Enad Global 7 Q2 2021 Financials and Concerning News

I keep having to remind myself that Daybreak’s parent is a public company once again, and a small enough one that Daybreak’s products aren’t hidden in the numbers but are big enough in the company to get highlighted at every report.  EverQuest is a big name at Enad Global 7.

Enad Global 7

Fortunately I have a Google alert setup for Enad Global 7 which, unlike some of my other alerts, has proven effective at catching updates about the company.  So early this week I got the nod that their Q2 2021 preliminary financials had been announced.  The statement was short and sweet:

During the second quarter, we delivered a net revenue growth of 179%, EBITDA growth of 360% and meanwhile having successfully integrated the acquisitions we closed in the first quarter of 2021. With our rapid acquisition growth, we have digested, integrated and built up the necessary processes to continue our strategic focus. I am delighted to announce that the relaunch of MechWarrior 5 was profitable already after a couple of weeks. It was a testament of the collaboration power between the subsidiaries of the group.

There was also a slide deck investor presentation to go with the announcement.  Quite a bit of the deck was information previously shared.  They did note that Daybreak’s seven titles account for 50% of the company’s revenue.

Daybreak, owner of 7 IP’s that are live and account for 50% of the revenue, mainly PC and Console.  Distributed mainly through our own platform.

Elsewhere in the presentation they say that live games make up 50% of the revenue for 2020, which includes My Singing Monsters as the 8th title, so I am not sure how that breaks out.

And, as always, the like to talk about the strong IPs and long running titles that came with Daybreak.

This slide from March was re-run, featuring 6 Daybreak titles in the highlights plus My Singing Monsters

Compared to that 16% of the revenue comes in via Innova’s 4Game platform which hosts titles licensed from other companies for distribution in the EU and CIS including Lineage II, Aion, and Ragnarok Online.

The presentation wasn’t big on news.  The previously announced plan to migrate all their titles onto the 4Game platform was reconfirmed.

We’ll all play on 4Game

Not a big news day for EG7 really.  A good financial report, some rah rah, and back to work.

As I was tracking down the financials I found that the same day a bomb dropped at EG7.  Robin Flodin, the chipper, young, and enthusiastic CEO of EG7 that gave us all such good feels when the Daybreak acquisition was announced, was being given the boot, with Ji Ham of Daybreak stepping in to fill the role as acting CEO.

The Board of Enad Global 7 AB (publ) and Robin Flodin have agreed that effective immediately Robin will transition away from his current role as CEO of EG7 and will be replaced by the current CEO of Daybreak Game Company, EG7’s largest subsidiary, Ji Ham. During this transition Robin will stay on for six months to assist Ji as he assumes his new role within the EG7 family of companies. Ji will be appointed acting CEO of EG7 as a search for a permanent CEO has been initiated. Ji has an extensive background in both gaming and finance and has for the last six years been the CEO of Daybreak. During his tenure at Daybreak Ji has overseen extensive growth and profitability of the company.

Of course, this made hearts sink, and not just because some of us had crushes on Robin.

Ji Ham should have an entry on the IMDB given his ongoing acting roles.  After Smed got the heave-ho from Daybreak, long time SOE exec Russel Shanks took over for a bit.  But that did not last long and Daybreak quietly updated its information to indicate that Ji Ham had stepped in as acting president of Daybreak.

Nobody outside of the company was quite sure who he was.  His profile over at Bloomberg, which has since been scrubbed from the site (classic Daybreak move), indicated that he was with Columbus Nova’s renewable fuels group, working closing with the Russian Renova Group, which owned Columbus Nova.

The profile probably disappeared during the 2018 panic when Daybreak tried to gaslight everybody , though “gaslighting” implies some subtlety and skill that was not present in the act, into believing that the company had never had anything to do with Renova, Columbus Nova, or any other Russians that might be facing sanctions from the US government.  And that is what the Daybreak era reminds many people of, a regime of obvious lies.

So why is Ji Ham in and Robin Flodin out?

I suspect we’ll never know the real dynamics of the situation, but looking at the slide deck from the quarterly numbers, Robin didn’t own a lot of the company.  The combined management and board of directors own 49% of the company, broken out like this:

EG7 board and management ownership stakes

I have pasted in the total ownership stake in the company for each individual (you might need to click on the image to view it full size to make those numbers readable) and in that mix that represents 49% of the company, Robin holds just 3.504%  That is a lot of shares, but not enough to maintain any sort of control

Meanwhile our old Columbus Nova friends, Jason Epstein and Ji Ham, own more than 9% of the company.  Add in the fact that Daybreak is responsible for 50% of EG7’s revenue and it probably isn’t a huge mystery as to how Jason Epstein and his partner Ji Ham got themselves in the driver’s seat again.

As for what it means… well, I am skeptical.  The press release says this about Ji Ham:

During his tenure at Daybreak Ji has overseen extensive growth and profitability of the company

That seems to be, from the outside, counter factual.

From the outside Ji Ham’s tenure was one of cancelling new titles, shutting down old titles, laying off staff, and tarnishing the reputation of the company with outrageous historical revisionism.  The company may have seen profits, but it wasn’t due to growth.  Growth didn’t enter into it.  Profits came by cutting costs and not investing in anything new, it came from maintaining the status quo at the cheapest possible rate.

Is that the future now holds for EG7?  Have they finished with their growth through acquisition phase and moved to consolidation and profit seeking?  Is Ji Ham being put on the throne to do to EG7 what he did to Daybreak?

Yes, I know he is “acting” CEO, but he was “acting” President and CEO at Daybreak too, and he had a long run in that role. He has recast his LinkedIn profile in the Daybreak tradition to indicate that he was CEO of the company since the date of Smed’s departure.  There was no Russell Shanks, only Ji Ham.  He did a modest attempt at downplaying the fact that he was deep in Columbus Nova, that company that never had nothing to do with Daybreak ever.

CN? What is CN?

I suspect he hopes people think he worked for Canadian Northern Railway and not a Russian oligarch investment front.

I might be borrowing trouble here, taking the dimmest possible view of events, but back in December, when EG7 announced their acquisition of Daybreak with a vision of growth and investment, a lot of optimism bubbled up for the future of the company and its titles.  That optimism came from the grim times that the Daybreak era represented, so bringing back the same actors to run the new show can hardly be expected to be received with enthusiastic applause.

Of course, some of that December optimism was likely misplaced, especially on the LOTRO front.  Making a console silk purse, as the initial announcements hinted at, out of the sow’s ear that is LOTRO now… and that, honestly, LOTRO has always been… would require an investment in funds that would likely never see a return.

And who knows, maybe EG7 is still looking to expand and grow.  Maybe Ji Ham will be given resources and instructions by the board to go in directions he could not when he was at the helm of Daybreak.  Hey, maybe the “acting CEO” bit isn’t a lie, maybe the company is really looking for a new CEO and Ji Ham will be just a caretaker… though why he needs a six month transition from Robin Flodin raises some questions on that front, though likely it means Robin gets paid as CEO for another six months while not having anything to do after a week or two.

But it is concerning.  It smacks of a return to the habits of Daybreak writ larger as they now apply to even more studios.  As I said with the initial burst of optimism about EG7 I will now say about this dark turn; we will have to wait and see.

Related:

• Contains Moderate Peril – LOTRO: We’ll Always Have the Books

Promptapalooza and Writing a Blog Post

This Blaugust is Promptapalooza where we spend the month chasing a series of daily prompts… if we so desire.  I opted in, but only for the minimum effort, which meant writing about the prompt I had drawn on the day it was due.  Mission accomplished.

August means some sort of Blaugust

It isn’t that I am against any of the other prompts on the list, but I am not sure I really have anything to add.  But the prompt from  August 9th prompt, led by Paeroka over at Nerdy Bookahs, felt like something I could address in some way.  It just took me most of the month to get to it.

The pompt itself is:

Share the process you go through in order to create content, both mental and mechanical.

Which sounds a bit pretentious to me.  I am not a fan of the idea of “content creators” as it is both over broad if you interpret it literally and often extremely narrow in the vision of some.  A few weeks back somebody asked on Twitter for “EVE Online Content Creators” to speak up and be recognized.  The person really wanted Twitch streamers and people who make YouTube videos.  People who write stuff?  Not content creators to them.

So I am a fan of saying what you mean on that front.  I am a blogger.  I write a blog.  I do not “create content.”   How does one even define “content?”  How many units of content are created by a Twitch stream versus a YouTube video versus a blog post.  Some of my posts are remarkably content free, so will likely not spoil your diet if you’re trying to cut back on content.  You will not get your USDA recommended minimum amount of daily content by navigating to my URL.

In fact, I would argue that, 300 word in to this post I have created no content so far.  Maybe I should stop grousing and move on, eh?

So how do I write blog posts, which is how I am going to interpret the prompt?

First, there are three types of posts on my blog.  They are:

• I did a thing
• A thing happened
• I have an opinion about a thing

The first is the meat and potatoes of this blog.  The instance group runs a dungeon, I write about it.  I am in a big fleet battle in EVE Online, I write about it.  I do something new in Minecraft, I write about it.

Easy.  I generally write about it as a story, a tale of how I or we started in situation A and ended up in situation Z.

The second is the structure that holds the blog together.  Weeks can go by where this is mostly what I post about.  There are lots of these, an you probably recognize some of the common ones.  EVE Online releases a update or the Monthly Economic Report.  SuperData sends me their digital revenue chart.  An MMORPG I am interested in announces, reveals, or actually launches an expansion.  An anniversary of some sort arrives again.  Something new and relevant to my interests launches.  The last day of the month arrives.  It is Memorial Day.

This is interrupt based blogging.  Stimulus, response.  These not only give a month structure… unsurprisingly, I am usually aware of when the last day of the month falls… but gives me filler to chew on when I haven’t done something I feel like writing about.

I have an opinion covers most everything else.  Quote of the Day posts are generally vehicles for an opinion.  Book reviews, movie reviews, posts about shows we have binge watched during the pandemic, those are all opinion pieces.  They are not stories and, while they can be timely, they are generally not as locked into a time slot as, say, an expansion launch or the end of the month.

As for the mechanics of how I write blog posts, I wish I had a process I could share.

I tend to sit down and just start writing.  If I am writing about something I did, I will generally at least go and look at any screen shots I may have taken along the way.  You will find some early blog posts about the instance group where I talk about taking notes, but that fell by the wayside for the most part.  At best I’ll jot a sentence or two into a Notepad++ document, usually some small tidbit I want to remember.  Maybe I will write very simple timeline… we went here, A blew up, B said something funny, we went home… but that is about it.  Screen shots are usually my reminder.

And then I write the story.  I might revise it a bit, especially if I think about it over night, though that can be a mixed blessing.  If you see a horribly mis-matched sentence in the middle of a post, that is usually the result of my thinking about the post in the middle of the night, obsessing about some phrase, getting up in the morning and adding it in, and then not checking to see if it actually made a damn lick of sense.  There have times when I have tacked something on to the end of the sentence that mirrors a revision I put at the start of the sentence, but forgot about.

So it goes.

When I write about something that happened, those are the posts that involve the most research.  I go back and look at how the SuperData chart changed since the previous month.  I open up the .csv data files to get regional numbers to compare against past months.  When an expansion launches I try to mention the theme, how much new content is being added, and if it is a WoW expansion, how long it was since the last expansion with a list showing other expansions for comparison.

I take “a thing happened” and try to apply some context.  That is my value add, though the value may only be seen by me.

These posts not only give the blog structure, but also have structure themselves based on past posts, which also makes them easier to write.  My Month in Review posts follow a pretty strict format. Even ones that change up a bit, like patch notes, generally have a formula that lets me put things together quickly.  Practice and all that.

And then there are the opinion pieces.  Aside from Quote of the Day posts, which tend to be quick and spontaneous based on something that popped up, these are usually thing I think about in the shower or while trying to get to sleep.

I can hear an objection out there.  Yes, these three post types are not mutually exclusive.  I have written, as an example, about an event the CCP launched for EVE Online, told the story of my own experience with that even, and given my opinion about said event, all in a single post.  Rare is the post that does not have an opinion, stated or implied.

But the posts generally are written for one reason, and the other two may or may not tag along.  So that EVE Online event post example would be “A thing happened” primarily.  But you can tell which is which by what the theme is based on; a story, some facts, an opinion.

SuperData July Numbers Show a Resurgent Grand Theft Auto V

The numbers are out from SuperData Research for July 2019 digital revenue, so it is time once again to look at their lists.

SuperData Research Top 10 – July 2019

On the PC end of the chart the list of titles was a bit stagnant.  Nine out of ten titles listed there in June were still there in July.  There was a little shakeup as Dungeon Fighter Online took the top spot from League of Legends.  That was shocking the first time it happened, but now they swap every few months, so seems pretty normal.

Six of last month’s titles remained in exactly the same position, including World of Warcraft in seventh place, behind World of Tanks.  We will have to see if the launch of WoW Classic pushes the Blizzard title up the list some when the August numbers come out next month.

The one new entry was PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, which returned to the list in ninth place, replacing FIFA Onilne 3.  As noted below, PUBG saw a price cut which juiced sales in July.

In the console column Grand Theft Auto V jumped back to the top spot with the release of the Diamond Casino update for the online version of the game.  Having purchased GTA V during the Steam Summer Sale, I received several email notes about the casino, so they were pushing that hard… and successfully it seems.

Call of Duty: Black Ops IIII moved up from third to second place in July, while the new release, Fire Emblem: Three House fell into third place, leaving last month’s number one, Fortnite, down in fourth.

At the mobile end of the chart, Honour of Kings remained on top, with Pokemon Go holding on to second place.  Candy Crush Saga, my other benchmark, moved up one spot to third place, taking it from Clash of Clans, which dropped down to seventh position.

Overall Supdata said that worldwide spending was up with this bullet point.

• Strong mobile growth drives a 5% increase in worldwide spending. Consumers spent $9.02 billion on digital games across console, PC and mobile in July, up from $8.56 billion in the same month last year. Mobile revenue grew 14%, offsetting declines on PC and console, with the latter being dragged by a 50% drop in free-to-play spending.

But when they tweeted a chart to support that, I wasn’t all that convinced.

Digital Spending July 2019 vs July 2019

It feels like if you’re going to claim that mobile is pulling the segment up, you ought to go with a chart that doesn’t show mobile taking a smaller slice of the pie while the PC slice is growing.

I realize that this chart does not necessarily invalidate their statement, it just feels like goofy optics to support the assertion being made.  “Mobile is growing!” he said, waving around a chart that showed PC and Consoles were growing.

Meanwhile, the comparison list from NPD of July sales is also available.  They show the following:

1. Madden NFL 20
2. Fire Emblem: Three Houses*
3. Super Mario Maker 2*
4. Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order*
5. Minecraft
6. Grand Theft Auto V
7. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate*
8. Mortal Kombat 11
9. Mario Kart 8*
10. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild*

*No digital data

As usual, it is different from SuperData because the NPD data is US only, combines PC and consoles, includes traditional retail (which favors console sales), and does not include digital sales where noted.

Given all of that, I think the relative position Madden NFL 20 is interesting.  It is primarily a US focused title, but I would probably say the same for NBA 2K19, and it was higher up for SuperData but didn’t make the cut for NPD.

Also, look how much Nintendo still depends on the normal retail channel.

And so it goes, another month of numbers.  Additional notes from the SuperData post:

Grand Theft Auto Online‘s Casino update leads to a huge uptick. We estimate Grand Theft Auto Online made $69 million across console and PC in July following the anticipated “Diamond Casino” update, marking one of the best sales months for the game since launch and the first month of double-digit year-over-year growth since August 2018.

Apex Legends Season 2 sales falls short of Season 1 levels. Apex Legends generated $37 million across console and PC in July, more than double what it made in June but only roughly half of what Season 1 earned in March.

Fire Emblem: Three Houses has a solid launch. Fire Emblem sold 800,000 digital units on Switch in July, making it the best digital launch in franchise history.

PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds gets a price cut and sells another million units. We estimate PUBG sold 1.1 million units on PC with an average selling price of roughly $18, though sales are still down significantly from last year.

FIFA Mobile Soccer faces a tough comparison against 2018’s World Cup. Despite being one of EA’s most reliable sources of growth on mobile since launching in 2016, FIFA Mobile has hit a rough patch this summer, with revenue declining over 50% year-over-year in each of the past three months.

Summer Movie League – Saved by a Fallen Angel

Week twelve of our Fantasy Movie League is now done and gone, leaving us just one week to go.

After getting trounced in week eleven, squandering my once substantial lead by not paying attention, you would have thought I would have done some serious research for this week.

But I didn’t, really.  I sort of winged it again, running mostly with my Monday.  Actually, if I had just stuck with my Monday pick I would have done better.  But I persisted with Angel has Fallen as my anchor, not really feeling it for anything else.  I thought Good Boys was too dear at the price, Here I Come was too risky, and The Overcomer unlikely to get enough of an audience.

And, as it turned out, I was about right.  If I had stuck with my 3x Angel has Fallen anchor, I would have been set, but for some reason I cannot recall I decided that Dora had a shot at best performer, so I loaded up on that for filler, losing a screen of Angel.

My final lineup was 2x Angel has Fallen, 1x Hobbs & Shaw, 5x Dora.  That was enough for third place and, more importantly, enough to stay ahead of Bhagpuss.

Saturday saw the estimates with me in second place, while Sunday dropped my into third, which carried me into the final totals, leaving the scores looking like this:

1. Miniature Giant Space Hamsterplex – $79,826,830
2. Conical Effort – $79,143,562
3. Wilhelm’s Qeynosian Kinetoscope – $77,485,569
4. Joanie’s Joint – $73,148,120
5. Too Orangey For Crows – $73,148,120
6. SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights – $72,072,088
7. Po Huit’s Sweet Movie Suite – $65,327,083
8. Cyanbane’s Neuticles Viewing Party – $61,665,007
9. grannanj’s Cineplex – $23,471,704

The perfect pick was 3x Angel, 1x Hobbs & Shaw, and 4x Peanut Butter Falcon, the latter scoring the best performer nod.  Nobody got that lineup here… it is the same as the normal rule perfect pick, and only 16 people got that total… but Hamster and Conical did go with 3x Angel for anchors, getting them the top spot.

After the top three, the next three were heavy on Good Boys, which wasn’t a bad anchor.  It didn’t get punished by pricing as much as I thought it was.

And then there was Cyanbane and Po, who seemed to have bit on the idea of Ready or Not doing just badly enough to get worst performer, get the $2 million bonus for that, and turn into a solid anchor.  Unfortunately, it did too badly, or not goodly enough, or something… maybe they thought it would do well… but it didn’t go as planned regardless.

All of which leaves the season scores looking like this:

1. Wilhelm’s Qeynosian Kinetoscope – $1,129,071,344
2. Too Orangey For Crows – $1,104,960,211
3. SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights – $1,013,187,702
4. Cyanbane’s Neuticles Viewing Party – $980,016,663
5. Conical Effort – $953,141,451
6. Joanie’s Joint – $944,658,210
7. Miniature Giant Space Hamsterplex – $928,603,452
8. Po Huit’s Sweet Movie Suite – $891,977,071
9. grannanj’s Cineplex – $754,894,150
10. Goat Water Picture Palace – $557,351,870

There was no change in the ranking.  Bhagpuss fell back a bit, but remains just about $24 million behind me, a gap a good week could easily cover.

The alternate scoring ended up looking like this:

1. Wilhelm’s Qeynosian Kinetoscope – 88
2. Too Orangey For Crows – 83
3. Miniature Giant Space Hamsterplex – 69
4. SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights – 67
5. Cyanbane’s Neuticles Viewing Party – 67
6. Conical Effort – 57
7. Joanie’s Joint – 55
8. grannanj’s Cineplex – 54
9. Po Huit’s Sweet Movie Suite – 45
10. Goat Water Picture Palace – 45

Bhagpuss is just five points behind me, so there are a number of final week possibilities that could end up with me in second place.  Third place is also in play, with three people in very close proximity.

Which leads us all to the final week’s lineup:

1. Angel has Fallen – $216
2. Good Boys – $161
3. Lion King – $143
4. Hobbs & Shaw – $129
5. The Overcomer – $123
6. Angry Birds 2 – $100
7. Ready or Not – $98
8. Dora and the Lost City of Gold – $84
9. Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark – $83
10. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood – $74
11. The Peanut Butter Falcon – $72
12. Spider-man: Far From Home – $60
13. Toy Story 4 – $59
14. Don’t Let Go – $54
15. 47 Meters Down 2 – $46

Two films dropped from the list, The Art of Racing in the Rain and
Blinded by the Light.  They were replaced by one new film and one returnee.

The new film is Don’t Let Go, a supernatural thriller that is showing up at the bottom of the list and has no long range forecast.  Unless it breaks out, I am not sure how to rate it.

The returnee is Toy Story 4, which was in 17th place last week at the box office.  I am going to guess that it is going to get a theater expansion this coming weekend to have made it back up into the list.

Why would Toy Story 4 get a theater expansion this week?  It is Labor Day weekend in the US, the holiday that pretty much declares summer is over and everybody has to get back to school… though my daughter has been back to school for more than two weeks at this point.  This is the last big family weekend, so if you don’t have a trip planned then maybe a movie will do you.

That also means that this is a four day box office, Friday through Monday, so good luck getting estimates that match your needs.

As for my Monday gut pick, I went with 3x Angel has Fallen, 1x Good Boys, and 4x 47 Meters Down.  That seemed “safe,” but we’ll see what estimates look like as the week goes.

Also, as noted, this is the last week of the season.  With the end of summer I will also stop writing about the league every week, save for the final season wrap up.  I’ll leave it running, because why not, but I won’t be watching it closely.  If somebody else wants to run a league though, I’ll join up.

So get your picks in.  The league locks for the last time this season tomorrow night.

Kickstarter and the Return of the World of Warcraft Diary

I wrote about the first run at the World of Warcraft Diary back in March.  I was concerned that the ask for the project was too much ($400,000) and that the publicity groundwork hadn’t been done for the project.  One of the rules of Kickstarter campaigns is that your core audience should know it is coming and be ready to support it.

Anyway, the campaign failed, but the author took what he learned to heart and said he would be back again with a second run with better groundwork and a more reasonable ask.  And so here we go with round two of the World of Warcraft Diary Kickstarter campaign.

And it has funded already.

I got an email via the original campaign because I was a backer letting me know that the new round would be showing up this week.  But by the time I got around to check on it the campaign was already funded.

Op Success

That is crazy first day success, and the first day isn’t even done as I write this.  My usual minimum benchmark for success is 20% in the first 24 hours, but this is already past 1049% and the number keeps going.  The charts over at Kicktraq show the tale of the campaign.

So yes, this book looks like it will be a thing.

The level of success doesn’t really surprise me.  World of Warcraft is huge and still popular and has enough of a fanbase to support this level of effort… or even the first $400K level of effort… so long as the word gets out to the fans.

I mean, if Andrew Groen can get huge numbers out of the comparatively tiny EVE Online fan base, then the WoW fan base should be able to beat that in a blink.  I will be interested to see where this campaign ends up with such big initial interest.

Anyway, if you are interested the campaign will run through to the morning of September 25, 2018.  Again, you can find the campaign page here.

Why are there Levels in Battle for Azeroth?

This is one of those question that I am pretty sure I know the answer to, but I want to ask it out loud just to see what else might shake loose.  What am I not considering in this mix?

It is here…

I am playing through the Alliance side of the expansion right now.  My paladin is already through the Tiragarde Sound zone on Kul Tiras and I am enjoying the new content.  The environments are beautiful, the quests are good, varied, and plentiful, and the various side tasks and ventures change things up.

But, as I write this (ten days before the post went live because I kept pushing it off to post something else), my pally is already past level 116 and I expect will hit level 120, the level cap, long before I am finished running him through the base content.

Not that I will suddenly stop when I get there.  But I will spend most of my time in this expansion… call it two years less the three weeks at most it will take me to meander to level 120…at the level cap.

So why bother having levels at all at this point?

The zones scale with you so gaining a level confers no special benefit.  In fact, there is a downside to it.  All the gear you get along the way is set for the level you at which you acquired it, so you have to keep replacing gear for ten levels to keep it abreast of your progress… after which you can then work on replacing gear to boost your item level.  And, as we found out, collecting gear upgrades actually makes getting through the new zones more difficult.  You are better off keeping your item level low, a seriously messed up situation that Blizzard seems just fine with.  I mean, I was afraid of what ilevel scaling was going to do when they introduced it in Legion, but this goes well beyond what I would have imagined.

Whatever.  If people complain enough Blizz will grudgingly fix it eventually.  Back to levels.

Traditionally levels have been used to gate content, and Blizzard does do some of that.  As you hit certain levels things are unlocked for you.  But with ten fast moving levels players will still be unlocking content after they hit 120 via various other means.  I don’t have to look much farther than the achievements to know that there will be plenty to do past hitting the level cap.  There will be world quests to unlock, new content to enjoy, faction to grind, and the groundwork to unlocking flying to start in on.

EverQuest, the king of MMO expansions, is almost six years older than World of Warcraft, has released 24 expansions so far, and has a level cap of 110 last I checked.  If you look down the list of expansions you will see that not every one raised the level cap.  You can see streaks of two or three expansions in a row with the same cap.

Then again, the do keep raising the level cap in Norrath every so often, so levels have their draw.

The downside is that levels are intimidating and/or silly after a certain point.  That the level cap is 120 with Battle for Azeroth has to work against it somewhat.  Purists like to say that you need to play through the whole thing, but when you are trying to collect new players, the starting proposition that you must play through 110 levels in order to get to the new/good stuff is a losing one.  Just having 120 levels can be seen as a pretty big barrier to entry.

So why have more levels when it is pretty clear you can do without them?

The answer, to my mind, is because people expect them.

Blizzard is a very conservative company when it comes to their successful properties, and none of them is more successful nor a bigger money maker than WoW.  When you have the goose that keeps on laying golden checks every month… and when you have made changes in the past they haven’t necessarily turned out well… you do all you can to maintain it with screwing things up.  Launching an expansion with a boost in the level cap… and a 10 level boost because 5 level expansions were not as popular…  is just part of the recipe for success to which Blizz feels they need to adhere.

Basically this is the way they’ve always done it and it works, so why change?

Addendum: There is a closely related post over at GamingSF this morning as well.  Armagon Live also has a post about that as well.

Cleaning Up Delve

After spending a couple of weeks staged in Hakonen in order to make a mess in and around Tribute and Vale we were now mostly home and ready to clean up the mess in our own region.  Not only were we not mining and ratting as usual… though some intrepid souls stayed behind to rat and mine, which led to a string of carriers and Rorquals being blown up… but the interlopers had laid down structures about the place.  So it was time to start fixing all of that.

Back in the Capital of Delve

On the sovereignty front the reduced mining and ratting had lowered the activity defense multiplier in many systems (all of that sov stuff explained over here) to the point where there were now systems when the industrial index, a measure of how much mining has been going on in a system, dropped below 1.

At that level mining anomalies stop spawning, so to get that back up there was a call for people to go back to belt mining in those systems so that ore sites would start appearing again.  People got on that and ADMs are already up.

Meanwhile it was time to grind down some structures that he been left in our space.  There were plenty of ops going out to shoot things.  I went on a couple, including one that generated a kill mail.  It is always good to be there to see something blown up.

In this case it was a Raitaru left behind by a Pandemic Horde alt corp.  Laying as it did near NPC null space in the region a full scale op was laid down with a Machariel fleet heading out to do the shoot with capitals on alert in case anybody came to contest the shoot in numbers.

We bridged in from the staging Keepstar to a Fortizar in the target system.

Machariels landing at the Fort

From there we warped on grid with the Raitaru.  It had just come out of its timer and we locked it up, launched drones… why waste ammo… and set on it, pausing the repair timer and hitting the damage cap almost immediately.

The Timer paused

As I have noted in the past, the damage cap is there to keep people from blitzing structures.  Instead there is a minimum amount of time it takes to kill one, somewhere in the 25 minute range if I recall correctly.

Machariels anchoring up

It didn’t look like any hostiles were going to show up to defend it, so we just anchored up on the FC and let the drones do the work.

Machs just loafing about the Raitaru

Since this looked to be a milk run, I logged my alt in, got him in an Ibis, the Caldari rookie ship that you get for free any time you dock up in a station in a capsule and have no ships available, and gated him out to the target system.  It was only six gates away and nobody seemed to be camping us very hard since we got back from the north.

Once there I joined the fleet for long enough to get a warp in… the Raitaru wasn’t on grid with a celestial… then dropped fleet, targeted the structure, and added the minuscule firepower of the default Ibis to the assault.

The mighty Ibis fires on the Raitaru

I was mildly surprise/bemused that I didn’t have a skin for the ship.  Last year’s Yoiul Festival had skins for many ships, including the rookie ships, and I thought I had picked up an appropriate one for all of my characters.  Have to go check up on that, I might have forgotten to activate it.

Anyway, for some reason it is always a bit of fun to get one of the most modest ships in the game on a kill mail.  I left him orbiting and shooting as the structure was eventually worn down and began brewing up to explode.

Raitaru death throes

The Ibis wasn’t in the lowest damage spot on the kill mail even having arrived late and having single, low power weapon.  It is near the bottom, but not at the bottom, though I am sure the vagaries of the damage cap and people warping in at the last minute to get on the kill account for the elevated position.

And that was that.  We took gates back to the Keepstar and stood down to wait for the next call to help clean up the region.  Soon things should be back to normal.

I will be interested to see the August edition of the monthly economic report to see how much change a couple weeks away from the region changed the mining and ratting numbers.

Honest Gamer Trailers – No Man’s Sky

I hadn’t been paying too much attention to No Man’s Sky.  However, a bunch of people seemed to be excited about it before it launched… and upset about it when it was delayed… and have jumped onto the bandwagon such that it is.  And while some people are happy, I have also heard a lot of griping about the title

And if that isn’t enough for you, in this past week’s Zero Punctuation Yahtzee takes on the game and comes up with a very similar list of flaws.  I mean sure, Yahtzee is hard on every game, it is part of his shtick (Honest Game Trailers as well), but he is also good about bringing up bits he does like about a game, and he didn’t get very far on that front.  Plus, both videos seem to echo a some thing I had already heard.  Comparisons with Spore and it promise versus what it delivered keep cropping up, which along with the who refund thing, has put a damper on the title for me.

Which is sort of a shame because it seems like a title I might be interested in.  I’ll put it on my Steam wish list and see if more has been added to the game by the time the next Steam sale shows up.