United Eden Login Event comes to EVE Online

Following on from the return of support for the Japanese language in the EVE Online client with the December update, CCP has announced the United Eden login event.

United Eden for Alpha and Omega

The event features some more Zakura SKINs of similar color schemes to the battleship SKINs currently available in the New Eden Store.  The even SKINs are for the Slasher, Tormentor, Kestrel, and Tristan hulls, as well as a capsule SKIN.

In addition there are fireworks, facial augmentations, and some skill points.

As usual, Omega pilots get all the goodies, while Alpha clones are limited to just the frigate SKINs.

Omega selection

The login campaign requires that you log in on four separate days over the course of the week long campaign, which ends at downtime on January 26th.

Another Level 50 in WoW Classic

We are not too far away from WoW Classic having been up and running for a year and a half and I have yet to get a character to level 60.  I have the usual excuses.  I’ve been distracted by other games, not the least of which was a stretch in WoW Shadowlands.  And, naturally, my efforts in the game have been diffused by too many alts.

But I am sure I will have some level 60s by the time we get around to The Burning Crusade Classic.  While doubtful of the alleged May launch date, I am sure we will hear about it in full at BlizzConline, which is just a month away.

As for my having level 60s, I feel confident on that front because I now have three characters on the far side of the level 40 doldrums.

Well Viniki, my gnome warrior and tank for our group, faced no such doldrums.  If you’re doing dungeons there is plenty of content to keep you going.  He will likely be the first to 60, being close to 59 already and with the group still facing a series of dungeons before we’re done.

Over in Dire Maul East

Then there is Tistann, my hunter, who was level 54 already when I last checked in on my alts in WoW Classic.  But a hunter might be the most relaxed way to level up in WoW Classic.  My hunter is level 57 now, though probably would have been level 60 had I not been diverted into retail WoW for a stretch.  Between him and level 60 there are a few zones as yet untouched, so he will get there.

And, finally, my paladin Wilhelm managed to get up to level 50 this past week.  He actually rolled on to level 51 before I even got a chance to start writing this.  With that last check in he was up to 45, but the climb from there to 50 was a bit of a chore.

There are quests to be done, though a few of them take some finding.  I wanted to try and lean on quests as much as I could because grinding mobs with him felt like a chore.  So there was a lot of traveling about to pick up a quest here that was finally viable, then a quest in another zone that I could manage.

One of the realities of the 40-50 climb is that at some points you just have to stop and grind out mobs for a bit to get that next level to make the next quest or two viable, and that was pushing me away from the pally because grinding mobs with him felt like a lot of work with too much downtime.

Of course, part of that was my fault.  Early on I had picked up a build from a guide over at Icy Veins and had been sticking to that.  However, on reflection, I am going to guess that it was more oriented towards being a retribution pally in a dungeon group.  Thinking there had to be a better way I decided to try the WoW Head pally guide and its build, and ended up with something a lot more manageable when it came to mana and health.  It still takes a while sometimes to beat down a mob, but you’re able to move on to the next one more quickly.

And then I got lucky.  A ret pally is only as handy as his weapon and I managed to luck out on a bargain priced 2H hammer late on a Sunday night.  The buyout price was more than I had, but the bid price was relatively low… Auctioneer does that as part of its algorithm I have noticed… so I bid on it and went to bed.  The next day when I logged in I had a new hammer waiting for me in the mail, the Taran Icebreaker.

The big hammer

Not only was it an upgrade on damage alone, but it also has a nice proc as well.  My 2H hammer skills were pretty low, but that just takes a bit of time and soon I was hitting on level mobs with it for full effect, which helped me move along.

Picking up Cuegro’s Gold

The quests were still what they were, but grinding some mobs to round out a level now and then became less of a chore.  And then, once I hit 50, some quests opened up in the Western Plaguelands, which is a paladin fun zone.  I actually rode up and got the flight point early and ground out some mobs just to get to level.  Then it was on.

Take that undead

So now he is on his way.  I still have to keep an eye on quests and levels and roam around between zones… after a start in WPL I went over to Felwood for the opening quests there.    If I can keep focus I might have three level 60s soon enough.  Of course, focus is a challenge.  I mentioned my sudden blacksmithing obsession, and that led to a burst of engineering work on Wilhelm, who now has the Gnomish Death Ray trinket… which is good, because he is otherwise lacking in trinkets, not counting the Argent Dawn commission.

Do not use when at low health

But once I get back on track, I could get there.

Paladin’s journey

That will probably be it though.  My next highest level character is my druid, who is still level 36.  I was holding him back in case Earl made it back to the group and we needed to re-assign roles or some such.  Best not to think of him, because while hope for Earl’s return has faded, I could get tied up in another run through the 40s with a restoration druid.

 

Friday Bullet Points Dipped in Nostalgia

It is raining again… which is a good thing in California… and a spate of different things have rolled across my screen, all of which interest me but which don’t quite warrant a full blog post yet, so we’re back to Friday bullet points.

Age of Empires Restrictive Edition

I was keen as mustard when it was announced last June that Microsoft was working on a remaster of the original Age of Empires.  While I was always more of an Age of Empires II – The Age of Kings fan… and I own the remaster of that already… I was still in for the original.

Age of Empires

After a long stretch of silence, there was finally some news about the game.

On the upside of things, the remaster will be available come February 20, 2018, so it will be here soon.

On the down side, the game will ONLY be available through the Microsoft Windows Store.  Leaving aside the whole “I don’t need another goddam Steam clone” and my lack of trust in Microsoft, the store itself tells me it won’t be available until the end of 2018 and that it won’t run on my device.

Also, it may require certain hardware

So I guess that pretty much lets the air out of any Age of Empires nostalgia I had as well as being a bad sign for any possible hope I had in their whole Age of Empires IV plan.

Rift’s Prime Number

From there we head over to Trion Worlds where their 2018 Rift On! producer’s letter.

Trion looks to be eyeing the green fields of nostalgia as well, taking a card from Daybreak’s deck and promising something called Rift Prime, a subscription only version of the game that will come with a fresh server, reduced cash shop options, progressively unlocked content, and NO lockboxes.

I have said in the past that the one thing that would surely get me to roll on back to Telara was a retro server of some sort, so this sounds like it might be the time.  The instance group in pre-Storm Legion expansion Rift was one of my MMO high points.  Still, there are some mixed messages.

We plan to present RIFT at its roots as much as is possible to do, and look forward to sharing details over the coming weeks. The PRIME server will progress at a faster pace than the original launch and will eventually come to an end in spectacular fashion.

So back to the roots is good, and I expect that the servers will have to progress… by which I assume they mean unlock expansions… more rapidly that than the first time around.  I am curious as to what the spectacular end will be.

But then there is also this to wrestle with.

As a small teaser of what’s to come, dynamically matching characters to their current zone’s level, dungeons dropping loot specific to your character’s true level, caps on the number of professions available to a single character, and participation awards that carry over to your characters on existing servers.

Many upcoming live content changes that apply to existing servers will also apply to the new PRIME server, assuming they’re not restricted by progression locks.

That doesn’t sound very much like Rift at its roots.

Anyway, the current time frame is “spring” for Rift Prime which, as we recall from the Landmark launch, extends out to the first day of summer in the back half of June.  Syp goes on about the Rift Prime server idea at length, but I am waiting for more details before I crank up the thousand word minimum post-o-matic opinion machine.

Legendary Pokemon Return.. Again

It is an even numbered year so Nintendo is having Pokemon events to give away legendary Pokemon.

Didn’t we just get some of these?

Getting people to come to events to make Pokemon a more social game has always been part of the Game Freak/Nintendo plan, but didn’t we just spend 2016 having monthly legendary events?  And isn’t the ability to catch a bunch of these part of the sales pitch for Pokemon UltraSun & UltraMoon?

Oh well, if you missed out and don’t have the wherewithal for end game Pokemon, another series of events are coming for 2018 starting with a Dialga and Palkia event in February at your local GameStop.  In order to participate you must have a copy of Pokemon Sun, Moon, UltraSun, or UltraMoon.

Also coming up in February for Pokemon nostalgia buffs is Pokemon Crystal on the 3DS Virtual Console.

More on the Expense of Video Games

In something of a follow up on the raging discussion back at the end of November about how expensive it is to make video games, Raph Koster has returned with a new presentation and discussion about the cost of making video games.  So more charts and graphs and a list of suggestions await.  If nothing else you can bask in how little we pay per kilobyte of video game software these days I suppose, a measure which makes those old 143KB Apple II floppies seem like something of a gold mine.

Where Have All Our Video Cards Gone?

And finally, we can wistfully recall the glory days when we were able to go down to Best Buy and purchase a goddam video card.  Ars Technica has an article up about how all this Tulip bubble crypto currency boom is soaking up all the high end video cards.  I guess I will be stuck with a GeForce GTX 960 until this whole thing collapses.

Anyway, those were my bullet points for the week.  If you want more there are some over at Endgame Viable, most of which are not duplicates of items on my list.

The Run for CSM 12 Begins Soon

CCP put up a dev post yesterday about the upcoming elections for the twelfth Council of Stellar Management.

Round 12 coming up!

Happens every year, so not exactly a surprise to people familiar with the body.

The surprising bit is that the current CSM session hasn’t been a drama shit show like the previous couple.  Nobody has been removed for breaking the NDA.  There haven’t been any long and emotional editorials or proposals about what the CSM should be doing or what its relationship with CCP ought to be that I have seen.  CCP didn’t feel the need to extend the “No Sions” rule to anybody else.  There were no boycotts.  And I haven’t heard any tales of CSM members being wrung out and soured by the whole experience.

A year ago people were wondering aloud if the CSM was headed for closure. At this same announcement in 2016 I was asking what was to be done.

Now, not so much.

The tenure of CSM11 has been fairly quiet.  I think the biggest CSM drama over the last year was Bobmon going to bat for I Want ISK, only to find out that Bobmon was a banker I Want ISK.  And since casinos were banned in the end, that bit of attempting to help his own interests didn’t add up to much.  The RMT barons got theirs, a happy ending for the game.

But other than that, and the occasional attempt to make hay over CSM meeting attendance on Reddit, the CSM hasn’t been news, headline or otherwise.

Granted, we have had other things to chew on.  There was the bitter Casino War that dominated the news for a few months.  And then there were the Citadel and Ascension expansions, the latter allowing people to participate in the game without having a subscription.  But CSM drama is like a bad smell; it becomes hard to ignore, even when other issues are occupying your mind.

So what happened?  Did we somehow just elect a perfect slate of brotherly love? (I don’t think there are any sisters on the rolls this time around, are there?)  Certainly the predicted XenuriApocalypse of footwear issues didn’t come to pass.  And I haven’t seen anything bubble up about CSM members talking out of school.

Or was it the change in management?

A year ago CCP Falcon and CCP Leeloo were running the show as the Combative/Deny Everything duo.  That might be unfair to CCP Leeloo, but certainly not to CCP Falcon who seems to revel in the tough guy, HTFU attitude of the game and who was shoveling nonsense about the CSM having some control over their status just a year back.

They were replaced before the CSM11 elections by CCP Guard, a long respected member of the CCP team, and CCP Logibro, who maintains a serious level of chill of his own accord. (Though I do wonder if there is some sort of maximum height limit for the community team at CCP as I don’t think many of them come up much past my shoulder.)

And since that change, it seems to have been smooth sailing.

I still wonder as to the efficacy of the CSM.  It still strikes me as a bit of a student council.  Its members still lack agency, and necessarily so as a customer advisory council.  And its membership still overwhelmingly reflects the groups in the game that know how to organize by necessity, which is to say the null sec alliances.  But at least it stopped being a public embarrassment to CCP.

So on we go!

The key dates for CSM 12 are:

• February 3 – 17: Candidacy application period
• February 17 – 28: Application processing period
• February 28: Candidates for CSM 12 are announced
• March 6 – 26: CSM 12 Voting period
• April 6: CSM 12 election results are announced

The biggest change since last year is the presence of Alpha clones, the non-subscribers, who can run for a seat on the CSM, but who cannot vote.  Franchise for Omega landowners only, you peasant alpacas!

There are, of course, all sorts of details about the hurdles of applying and running for the CSM, which are covered in gritty detail over at The Nosy Gamer.  If you want to immerse yourself, I recommend going there to get your fill.

Anyway, let the election season begin.  Xenuria 2017!