The Friday Bullet Point is GameStop

January is almost in the rear view mirror and it has already been a strange year.  I figured it was about time for me to grab some smaller items from the month and do a Friday bullet points post.  Obviously, GameStop was the top item for me.  But, after that, everything else sort of faded into insignificance.

• The Revenge of GameStop

A year ago, in my predictions for 2020, I said that GameStop was headed for bankruptcy.  That seemed like a gimme prediction given the company’s situation.  But then came the pandemic and we all needed video games and the company revived.

Still, things were not looking great for storefront video game sales.  The company’s stock price (ticker: GME) was around $4.00 a share a year ago and had buoyed up close to $20 thanks to holiday sales.  And then, earlier this week it was past $450 a share.

Melvin Capital Management (MCM) decided to short the stock… basically a bet that the price would go down… when it was sitting in the high teens, which the Reddit group Wall Street Bets decided to go all in the other way, driving the price up to punish MCM, costing them a lot of money as they had to cover their position.

As if many were not convinced already that the stock market has simply become a casino for the wealthy, Robinhood, E*Trade, and TD Ameritrade, all of which cater to small investors, stopped allowing their users to trade GameStop (along with AMC, BlackBerry, Nokia, and a few others which was also seeing unexpected movement).  Robinhood denied it was a political move, claiming problems with margin exposure and reconciliation, and they are kind of a dicey edge case in the market, being already under investigation by the SEC and some states.

But TD Ameritrade E*Trade are not.  They’re really in the Wall Street club first, and no doubt this move was to defend the extremely wealthy… which includes themselves… as much as anything.  The casino gets upset if the suckers start costing them too much money and start changing the rules.  And there have already been calls for the SEC to control this sort of outsider behavior so that the peasants can’t rise up again.  Populist politicians on both sides of the divide are already looking to make hay out of this and there may be congressional hearings… because political donations from Wall Street are all important.

As a rule, small investors are only safe… or not at complete risk… investing in index funds, usually through their 401k retirement program, because Wall Street can charge a recurring maintenance fee and then use the money to prop up the stocks that benefit them the most.  The little guy is allowed to benefit, but only if Wall Street can make its money first.

And people may be cheering that MCM lost a bunch of money on this, but other big firms either sold off or got in with their shorts when the price was high and made money on the backs of the Redditors.  Meanwhile, individuals who saw GME prices taking off and jumped in later and who didn’t sell before the dive will lose out.  As always, Wall Street wins in the end and the small investors mostly lose.

In the end, none of this helps GameStop  the company even one iota. (Though I wouldn’t be surprised to find some senior execs and board members sold off part of their positions.)  The stock price only matters when the company offers new shares to the public.  This was all people trading shares the company had already sold, so the price… $4.00 or $400… doesn’t mean much to their daily operations.  The company is still in trouble.  This is all people trying to make money from nothing but perception… it is straight up gambling.

This sort of thing happens every so often.  The NPR podcast Planet Money did a story earlier in the year about Hertz Car Rentals when declared bankruptcy earlier this year… due to the fact that they had no cash reserves to speak of because they have spending all their money on stock buy backs which are what most benefit the CEO, board of directors, and Wall Street in the short term, so were completely unprepared for the pandemic downturn… and how their stock suddenly shot up because people were playing the market and wanted to make a quick buck.  The GameStop thing was only news because Wall Street lost control of the situation for a brief moment.

And yes, I am a bit cynical about Wall Street after watching them wreck the economy with sub-prime mortgages fifteen years back only to pay no price and get handed billions of dollars in quantitative easing so they could pay themselves bonuses while many suffered.

After the great depression of the 30s a lot of regulations were put in place to keep a titanic event like that from happening again.  For a brief time in history the stock market was what my finance professor described back in college, a way for company to raise money in order to expand or invest in the business.  That has long since been chipped away and we’re not so far from the days of Joseph Kennedy bilking small time investors.

Anyway, this seemed like something worth noting, even if it is only tangentially gaming related.  I’ll be interested to see where things stand in a year when I review this post.

For those interested in more details about GameStop:

• Ars Technica – The complete moron’s guide to GameStop’s stock roller coaster
• Ars Technica – Gaming the system: How GameStop stock surged 1,500% in nine months
• CNET – Robinhood, TD Ameritrade restrict trading of GameStop, AMC stock
• Polygon – The fallout from GameStop’s wild Wednesday has been ugly
• Twitter Thread – How Robinhood helps Wall Street in the end
• I, Cringley – Get Ready for More GameStops

 

KarmaFleet

I joined KarmaFleet.

My new calling card I suppose

As I mentioned early in the month, our long time corp Black Sheep Down was folding up shop.  With just a few active players I gather there was some pressure to be absorbed into a larger corp in TNT.  I doubt I would have left Black Sheep Down otherwise, as it enabled me to do what I wanted to do in EVE Online, which mostly involves repairing space ships in fleets and blowing up structures.

But given the need to move I also now had the incentive to consider where I should land.

This is a lesson that all companies, real or virtual need to remember.  Customers will often stick with you simply because it is easier to deal with the known than consider the unknown.  But if you force somebody to consider it, they might decide they would be better off elsewhere.

And so I ended up in KarmaFleet, the then CFC response to the “levee en masse” idea that started to become a part of war in null sec.  Once it was difficult to get into null sec alliances.  Many considered themselves elite.  But the math of “N+1” is what ended up winning wars and now any coalition beyond a certain size has to have some form of easy entry, new player friendly organization to keep fleets full and fresh blood replacing attrition.

Why KarmaFleet?

Dear kindly social worker,
They say go earn a buck.
Like be a soda jerker,
Which means like be a schumck.
It’s not I’m anti-social,
I’m only anti-work.
Glory-osky! That’s why I’m a jerk!

-Gee, Officer Krupke, West Side Story

KarmaFleet has their own answer to that question and produces propaganda around that.

What KarmaFleet Offers

I’ve pointed a few people in the direction of KarmaFleet in the past as place to get access to the null sec aspect of EVE Online.  (Tellingly, I never suggested TNT or our old corp.  Being around me is not a lot of help in game really.)

Of course, they also produce propaganda that might be more on point.

The real progression

I may already be in that final state even as I join.

I certainly didn’t need free skill books or free ships, I had access to almost all the SIGs and squads when I was in TNT, and I am in a post-ISK state of denial, living off of the modest reserves I acquired in my more enthusiastic days.

Instead, the move to KarmaFleet was more of a simplification of my time.  Being in TNT gave me access to all of the GSF infrastructure.  In fact, it is a requirement to be integrated with their auth services, forums, coms, and what not in order to participate.

But TNT also has its own auth services, forums, coms, and SIGs, which are also required, such that to be in TNT means keeping up basically a dual set of services.  That wasn’t exactly a huge burden, largely because I mostly failed to keep them going.  I would update TeamSpeak for corp meetings when they happened, but I was mostly in a state of lapsed compliance.  Having, for example, a that second Jabber account TNT that would echo every Goonswarm all/all ping but wasn’t hooked into SIGs and squads wasn’t all that useful.

Now, in KarmaFleet, all the things I already had setup and maintained remain the same and the stuff I would occasionally have to get back into compliance with are no longer an issue.  That and a few other small items have streamlined things for me a bit.  I wasn’t going to leave our corp just for that, but since I had to leave anyway, I figured I might as well find what benefits I could.  So I indulged my laziness.

Getting In for Normal People

Of course, that is why I went.  How I went, that is a bit of a tale in its own.  As with many things, what you’re told and what actually happens do not always exactly align.

The application process is simple.  You go to the KarmaFleet site, click on the “Click Here to Apply” and follow instructions.  You create an account, add you API data for your characters, and fill out an short application that asks about your history with the game mostly.  The characters part is the sticking bit for most people.  I have seen it come up on their Discord multiple times and it was the only question directed at me; did you list ALL you characters in the game.

I foolishly said I thought so but that I had been playing since 2006.  So I had to answer the question in a couple more ways before I got an “alight” in response.  I’m pretty sure a spy would have just said yes, they were certain, but whatever.  Spying is still a bit of a mania.

After that you wait for a bit… I waited for almost three weeks… and then somebody will give you the yea/nay on your application.  If you’re accepted there will be a corp invite waiting for you in game… which was the only notification I got.  Accept that and you are in KarmaFleet.  An automated in-game email will show up full of all the things you need to do to register for and access the various alliance resources.

Getting In for the Encumbered

Of course, I was a bit different.  I was already in the coalition and already registered and on the various services and there is honestly not a lot out there about how to move forward from there.

I had dropped roles in Black Sheep Down a while back, so when the invite came I accepted it and was in KarmaFleet right then.  I knew from having heard in the past that I would have to re-apply to the various SIGs and groups to which I belonged.  But while I was in KarmaFleet nothing else had changed.  I still had access to all my old groups and various identifiers still showed me as belonging to TNT.

Here is what to do; be patient.

At some point the system will poll and notice that your current status does not match what it has stored for you, and it has only one response to change… to purge you as an inactive.  At that point you will get an email telling you this with a link the the authentication system and instructions to go log in and click the button to restore yourself.

Once you do that you will be set to go.  Your info will be correct and you will have access to all the default forum areas and such that you get as a corp member.  You have to reapply to all your old groups again, but that is pretty easy.  I was back in Reavers pretty quickly, for example.

I did not know the “be patient” part.  I last changed corps back in 2013 and almost everything in the API and authentication area has changed since then. So I asked in the general Jabber channel how long it would take for the data to refresh.  Somebody told me I needed to go push a button in the auth interface and everything would be fine.

But it wasn’t.  The system hadn’t gotten around to noticing something had changed yet.  It seems to poll about every couple of hours I would guess.  And until it notices you and takes action, there is no button to press that will move things along.

Somebody had indicated that there was something I could do and, having forgotten to calculate in the value of advice from random Goons in a general chat channel, I spent a futile hour or so poking various things in the hope of forcing an update.  Only then did I decide to be patient and went off to do other things.  Later, when the email arrived, I went and pressed the button and things were fine.

Now to wait for EVE Who and zKillboard to update while I reapply to my various SIGs and squads (and one new one that was just formed).  I actually might not reapply to all of the ones I was in previously.  I never was of much use in CapSwarm nor in the fleet booster SIG.

I just need to figure out how to get Pidgin to stop trying to log into their Jabber/XMPP conference channels every time I launch it.  I can’t find a UI element that controls that, but it knows to try and log me in every time, so there is probably a config file somewhere I can edit.  (Also, maybe I should upgrade my seven year old copy of Pidgin to the latest version.)

To the Ring Forges of Eregion

Eregion shouldn’t be there.  It shouldn’t be in the LOTRO Legendary server yet.  I shouldn’t be able to access it.

We’ll just stick with Legendary I think

As a zone, it was not part of the original launch content, or even a post-launch addition like Evendim and Forochel.  Eregion came in with the Mines of Moria expansion in early 2009.  It is the starter zone for Moria, the warm up that sets your location relative to the fellowship of the ring as well as the place where you pick up your legendary weapon so you can start that endless grind.

Not that the fellowship is all that hard to follow…

Also, as you progress through the zone, you start getting quests where the reward is experience for that millstone about your neck, your legendary weapon.  Only you can’t get one of those yet, so doing those quests are something of a waste.

Anyway, if you are keeping a list of all the ways that the LOTRO Legendary has included things that weren’t there at launch… and that must be a very long list by this point… you can add Eregion to it.

On the flip side, it would be hard to keep Eregion out.  Since SSG was determined to keep the effort as low as possible for this server, Eregion pretty much had to stay in because you can walk there if you so desire.  So, short of having a different map for the server… and I don’t think the patcher is up to even that level of complication, given how it seems to need to take its shoes off to count to twenty some days… we were just going to have to deal with Eregion being part of the first chapter of the server.

Eregion is also a bridge zone, a link between what happened in the original Shadows of Angmar content and what was to come in Mines of Moria.  It is where you prepare for your new life under ground.  It is also where the hand-off between Volume I and Volume II occurs, so I suppose it isn’t a stretch to argue it ought to be there.  You need to go there in order to finish up Volume I in any case.

And so it was that I launched into Book XIV of the epic quest line.  This book doesn’t center around a single zone, but rather sends you out again on a grand tour of various locations in Eriador.  We have the two halves of the ring Narchuil, so now we have to find out what happens next, all of which starts with Laerdan.

So, what’s it going to be Laerdan?

There is much running about across the landscape and a series of instances that tell what happened between Laerdan and his daughter Narmeleth, possessed by Amarthiel (and who can appear as here… or Sara Oakheart… as needs require) that I am sure would take years of therapy for either of them to work through all of what happened.

Questioning daddy before an audience

Trying to play nice, before getting rough

The whole thing is drawn out too far and makes you play as other characters with different abilities from time to time, something that always gets on my nerves when over-used.  You even have to run around and wake up sleeping orcs with a good, swift kick at one point, which might remind you of early quests in Durotar.

Eventually though it is off to Eregion, to the ring forges found there where the one ring, its companions (the three, seven, and nine), and an unknown number of lesser rings (including Narchuil) were made.

Map of Eregion

That all comes together at the instance at Tham Mirdain, down near Mirobel, in the southwest corner of the zone.  As before, this is a fellowship sized instance which, if you attempt it solo, you get a buff that makes you powerful enough to master it.

The instance is straightforward enough.  If you take on each group around an area it will save you some bother as they’ll all come to help if you go straight for the obvious main NPC there abouts.

In the end I made it through and found myself facing Amarthiel.  But Narchuil had already been reforged and she now wore it.

Pretty much the story of this whole quest line so far

She kindly offers to let me be the first to die to her new toy when Mordrambor, who has been running around after the ring himself shows up.  He also seems pretty confident that he holds the upper hand despite Amarthiel having the ring.  He has a backer, some power in his corner now, some heavy ammunition in his camp, but he isn’t saying who quite yet.

Interrogation is not her strong suite, let me tell you

And then we find out as Mordirith, who I thought Golodir and I had defeated back at the end of Volume I, Book VIII in Carn Dum deep in Angmar.  Reports of his death, however, were greatly exaggerated.

The trio re-united in Eregion… Mord has a dragon mount now!

To cut to the basics, this was all a ruse to test Amarthiel.  She failed, Mordrambor is awarded the ring by Mordirith.  Amarthiel is rightly pissed and tries to defy Mordirith, which works out about as expected.

Mage fight! Mage Fight!

It was kind of like the duel between Harry Potter and Voldemort… only they are both evil and you’re probably screwed no matter who wins.

The power of the Nazgul prevails and Amarthiel lays broken and sobbing on the ground as Mordrambor takes the ring from her.  And then Laerdan shows up, because this is the grand finale I guess, and promptly gets himself smote by Mordrambor because he called Mordirith by his middle-school nickname or something.

And so the scene ends.  Mordirith flies off on his dragon.  Mordrambor disappears… I guess the ring gave him that power, as previously he had to exit scenes on his own two legs.  Laerdan is… well… not dead.  Elves don’t die, being tied to the fate of Arda for all time, so he could come back.  But his current body was laying there lifeless. And Amarthiel is just sprawled on the ground, her plans undone.  The narrator says you capture her, but that is played off screen.

And that was it for Book XIV.  Just one more book to go to finish out Volume I of the epic quest line.

The Celestial Tournament

I have mentioned the Celestial Tournament before.  It is a pet battle challenge in World of Warcraft on Timeless Ilse in Pandaria.  You go there and speak to Master Li to join in.

Master Li on the Timeless Isle

Master Li has a simple description of the event.  The tournament is an instance with its own rules.

To be able to enter it you first need to have at least 15 battle pets at level 25.  That probably isn’t enough, but that is the bar.  You can only do the tournament once per week, a lock out that resets every Tuesday.  Once you enter you have to defeat all of the challengers to win and you cannot use the pet heal skill or pet bandages to heal up any of your pets.  You have to get through with the pets you have with you.

Now, there is a work around on the healing thing.  There are some of the fights where the first pet the foe uses does a self-buff, so you have a free round to cast a heal.  Also, there is no penalty for quitting a fight, unlike the 10% health hit you suffer if you surrender in the wild, so you can get out a pet with a group heal, make them your first pet in a group, and heal on the first round, then surrender, until your injured pets are healed up.  That is a bit tedious and it requires that you not let your pets die in battle.  If you do, you’ll have to get along without them.

The challenge itself is divided into two parts.  The first part is a set of three Master Pet Tamers, each with a team of three.  There are nine total, three groups of three, that rotate each week.

The initial three are not all that tough of a challenge.  I was able to come up with winning teams for the various tamers soon enough.  My main problem was creating independent teams to fight each one.  If you read advice or comments about fighting any individual master pet tamer, the same usual suspects always seem to come up.  If you go over to Warcraft Pets and look at their Top 20 List of highest rated pets, most of that list comes up again and again.

I have duplicates of some of them… the Iron Starlette and the Emerald Proto-Drake for example… but not all of them, so to make independent teams I have to find substitutes.

Fortunately, for those first three, there are substitutes possible, so those teams were setup.

It was the second set, the legendary battle pets, that was the difficult part for me.  After the three pet tamers, you have to fight the four legendaries, Chi-Chi, Xu-Fu, Yu’la, and Zao, who also happen to be the four pets standing around Master Li in the screen shot up at the top of the post.

For those fights your team of three goes up against a single pet which generally has a lot more hit points and hits harder while having a buff that reduces your own attacks and often a self-heal skill that will undo all your efforts.  Over at WoW Head they have a pretty extensive guide to the whole thing.

My problem was two-fold.  First, back when I was first giving this a shot, I lacked a lot of the pets on the guide, so was having to wing it and roll up my own teams.  That led to the second problem, which was it is a pain in the ass to experiment with teams.  You have to go into the tournament, defeat the first three, then use your experimental team to see how it does.  If it fails, you have to leave the instance, heal up your pets, then go back and do it again with whatever your adjustments might be.

After a long evening of doing that I said, “screw it!” and set about just collecting more of the battle pets suggested and then leveling them up.  Basically, I went away for almost two months and only returned over the weekend to finally give it a go again.

And with a bevy of new pets to form teams around, I beat it on the first try.

Well, that was suddenly easy

There was, of course, an achievement that went with the victory.  But the real reason to do the Celestial Tournament is to ear Celestial Coins.

The coins, I want the coins

With the Celestial Coins you can purchase items from Master Li, including four battle pets representing each of the four legendary pets you have to fight.

The pets for sale

Fortunately, when you with the Celestial Tournament for the first time Master Li gives you a quick quest that gives you two more coins, so that you have a total of three and can purchase one of the pets right then.

It’s a gimme, but you won’t pass it up

I went for Xu-Fu, who is one of those pets on that Top 20 list I linked above and comes up regularly in strategy guides for various fights.

Xu-Fu obtained

Of course he is level 1, so I put him at the top of the leveling queue in Rematch to get him up to level 25 on my next leveling cycle.

Now I just need to win the tournament nine more times… which means nine more weeks… to complete the set.

For those interested, these are my teams for each of the for legendary battle pets.

Final Four Teams

You can click on that picture to make it readable.

The general strategies for each were:

• Chi-Chi – Snails!  Keep Chi-Chi poisoned with your two DOTs and use dive when it is off cool-down.  Two snails should be enough, but bring three just in case.
• Xu-Fu – Cast lightning with the Whelpling, switch to the Clockwork Gnome and have him put down a turret. When he dies, which he will do quickly, in with the Chicken and Flock until Xu-Fu goes down.
• Yu’la – Dodge when Yu’la does lift off, burrow, then a cycle of attacks around that.  A set of regular rabbits can do this, but the Dust Bunny from Dalaran has a more powerful base attack, so speeds things up.  Now glad I got two of those.
• Zao – Get lightning up with the moth before it dies, then go to the raptor, do expose wounds and then batter until Zao goes down.

Those teams I picked up while searching around.  They were generally not the top strategies I came across, but they all seemed to work and, most importantly, had no overlap in pets so I didn’t have to worry about keeping pets alive from battle to battle.

Anyway, another battle pet collected.  Back to working on the various Raiding with Leashes pets.

Honest Game Trailers – Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic

A look at the BioWare classic, which does actually lead into SWTOR.