Pokemon Go Relents on the Range Reduction

With the declaration that things were headed back to normal in May, Niantic immediately started making noises about rolling out some of the changes they had put in place in Pokemon Go during the pandemic.

Now, they certainly were not going to remove remote raid passes, something they added in response to COVID, because I am sure they are a big money maker for the company.  But they did throttle back on their usefulness.  They weren’t nerfed into oblivion, but if you started a raid with one it would be limited to 10 people and the damage output of remote raiders was dialed back.  Kind of a pain, but tolerable.  Our remote raid pass text group can still take down a five star boss if we can get six of us in the fight.

There were a few other changes, but the kicker, the one that got people howling, was the reduction in range when it came to accessing gyms and Pokestops.  In order to facilitate people being able to raid and battle in public during the pandemic they had doubled the range at which you could access gyms and Pokestops from 40 meters to 80 meters.

That is kind of a lot, and we immediately got used to that range.  We live in an area with a lot of gyms around, and that range puts a lot of them in range from the street, so my wife and I would go out and battle roll in the car, taking gyms and spinning Pokestops without having to stop and, in a couple cases, stand in the middle of somebody’s condo complex to battle.

So when Niantic pulled it, the change was immediately noticeable.  We had gotten used to the 80m range so quickly it was hard to recall the before times.  And we were not the only ones who felt the blow.  Lots of people complained, signed petitions, ranted on forums, and generally tried to raise an internet ruckus while Niantic seems quite unmoved.

This is one of those things where I wonder if the decision was even up to Niantic.  When they announced the roll back for Pokemon Go I went and checked their news for their other games, Ingress and that horrible Harry Potty skinned version of Pokemon Go, and the company wasn’t putting out press releases about post-COVID roll backs for those titles.

So I suspect, even if I cannot prove, that it was The Pokemon Company… which, given the ownership balance, is pretty much a sock puppet for Nintendo… that was calling the shots on this front.

The Pokemon Company oversees the Pokemon franchise with an iron fist and, because Nintendo has the biggest voice in the company, it also tends to reflect some of Nintendo’s obsessions, like health and forcing community interaction.   Some of that obsession has turned into fun features.  I liked the PokeWalker that came with Pokemon HeartGold & SoulSilver, and the whole Street Pass thing with the Nintendo 3DS series was genius.  But sometimes they push things a bit far, so I could see somebody at TPC declaring that 80m wasn’t close enough to foster community.

We had a grand old time with Pokemon Go Fest and sat on the steps of the old post office building with a crowd of fellow players and hit the four gyms in range without remote raid passes as we swapped stories and exchanged friend codes.  I think we were honestly more social being able to congregate in one place.  But you can’t tell Nintedo that.

But then the whole idea that the pandemic was over went out the window with the Delta variant and now ICU beds in red states are full of people who refused to get vaccinated to “own the libs” and makes and quarantines and working from home and remote schooling all possible in our reality again soon because we just can’t take this stuff seriously.

And so this past week Niantic announced that their task force studying player feedback on their pandemic feature roll back would be presenting their results on September 1st.  Yeah sure, whatever.

But they did say that the interaction range with gyms and Pokestops would be swapped back immediately and permanently to 80m.  Somebody saw the light… or felt the community wrath.

Trainers – we’re looking forward to sharing our plans as a result of the task force on September 1, but one thing does not have to wait! From now on, 80 meters will be the base interaction radius for PokéStops and Gyms globally. (1/2)

— Pokémon GO (@PokemonGoApp) August 25, 2021

I texted my wife, who was out and about, and she confirmed that the 80m range seemed to be back in place.  So we’re happy again.  We’re going on a trip soon… if it isn’t scuttled by COVID… and having that extra range in a new place will make for some easier Pokemon adventures out in the world.

The Shadowlands Expansion is coming to WoW on October 26th

I knew if I was away for a few days some big news item would drop.  Actually, a few things came up while I was gone, but for me the big one was Blizzard announcing the launch date for the Shadowlands expansion.

The worldwide launch, similar to how the company launched WoW Classic last year, will happen across time zones landing on October 26th or 27th depending on where you live.

The world-wide launch plan

There is also a release date trailer… which looks pretty good.

I wish my in-game experienced looked so good.  I probably need the latest generation video card to get there.

By a complete luck, when I wrote about potential launch dates, my sample date for estimating the time between releases was October 27th.  If only I had been that on the nose with my new year’s predictions, where my call was August 18th.  No points for that prediction I guess.

So, if Shadowlands launches on time, the time between expansions list will end up looking like this:

• WoW Launch to The Burning Crusade – 784 days
• The Burning Crusade to Wrath of the Lich King – 667 days
• Wrath of the Lich King to Cataclysm – 754 days
• Cataclysm to Mists of Pandaria – 658 days
• Mists of Pandaria to Warlords of Draenor – 778 days
• Warlords of Draenor to Legion – 670 days
• Legion to Battle for Azeroth – 728 days
• Battle for Azeroth to Shadowlands – 804 days

That still makes Battle for Azeroth the longest running era for WoW, running out to 804 days, passing even the run from the launch of vanilla in 2004 to the release of The Burning Crusade 784 days later.

I have not been paying much attention to the Shadowlands beta.  That probably makes it more likely I will enjoy the expansion, if my rule of surprise… not knowing the content ahead of time keeps me more engaged… holds true.  We shall see.

We still have one major milestone to hit before launch though, and that is the pre-launch patch.

While the pre-launch patch is generally a big deal, as it opens up the lead-in stories and quests that set the stage for a new expansion, this one is doing extra duty as it will also usher in the level squish.  The level squish will make 50 the new pre-expansion level cap.  All old content will scale for levels 10 to 50, and a new level 1 to 10 starter experience will be introduced.

What the new level ranges will be

For at least some period of time my highest level character in WoW Classic (my hunter is level 54) will be higher level than any of my retail WoW characters, which will cap out at level 50 pre-expansion.

Strange but true.

So the big question is when the 9.0.1 update will hit, bringing with it all of these changes?

Another chance to guess a date!  I am going to guess it will hit the week of September 21st.  This is a big change, so my thought is that Blizzard will want some extra time to work out the wrinkles.  That will give them five weeks to get things settled down.

Of course, with the 10-50 scaling of all of the old content, it also means that if you were solo farming some old raid for a specific drop… maybe something for one of the Raiding with Leashed achievements… you had best get it done before the patch hits, as all the content will be level 50 afterwards.  How things will play out when you get to level 60 is an open question for me still.  We shall see.

WoW Classic and the Hunter’s Path

I am in no hurry to get through things in WoW Classic.  As tends to be my approach, I want to cover a lot of ground without wearing myself out.  And wandering every side path has already paid off.  This was the era of random quest givers stuck in the middle of nowhere.

The exception so far has been with my hunter.

The hunter was probably the most distinctive class of early WoW; strange, complicated, and always pressed for inventory space, both because hunters lose a bag slot to hold ammo and because you have to carry food for your pet.

But a hunter without a pet is practically no hunter at all… and all the more so where your still running around with the 1 dps newbie hand axe because you haven’t gotten a fortunate drop yet.  Three gun upgrades, but no melee,  and without a pet every encounter gets resolved at knife range… or axe range, as the case may be.

So I was in a bit of a hurry to get to level 10 with Tistann so he could get a pet going.

I was out in grinding that last bit of experience by taking down leper gnomes past Brewnall Village, itself a quest destination.  I had already done the Operation Recombobulation quest there… another one of those quests you might miss if you don’t wander in the right building… but leper gnomes were good exp and drop coins, cloth, and the occasional green quality item.  I finally got my axe upgraded hitting them.

Battling a leper gnome, just a few xp to go

That got me to level 10, at which point I started to trot on back to Kharanos where the hunter trainer with the class quest hangs out.  I had forgotten that class quests were a thing really, except for hunters.  But SynCaine reminded me that they are there for everybody and do require a bit of class knowledge.

I passed through Brewnall Village to sell some drops and saw that I had a quest waiting for me there.  And it wasn’t just any quest, but the lead-in quest for the hunter class quest.

Hunter quest for you

This wasn’t the best assumption on the part of Blizzard I suppose.  I had already finished up the quests in the area by the time I was into level 9, and this quest only goes live when you hit level 10.  I could have easily left the area, hit level 10, and never have seen it.  I don’t think it blocks you from getting the actual level 10 hunter class quest, but I would have missed out all the same.  These days a quest just appears for you in the UI to keep you from missing such things.  But back in the day some game designer just assumed that of course all dwarven hunters would be passing through Brewnall Village after hitting level 10.

I took the quest and kept on trucking to the hunter trainer, where I got a little extra xp for having the lead-in quests I suppose.  And then it was on to the real deal.

The Hunter’s Path

The Hunter’s Path is in a few stages.  You run out and tame a crag boar, a snow leopard, and an ice claw bear as samples of the pets you can tame.

Taming the bear

You have to spend ten minutes with them, which I used to go hunt some more skinnable animals.  I had picked up skinning and leather working with Tistann.  And while the auction house was saturated with light leather (and we’re all too poor to buy anything still anyway) I was quite active in skinning everything I could find, so those stacks of light leather could be sold to a vendor for 3 silver each if I was short of coin.

After the three runs, you are given the ability to tame a pet of your own, as the three each disappear as you finish up each quest.  Then the next step is to run up to Ironforge and find the pet trainer… the trainer with skills for your pets.  You also get some of the follow-on skills, like pet feeding, dismissing, calling, and reviving.  I had to sell a couple of those stacks of light leather to load up on everything.

And then it was time to go out and find a pet of my own.  My gut said I should get a bear, and not just any bear, but a bear from Elwyn Forest in the human starter area.  There was a reason to get that particular bear, but I couldn’t recall why.  I just knew I did that back in the day for a reason, and my hunter on WoW live still has that pet from way back in the day, even though any advantage has long since been ironed out by changes to the game.

Fortunately Petopia, the long standing hunter pet reference site, had opened up a Petopia Classic page for those of us playing WoW Classic.

That brought me back up to speed on bears as pets.  Some of it I knew, like the fact that bears are good tanks.  I had forgotten they were pretty omnivorous, which is handy since you have to keep pets fed to keep them happy.  And the bears in Elwyn Forest come with a rank 2 version of the Claw skill, which other bears don’t get until later.

So I took the tram from Ironforge to Stormwind then ran down the hill to find a bear.  I was able to tame a nice level 9 specimen.  Level is kind of important, both for what skills they can learn and because your pets level up independently of you, capped only by your own level.  I was nearly level 11 at that point, so wanted a pet that wasn’t too far behind.

Pet tamed, then fed until he was happy, I used my hearthstone to get back to Ironforge.  Fortunately I remember to set it at the inn there.  So my hunter now has his first pet.  I ran around and killed some mobs with him, which got both of us a level.

A bear named Barstow

I just have to keep him fed.  A fed pet is a happy pet.

Happy Barstow

I’ve never had a pet run away on me, though it has been said that an unhappy pet can lose enough loyalty that they will take off.  Now my hunter can get on with actually being a hunter… though I need some more silver so I can stable Barstow at some point, because to learn some skills you have to tame a an animal that has the skill, the work with them until you learn it.  Then you abandon them, unstable your own pet, then hunt with them until they pick up the skill.

Being a hunter can be a job at times, but there are few classes so fun and flexible… in WoW Classic at least.

Blaugust and Keeping the Words Flowing to the Site

Dans ses écrits, un sage Italien
Dit que le mieux est l’ennemi du bien.

-Voltaire

Here we are in the last week of Blaugust and the topic of the week is about staying motivated.

To write a single blog post is pretty easy.  We all have something to say, some opinion to share, something to complain about, or some entertaining tale of challenge, victory, defeat, or shame.  It probably isn’t a chore to get to maybe half a dozen posts.  The world is, as I noted a couple weeks back, full of topics if you look closely enough.

But at some point the white hot rage or whatever drove you to start a blog will diminish.  You will have said the things that were on your mind at the beginning and will have to face the fact that if you want to keep writing you will need both a source of topics and the motivation to keep going.

If you are happy with what you have written, if people are reading, if you’re getting comments that turn into thoughtful discussions or interesting counter-points to your posts, it will be easier to carry on.  Attention is a powerful motivator.

But what if you post your well crafted opus on the evolution of housing options in Runes of Magic and nobody responds?

There was a time about a decade back when you could reliably count on somebody showing up for a comment if you had managed to pass what seems now like a fairly low bar of notoriety.  The stats that WP.com shows me say that there was a stretch when I could count on an average of 8 comments per post.  Even with some percentage of those being my own responses in comments, that is a lot of discussion going on.

As SynCaine pointed out in my July month in review post, there was a link to a reference to a fairly simple post he did back in 2009 that ended up with 40 comments.  That was the golden age, where a rant or a controversial opinion might get your comments to overflow.

But now a days the threshold for getting comments has risen quite a bit.  The advent of other social media channels like Twitter and Reddit, and other gamer outlets like Twitch, not to mention the whims of Google, has made blogs much more of a niche than they were.  Comments per post here, which peaked at 9 a decade back, are a lot closer to 3 these days.  And if it wasn’t for Bhagpuss that number would probably have sunk to around 2.

What do you do now?

Well, first, go leave a comment on another blog.  They’ll appreciate it.  And, if they don’t, you know not to bother going forward.  There are still plenty of fish in that sea.

But after that, you probably need to evaluate why you were blogging in the first place and work towards that as a goal.

If you started blogging in order to get traffic and comments and whatever, you can still do that.  It is more difficult than it was a decade back, but you can still swing it.  You can work on your SEO, you can promote your blog on a wide range of social networks, and you can tackle controversial topics or take radical stances on more mundane things.  You can get attention.  Whether that attention will make you happy is your call.

Or maybe you set out simply to craft a gold plated edifice of perfect text that you expect to stand the test of time and and serve as a shining beacon to future generations.  You might manage that with a few more revisions of that post that has been sitting in your drafts folder for two years already.

My own motivation is much more mundane; just to remember.

Even if you have your writing goals nailed down and you can think up topics left and right, there can still be times when motivation lacks.  Do I want to write about another move op or quest run or achievement?  Sometimes the words just won’t come, or dribble out half halfheartedly.  It is around then that I feel like I need to prime the pump.  The one thing that seems to get me writing is to be writing already.  So I have a series of regular posts I do, or events that I will write about, which I can fall back on.  I mentioned a few in my prep week post.

Probably the most common on here at TAGN is the month in review post.  I have managed to do one on the last day of the month, every month, since I started the blog.  But I don’t have to write it on that day.  It has a standard format and, save for a couple of entries that require the end of the month, I can start writing it any time.  I often start writing these posts weeks in advance when I have some time to write but don’t feel I have something to write about.  Doing the 1/5/10 years ago section often sparks ideas and leads me off to some topic about which to write.

Another post type I find I can get running with are Quote of the Day posts.  Somebody is always saying something.  Take their quote and run with it.  And then there are “Summer Re-Runs” posts, where I lump together a series of posts on a specific topic that bring together a story or a bit of history.

There are some other regular posts, like a look at the EVE Online Monthly Economic Report and the SuperData Research digital video game revenue chart.  EVE Online also releases a patch/feature update most months, which is an easy item to write about.

And then there are the items that trigger posts for me, things like announcements, patch notes, expansions, and the sort of headline news items that come around once in a while.  There are times when I get in almost a reactionary style of writing, where these sorts of bits that I feel I ought to write about start showing up all of a sudden and I am just writing about them.  The blog starts to feel like a news site as I try to cover these sorts of things.  But I am not about news, but about context, the idea that all sorts of things are going on even if I am only playing EVE Online or WoW in a given week.

Of course, the problem with standard posts is that they can start to feel routine.  If they get stale then they are less likely to spur you to write other things.  Sometimes you have to shake things up in order to find a new balance that can keep you going.  For example, for the EVE Online MER I kept reporting on the same charts for over a year.  When that got stale, I decided to find something specific to focus on each month, something related to events in the game to see what influence they had.

And then there was the weekly Fantasy Movie League posts, which grew to be immense, 2,000 word ventures each week.  That started to feel like a burden.  So I looked at what was the most interesting bits and focused on that… for me it is probably the look at the new movies that show up each week… and cut other parts back to no more than what was probably really needed.

But all of those together, the regular posts and the fall back options, give me just enough structure that I seem to be able to build up a week’s worth of posts, one week after another, until another year has gone by.  And then they find their way into the Month in Review post where I look at them and often find inspiration from them yet again.

Or I suppose you could just to what WordPress.com sent me this morning about writing more.

Summer Movie League – The Mediocre Muppet Caper

Our summer Fantasy Movie League is coming to a close soon as we are now through week thirteen, the penultimate week of the season.

I like the word “penultimate” and will use it every chance I get.

For week thirteen we had the following choices for our lineups.

Crazy Rich Asians     $318
Happytime Murders     $264
The Meg               $201
Mile 22               $129
Mission: Impossible   $127
Christopher Robin     $106
Alpha                 $102
BlacKkKlansman        $84
A.X.L.                $58
Hotel Transylvania 3  $45
Slender Man           $40
Mamma Mia 2           $35
Ant-Man and the Wasp  $29
The Equalizer 2       $28
Incredibles 2         $27

Crazy Rich Asians was still slated to take the top spot in its second week, but second place was expected to go to Happytime Murders, with The Meg coming in third.

I was not enthusiastic at all for Happytime Murders however.  As I said in league chatter, to me it seemed like a picture in search of an audience.  The clips and trailers, along with the R rating, were pushing it as an adult feature, so you couldn’t expect too many kids going to see it.

But even with Melissa McCarthy at the helm it looked like a rip-off of homage to Who Framed Roger Rabbit, a film with a PG rating back in the 80s, done with muppets rather than animation.  Or puppets rather, as muppets are a registered trademark of the Disney corporation.  The film was clearly trying to ride on that association however, along with children’s television with the tag line “No Sesame, All Street,” for which they were sued by the Children’s Television Workshop.

So I was staying away from that.  I was also down on A.X.L. which, despite its low threshold for success based on its FML pricing, seemed trite and uninspired.

At the beginning of the week I was keen on CRA and my Monday Hot Takes League saw me anchor on two screens of that along with some filler that was mostly picked to spend my budget and avoid A.X.L.

As the week went on though, I began to feel like CRA wasn’t going to do it, that to be worth that price it would have to have an almost unprecedentedly small drop in earnings week over week as to be unlikely.

I decided that since I could get three screens of The Meg for less than the price of two screens of CRA that I would go with sharks for my anchor.  So I ended up with 3x The Meg, 1x Mile 22, 2x BlackKklansman, and 2x Hotel Transylvania for the TAGN league pick.

Summer Movie League – My Week Thirteen Picks

That wasn’t a bad pick.  I did okay for the week.  But if I had just stuck with my Monday pick I would have won the week in the TAGN league because CRA only dropped 6% week over week, which was just the sort of unprecedented result that was needed to justify the price.  Anchoring on two screens of CRA was the path to the perfect pick.

Summer Movie League – Week Thirteen Perfect Pick

While I failed to get on board with CRA, at least I didn’t go with Happytime Murders which, in addition to confused marketing and poor reviews, also fell into third place overall for the week behind The Meg.  And that wasn’t because The Meg was suddenly on fire, but because Happytime Murders just didn’t have the draw.

On the other hand A.X.L. did okay, at least based on its FML pricing.  It ended up just about where it needed to be so if you used it as a filler item it didn’t drag you down.

Thus the week ended up with scores looking like this:

1. Joanie’s Joint – $71,400,125
2. grannanj’s Cineplex – $70,978,648
3. Vigo Grimborne’s Medieval Screening Complex – $70,706,218
4. Corr’s Carefully Curated Cineplex – $62,887,75
5. Ben’s X-Wing Express – $60,735,430
6. Wilhelm’s Abyssal Pocket Playhouse – $60,084,033
7. Too Orangey For Crows – $53,041,276
8. SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights – $49,660,699
9. Miniature Giant Space Hamsterplex – $42,582,979
10. Goat Water Picture Palace – $42,550,095
11. Po Huit’s Sweet Movie Suite – $40,224,039
12. Darren’s Unwatched Cineplex – $39,238,157

Joanie won the week, their first win of the season, though grannanj and Vigo were close behind.  All three of them anchored on a pair of CRA screens.  After that we get into people who anchored on The Meg.  Corr had four screens of it, Ben had two, and I had three.  Go figure.

After that Happytime Murders start figuring in lineups, dragging them down, though SynCaine went all in on Mile 22, so stands out in the pack in that regard at least.

That left the overall scores for the season looking like this:

1. Corr’s Carefully Curated Cineplex – $1,175,879,341
2. Wilhelm’s Abyssal Pocket Playhouse – $1,125,111,970
3. Goat Water Picture Palace – $1,108,602,352
4. Ben’s X-Wing Express – $1,034,589,827
5. Vigo Grimborne’s Medieval Screening Complex – $1,000,347,512
6. SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights – $993,182,641
7. Miniature Giant Space Hamsterplex – $988,423,806
8. Darren’s Unwatched Cineplex – $986,412,699
9. Po Huit’s Sweet Movie Suite – $974,990,413
10. Joanie’s Joint – $952,413,909
11. Too Orangey For Crows – $950,848,424
12. grannanj’s Cineplex – $944,483,300
13. I HAS BAD TASTE – $890,174,972
14. Skar’s Movies and Meat Pies – $707,708,993

Corr widened his lead against Goat and myself, though I was able to reclaim second place from Goat.  Vigo jumped up several spots on a strong performance and Joanie pushed Bhagpuss off of his hard earned tenth place spot with their week winning finish.

Now we are headed into the fourteenth and final week.  While Corr has first place locked, Goat and I are still battling over second, while fifth position still could change hands as well.

To get there we have the following choices.

Crazy Rich Asians     $460
The Meg               $204
Mission: Impossible   $143
Operation Finale      $133
Christopher Robin     $116
Searching             $111
Happytime Murders     $108
Alpha                 $97
BlacKkKlansman        $92
Mile 22               $89
Kin                   $82
Incredibles 2         $62
Ya Veremos            $56
Hotel Transylvania 3  $49
A.X.L.                $44

Falling off the list for the final week are Slender Man, Mamma Mia 2, The Equalizer 2, and Ant-Man and the Wasp.  I am a bit surprised that The Increadibles 2 held on for another week since it was the bottom pick for week thirteen.  Pixar magic I guess, as it has made the cut twelve weeks running now.  That is no Black Panther run, but it is damn good.

New this week are Operation Finale, Searching, Kin, and Ya Veremos, none of which I had heard of until I started working on this post.

Operation Finale follows the story of the Israeli abduction and trial of Adolph Eichmann in 1960.  This tale has been done before as The House on Garibaldi Street , The Man who Captured Eichmann, Eichmann, and Operation Eichmann.  The latter stands out in my mind especially since it featured Werner Klemperer as Eichmann and John Banner as Rudolph Hoess, roles made somewhat surreal due to their characters on the show Hogan’s Heroes.  I remember seeing it on TV at one point and not being able to tell if it was serious or not for quite a stretch due to the actors and how they played it.

Operation Finale was pegged at about $7 million on the last long range forecast I saw, though it was trending upward.  It should be at about 1,800 theaters in the US.

Searching is a thriller starting John Cho, of whom I am a big fan, about a father whose daughter is kidnapped and as the police find no leads he goes off after her, following her digital footprint.  A technological Taken maybe?  I don’t know, but there is no long range forecast for it, so maybe not at the Liam Neeson scale.  It is supposed to be in 1,100 theaters, expanding from just 9, and is in its second week so won’t get any boost from Thursday night previews.

Kin is… well… I will let the ad copy spell it out:

Armed with a mysterious weapon, an ex-con and his adopted teenage brother go on the run from a vengeful criminal and a gang of otherworldly soldiers.

So we have that.  It was called at $5 million on the latest long range forecast and was estimated to be in 2,100 theaters.

And then there is Ya Veremos, a Spanish language film, with no long range forecast either.  While it has done very well in Mexico foreign language films are always a bit of a wildcard here.

On top of all of that, we have a holiday weekend coming up in the US.  Viva Labor Day and all that.  Time to put away the white shoes.

That means this week fourteen is a four day haul, Friday through Monday, and the forecasts I mentioned above were only for the first three days.  Forecasts and results always get messed up on these weeks, a situation made all the worse by this being the final week of the season.  You are pretty much on your own this time around as the forecasts won’t help much.

Meanwhile, the new season starts the following weekend, so there will be a busy transition as this season wraps up a day late while the new season starts.  Expect two posts, but the new season post might be on Wednesday with the old season results showing up on Thursday.  There are only so many hours in the day to write this stuff.

Also, the plan for next season is to return to the default FML rules, including screens locking at 9am Pacific Time on Fridays, so you’ll have an extra day to pick in the hope that fewer people will forget.  If you have any thoughts on next season leave a comment here or in the FML Chatter group for the league, which is where we are also talking about scoring alternatives.

But this season still is still going, though it effectively closes on Thursday at 9am, so you have less than 24 hours to make your final picks.  Go do them!  Now!

My Monday Hot Takes picks are currently 4x The Meg and 4x A.X.L., but you know I’ll change my mind by Thursday.  I am trying to figure out who goes to the movies on Labor Day weekend.

CCP Launches Sparc Today

Sparc is a virtual sport, or vSport – a unique physical sport only possible in virtual reality, in which players compete in full-body VR gameplay and connect in an online community.

-What is Sparc, from the Sparc FAQ

CCP launched their latest title today, a VR game called Sparc.

Sparc – Virtual Sports

The press release from CCP says that it is available for the PlayStation 4 with PlayStation VR from the PlayStation Store for $29.99.  There is also a launch trailer.

There is a mention of a version for PC in the FAQ, but no firm date as yet.

The game itself has been compared to Wii Sports, the extremely popular game that was bundled with the Wii in many countries.  Wii Sports was an excellent demonstration of the potential of the Wii motion controllers, a potential that the controllers never really achieved.  Wii Sports was a selling point for the Wii.

That is a pretty high bar for Sparc, which is not bundled with anything and requires potential players to have invested in the PlayStation VR hardware.  Add in the fact that you cannot play locally against another player, having to connect to opponents over the internet, thus any match requires two PlayStation 4s and two PlayStation VR sets.

Still, a simple, fun, and not-too-expensive VR sports game might do well within the VR niche, even if it isn’t the killer app that Wii Sports was for the Wii.

The game has been controversial with a few EVE Online players since it was announced back in February of this year.

There is, of course, the usual outrage at EVE Online funding other games.  For all of the recurring “EVE is dying!” sentiment, it still pays the bills for CCP.  However, any business funds new projects from the profits of current projects.  That is just the way things work.  EVE Online itself was funded, in part, by profits from the board game Hættuspil.  What goes around comes around.  The problem is that, being an MMORPG, EVE Online never feels “done,” so taking money from a game that clearly still needs work (and will forever need work) does not sit well.

And then there is the fact that Sparc, unlike Valkyrie, Gunjack, or the late DUST 514, does not glorify the universe of New Eden.  A VR spaceship game might at least bring some attention to our internet spaceship game.  A cartoony virtual sports game doesn’t even do that.

My own view is a bit mixed.  I’ve worked on projects that basically paid all the bills in the past, and have been irked by resources being siphoned off to build new things.  And as an EVE Online player I always want CCP to pay more attention to the game.  But I also know that in business not expanding is often equated with dying, and the days of growth for EVE Online seem to be in the past.  The game has too much baggage and is far too niche to expect to reach new heights now.

So the best hope for EVE Online going forward is a healthy and prosperous CCP, and we get that by CCP doing well with other products, or so it seems to me.  We shall see.

Anyway, I have neither a PlayStation 4 nor any VR hardware, so Sparc clearly isn’t for me.  But if it does do well I suspect we will hear about it from CCP.

Blogger Fantasy Movie League – The Final Score Summer 2017

Here we are at the end of the thirteenth week and it is time to see how things shook out for our summer fantasy movie league.

Unfortunately, there isn’t a lot of drama or any sort surprises in the results, something capped off by the fact that the past weekend was the slowest box office of the year so far. (This coming weekend could be even slower however, with nothing new opening, though being a holiday weekend might help.)

We came into the final week with these options on the table:

 Hitman's Bodyguard  $203
 Annabelle Creation  $143
 Birth of the Dragon $99
 Dunkirk             $74
 Logan Lucky         $73
 Leap!               $68
 All Saints          $67
 The Nut Job 2       $58
 Emoji Movie         $53
 Spider-Man          $52
 Wonder Woman        $50
 Girls Trip          $40
 The Dark Tower      $33
 Baby Driver         $32
 Kidnap              $30

Those titles are ranked by expected box office, so when the new titles for the week only rank 3rd, 5th, and 6th on the list, it isn’t going to be a hot week.

Hitman’s Bodyguard, which was the top earner for week twelve was fully expected to hang on to the top position for week thirteen even if its take was estimated to drop by half.  That made it the obvious anchor for any serious lineup.  The question was how deep to go with it.  Liore, Ocho, and I went for three screens while the remaining contestants still standing, save Braxwolf, were in for two screens.

With parity on that front, the question of who would win the week was based solely on what people chose to support their anchor pick.  I went all-in on Leap! as it was getting some last minute buzz causing box-office expectations for the title to jump from $3.5 million to $5 million, something that not only made it a contender but also made it a show-in for best price/performance title of the week and the $2 million per screen bonus for picking it.

My Week 13 Picks… yes, it says Ballerina, but the US title is Leap!

Ocho went all-in on Dunkirk while Liore split the difference with three screens Dunkirk and two screens Leap!.  Those picks made sense in the “spend as much of your budget as possible” strategy, since going all-in with Leap! left me with $51 of my grand unspent.

Meanwhile, in a rare moment of symmetry, Void and Pasduil both went for two screens of Hitman’s Bodyguard and six screens of Birth of the Dragon.

And then there was Braxwolf who was all-in on The Nut Job 2 as another comedic entry.  If only he had gone all-in on Leap! he might have done pretty well.

On Saturday, with the Friday night estimates came in, my bet on Leap! seemed to be paying off, and when the Saturday night updates came in the next day, my selections looked like they would be the perfect pick of the week.  Finally we got the official number and the week shook out like this:

1. Wilhelm’s Clockwork Lemon Multiplex – $70,227,500
2. Dr Liore’s Evil House of Pancakes – $56,031,000
3. Ocho’s Octoplex – $49,900,000
4. Moderate Peril’s Sleazy Porno Theatre – $46,767,994
5. Syl’s Fantasy Galore Panopticum – $37,850,682
6. Void’s Awesomeplex – $35,106,600
7. Pasduil’s Popcorn Picturehouse – $35,106,600
8. Braxwolf’s Waffleplex – $17,671,008

So I won the week!  Go me!  And I got the perfect pick, an honor I shared with 1,550 other individuals.  It was the most popular pick of the week as well.

Perfect Pick for Week 13

That still didn’t change the final standings.  While I was able to close the gap between Liore and myself over the last two weeks, I remained over $30 million behind at the final counting.  Liore, who has been in first place since week one, maintained her dominance and won the overall season:

1. Dr Liore’s Evil House of Pancakes – $1,280,117,213
2. Wilhelm’s Clockwork Lemon Multiplex – $1,249,236,020
3. Ocho’s Octoplex – $1,124,432,158
4. Void’s Awesomeplex – $1,094,582,400
5. Moderate Peril’s Sleazy Porno Theatre – $1,079,963,459
6. Pasduil’s Popcorn Picturehouse – $1,055,255,483
7. Braxwolf’s Waffleplex – $995,627,210
8. Syl’s Fantasy Galore Panopticum – $956,452,366
9. Murf’s Matinee Mania – $833,121,646 (dropped out Week 11)
10. Bel’s House of Horrors – $803,362,573 (dropped out Week 11)
11. Clockwork’s Cinesplosion – $274,973,532 (dropped out Week 4)

Congrats to Liore for winning.  I understand she also won in her other, more competitive league, edging out the second place contestant by a very slim margin.

Ocho held on to third place… and… well… everybody mostly held onto the positions they likely occupied for most of the season.  Syl climbed up over those who dropped out, but otherwise the ladder remained fairly well fixed in place.

Liore won of course because she won most of the individual weeks.  The standings for weeks won were:

• Liore – 7 weeks
• Wilhelm – 5 weeks
• Braxwolf – 1 week

Winning weeks… which means getting the top score… means winning the season and Liore managed that.

Technically I “won” seven weeks as well, since I tied with Liore on two occasions, but the weeks I did not win Liore managed a much larger leading gap than I could muster on the weeks I won.  So I was a solid second place, but could never get within striking range of first.

Just to beat this to death, I made a chart showing the week by week results of Liore, Ocho, and myself.  I made a chart with everybody, but it had too many lines to be clear, so I just went with the top three.  All of the weekly data is posted here if you want to make you’re own chart.

Week by Week result chart

Liore opened up a big lead on the first week, for which she got some grief.  That wasn’t wholly undeserved.  When you suggest a game to some friends and beat the tar out of them in the first round, they might rightfully suspect something is amiss.  I think if we had had a couple of warm-up weeks, the race might have been closer in the end.

Maybe.

I was $25 million behind on the first week, but fell as far as $87 million behind after my horrible showing in week ten.  I only closed the gap because Liore forgot to pick in week twelve.  So Liore forgetting offsets her first week domination.  In the end, she was the most skilled at picking and deserved to win.

Overall, out of all of the people who played this season, about 17K individuals, I came in 988th place.

The overall winner of the season was “20th Century Plopstar: Never Stop Never Flopping” who rang up a total score of $1,407,976,016.  So there we are.

I’m still a bit dubious on the bonus for getting the perfect pick of the week.  That does seem to extend the lead for somebody who already won.  Likewise, while I see how the bonus for best price/performance title each week leads to considering a titles you might otherwise ignore, it also feels like it distorts the process a bit.  Then again, in a contest like this, being able to min/max to get to the winning pick is going to happen regardless of the bonuses, so I am not sure removing either would really change things.

I suppose that the award for the person who ran their cineplex most like a real theater throughout the season goes to Contains Moderate Peril.  He only went the min/max route for the week of the Spider-Man debut.

Meanwhile, the film of the season has to be Wonder Woman, which launched on the first week of the season and was still available as a $50 pick on the final week, upstaging even the long lasting Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2.

Here at the end of the season I would say that I enjoyed the experience.  I certainly paid more attention than usual to what movies were coming out.  Unfortunately, we did not actually go and see that many movies during the summer.  That was more a matter of circumstances at home… my wife has been really busy on weekends so going to see a movie hasn’t really been an option as often as one would like… so I believe we only saw Wonder Woman, Dunkirk, Baby Driver, and Hitman’s Bodyguard which were, in that order, excellent, excellent, excellent, and exactly what was expected so very funny if not all that surprising.

So now what?

A new Fantasy Movie League season starts this week.  I will probably make weekly picks and watch how things go.  I’ll stay in Liore’s league.  However, I am unlikely to blog about it every week the way I have done.

Come next summer though, I would be up for another run, either in Liore’s league or in a new one that I or somebody else rolls up.

Anyway, thanks to Liore for inviting us along for this summer run!

Ten Years of Internet Spaceships

Ten years ago today I signed up for EVE Online, made a character… Wilhelm Arcturus… yes, EVE Who says August 30, but 03:58 UTC was still August 29 here in California… and undocked for the first time in New Eden.

Or tried to undock.  The freakin’ tutorial back in 2006 had me sitting in the station, in my pod, but kept telling me to open up the hangar.

Still, I somehow managed to get in a ship, undock, kill the elusive pirates, and advance into the serious business that is internet spaceships.  When I started the game was going strong, passing 100,000 capsuleers according to the old timeline graphic (and this dev blog).  Also, the game broke the 30K PCU mark!  The current expansion was the forgettable Bloodlines which, so far as I could tell, only really added a few character creation options.

Bloodlines – March 2006

Okay, tech II modules came into being as well with Bloodlines, along with a few other details.

But Revelations was on its way soon.

Revelations – November 2006

And with Revelations would come salvaging, invention, rigs, many bugs, and motherfucking warp to goddam zero, something that changed everybody’s lives.  Seriously, that was the end of the “uphill, both ways, in the snow” era for travel by gates.  (Sugar Kyle has a post up about that era and its events.)

It was a strange and wonderful time.  MMORPGs were a thing, World of Warcraft caused a lot of “if we build it, they will come” moments as its subscription base continued to climb, causing even Richard “Lord British” Garriott to say at GDC that you would be foolish not to be making such games. (As opposed to when he said that about Facebook games.)  Blogs and podcasts about MMOs were all the rage and a flourishing community of people seemed to coalesce around VirginWorlds to discuss and debate the relative merits of various entries in the field.  This blog was still two weeks from going live and I was still debating possible names.  A pity I went with the one that seemed the most amusing at the time.

EVE Online was in the thick of those discussions because back then, as now, there wasn’t really anything else quite like it.  And one item that kept coming up was the fact that you couldn’t get out of your ship.

We had long discussions back in the day about whether or not simply being unable to interact face to face would limit the appeal of the game.  Space is huge and very lonely and, even where ships congregate, a passing ship is just a cold machine that doesn’t even have a dance emote.  That was a hot topic and CCP was on the case even back then.  Of course, after seeing what more than five years of work gave us in the Incarna expansion, a lot of people (myself included) changed our minds on whether or not it was worth the effort.

No, a far bigger problem with EVE Online to my mind, the one that persists through to today, is the fact that in order to play the game effectively a capsuleer must avail themselves of the many external utilities that players have created to support the game.  If you want another variation on “EVE is Dying!” take a look at how things are going in that arena.  Battle Clinic has gone away, EVE Mon support seems to be tottering, EVE Fitting Tool was last updated back in May, Pyfa is likewise behind, and over on Reddit, /r/eve has sucked all the joy out of any discussion of the game by becoming the primary focus for several key groups and where a mass of howling morons are more interested in adding their voice to the comments than considering whether or not their comments adds any value.  It is Sturgeon’s Law run amok.  It makes me miss the Kugutsumen forums badly.

And in a world where if Wollari decides he’s taking down DOTLAN EVE Maps we’re all doomed, what has CCP been up to?  Back in 2006 I was pissing and moaning about the in-game map, which was pretty but useless for actually getting information you needed in any expedient way.  CCP has worked on that map for years and made it somewhat useful.  At least I can see where my fleet members are.  And after that, they rolled out a new map, which is even prettier but, in terms of usefulness, brought us back to 2006 or earlier.  I think even CCP realizes they fucked up there and I won’t be surprised to see a release note about how the new map has been removed from the game at some future date.  Wasted opportunities while the game remains as dependent as ever on the charity of players.

But my purpose wasn’t to rant about CCP’s stewardship of the game, though it is hard not to slip into that now and again, hindsight giving one such clear vision.  It was to meander a bit through what was going on a decade back in and around New Eden.

There was the great Intergalactic Bank scam, a ponzi scheme wherein somebody set up a bank, took deposits, promised to pay interest, paid some out of the ongoing deposits, and then folded up shop and ran off with more than 700 billion ISK.  Brent had a good summary on the VirginWorlds podcast (episode 27, with a follow up in episode 29), where he brought up one of the key post scam issues: How do you get back at somebody who doesn’t have a space empire, just a pile of ISK?  And this was before ISK casinos allowed a few people push their agendas through payouts while remaining immune to any response.  CCP was more interested at the time, as they are now, in any illicit RMT transactions involving that stolen ISK.  They were even hinting about a plan they had to make ISK selling obsolete, though it would be another 3 years before PLEX would land in the game.

It has also been almost ten years since CCP partnered with Vivox to bring voice coms directly into the EVE Online client, thus removing our need to use external voice software like TeamSpeak or Mumble.  Hah, hah, hah!  Seriously though, does anybody use the built-in voice?  Or does turning on sound still cause a big performance hit to the game?  I haven’t had sound on for years.  This was another topic covered by Brent on the VirginWorlds podcast (episode 29).  That podcast is a gold mine for anybody who wants to get a glimpse of the MMO scene a decade back.

My own history in New Eden has had its ups and downs.  I ended up cancelling my account after my first three months in game, then came back to it a few months later.  I created a second account 11 months after my first, when I started the great trek to master mining.  Two years in I created another blog just to post pictures of the game.

During that second period I ran missions, did manufacturing, invention, played the market, did some hauling, dipped a toe into factional warfare, learned to scan well enough to get in and out of wormholes (which I have since forgotten how to do), and generally stuck in high sec for about four years, after which I took a break.  I came back for Incarna and unsubscribed almost immediately upon seeing what was being offered, then came back again for Crucible, when CCP promised to actually start working on the broken stuff in the game.  About then Gaff offered me a chance to run off to sov null sec, and I have been there for almost five years now and have seen many of the most publicized moments from that time.

I have 1,080 posts up on the blog that focus on EVE Online in some way or another that cover topics from the big fight at B-R5RB to simply moving my ships from one location to another.

According to Zkillboard, up to this point I have been on 2,038 kill mails, a large portion of which are structures.  One of the things I did upon arriving in null sec was train up to fly logi, which I offer up as an excuse for my low total.  Also, I remain bad at EVE.

Still, there are some memorable kills on the list.  While my trophy page on Zkillboard shows I have never been on a kill mail in wormhole space, that I have never managed a solo kill (so close that one time), and that I have never killed any mining ships, I am on ten titan kill mails.  Those are always fun.  Oddly, I am also on ten super carrier kill mails.  One would think those would be easier to get.

And after all this time, EVE Online remains a strange game.

It remains a pain to get into.  It seems to dare you to like it.  You really have to make up your own story in order to stick with the game.  I think that one of the reasons null sec remains popular with outside observers… though not I would guess not as popular as we might think… is that it represents a long running space soap opera, a story of conflict and powers rising and falling.  It is an accessible story in a game that generally refuses to give you a story.  I know that being within the framework of that story has helped keep me interested in the game for the last five years.

Still, sometimes I undock just to look around in space and get a sense of its vastness and beauty, something I have done since I started in New Eden.

Cormorant Docking – Circa 2007

That isn’t enough to keep most people playing long term, but it is a hook that can get you on your way.

So here I am, ten years in and still playing regularly and planning to continue to do so for the foreseeable future.  A pile of other MMOs have come and gone in the time EVE Online has been hanging about and being different.  Not bad for a game that has been dying for almost as long as it has been live.