31 Weeks of World War Bee

We are now past the seven month mark for the war, which officially kicked off way back on July 5, 2020.

The headline news of the week was probably Siberian Squads opting to join the Imperium.

Siberian Squads

I mentioned back in the Week 29 post that Siberian Squads was leaving Legacy Coalition and possibly moving north to join in the shenanigans going on up there.  Unlike Red Alliance, which left PAPI to join in with their Stain Russian pals, Siberian Squads is joining the Imperium as a full member.  The will be taking up residence in Querious to keep that front active.  What will happen to there holdings in Tenerifis remains to be seen, but I assume that they used the two week interlude to move their stuff out of the region.  The FI.RE coalition seems salty about this.

This is something of a reversal of the Casino War where I announced several times that this alliance or that was leaving the Imperium. (Or in the case of Circle of Two, had betrayed the coalition and changed sides mid-battle.)  Since the war started the Imperium has actually grown while Vily’s Legacy Coalition is now missing some of its members.

Delve Theater

I mentioned back in the Week 28 post that the Imperium had given up the gate camp in E3OI-U that was protecting what was being called Helm’s Deep in order to maintain the hell camp on the logged out titans in M2-XFE. (See the Delve map in the Week 27 post for my last mention of Helm’s Deep on the map.)  PAPI finally noticed that the camp was gone and made a push to reinforce those constellations, culminating in day long series of entosis contests.

The Helm’s Deep constellations

PAPI was able to bring the numbers and were successful in taking two of the four constellations in play.

Delve – Feb 7, 2021

The back two constellations are significant as they represent the homes of The Bastion, Get Off My Lawn, and TNT alliances as well as hosting the KarmaFleet home system.

The TCU Sovereignty

GSF owns all the ihubs since they have the numbers and can bring the entosis forces, but those alliances get the territorial control units so they show up on the sovereignty map.

PAPI has pushed hard on ihubs over the last two weeks and now controls all but four constellations in the region.  They key to things for the Imperium is 1DQ1-A.  PAPI has not made a serious effort against that system and so long as it and its Keepstars and other structures survive, the Imperium will remain defiant.

Other Theaters

PAPI also expended some effort in Querious when it came to ihubs.

Querious – Feb 7, 2021

PAPI put 800 pilots up to attack the GOP-GE, W6V-VM, F2OY-X, and RF-CN3 ihubs, but only managed to secure the latter two.  That leaves a couple of footholds with structures in the region for Siberian Squads to base from and start harassing Severance (-7-) and Stellae Renascitur (S.R.) in the region.

Catch remains a battleground, with The Initiative continuing to press on Brave and Warped Intentions, with the latter losing several more ihubs over the course of the week.

Catch – Feb 7, 2021

Likewise, Immensea next door has become another bleeding sore for Legacy Coalition.

Immensea – Feb 7, 2021

There both Warped Intentions and Federation Uprising have been losing ihubs and the occasional structure to Imperium and Stain Russian forces.

Down in Esoteria, The Bastion and its allies continue to hold the northwest corner, so I’ll just roll the same map as before.

Northwest Esoteria – Feb 7, 2021

TEST has been telling their pilots to leave Esoteria and move to Delve, which seems like a trip with a fire at either end.  But they have been away enough that they lost another Fortizar.

My Participation

I did not spend a lot of time in New Eden over the past week.  The sovereignty battles tend to happen in EUTZ, which I can sometimes join in on as a break from work, but not always.  I did spend some time at the M2-XFE hell camp, which continues watch on the ~130 titans still logged out in space and was fortunate enough to be there when an Apostle decided to log in.  That put me on the kill board for February.

Apostle Explosion

Otherwise much of my space time was spent doing maintenance things like collecting PI output to sell.  I did get my corporate dividend payment for my 5 Imperium war bonds.

War Bond Dividend #1

The 1.25 ISK payment appeared to be a test run to see if the system would even work.  41 million ISK isn’t a ton, but right now my only other income is PI, insurance, and SRP and every little bit helps.  Fortunately I did not lose any ships this week so I didn’t need to collect insurance or SRP.  My losses for the war remain:

• Ares interceptor – 15
• Malediction interceptor – 7
• Crusader interceptor – 5
• Atron entosis frigate – 6
• Rokh battleship – 5
• Drake battle cruiser – 4
• Scimitar logi – 3
• Ferox battle cruiser – 3
• Purifier stealth bomber – 3
• Guardian logi – 2
• Scalpel logi frigate – 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

This past week CCP posted a dev blog about the first battle at M2-XFE.  The Dev blog lays out some details as to who lost how many ships, how the battle compares to other large battles in New Eden history, and plans for a monument to commemorate the battle.

Planned monument

CCP was also awarded two Guinness World Records for the battle, which was detailed in a separate press release.  The records seem a bit dubious compared to some of the past records, but are still a good PR moment for the company.

Meanwhile, the weekend saw the peak concurrent user number stay up above 38K for another week.

• Day 1 – 38,838
• Week 1 – 37,034
• Week 2 – 34,799
• Week 3 – 34,692
• Week 4 – 35,583
• Week 5 – 35,479
• Week 6 – 34,974
• Week 7 – 38,299
• Week 8 – 35,650
• Week 9 – 35,075
• Week 10 – 35,812
• Week 11 – 35,165
• Week 12 – 36,671
• Week 13 – 35,618
• Week 14 – 39,681
• Week 15 – 40,359
• Week 16 – 36,642
• Week 17 – 37,695
• Week 18 – 36,632
• Week 19 – 35,816 (Saturday)
• Week 20 – 37,628 (Saturday)
• Week 21 – 34,888
• Week 22 – 33,264
• Week 23 – 33,149
• Week 24 – 32,807 (Saturday)
• Week 25 – 31,611
• Week 26 – 39,667 (Saturday)
• Week 27 – 34,989 (Saturday)
• Week 28 – 34,713
• Week 29 – 35,996
• Week 30 – 38,323
• Week 31 – 38,167

Related

• INN – World War Bee: Week 31
• CCP – The Massacre at M2-XFE
• CCP – The Most Expensive Video Game Battle Ever Earns Two GUINNESS WORLD RECORDS
• TAGN – CCP Details the Titan Massacre at M2-XFE
• INN – Massacre at M2-XFE Immortalized By Monument
• NEP – Monument to Be Constructed in M2-XFE
• INN – The Myth of ‘Ceric the Cyno Killer’
• INN – Sweep the Skies—Why Carriers Aren’t Capital Ships
• INN – Siberian Squads Join The Imperium
• INN –  The Point of No Return
• Reddit – Frat vs The Freemen of the North Week 5
• Reddit – Attempt to tally the war losses so far

What Should EverQuest 3 Even Look Like?

The future of the EverQuest franchise as a whole is important to us here at Daybreak. EverQuest in all its forms is near and dear to our hearts. EverQuest and EverQuest II are going strong. Rest assured that our passion to grow the world of EverQuest remains undiminished.

-Russell Shanks, March 11, 2016

We’re coming up to the 20th anniversary of the EverQuest franchise next month.  That is a long time for a game to hang around.

EverQuest is still alive and kicking, still getting updates, and still making money so far as I can tell.  It is long past its population peak, which hit way back in 2003.  There have been multiple rounds of server merges in order to keep server populations viable.  But there remains a sizable active player base… a player base that is, in all likelihood, still larger than the initial target Sony had for the game back before it launched.

Therein lies the problem, the dilemma of these sorts of game.  Titles like EverQuest, which I will call MMORPGs, are not like single player games or even most multiplayer games.  They are more like their MUD antecedents in that they have a social aspect that attracts and holds players and keeps them playing long after they might have walked away from a game that only featured a single player campaign.  MMORPGs, if they grab a big enough audience early on, can stay viable for years and years.

Just about five and a half years after EverQuest hit the shelves SOE launched EverQuest II.  It was supposed to ship before then… at least a year before then according to Computer Gaming World back in 2003… but when do these things ever ship on time?

It was meant to replace the original, but was too different and initially too… broken isn’t the right word because a lot of regrettable aspects of the game were working as designed, so maybe just not well thought through… to lure many away from the first game and not good enough on its own to surpass the original.  And, as I mentioned, people invested in EverQuest ended up declining to  jump to a new game to start anew.  The old game was still there and they were settled in the world they already knew and loved.

So Everquest II didn’t exactly break records on the subscriptions front.

In the scale of the time, where EverQuest was the top dog, it still did pretty well.  We’ve seen the subscription chart before that shows it peaking around 350K subscribers.

Subscriptions – 150K to 1 million

That was well shy of EverQuest‘s 550K peak, but nothing to be ashamed of in the mix of games at the time.  Or it wouldn’t have been had not World of Warcraft launched a month later.

I think the the fact that you couldn’t find a copy of WoW very easily until early in 2005 kept people in EQII longer than they might have stayed.  But many of the 350K fled, either back to EQ or on to WoW.    The lesson learned, according to Smed at the time, was no more MMO sequels.  But if they had kept to that this post would stop right here.

Meanwhile WoW‘s subscription numbers distorted all previous measures.  550K looked great, until WoW was rocketing past ten times that number and continuing to climb.  WoW changed the genre and the expectations of both players and studios.  The era of insanity began, where the potential of the genre seemed unlimited.  Charlatans declared that if you weren’t making an MMORPG.  WoW became the benchmark for success and money chased those who claimed they could reproduce the success of WoW.  However, the plan usually involved copying WoW, sometimes subtly, sometimes brazenly, but WoW was the target.

EQ and EQII chugged along all the same.  They clearly had enough of an audience to remain viable.  They both got updates and expansions on a regular basis.  There was the inevitable change over to a cash shop F2P model since the audience willing to part with $15 a month for a game was limited and, it seemed, concentrated on Azeroth.

Along the way the idea of a sequel began to stir anew.  A SOE Fanfest in August 2010 SOE announced that they were working on a new EverQuest sequel, which had been given the placeholder name EverQuest Next.

The Freeport Next we never saw

I don’t have a post about the announcement itself.  That was back in my naive blogging days when I thought linking out to other coverage was enough.  Link rot has proven that idea wrong.

But I did take a closer look at what SOE considered their lessons learned from the Norrath experience so far.  They sounded reasonable enough in summary:

• Single world without the need to load zones
• Instanced dungeons
• Low system requirements
• Stylized character models
• Fewer classes, relative to EQII
• PvP from day one and “done right”

Basically, it sounded like WoW, except for the PvP “done right” part.  But SOE has never done PvP right in Norrath, so WoW PvP would probably have been a step up.

We heard nothing much else for a long stretch (the usual SOE method) until June of 2012, when it was announced that everything we saw or heard in 2010 was obsolete and should be disregarded.

Come SOE Live, the new name for SOE Fanfest, of August 2013 we were treated to a new vision of an EverQuest sequel.

Firiona Vie makes it to 2013

There was definitely a new plan with a new set of parameters:

• No Levels
• Limited Skills Available
• Skills Specific to Weapons
• 40 Classes and Multi-classing
• Six Races
• Destructible Terrain
• Parkour-like Movement
• Combat Roles beyond the WoW Trinity
• Emergent NPC AI
• Sandbox nature
• World Changing Quests

They also adopted EverQuest Next as the official name.  I wrote a long post about each aspect that was covered and linked out to what other people were writing about it as well.  And a lot of people were writing about it, excited by the prospect.

That went on in fits and starts, with long periods of silence, until early March 2016, when the whole thing was finally cancelled.  I declared that the end of the classic open world MMORPG.  Nobody seemed likely to make anything like the original EverQuest again, despite that quote at the top of the post, which came straight from the copy of the EQN cancellation announcement.

But we were into the Daybreak era by then, and closing games had become the rule rather than the exception for the team in San Diego, so a cancellation seemed par for the course.  The development tool-become-game Landmark was all that survived of EverQuest Next, and even its time was limited.

Which brings us to today.  It has been nearly three years since EverQuest Next was cancelled, and I suspect that we will hear no more about it or the goals it had.  Yet still, the rumor of sequels persist.

I had a tip sent to me about two years back that suggested that Daybreak was working on a small scale game based in Norrath, something more like a co-op RPG rather than an MMORPG.  But that was when H1Z1 still included what became Just Survive, which was also supposed to be small scale, with many servers and a co-op or PvP mechanic.  But I haven’t heard anything like that since.  Perhaps the decline and eventual demise of Just Survive kept that from becoming a thing.

Then there was the post-layoff rumor post from last May which had this gem in it:

Everquest 3 has been back in development for a year and is being rebuilt from the ground up. It aims to compete with Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen and to be the first fantasy MMORPG to put an emphasis on team battle royal PvP.

Battle royale EverQuest, because when you have a hammer that worked really well for a bit, every problem looks like a nail?  As PlanetSide Arena suggests, Daybreak is still trying to recapture that battle royale magic that they so briefly held with H1Z1.  And I am not sure that really competes with Pantheon.  But Pantheon is still a vision and some demos five years down the road, so who knows what it might end up being.

And then, back in September of last year, there was the NantWorks joint venture announcement which, among other things, seemed to promise some version of EverQuest on your phone.  But the press release also suggested that H1Z1 and some version of EverQuest were running on the Daybreak’s “well tested game engine,” which might have been a mistake, might have been marketing being unclear on the concept, or might have been a slip that indicated that something in the EverQuest domain was up and running on that engine.

So, with all of that context, where does an actual EverQuest 3 fit into the world?

Wait, I’m not done with context.  Did I mention that it isn’t 1999 anymore?

I realize that the fact that time has moved forward ought to be self-evident, but I don’t think that always sinks in as deeply as it should.  There will be somebody out there who wants the original EverQuest, death penalty and corpse runs included, on an updated platform.

And, I have to admit I have pined for that sort of thing myself at times.  Wouldn’t original EverQuest on the WoW engine be something?

But part of what made EverQuest great and popular and a legend is that it came out in 1999, which I am sad to say is now twenty years gone in the rear view mirror.  At that point in time it was a perfect storm of features and design.  Now though?

So what should an EverQuest 3 look like?

Suggesting going back to 1999 feels like trying to get lightning to strike the same spot a second time, only the storm clouds have long moved on.

Building something more WoW-like with the Norrath lore might have some draw, if done right.  But is the lore enough of a draw if the game is otherwise just another free to play, cash shop, and loot box clone in the genre?

And then there are those lessons learned.  There are some tasty tidbits there.  But Daybreak has already folded on that hand once.  Why would I possibly believe they could revive it again?  It may very well be that the “no sequels” lesson was the one they ought to stick with.

During the coming 20th anniversary of the original I suspect/hope/dread that Daybreak will tell us about plans they have for the future of the franchise.  It seems like the optimum point in time, when nostalgia for the franchise will swell and attention will be drawn to the game as it reaches that milestone.  But I am conflicted as to how I will greet the news of any such successor.

Pokemon Dialga and Palkia GameStop Download Event

It being an even numbered year… or such is my theory… Nintendo has again decided to give Pokemon players a chance to get their hands on an array of otherwise mildly difficult to obtain legendary Pokemon.

The first up are from the Pokemon Diamond, Pearl, & Platinum generation, Palkia and Dialga.

Legendaries of the DS era

To obtain one or both of this pair you must trundle on down to your local GameStop to pick up a code to redeem with your game.

The code requires you to own a copy of Pokemon Sun, Moon, UltraSun, or UltraMoon, and the legendary you get depends on which copy of the game you have.  Those with Pokemon Sun or UltraSun get Palkia while those with Pokemon Moon or UltraMoon get Dialga.

But the divide doesn’t end there.  Those with Pokemon Sun or Moon get a level 60 version of their respective legendary with one set of moves, while those with Pokemon UltraSun or UltraMoon get a level 100 version of their legendary with a different set of moves and a held item.

Look, here is the chart if you want the details.

You can click on this to see it larger…

So the true OCD Pokemon fan has to have all four games… but of course they already do… in order to obtain all four legendary variations.

I will likely just get a code for my copy of Pokemon UltraMoon… mostly because through my own bit of obsessive “Gotta Catch ‘Em All!” collecting, I already have the duo sitting in Pokemon Bank.  But I wouldn’t say no to another one.

Anyway, all of this, including the steps on how to redeem your code once you obtain it from GameStop, are documented over on the Pokemon web site.

There is a time constraint.  The codes will only be available during February and must be redeemed by May 28, 2018.

Happy collecting!

Addendum: I actually picked up a card after writing this.

The Dialga and Palkia card

The cards are much bigger than the last GameStop distro, being about 4x the side by my estimation.

The reverse side of the card

Moving Day Again

If there is one bad habit I have had in New Eden, it is my propensity to collect crap.  The “All Items” tab in the Assets window is a scary place for me.  Once it took so long to load I thought I had crashed the server by opening it.

Just a snippet out of the long, long list of places

I have a recurring nightmare about having to go out in a ship and haul everything back to Jita or Amarr.  Some of that stuff has been out there for a long time too.  I don’t think I have spent time in Hageken for nearly a decade.  And then there was that unfortunate region-wide buy order in Domain.

So when it was announced yesterday that the coalition was moving to a new staging system, I wasn’t exactly thrilled at the thought of moving my stuff yet again.  We were not moving too far, just a couple gates, but there was still the prospect of a lot of hauling in my future.

Dead pods mark move ops

However, things didn’t turn out as bad as I thought they might.  I managed to stuff my Mastadon full of stuff and moved most of the loose modules and other items in three runs under the protective eyes of the local standing fleet.

After that, it was time to move all the ships I had stored up.  That is usually the tough part.  But as it so happens, I haven’t been collecting quite so many ships lately.  I used to buy a couple ships for every doctrine, but the coalition has been trying to keep logi stable between doctrines, so I have been able to re-use the same ships.  That, plus the fact that I now have an Archon and an Apostle, both of which have hangars capable of hauling assembled ships, meant I was able to carry almost everything over to the new staging rather than flying each ship.

Apostle ready to jump

So having two capital ships finally pays off.

The only downside to the whole thing is that the ships you are carrying in the hangar can only have ammunition and other charges for modules in their cargo.  So I had to pull out all the refits and mobile depots and nanite repair paste and what not and shove them in the cargo hold to be sorted out later.

So move op completed for me more quickly than usual.  Everything I had in the old staging Keepstar is now in the new one.  However, it still feels like I have a ton of stuff rolling around in my inventory bin.  Also, I have to go through all the fits and figure out which ships need modules in their holds.  I might save that task for the start of an actual op.  There is always some lag time while we assemble.