24 Weeks of World War Bee

We are at week 24 of the war proper, having started officially back on July 5th, but it has been a full six months since the invaders were caught out in their plans and the two week count down to the start began, so I am celebrating six months of writing about World War Bee.  Compare that to the Fountain War back in 2013, which covered just two months, or the Casino War, which started in earnest in February 2016, had us in Saranen by mid April, and in Delve come July.  And we’re not done yet.

This week saw an address by Progodlegend to Legacy and TEST where he both said the war was pretty much a foregone conclusion and that we will all soon begin to abandon the Imperium.  The Initiative attacking in Catch was held up as a prime example of the Imperium collapsing.  Once the war is over Legacy will lay claim to both its old territory, such Esoteria, which they previously said they were abandoning for Delve, as well as Delve, Querious, Period Basis.

Basically, all they need to do is wrap up the Imperium pockets in 1DQ1-A and E3OI-U and they’re done, the war is over.  Those will be the last big fights of the war.  The timeline for that, however, is fairly vague.  Progodlegend says the will come very soon at one point and maybe in  a couple more months elsewhere.  Goons being driven from the game is assumed in there somewhere.

Pandemic Horde had a town hall meeting last week as well, where they distanced themselves from the Vily message of driving Goons from the game.  They are just in it to damage the Imperium economically.  They seem less patient when it comes to assaulting 1DQ1-A and E3OI-U, suggesting if the current strategy wasn’t working in the first few weeks of December that they might try something different.  Also, the second pass on Fountain has been seen to be something of a wasted effort which will likely not continue.

On the comedy front, there was this 5.3 billion ISK Vince Draken pod that got caught trying to slip through Delve in a covert ops frigate.

Delve Front

The Delve front saw quite a bit of action.  Also, that metaliminal storm has found its way into NPC Delve, keeping people from cloaking in the systems marked around it.

Delve – Dec. 20, 2020

The Imperium strategy of retaking ihubs before the 35 timer runs down and allows PAPI to cyno jam the system has not been working out for us.  We were not able to retake the ihub for NOL-M9 as they were able to put many more people on the field to defend it that we would manage.  NOL-M9 now has a cyno jammer setup and the Keepstar there seems likely to be destroyed this week.

PAPI titans at the armor timer shoot

A similar fate seems likely for the Keepstar in D-W7F0, where PAPI also holds the ihub.

The strategy, or that aspect of it which I can see, appears to have moved to preventing enotsis ops on the ihubs that remain in our hands where Keepstars remain.  This had led to a number of fierce skirmishes, like the ones that have happened around 5-CQDA.

Battle Report Header

The other twist that has been coming up more recently is forcing PAPI to choose between objectives.  PAPI can put enough pilots in Delve to force an objective there, but a simultaneous timer elsewhere, like Catch, will be lost because they had to make the choice.

Catch Front

This week I am elevating the Catch region to have its own category as it remains the most active theater outside of Delve and is the place where Legacy is being forced to make choices.

Legacy came back and reinforced the staging Fortizar of The Initiative, but were distracted by a Delve objective that allowed The Initiative to put down a backup Fortizar in their staging in 0SHT-A.  The odd thing was that, when the final timer came up for the original Fortizar, Legacy started to commit to it, lost a bunch of ships to The Initiative, then stood down, losing both the objective and the ISK war.

That left The Initiative with two Fortizars in 0SHT-A after the fight.

Meanwhile, ihubs in Catch, and even next door in Immensea, have been falling.  We took the DY-P7Q ihub and then blew up the no longer operational Ansiblex jump gate and Pharolux cyno beacon on the grid with the Keepstar anchored there.

The Ansiblex blowing up, taking over a billion ISK in fuel with it

The Initiative now holds the ihub and TCU for HED-GP, the gateway system into the region from high sec.

And, as Progodlegend said, Imperium SIGs have been active in Catch as well.  Asher, accused of abandoning the war to hide in Catch, had gathered up the Reavers SIG to deploy out to 0SHT-A along with The Initiative, so I have been out there some myself.  We have been shooting structures… like the two above… as well as doing some of our own entosis work.  Not bad for a “30 man SIG.”  (We have Dawn Rhea of Theta Thursdays with us as well, so add at least one woman to the total.)

Popping a node during an entosis event

Things do not look so bad for Legacy when you look at the map of Catch right now.

Catch – Dec. 20, 2020

They have taken back some ihubs, including the one at 4-07MU, which connects to Querious.  But having lost them, they have to wait 35 days after restoring them before they can install Ansiblex jump gates to restore their easy travel routes.  Instead they either have to gate, use titan bridges, or jump clone between Delve and Catch.

Furthermore, rumor has it that The Watchmen alliance, which holds a large section of Catch for Legacy, is about to fold up shop and disband.  That would set quite a few systems back to the 35 day clock before they can be used for travel infrastructure.

Other Theaters

Despite Progodlegend declaring the Esoteria efforts a failure, citing The Initiative’s move to Catch as evidence, the groups remaining down there, The Bastion, Ferrata Victrix, and the Stain Russians who hate TEST, have continued to make a nuisance of themselves.  They have pushed back on The Army of Mango’s attempt to assert itself in the region and have expanded to hacking new systems.

NW Esoteria – Dec. 20, 2020

Then there is Querious, which is largely a dead zone as both sides have tired of planting new ihubs in the region.

Querious – Dec. 20, 2020

A range of systems remain empty while those still occupied by Brave continue to be assailed, meaning Brave has to deal with entosis events both here and in Catch.

And then in Fountain, as noted above, the PAPI invasion has pretty much ceased, with NCDot left holding a single ihub in LBGI-2 for now.

My Participation

I was able to jump in on a few ops, including two fights in 5-CQDA, including the one mentioned above.  I was also off on a few side missions over in Catch.  I ended up losing a few ships, including two Malediction interceptors that were used for burst jamming in one fight (the hostiles love that), a Scimitar in another fight, an Atron entosis frigate, and a Drake.

Probably the most amusing fight was in Catch on Saturday night when we landed on a gate with a Maller gang fit with smart bombs who were looking for ESS banks to rob.  We murdered them.

Murder report header

The one ship of ours they got was a Griffin ECM frigate.  Otherwise they were tackled and blown up.  In that quick clash I somehow managed to get the final blow on five of them with my sentry drones, which gave me a nice little line of five kill marks on my Ishtar.

5 orange kill marks in the upper left on my Blaze SKIN Ishtar

I do not think I have ever had a hull last long enough to earn five kill marks.

Anyway, my losses for the war so far now are as follows:

• Ares interceptor – 12
• Crusader interceptor – 5
• Atron entosis frigate – 6
• Rokh battleship – 5
• Drake battle cruiser – 4
• Malediction interceptor – 4
• Ferox battle cruiser – 3
• Purifier stealth bomber – 2
• Guardian logi – 2
• Scalpel logi frigate – 2
• Scimitar logi – 2
• Raven battleship – 1
• Crucifier ECM frigate – 1
• Gnosis battlecruiser – 1
• Bifrost command destroyer – 1
• Cormorant destroyer – 1
• Hurricane battle cruiser – 1
• Sigil entosis industrial – 1
• Mobile Small Warp Disruptor I – 1

Other Items

CCP did a Fireside Chat on Twitch with CCP Burger and CCP Hellmar where they mentioned, among other things, that more than 1.9 million new players had logged into EVE Online in 2020, a number greater than the previous three years combined.

That seems like amazing news, though the fact that the online numbers peaked back in April and have been slowly sliding down as the year has begun to fade suggests that CCP has not solved the player retention problem they brought up at EVE North back in 2019.

The CSM 14 summit meeting minutes had a list of priorities that were:

1. Stop the bleeding
2. Fix the stupid
3. Excite and teach
4. Incentivize return

It feels like they haven’t really addressed the first point yet as 1.9 million people have poured into the game this year and apparently right back out again.  This number of new players was so huge that I had to check to see if they were including EVE Echoes in their count, but EVE Echoes has claimed more than 2 million players on its own, so I couldn’t tell you where those 1.9 million went.

And that brings us to this week’s peak concurrent user number, which was down again.

• Day 1 – 38,838
• Week 1 – 37,034
• Week 2 – 34,799
• Week 3 – 34,692
• Week 4 – 35,583
• Week 5 – 35,479
• Week 6 – 34,974
• Week 7 – 38,299
• Week 8 – 35,650
• Week 9 – 35,075
• Week 10 – 35,812
• Week 11 – 35,165
• Week 12 – 36,671
• Week 13 – 35,618
• Week 14 – 39,681
• Week 15 – 40,359
• Week 16 – 36,642
• Week 17 – 37,695
• Week 18 – 36,632
• Week 19 – 35,816 (Saturday)
• Week 20 – 37,628 (Saturday)
• Week 21 – 34,888
• Week 22 – 33,264
• Week 23 – 33,149
• Week 24 – 32,807 (Saturday)

That is now the low water mark for the war, with even the holiday events and the Luminaire snowball fight failing to entice people into the game.

Related

• INN – World War Bee: Week 24
• INN – Legacy Coalition Address by Progodlegend (transcript)
• INN – Analyzing the Legacy War Update (warning: into the Moomin zone)
• INN – Pandemic Horde Town Hall (Moomin again)
• INN – Where’s Asher? Oh, He’s Here!
• INN – Amber Alert! Legacy’s Report Premature
• INN – Personas, Propagandists, and Backstabbers
• INN – HD-JVQ Fight and the Aftermath (other theaters)
• New Eden Post – Keepstar in NOL-M9 Reinforced
• CCP – Twitch Fireside Chat

My Five Books of 2019

I did this last year and it seemed to go well enough, so here I am again.  I try to read, or when unable to find the time, listen to audio books.  Trips are usually good for reading time.  I do not read… or listen… as much as I would like… or as much as I used to back when my time was more free and my eyesight was able to focus on something as close as the printed page… but I do what I can.

I also log my reading over at Good Reads, which serves the same purpose for books as this blog does for gaming.  It is a record and a memory.  They even gave me a little end of year summary.

Good Reads Summary

According to Good Reads I managed to make my way through about two dozen books this year.  You can see my whole Good Reads list for 2019 if you want.  I’ve actually finished a book since then, and will likely finish at least one more, so the up to date tally is available at that link.

Out of those, these are the five that felt the most meaningful I suppose.

The covers, if you prefer visual representation

The Doomsday Machine by Daniel Ellsberg

Daniel Ellsberg is remembered as the RAND Corporation employee who smuggled out the Pentagon Papers, the detailed study of US involvement in Vietnam commissioned by SecDef Robert McNamara who wanted to figure out how we got in that mess.  It was a big deal and changed the outlook on the war for many.

However, Ellsberg actually smuggled two sets of documents out of RAND, the other being related to the work he had done as a nuclear war planner to support the US in determining its strategy for nuclear weapons use.  He didn’t want to dilute the Vietnam report, so he hid those documents while the government tore his life apart.

And he ended up losing them.  The story of how is in the book.

But he has been able to recreate much of what he had worked on from declassified government documents and his own recollections, which became this book.

It covers US policy on nuclear weapons, the level of command which felt it could authorize a nuclear strike (the movie Dr. Strangelove seemed very possible), and how the US has used nuclear weapons, if not actively, as a constant and ongoing threat, both implied and explicit, as part of its foreign policy.

It makes you wonder how we got through the cold war.

Albion’s Seed by David Hackett Fischer

This is a long, detailed, and somewhat dry book, and could easily be dismissed as so much trivia about four groups of colonists who came from England to the new world.  But buried in all of that are a series of attitudes and traditions and behaviors that still influence the US and its politics and regional divides.  It is no coincidence of history that partisans of the English Civil War, the Puritans and Royalists, settled in the regions of the colonies that would later end up as opposing sides in our own civil war.

The book lays out attitudes and traditions that persist through today that make up much of the current Red/Blue political divide in the country.  The book is uncanny in tracing lines from the 1600s through to today.  Also, a bunch of regional words that are often associated with southern or African American culture originated in rural England, where they have since fallen out of use.  Hat tip to The Mittani who mentioned this book on Twitter.

The Peripheral by William Gibson

Some times you just need something new in a science fiction tale.  William Gibson managed that back in the 80s with Neuromancer, which was on my list last year as a re-read.  While not as ground breaking as that tale, it does take what was a new tack for me on what might otherwise be seen as tropes of the science fiction genre.  A good palette cleanser in the midst of some deeper reads.

Shattered Sword by Jonathan Parshall

When I was growing up the generation of leaders from WWII was passing and the mid-to-high level commanders were getting very old.  All of them seemed keen to write their memoirs which created a base of myth about the war, feeding off of and supporting each other.  I hit a point in my 20s where I refused to ready anything about the “big” battles of WWII like Midway, D-Day, Stalingrad, and so on because they were all telling the same story with only minor variations in detail.

It has only been since maybe the late 90s, when the higher ranks of the commanders began to dwindle and so those with a stake in telling a tale that put them in the best light stopped being an influence.  Historians like Anthony Beevor began taking a harder look things and reworking the myths to either discard them or at least make them align to the facts available.

For the Battle of Midway, Shattered Sword has become something of a definitive source.  Focused on the Japanese side of the battle, it dispels myths that have lingered for decades.  My only regret is that it took me about a decade to finally get to it, though the fact that they found two of the Japanese carries lost at the battle while I was reading about them sinking was kind of a nifty coincidence.

Permanent Record by Edward Snowden

Something of a latter day Daniel Ellsberg, Edward Snowden tells the tale of his life.  This is his biography, covering his youth, desire to serve his country, time with the CIA and NSA, and eventually how he went about telling the world about the dubious and illegal activities of the US intelligence community.  In a parallel to Ellsberg’s book, it is surprising how much access and control was being handed to young and not well supervised employees and contractors.  Whether you think he is a hero or a traitor, this is the story of his life and the string of events that ended up with him in exile.  It also lined up well because the book I read next was Legacy of Ashes, which was about how the CIA ended up in the state it was when Snowden was there.

Picking

That is a lot of non-fiction there.  Picking five wasn’t a huge effort, but there were clearly some other contenders in my mix.  As the Good Reads banner indicates, I read Margret Atwood’s The Testaments, the sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, which I enjoyed.  However, I wasn’t for a minute unable to guess how things would turn out.  It felt like something cranked out as fan service to support the popular video adaption of the original book on Hulu.  I also disdain the re-used “academics discuss things” ending.

Good Reads also tells me that the book with the highest review score I read this year was How to Hide an Empire.  But that didn’t get high marks from me largely due to its tone, which was of the hysterical making mountains out of mole hills variety.  Also, I literally knew every talking point in the book before I picked it up, so this alleged attempt to hide an empire hasn’t exactly been a huge success.  I might not have been the target audience here.

I might have put Legacy of Ashes on the list if it had mentioned my great uncle who worked for the CIA in the 50s and 60s and who carried some of those briefcases of cash used to support or overthrow governments in the middle-east.  He also worked with Kermit Roosevelt in Egypt.  But he wasn’t high enough level to get a mention.  When it comes down to it, I wouldn’t kick any of the five titles I have to inject this.

And then there is William L. Shirer.  I have half a post written about his two huge tomes about Nazi Germany and the fall of France in 1940.  It basically sums up to what he wrote aligns up almost exactly to the views of my grandparents generation, who served in the war.  I heard many of the things he wrote come straight from the mouths of my grandparents and their siblings and friends.  His work, while not well loved by historians, captures that amazingly well.

I did read a lot more fiction than my picks might indicate.  Some of it was re-reading that didn’t spark much interest after I was done.  I did start on C. J. Cherryh’s Foreigner series, but after two books I couldn’t stand the ratio of introspection to action.  We read about Bren over-thinking things for about ten pages for every page where something actually happens.  I found that wearisome and declined to go further in the series.

I also went into the Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu due to it featuring as an alleged motivator for CCP for their summer of the Chaos Era.  Like the Chaos Era in New Eden, I found it interesting but tiresome.  I declined to pick up the third book.  I read a spoiler instead, so I know how it ends, so I don’t feel like I missed out.

I did just knock out the first book in a new series from Marko Kloos, who wrote the Frontlines series I mentioned in a post a few years back.  He’s done with that and while I liked the new book, Aftershocks, and I’ll read the next in the series when it comes out, it wasn’t epic.  Good, solid science fiction, but I want to see where it goes.

And then there is the curious case of Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw, of Zero Punctuation fame.  I’ve read two of his books this year… one and a half as I write this, but I’ll be done with the second before we get to 2020.  His style has developed since Mogworld and makes me feel like he is about 20 degrees off course towards becoming the next Douglas Adams. (Also, he makes video games, which is something else Douglas Adams dabbled in.)  I like his work, I’ll read whatever he writes, but he isn’t quite there yet and I cannot put my finger on why.

Honorable Mention

I write these posts in advance which, given that they can go up whenever I have a slow day in December, which means they are done with enough time left in the year to knock out another book or two.  And so it was last year where I was able devour a book that might have made the list.  I thought I would mention it

The Collapsing Empire by John Scalzi

Scalzi at his page turning best, creating a universe of lives and politics.  I read this and then the second book in the series and felt thwarted by the fact the third installment was more than a year away.  Such is the life of a reader.  You binge through a hot new title and then there is a year or more wait until the next one.  Odd how television has adopted that model these days, where we get 10 episodes and then wait a year… or nearly two in the case of Rick and Morty… for the next installment.  Anyway, the next installment was due in April last I checked, so I’ll be there.

And so it goes, another year of reading has passed by.  Was there anything great that you read in 2019?

A Short Rant About the State of the MMORPG Market

This started as a response to a post over at Massively OP about the worst MMO trend of 2018.  However, a few paragraphs in I realized I wasn’t really on topic, focusing as I was on MMORPGs, since MMO pretty much means “online multiplayer” in today’s market, and I wasn’t keen to dump this much text into their comment section where about a dozen people might see it before it scrolls off the front page into oblivion.  Better to bring it over here where I can regret it again later.

So we’ll call this another end of 2018 post and I’ll run with what I had.

The most disappointing trend for me isn’t really a trend, but more the realization that MMORPGs are a trap for most studios, a tar ball that they find they’re stuck with once they have one. An MMORPG can bring in money, sometimes lots of money, but they have expensive infrastructures to maintain and they need a continuing stream of content to hold enough of an audience to keep them viable. They can eat up all the focus of a smaller studio, so they neglect or never start other projects because you have to keep feeding the monster or it will stop crapping out money.

But the population peaks, often very early these days, and then every content update pisses somebody off and they go away like it is a game of musical chairs and each patch is another point where the music stops. Or it would be like that if people wouldn’t also leave if you don’t patch often enough.  You can’t sit still or you will lose players and you can’t change anything or you will lose players.

Meanwhile MMORPGs have only gotten more expensive to make, which makes innovation a risk that few can afford. And then there is the target player base which complains about every game being a WoW clone and yet will also complain even more bitterly about anything that strays from the WoW formula.

And don’t even get me started on the false hope that is PvP.  It seems like a great idea, and a true money save, to just get the players to be the content.  In reality, anything beyond a tiny, consequence free instance of PvP in an MMORPG will be shunned or ignored.  Few developers who follow that path and go in on PvP are rewarded with any success and trying to move PvP out of its tiny corner is almost always a waste of development time.  Add in a capture the flag arena game… or a battle royale game these days… and move on.

The customers are no better, myself included.  The loud demographics that haunt any developer’s forums should serve as a warning, but if that is the only feedback you’re getting then where are you going to go?  There is always somebody agitating loudly for their favorite thing.  Some want PvP everywhere, others think your game will die if it doesn’t have player housing, another group hates walking and wants to fly everywhere, and somebody in the back seems to believe in time travel and that everything would be great if you could just teleport everybody back to 1999 or 2004 or 2007 or whenever they felt they were having the most fun playing your game.

And none of them has a fucking clue about the level of effort their one “simple” request entails.  But if you’re not doing exactly what they want or it is taking too long then you are “lazy” or “stupid” or both.

If players could keep their focus on actual game play issues it might not be so bad.  But they are on about how you charge money for this or that, with “greedy” or “cash grab” being favored terms.  They complain about how they just want to play the game and not worry about real world politics, a sentiment that is usually the opening salvo about how they’re bent out of shape that the CEO or some dev or some rumor indicates that the company has somehow transgressed the whiners personal stance on the topic of the day is; gamer gate, gender politics, overtime, unions, campaign donations, boarder walls, or whatever.  And then there are the truly loopy who see conspiracies, collusion, and corruption in the machinations of a studio that is really just trying to keep the lights on and the customers happy.

Add into the mix the players who see the genre as a zero sum game, so feel they need to constantly crap on every game that competes with their favorite.  The worry is that they might be right.

So we see studios going under, the weight of their MMORPGs around their necks pulling them down.  The revenues are no longer enough to keep them afloat, much less fund anything new, but they cannot let go because what else do they have?

Even Blizzard, long addicted to the huge income stream from WoW, once past a billion dollars per year, is in trouble now that the game is stumbling again. They don’t want to depend on WoW, but they haven’t made another game that has come anywhere close to the money WoW was bringing in at its peak.  And even their best, Overwatch, could only sustain its peak for a few months at a stretch and is now reported in serious decline.  Companies, like people, size themselves to match their income, and when it drops tough choices loom.

Someone in Blizzard at least recognized a bit of the problem, so we don’t see the company making any more MMORPGs.  But WoW was enough to distort the company and change investor expectations.  They can’t go back to selling stand alone games.  They have to keep WoW going or die, because there is no replacing it.

Game development is a bad business to start with. But at least with a stand alone game you can walk away to work on the next thing. An MMORPG never goes away, unless you have several and you have to make Sophie’s choice. Studios tied to MMORPGs die and other studios with less ambition buy the remains, put the games on life support, and try to milk the remains for some more cash. But only the unbalanced jump into the MMORPG market to create a new game and expecting happiness and success.

And so it goes.  Expect more studios to shut down operations, more games to be closed or put in maintenance mode by some third party game aggregator like Gamigo, and more loud complaining from players that if the studio had only listened to their completely uniformed opinion, then everything would have been fine.

Oh, and expect the usual level of optimism for every new MMORPG title announced because we also apparently never learn.

There, with that out of my system, let’s move on… or not.

SuperData Says League of Legends is Back on Top, But WoW is Nowhere to be Seen

SuperData Research is out with their November 2019 charts just in time to take the holidays off, and this data set has some interesting changes.

SuperData Research Top 10 – November 2018

First, League of Legends, which has been having a down year, has returned to the top of the PC games list, the spot it has pretty much owned since SuperData started publishing this particular format.  So the top three are back in what we might consider their normal alignment.  Missing, however, is Fantasy Westward Journey Online II, which had been bouncing around between fourth and sixth place for months.

But the bigger mystery is what happened to World of Warcraft?  I have been posting this chart since December 2016 and WoW has been a permanent resident, even when it was split into East and West for a few random months in 2017.  WoW has been as high as second place and as low as eighth, usually hanging around one notch ahead of World of Tanks most of the time, but it has never fallen off the list.  Well, until now.

WoW was doing well on the chart recently, rolling in the money from the Battle for Azeroth box sales and then propping up its revenues a bit with a six month subscription deal that threw in a special mount.  You know all the faithful bought in on that.

But now those birds are coming home to roost.  The faithful won’t be spending subscription dollars again until around May 2019 while the Battle for Azeroth expansion remains a confused muddle.  A pretty expansion with a set of very solid leveling zones and an actual split experience for the Alliance and Horde, seems to have fallen apart due to ill considered ideas and half measure fixes.  And once you lose the rank and file, the game is stuck until it can do something new.

I expect that we may end up seeing WoW Classic launch sooner than expected in order to “save” the game, or at least its revenues.  If Blizz sticks to the summer launch, it will be in June.  But I wouldn’t be surprised to find it moved up to May or even April now that Activision is probably on the phone every day wanting to know what the hell is going on.

That big news aside, the rest of the list isn’t unexpected.  Fortnite rang in at fourth, followed by the debut of Battlefield V.  PlayerUnknown’s Battleground grabbed sixth while The Sims 4 came out of nowhere to hit the list at number seven.  Was there a new expansion there?  World of Tanks hung in at is oft repeated eight position, sans its usual partner in WoW, while the on-again, off-again pair of CS:GO and DOTA 2 took the bottom two spots once more.

On the console chart, the game everybody was talking about, Red Dead Redemption 2, tops the charts.  This month shows how driven by new titles the console market can be compared to the PC market, where the same old online titles linger for years.  Almost everything on the console chart is a fairly recent release save for Fortnite in fourth place and the ever present Grand Theft Auto V in eighth.

And then on the mobile end of the chart Pokemon Go has managed to take the top spot, beating out the usual leader Honour of Kings, pushing it into second place.  And an even older title, Candy Crush Saga managed third place.  And so it goes.

Other items from the report:

• Battlefield V and Fallout 76 launches fail to meet franchise benchmarks. We estimate Battlefield V and Fallout 76 sold 1.9 million and 1.4 million digital units, respectively, across console and PC at launch. Both are down from Battlefield 1 and Fallout 4.
• Ultimate Team continues to underperform. Total additional content spending in FIFA and Madden grew by 1% in November, compared to a 25% year-over-year increase last November.
• Destiny 2′s “Forsaken” boost was short lived. We estimate additional content revenue for Destiny 2 dropped 63% year-over-year. Overall, engagement and monetization seem to have reverted back to the same levels last seen before the launch of the “Forsaken” DLC in September.
• Rainbow Six shows signs of fatigue. Ubisoft’s popular FPS title has had a better-than-expected performance throughout most of 2018. However, additional content revenue declined 33% in November, the game’s biggest decline to date, and follows a decline in October as well. This points to some likely disruption from recent launches of other high-profile AAA shooters.

Picking My Favorite WoW Expansion by Reputation

There is always a desire to rate and rank things, to quantify things down to a simple calculation.  Sure, you wrote a nice 2,500 review of that game, but how many stars did you give it?  What is the Meta Critic score.

And I am not immune to such things.  I can ramble on for hundreds of words about something, how I feel about it, what I liked and what bothered me, but sometimes I’d like a nice objective measure of my real reaction.

Which brings us to World of Warcraft expansions.  I had this idea rolling around in my head and then Syp moved me to action by essentially praising what I found to be one of the worst aspects of the first WoW expansion, The Burning Crusade.

Looking out from the Portal

I find expansions problematic in general.  They must change the game and, in doing so, alienate some segment of the game’s population.  They seek to extend the support of the fan base yet risk driving it away because every horrible feature, no matter how seemingly universally reviled, is somebody’s favorite.  So when an expansion makes something better it inevitably wrecks the game for somebody.

I’ve long said, only semi-sarcastically, that EverQuest: The Ruins of Kunark was the only “good” expansion, mostly because it expanded Norrath without changing it too much.

And yet I am always at least somewhat enthusiastic for expansions, so I am even at war with myself over the idea.

Anyway, my gut ranking of WoW expansions has generally been:

1. Wrath of the Lich King
2. The Burning Crusade
3. Mists of Pandaria
4. Warlords of Draenor
5. Cataclysm

Vanilla can’t really be ranked in that list, it is more of a baseline, and WoW Legion is still active and I am still playing it, so the jury remains out.

But I do wonder how much of an effect distance in time has on that ranking.  If it wasn’t for a peeve of mine about quests in TBC it might actually contend for first spot.  I mean, I loved the dungeons, there were plenty of them and, at the time, that was more important than a lot of other things.

So I started fishing around for a way to quantify my activities in each expansion.  Ideally I would be able to extract something like total play time or number of quests or number of dailies or number of dungeons run while each was the current live expansion.

I stopped for a bit at measuring the number of characters who hit the level cap during the expansion, that being at least theoretically being a measure of how much I enjoyed playing in an expansion, but discarded it when the list turned out like this:

1. Warlords of Draenor – 7
2. Mists of Pandaria- 3
3. Cataclysm – 3
4. Wrath of the Lich King – 2
   
5. The Burning Crusade – 2
   

Hanging with Khadgar and Thrall in Draenor

This is more a measure of how easy it was to level up rather than an indicator of enjoyment.  Plus, WoD started the trend of giving players a level boost and ended on the pre-launch event for WoW Legion where I managed to get two character to max level.

So I fished around some more and settled upon factions.  More specifically, how may factions from a given expansion did I end up getting to exalted status?  It is a decent measure of how long I stuck with a given expansion and it is something I tend to do with a single character.

So I went over to the WoW Armory and looked at Vikund’s standings, took the total number of “main” factions and the number I managed to get to exalted and ranked the expansions based on the percentage, which looked like this:

1. Mists of Pandaria – 10 of 12 or 83%
2. Wrath of the Lich King – 8 of 11 or 73%
3. The Burning Crusade – 6 of 13 or 46%
4. Warlords of Draenor – 3 of 8 or 38%
5. Cataclysm – 1 of 4 or 25%

Jumping into Pandaria

Of course, there are problems with that measurement.  To start with, not all expansions have the same, or even comparable, numbers of factions.  And there there is the question as to which factions should really count?  I put “main” in apologetic quotes above for a reason.  I somewhat arbitrarily decided individuals in Mists of Pandaria should count, nor should the Sholazar Basin factions in Wrath of the Lich King.

If I add those in MoP goes to 63% and WotLK goes to 61%.  Since that keeps the ranking the same I dismissed that for the moment.

Going the other direction, I might argue that the sub-factions of Alliance Vanguard in WotLK ought not to count the same way the Sholazar Basin factions didn’t count, which would give the expansion an 86% score, putting it on top.

And then there is the question of which factions did I get to exalted in one expansion AFTER a later expansion appeared.  Things get ugly for TBC with that, since I did at least three of those factions long after the fact, and even uglier for Cataclysm, which drops to zero.

1. Wrath of the Lich King – 8 of 11 or 86%
2. Mists of Pandaria – 10 of 12 or 83%
3. Warlords of Draenor – 3 of 8 or 38%
4. The Burning Crusade – 3 of 13 or 23%
5. Cataclysm – 0 of 4 or 0%

Valiance Keep Harbor

This is the reason I cannot rate Vanilla, I am pretty sure I only had one or two factions to exalted at the most during the reign of the original game, and maybe not even that.  The Argent Tournament in WotLK got me to exalted on most of the main alliance factions  Also, there are a those wacky factions, like the Bloodsail Buccaneers, or raid only factions, like the Brood of Nozdormu, that I was never going to crack.

And this brings in a side issue, which is the expectations set by the previous state of the game.  After Vanilla my expectations for TBC were pretty high.  They were met on the dungeon experience side of things, but were dashed by how Blizz decided questing should be handled.  And don’t get me started on ugly equipment or the introduction of some really dull daily quests.

So my expectations were more modest for WotLK.

Then came Cataclysm, the expansion I spent the least amount of time playing.  That set expectations so low that I punted on Mists of Pandaria until it had been out for a year, then found it to be a really solid expansion.  But with only 5 level boost in the level cap you could get to dailies and follow on items like playing with your farm or doing fishing quest pretty quickly.

That realization, along with the return to TBC vibe that Warlords of Draenor started with and the idea of housing, again set expectations high.  The zones were fine, the dungeons good, but garrisons sucked the life out of things, seemingly having been designed to prove a comment that Blizz made long ago about why they didn’t want housing; they pulled people out of the world into their own little domains.

To add to the list of things that this might measure, I should also consider what I got out of getting various faction standings to their current state.

In WotLK getting to exalted unlocked mounts.  Many mounts.  Likewise, mounts were a motivator in MoP.  I know that the only faction I have at exalted in Cataclysm is there because I wanted that camel mount, while in TBC the Netherwing and the Sha’tari Skyguard specifically to get their mounts.  But in Warlords of Draenor I either didn’t want mounts or they were not there.  I can’t remember.  All I really wanted was to unlock flying, and that

And over the course of all of this the game has changed, the market changed, and we have all changed.  Goofy stuff that my daughter and I used to do, like wander far afield just to find a specific pet, have been replaced with other tasks.  The instance group, with whom I ran though Vanilla, TBC, and WotLK, started to fall apart as the years went by, our lives changed, and our ability to stay up late diminished.

So I have gone from a situation where the dungeon content has been supreme in my mind to being much more interested in solo items with some touristy group things via Dungeon Finder and LFR.  That means my rankings are flawed in an even more esoteric fashion.

So TBC and WotLK were good at dungeons when that was important to me while Cataclysm was not, while MoP was very good for solo when that was important to me while WoD wasn’t quite there.  But WotLK was also very good for solo for me once the group tired, while the TBC solo content didn’t hold me very well once the group was done with dungeons.

So maybe, in my own little world, I can admit that WotLK was a good expansion and put it alongside Ruins of Kunark.

Basically, 1,500 words in, I think I have decided that I have wholeheartedly liked two MMO expansions, but I don’t expect you to agree with me.

Blaze Fleet in Deklein

Up north it has become clear that the locals have decided to get serious about the citadels we have been dropping.  Early on they were responding with modest fleets only to find themselves in trouble from time to time even against our own modest efforts.  Battleship fleets started coming with force auxiliary support, then capitals started getting dropped, and we even saw supers getting dropped on us.

You can’t really complain about that.  We’d do the same on our own home turf.  But when our scouts are out reporting on the forces being arrayed against, just standing down instead of taking the fight starts to seem like the most realistic option.  We still tend to go to see if we can at least extract some kills from the situation, but the likelihood of us winning any timers is pretty much non-existent at this point.

We had a couple of timers the other night and Asher had promised us something special.  When we got online we found that, rather than our sturdy VNIs, he had a different theme planned.  We were going out in Armageddons instead.  We could then wear our CCP Blaze SKINs for the ship.

The CCP Blaze SKIN on my ‘geddon

There had been a real push to get people to pick up the limited edition SKINs that CCP offered to honor the late CCP Blaze and raise money for his family.  Pings went out Imperium-wide encouraging people to buy the SKIN pack, while within Reavers there was an even stronger push to get people to grab them as several of the ships are in our doctrine catalog.

So Asher had a whole fleet doctrine imported and handed out ships in our staging station, trading for logi, boosters, support, and the ships of the line, the Armageddon.  I opted for the latter, mostly because I had the CCP Blaze SKIN for it, otherwise I might have considered logi.

As that got sorted out reports were coming in about what was being brought to face us.  In Fade, the Astrahus in DW-T2I had Pandemic Horde coming in Machariel battleships and capitals, while the citadel up in Deklein had a Guardians of the Galaxy coalition was also forming capitals, but were going with a Typhoon battleship doctrine instead.  The odds against us were going to be long whichever way we chose to jump.

It was already clear to many of us that this Armageddon fleet was going to be a one-way trip, but Asher put it out there on coms and asked us if we still wanted to go.  The response in fleet chat was overwhelmingly in favor of going.  So we undocked.

Leaving our station

We did not have as many CCP Blaze SKINs… or SKINs in general… as I would have hoped.  The Armageddon isn’t used very much in the null sec meta, so buying a SKIN for one isn’t much of a priority.  If cash or ISK are short, it is arguably a bit of a waste for a ship you’re unlikely to ever fly.  But there were also some comments from people who hadn’t gotten the word about the CCP Blaze SKIN deal who would have bought it if only they had known.

That is always the way of things.  No matter how much you think you’re getting the word out about something… there was a dev blog, it was in the launcher, it was highlighted in the New Eden store, it was mentioned on EVE news sites, and our own coalition was pinging about it… most people don’t pay that close of attention to their video games.  As I have been known to say, if you’re reading this you’re part of some strange minority that probably obsesses too much about games.

Still, there were some CCP Blaze SKINs present.

SKINs on display

The first thing we had to do was warp to another station as the one we chose to stage out of does not offer insurance as a service.  If we were going to go on a one-way trip opting in on the Platinum insurance plan seemed like a good idea.  That goes double for T1 battleships like the Armageddon, which gets a handsome payout relative to its cost.  Once insured we got to undock again.

Armageddons undocking again

Then it was off to the titan to see where we would be heading.  Even as we were hanging around waiting for the bridge it looked like we would be off to Deklein as the INN coverage of the Fade Astrahus timer was already showing the shoot there winding down.

Drunk Canadian and the fall of the Astrahus

As expected, we went off to Deklein to face the GotG fleet in part, as Asher noted later, because they were flying a Typhoon doctrine, something they declared dumb when we did it, but not so dumb that they didn’t copy it.  The fleet meta defies propaganda.

Bridged into Deklein we gated towards the impending fight, then turned to hang on the gate 3QE-9Q gate in E-FIC0, a system name that always makes me think of my credit score.

The gate of fate

We held there because our scout had reported the hostiles coming that way.  Soon enough they were coming through the gate and the fight was on.  Bubbles were up and and we were off to the races.

Bubbles going up around the gate

The Armageddon gets boosts to energy neutralizer range as well as drone hit points, so we were sent off to neut out targets near our name alphabetically while putting drones on one set of targets while running our rapid heavy missile launchers against another set.

That did not start out very well.  While we knocked down a few Typhoons, their logi wasn’t breaking.  And then we spent some time focusing on one of the Apostles that was nearby in the hope of getting a big kill.

A fat target in our midst

That did not meet with success and all the time we were getting whittled away.  The ECM fleet that flew up from Delve to join in with us was picked off in short order and the Armageddons began to drop one by one.  After seeing that the Apostle wasn’t going to go down we switched back to Typhoons, sending our drones after each broadcast in turn, launching fresh drones when the current ones were cleared away by smart bombs.

The Typhoons did not seem to be hitting us very hard.  I survived quite a while with a batch of them hitting me.  But once one of the 19 hostile carriers on grid sent fighters my way, the end was nigh for my Armageddon.  Fighters eat up sub-caps pretty handily.

Into structure now… I also forgot to turn my neut back on when I capped out

I went boom shortly thereafter, managing to catch my ship coming apart only to have the screen shot ruined by the insurance payout popping up during the most dramatic point.  Still, it looks pretty neat cropped down.

My Armageddon coming apart

From that point on I was floating around in my pod watching the fight.  A couple more Typhoons went down but we were rapidly approaching the point where we could no longer break their tanks.  Fleet chat filled with links to our kill mails as we died and soon logi and support were gone as the final stand ended.

A few ships managed to get away, but the battle report shows we welped and welped hard.  I was sitting back in the station in my fresh pod when I saw the bounty payment notification for Asher come in.  They saved him for later.

Bounty Paid

It isn’t a bad thing to place a bounty on your FC.  The bounty system will often tell you they’ve been blown up well before you hear it on coms so you are ready to change over to the alternate anchor or get the hell out if appropriate.

Anyway, it all went as expected.  We got stuck in, got a few kills, and then died a glorious death in our old homeland. No citadels were saved.  All that remains in the CCP Blaze tribute thread on Reddit and some screen shots of our fleet.  For the latter I have a gallery below: