Showing posts with label January 08. Show all posts
Showing posts with label January 08. Show all posts

Friday, January 8, 2021

World War Bee Six Month Review

Time to sum up the story so far, if only to organize what I have written.

Munnins and Ishtars together in EI-O0O

The war officially started on July 5th with the end of the non-invasion pact between the Imperium and Legacy Coalition.  But nothing like that just happens on a single day.  The roots of the war go back much further and various points have been pointed to as where things began to head towards the state of affairs today.

I am not going to go down that rabbit hole.  Instead, I am picking as the start of things, the date when it became public that Vily and Legacy Coalition had been working PandaFam to attack the Imperium.  That extends the timeline by a couple weeks, but that was when things started moving… and when I started writing about the war and tagging it as such

Below is my post journey through the war so far in headline form.  This includes some events outside the war zone that involved the involved parties.  Each link goes out to the post named naturally, and often the headline is sufficient to tell you what to expect.  But somehow… and this was entirely unplanned… I ended up writing a weekly summary post.  For those posts I have added a few sub bullets to hit on the topics mentioned beyond just the state of the fighting.

And that is where we sit some six or so months into the war, with 71 posts documenting the path I’ve taken.  The battles over the M2-XFE Keepstar has given the Imperium some breathing room to push back on the invaders, but the war is still in Delve and PAPI still has a Keepstar one gate over from our capital.  There is much left to do.

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Wednesday, January 8, 2020

Gearing up for the Moon

In which I run on about gear just for the sheer joy of doing so.

EverQuest II is a bit of an outlier MMORPG.  If nothing else, it was perhaps the last such game to launch into a world where World of Warcraft wasn’t live and taking over the genre.  Both EQII and WoW were children of EverQuest, but even launching in the same month in 2004 they ended up very different beasts indeed.

My working theory is that the WoW team, despite being game devs, took what they loved about playing EverQuest and tried to improve it while the EQII team, with their insider perspective, tried to solve a lot of what they saw as problems with EverQuest, including things people were complaining about on the forums.

So while EQII has been influenced by WoW at times, it has always been grounded in a pre-WoW sensibility that has set it apart for better or worse.  And it has, over time, developed its own set of standard mechanics, like the box of equipment at the start of each expansion.

WoW and EQII are both big on gear, but EQII drove that obsession to 11 from day one, with way more gear slots, way more stats, and almost a phobia about letting people use the same bit of gear for too long.

Currently EQII has 21 gear slots for your character.

Paladin Slot Count

I am not counting the food and drink slots nor the quiver slot for your ranged ammo container. (Food and drink are very different than in WoW too, following the TorilMUD to EverQuest to EQII tradition of you needing to always have some to hand.)

Compare that to WoW… and I’ll do WoW Classic and WoW retail, both with paladins to maintain a paladin specific matrix I guess… and you will see that WoW Classic has 19 gear slots, while somewhere along the old relic slot went away, so retail WoW only has 18 gear slots.

WoW Classic and WoW retail paladins

Furthermore, two of those WoW gear slots, the shirt and the tabard, are purely cosmetic, so I am going to say that they don’t really count.  So we’re really talking 17 and 16 slots.

And in WoW, or at least in WoW Classic, you get introduced to that gear fairly slowly.  My characters, now in the low 30s in old Azeroth, finally all have hats.  One so far has a necklace, and nobody has trinkets yet.

In EQII you can find and equip gear for all those slots from level 1 forward.  The various crafting professions can make anywhere from two to half a dozen choices for each gear slot I would estimate, while the weapon slot has a lot more options.

And don’t even get me started about stats.  That was simple back in the day, but unlike WoW, EQII has never felt the need for a stat squish so the numbers just keep growing while the range of stats expand.  And then there adornments, while are slots in the gear that you can use to upgrade an item.

A modest item, stat-wise, and an orange adornment

And I won’t even bother with reforging, which lets you tinker with the stats on your gear, as I am completely unqualified to even boggle at that.

On top of all of that, in EQII you pretty much have swap out every single piece of equipment you’re wearing every ten levels.  At one point they put in a mechanism that basically made any equipped gear worthless to wear if it was more than ten levels below your current level.  I think that was put in to drive the trade skill market… believe me, there is a whole post coming about trade skills here… and might have been pulled out later on when the company decided they needed to hand out gear.

WoW gates content behind levels and gear as well.  But when you roll into a new WoW expansion you just do a few quests and you get enough gear upgrades to make you viable in the new content and allows you to progress and earn more.

But EQII these days… I’ve never had an MMORPG simply hand me so much gear.

Some of it, like the summer Panda gear, is behind a few simple quests.  But most of it is just on a box on the ground by the first quest giver you run into in an expansion.  And in that box is something for every damn slot.

The box o gear on the Plane of Magic

That isn’t a set of “this is all you’ll ever need gear” either.  You still get a stream of upgrades as you run quests.  I was replacing items within minutes of getting that gear.  Rather it seems to be an admission that gating content gating based on gear hasn’t always worked out for them. I recall Rise of Kunark being a trial because the beta test was mostly raiders in peak gear so all the solo starter content was tuned for them.  So, rather than fret about that they toss a box of gear on the ground behind that first quest giver.  And it has been a thing for a while.  I saw that same box in the Planes of Prophecy and in the Chaos Descending starting areas.

I didn’t need gear from either of those boxes because I had the summer Panda gear, but it was there if I did.  And, as my struggle to get to Luclin… the hard way, as it turned out… indicated, I might have been better off had I run through Chaos Descending for some better gear, though the easier answer was just to do the trade skill signature quest intro, which basically involves running down to the chemist for a pack of smokes, get access to Luclin, take the gear upgrades, then go do the intro quest for the adventure signature quest line.

Of course, once you have done either you not only have access for that character, you have access account-wide.  So now I have two characters at the level 120 cap, my paladin having gone through as well.  He still has some catching up to do on the trade skill front… he’s back in Planes of Prophecy for that… but that won’t take much time.  I’ve done that recently which, again, is another post in the making.

And then there is your mercenary, who also has slots for gear.  Because of course.  The slots get unlocked in a very EVE Online way, over time, like skill training.  Or you can pay for the unlocks with Daybreak cash, though the option is pretty expensive.

Still less time than a titan

To straight up buy the next rank would run me $15, which is a bit steep at this point.  I’ve been content to wait it out.

Mercs wear normal gear, but there is also mercenary specific gear.  In a stroke of good luck my first character to level 120 in both adventure and trade skills was an armorer who, it so happens, can make mercenary gear.  Or, at least gear for mercs who are level 100 and up.

Some merc gear items

I cannot make the accolades though.  Those are the ribbon items that are akin to stat boosters.  I am not sure who makes those yet.  But after Sigwerd made it through to 120, my follow on characters all have pretty well equipped mercenaries.

And then there are mounts, which got stats ages ago, but which got gear with the previous expansion, Chaos Descending.

My mount and its gear

Like mercs, mounts unlock gear slots over time.  I happened to get a few mount related gear drops as part of the dragon event that went on during the 15th anniversary celebration.  I was level 100 at the time and couldn’t use them, but on hitting 110 I had a few options.  Crafting them is apparently part of the Chaos Descending crafting timeline, an expansion I skipped over almost completely as there was no level cap increase… and I was able to gear up from the box on the ground on Luclin once I got there.  But I might have to go back and run through that just to get that as an option.  The good stuff is expensive.  More than I can afford to spend.

All of which is a whole lot to take in.  Believe me, it has been spinning around in my head at various points.  But it has taken 15 years and 16 expansions to pile on all of this, and some complexity isn’t a bad thing.  It is just another case of wondering how much this locks out anybody wandering into the game fresh versus veterans who have figured things out over the years as expansions have layered on change after change.

Otherwise there was no real point to this post other than to bring together a bunch of gear related items that have come to me as I have been back in EQII.

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Tuesday, January 8, 2019

MER – Hard Knocks Distraction and a Slight Mineral Price Rebound

We’re into the new year, but news and data from the old is still being put together.  Information and reports always lag behind.  And so it is here in shiny new 2019 CCP has posted the final Monthly Economic Report for 2018 covering the month of December.

What did we do in New Eden while many of us had some extra time off?

Well, to start off with mining, where I traditionally begin, it looks like we mined less.  At least we mined less in Delve.

December 2018 – Mining Value by Region

Delve still remains way out in front of all other regions, something more easily visualized on the bar graph.

December 2018 – Mining Value by Region – Bar Graph

Delve clocked in at 12.2 trillion ISK in value mined, down from the 15.5 trillion ISK mined in November.  And November was down from voracious 19 trillion ISK that was mined in October.

Previously I speculated as to whether the down turn in mining might be related to the dropping price of minerals, mining output being valued by what the market will pay.  And I might have gone to that as a potential explanation again this month, except that the price of minerals rebounded a bit in December.

December 2018 – Economic Indices

The price is still down near the three year low (though still a bit above the all time low), but still up some, enough that the drop in mining measured in Delve cannot be due to price.  Instead, it appears that people just mined a bit less.  This might even be related to the low price.  Ideally Adam Smith’s invisible hand will push supply and demand towards equilibrium.  A low enough price ought to get people to drop mining in favor of other economic endeavors.

But there was a week last month when a lot of us were in wormhole space blowing up that Hard Knocks Keepstar.  That might also explain the dip in Delve and the minor rise in the mineral price.

And all the more so since other places were on the rise.  Second place Esoteria, TEST’s home turf, was up a trillion ISK over November, as was third place Detroid, home of Fraternity.

Querious, another Imperium region, was down half a trillion ISK, leaving it in fourth place.  While still dominant, out mining the next three regions combined, Delve seemed to have been distracted by other events for a bit in December.

On the production front Delve remained steady.

December 2018 – Production Values by Region

Delve production was off by such a small number as to be effectively the same in December.  Likewise The Forge, Lonetrek, and The Citadel regions, the production areas that directly feed the Jita market, saw very little change between November and December.

December 2018 – Production Values by Region – Bar Graph

TEST was busy in Esoteria though, as production there climbed, pushing the region ahead of Lonetrek and The Citadel in the ranking.  It is now in third place, even if it is a distant third.  Other null sec regions also saw bumps in production since last month.

Trade value by region saw very little change in December.  The Forge, home to Jita, still dominates.

December 2018 – Trade Value by Region

Leaving The Forge out of the picture, the rest of New Eden stacks up behind Domain.

December 2018 – Trade Value by Region – Bar Graph, Forge Excluded

Delve held on to third place, not closing in on Domain and the trade hub in Amarr, but still staying comfortably ahead of the other high sec trade hubs as well ahead of any null sec region.  Delve continues to try and have its own economy in a single region.

And then there is the big faucet, NPC bounties.

December 2018 – NPC Bounties by Region

Delve remains at the top of the chart on this front.

December 2018 – NPC Bounties by Region – Bar Graph

Delve, while still in the lead, was down, as were the other Imperium regions, perhaps reflecting the coalition being distracted by blowing up structures in wormhole space for about a week.  Other regions, however, were up.  Of note were Branch (GotG), Esoteria (TEST), and Detroid (Fraternity), which were undisturbed.

You can even seen the week where the Imperium was in w-space on the sinks and faucets chart. (I was rolling back home around where the line spikes up, with a lot of other people traveling with.)

December 2018 – Top Sinks and Faucets

It is interesting to see what else on that chart dipped (or rose) in conjunction with the dip in bounty payments.  And, of course, once everybody was back from wormhole space bounties jumped to an all time high yet again, something I suspect that CCP will feel the need to address at some point.

Then there is the final chart, which compares some select regions across several parameters.

December 2018 – Regional Stats

And so it goes, the end of another year.  We will see if next month sees a continuation in the rise in NPC bounty payouts.  Or maybe something will happen to distract us again.

As usual, you can find all the charts and the raw data used to create this report over in the dev blog.

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Monday, January 8, 2018

Legion in the New Year

The Feast of Winter Veil is behind us.  The decorations have been taken down, Santa and the Smokeywood Pastures vendor have packed their bags and headed home, and all has returned to normal here in the new year.

I must admit I did not do much with the Winter Veil event in Azeroth this year.  I collected my gifts and treats from under the tree in Ironforge, but that was about it.

Happy Winter Veil… yummy

Instead I have kept chugging along on my own goals, logging in daily to do a few things and occasionally pressing on into uncharted territory.

Having flying unlocked has made running alts up to the level cap considerably easier.  I don’t mind having had to walk or ride everywhere for my first trips through the zones.  In fact, Blizz did their best to make that less onerous that it might have been otherwise, especially when working on world quests for reputation, via the flight master’s whistle that would picked you up and drop you at the nearest flight master.

So very nice

As good as that was however, flying both ways is still quicker than walking one way and hitching a ride back.

With flying I now have my hunter, the traditional second character I work on, up to level 110 along with a rogue and have a death knight well on the way.  Meanwhile I have been working on exalted status with the local factions via world quests with Vikund, my main.

I have to admit that I really like the way that Blizz worked the whole daily quest routing in Legion with world quests.  Those are the primary method for boosting your faction standings and if you are dying to get there ASAP you can work your way around the map doing them.

Or, if you’re like me and don’t want to burn out, you can just do the daily emissary quest.  Every day you get a new emissary quest on the map for one of the factions.  All you have to do is travel to their zone, do four world quests, then turn in the quest with the emissary for that faction and you get a nice 1,500 point boost to your standing.  And the emissary quests persist for a couple of days, so if you skip a day or two you can still pick up the ones you missed.

This totally works for me.

I do the emissary quest with Vikund and then usually move on to something else, often pet battles.

I actually have a couple of posts brewing about pet battles, including one on how I am building up my pet battle army by leveling up a pet a day from 1 to 25 by doing just 5 trainer battles.  Again, I like pet battles but am wary of over-indulging lest I burn out, so I have a nice easy routine, after which I do something else.  Sometimes that is hunting down another pet I do not have or doing some of the world quest pet battles for supplies.

That does bring me back to my garrison in Draenor for the menagerie every day as a start.  As much as I felt the garrison was not ideal… it was not housing or personalized but it did pull people out of the world… I still end up using it.

In addition to starting off my daily pet battle routine there I also bring my rogue back there regularly to collect hexweave cloth… and the ingredients to make it… to make 30 slot hexweave bags. I can crank out one of those about every other day so soon all my alts and their bank slots will have 30 slot containers.  I also send some to my daughter.  Bag space all around.

And I have finally moved into Argus.

Oh the places you’ll go…

I had the initial quest line for that open up to me ages ago and did the first steps, but then set that aside in favor of working on flying, the Paladin order quest line, and pet battles.  But now that I have flying and have capped off most of the order hall stuff I plan to do, I figured I ought to move forward.

Of course, there is no flying on Argus.  Ah well.  That probably means I won’t go there with a bunch of alts.  But I will bring my main out there and do all the things, so to speak, so as to see all of the expansion available to me.

Argus is interesting.  My first brush with it was a bit of a chore until I figured that bringing along one of my followers as a helper made things much more manageable.  So I am following the story line there under an alien sky… a sky with a huge object lolling about.

Hrmm, that planet looks familiar

Anyway, I continue on with WoW, still enjoying it on this return trip.

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