Post at EQ2 Wire

Legends of Norrath went dark last week and, despite a previous post about its imminent demise, I totally missed the date.  I suppose next year, when I do the month in review post, being off by ten days won’t matter much.  And frankly, to me the game itself didn’t matter much.  It was a convoluted game in a genre I don’t care for in any case.

Dellmon puts the game’s “players” into three categories in the post linked at the top, and I clearly fell into the third of the three.  I tried the game for a bit early on, then just collected the free card packs that being a Station Access subscriber got me, opening them up in hope of finding a loot card or two.

I will admit that I did get a few nice housing items out of those packs.  But it wasn’t enough for me to bend my mind to the task of opening up those card packs on a regular basis.  I think I had 80 or so sitting around unopened as the game went away.

There was a momentary glimmer of hope for the game when Smed, seeing Blizzard make a quick success out of its card game, Hearthstone, figured SOE (soon to be Daybreak) could do something like that too with Legends of Norrath.

Of course, nothing came of that.  The studio had just announced the closure of four titles in what looks like, in hindsight, pre-acquisistion house cleaning.

And so it is gone, like so many online titles before it.  I still think the high point of the game for me was when Brent from VirginWorlds was used for a card in one of the expansions.

Brent on his card

That is likely to be the only card I will remember.