A Year in KarmaFleet

A little over a year ago I wrote about how our old corporation in the TNT alliance, Black Sheep Down, had dwindled in numbers and the remaining members were be pressed, if not pressured, to move into other corps in the alliance.  As with many things in life, my corp didn’t matter so much to me at that point… almost anybody I knew or who knew me had stopped playing by that then… but there was no real reason to pick up and move either.

Once pushed to choose something new I felt I had best look for the corp that would work best for me, and KarmaFleet seemed to be the obvious choice.

Spoiler, that is where I ended up

KarmaFleet is the largest corp in Goonswarm Federation (GSF), with nearly 5,500 pilots currently.  That makes the corpse more than double the size of GoonWaffe, the traditional core corp of GSF, and its nearly 2,500 capsuleers.  Those in GoonWaffe have traditionally been the “made men,” to borrow a concept, of the alliance and to get into that corp was to be accepted into the bosom of the organization and accepted fully as one of their own.  Other corps have to prove their value to the alliance, but those in Waffe were only ever subject to removal because they betrayed the alliance in some way.  Otherwise you were pretty much free to do as you pleased, no PAP link requirements or such would dog you.

GoonWaffe used to be the goal of many, and back in the day you had to show your Something Awful forum bonafides.  It used to be a standard “True Goon” dick measuring contest to compare registration dates over at SA.

These days though, KarmaFleet has become something of the destination for a lot of long term members of the alliance.  There are a lot of people in Reavers who were in other corps back in the day who are now in KarmaFleet.  It is the corp to be in if you don’t have a strong reason to be in another alliance corp.

KarmaFleet is the way into the alliance for many people and over the last six or so years as it was the GSF response to the need for more pilots to hold space.  Deep in the past a lot of null sec systems were not worth having, save for the fact that you wouldn’t want anybody hostile living next door to you.  Over the years that changed and more players could be accommodated in fewer and more densely packed systems.  The empires of 2014 or so, with three major coalitions holding most of null sec as either their own space or as rental space.

The Eternal War of Coalitions in 2014

Changes to null sec, both before and after Fozzie Sov, made having more players who would both live in coalition space and fight for the coalition itself more important.  The levee en masse era of null sec began.  Brave Newbies showed the way, and now each coalition has at least one new player organization that outsiders can join.  Gone are the days when getting into a null sec corporation needed three vouches, a phone interview, and a DNA test.

It also meant that these groups had to be nicer to people.  In 2011, when I went to null sec, the prevailing attitude was still very much “you should be happy we even let you in.”  Now organizations advertise the benefits of joining.

What KarmaFleet Offers

Of course, by the time I was thinking about KarmaFleet I was already in the coalition, so a lot of the recruiting benefits were already mine… or I was well beyond needing them.  There were no free skill books from them that I could use.

Once I had filled out the forms and waited around for a while… there was a bit of a queue to get in… I was let in.  I got myself set back up in the various channels and SIGs and squads and whatever and went on my merry way.

So the question now is, was it the right choice?  Am I happy a year down the road?

Sure.

From a purely selfish perspective, being in KarmaFleet has been good for me.  Some of that has been due to some rather small items, like not having to maintain two sets of coms because TNT has their own voice server and own forums and own Jabber channels.  I also don’t get every “all all” ping twice, once straight from GSF and once via the TNT relay.

Not a huge thing, but a benefit none the less.

I think the biggest change early on was with contracts.  Since I tend to do things with special groups within the coalition, that means getting out to remote stations and buying replacement ships.  Since we’re often in NPC stations adjacent to hostile space, that means that any ship contracts need to be up for alliance members only, lest the hostiles just come in and buy up all of our stuff right when we need it the most.  (Or buy it up and relist it for more, or put up bogus contracts with bad fits, something I have fallen for in the past.)

When I was in TNT that often meant I had to ask somebody else to buy me a ship off a GSF alliance contract and then I would give them the ISK for the ship.  Not a huge deal, but it is annoying to have to constantly ask and not be able to take care of yourself.

SRP, the ship replacement program… and I think I should do a post about the SRP and how it works at some point… is better in KarmaFleet.  TNT, as a smaller org, wasn’t keen to support special SIG or squad fits.  I ate some Reavers losses over the years as my SRP requests were denied.  KarmaFleet uses the GSF alliance SRP, which has been pretty good about special fits.  But they also have their own SRP for certain fits.  To encourage people to fly logi in support of fleets, you can get an additional payout on your loss by filing for both GSF and KarmaFleet SRP reimbursement.

One of the other benefits is that the participation requirements for KarmaFleet are low but well defined.  You need to go on three fleets and get participation credit every quarter.  Basically, one PAP a month, but you can make it up if you miss a month.

In TNT the participation requirements were somewhat vague.  I was never called out for lack of participation… and, in our corp, I was often one of the top three when it came to participation… but it is the sort of thing I can fret about.

Of course, once the build up to World War Bee came back in June, I was never in danger of missing participation goals.  I am on 64 PAPs so far for January and there is still more than a day left in the month.

The war itself has been the main focus for more than six months now, but I am glad I made the change when I did.  I could have lingered around in the old corp… like I said, they were not necessarily pushing, but the end was nigh… but getting out and getting set up and settled well before the war worked out.

Over all it was a good move.  I don’t take advantage of a lot KarmaFleet has to offer, and being a big organization means that I hardly stand out at my level of effort.  So it is likely this is where I will stay until they kick me out or I finally tire of the whole null sec thing completely.  I came in well on my way to the final stage of member progression.

The real progression

But the full transformation won’t happen until the war is over at least.  I know I have to see that through to the end, if only to see where it goes and to be a part of whatever denouement lays in our future.

SuperData Wraps Up 2019 with December Numbers

We have the final monthly digital revenue update from SuperData Research with the release of their December chart.

SuperData Research Top 10 – December 2019

Going straight to the PC end of the chart, the usual top four stayed in their usual ranking, with League of Legends still at the top of the revenue list.  The first change doesn’t hit until fifth position, where World of Warcraft was last month.  In December Red Dead Redemption 2 moved up into fifth place thanks to launching on Steam, with Roblox, which drops on and off the list, surging up into the sixth spot.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare held onto seventh, where it was last month, while World of Warcraft ended up down in eighth.

After that was CS:GO, another title that wanders on and off the chart, and Halo: The Master Chief Collection, which landed on PC at the start of December.

Missing from the list are Fortnite, which had been in the top five for a few months, but which had been falling off more recently, and World of Tanks, a long time and regular entry in the bottom half of the list.  With no revenue numbers to gauge by, you cannot really tell if the new titles were surging onto the list or if revenue dropped off for the titles that fell off.

On the console list, Pokemon Sword & Shield, which topped the list after its November launch, disappeared completely.  On top for December instead was Call of Duty: Modern Warfare which was in second place the previous month.  FIFA 20 and Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order swapped and then moved up a spot, while Grand Theft Auto V, the old grand dad of the list, managed a fifth place finish for the holiday season.  Finally, Fortnite is still holding on in the console space, grabbing the sixth spot.

On the mobile end of the chart Clash of Clans ran ahead and passed perennial top title Honour of Kings in December.  Candy Crush Saga landed in third place and Pokemon Go fell down to ninth position.  Also of note is Roblox, which broke into both the mobile and PC list this month, and Homescapes and Gardenscapes, both of which I have noticed advertising very heavily in other mobile apps.  I saw constant ads for both  in Words with Friends.

We can compare this with the December numbers from NPD.  As always, NPD is US only, combines PC and console sales, and do not always include digital sales.

1. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare
2. Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order
3. Madden NFL 20
4. NBA 2K20
5. Luigi’s Mansion 3*
6. Pokemon Sword*
7. Mario Kart 8*
8. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate*
9. Pokemon Shield*
10. Minecraft**

* Digital sales not included
*** PC Digital sales not included

The top of this list tracks the first spots on the SuperData console list, as consoles still depend quite a bit on the physical distribution chain.  People go to GameStop to buy console titles still.

FIFA 20 doesn’t make the cut because we don’t care that much in the US.

And Nintendo, which has no presence on the SuperData console chart this month grabs half the spots on the NPD chart.  Nintendo depends on physical sales more than any other console.

I think it is a bit of a cheat to split out Pokemon Sword and Pokemon Shield, but they do what they do.  But it looks like a lot of people got games for their Switch under the tree in December.

NPD also has a full 2019 sales chart.

1. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare
2. NBA 2K20
3. Madden NFL 20
4. Borderlands 3
5. Mortal Kombat 11
6. Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order
7. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate*
8. Kingdom Hearts III
9. Tom Clancy’s The Division 2
10. Mario Kart 8*

* Digital sales not included

As one might expect, another console-centric list there.  I suspect that Pokemon Sword & Shield would have made the cut had they decided to break them out as individual titles.

SuperData released their own report on 2019 already, which I covered in a previous post.

And so it goes.  The SuperData report also included the following items to accompany their chart:

Consumer spending on digital games reached an all-time high of $9.8B in December 2019, up 8% year-over-year. Substantial year-over-year growth in mobile revenue (28%) more than offset falling Console and PC earnings (down 25% and 4%, respectively). Console spending was down partially due to shrinking Fortnite revenue (December 2018 was the title’s highest-earning month ever) and also due to fewer major premium games being released in late 2019 compared to the 2018 holiday season.

Clash of Clans from Supercell had its best month ever, more than seven years after its launch. The game earned $158.2M in December 2019 as content updates and holiday sales resulted in growth of monthly active users (MAU) and conversion rates.

A gamble on a new business model paid off for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. Unlike past games in the franchise, Modern Warfare did not offer a season pass or paid map packs and monetized exclusively through battle pass sales and microtransactions. Despite this, Modern Warfare revenue in Q4 2019 was 4% higher than Call of Duty: Black Ops IIII during its launch quarter. In December 2019, the first month Modern Warfare players could purchase in-game content, spending reached $78.7M, nearly as much as was spent on Black Ops IIII in-game content during that game’s entire first quarter ($92.9M).

Grand Theft Auto V had its best month since December 2017. The game earned $84.7M across Console and PC as discounts drove downloads. Additionally, the release of the Diamond Casino Heist content update, a follow up to the highly successful July 2019 Diamond Casino and Resort update, resulted in increased spending on premium currency.

Red Dead Redemption 2 received a substantial boost after launching on Steam. Digital unit sales more than doubled from 406K in November to 1.0M in December. The game became available on Steam on December 5, one month after releasing elsewhere including the Epic Games Store and Rockstar Games Launcher. This brief exclusivity window was advertised in advance, so many players simply waited a short period to play the game on their preferred launcher.

 

Warcraft III Reforged

Earlier this week we got Warcraft III Reforged, the remaster of Blizzard’s 2002 RTS Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos and its follow-expansion Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne.  The remaster was announced at BlizzCon 2018 and was in beta late last year.

The return of RTS again

I pre-ordered this back during BlizzCon 2018… we were only mad at them about Diablo Immortal that year… and have been looking forward to giving it a try.  Warcraft III was the last step before World of Warcraft for Blizzard.  WoW was very much a mash up of EverQuest ideas (the whole MMORPG thing), some Diablo II mechanics (itemization, skill trees, health pots, and so on), and the Warcraft III lore.

I went back to play Warcraft III a ways back to experience a bit of the pre-history of WoW and it was, with the hindsight perspective, a prototype of what WoW would become.  It is a key part of the Warcraft franchise, which according to SuperData Research, has earned $19.2 billion in digital revenues over the last 25 years.

Includes Hearthstone as part of the franchise. Does not include physical retail sales

Given all that I am keen to carve out some time to see what Blizzard has done with the remaster.  That will probably happen next month at the earliest, given that we’re at the end of the current month.  That will also give Blizz a chance to fix some of the bugs that have been reported already.

Of course, being the immediate successor to WoW is not the only the only thing Warcraft III is famous for.  It is responsible for kicking of another genre whose revenue no doubt eclipses that of the Warcraft franchise.

With the the Defense of the Ancients mod, the whole MOBA genre that would lead to League of Legends, DOTA 2, and Blizzard’s own Heroes of the Storm was created.

Who made $1.5 billion in 2019 alone?

Blurb also from SuperData Research.

Given that Heroes of the Storm is the distant third place runner in that race… and that Valve managed to grab control of the DOTA trademark which meant changing the games name from Blizzard DOTA to Blizzard All-Stars and later to Heroes of the Storm… Blizzard is no doubt still smarting at some level about all of that.  I mean, having to have this up on the Blizzard main site has to irk them.

DOTA USAGE
DOTA is a trademark of Valve Corporation and used under license. By making use of the term “DOTA” in any content posted on any Blizzard website or battle.net, you agree that use of this trademark is subject to Valve’s trademark guidelines found at https://store.steampowered.com/legal.

Not that I think having the DOTA name would have made Blizzard the MOBA winner.  They were almost six years late to the party, only launching Heroes of the Storm in 2015, by which time LoL was already king.  DOTA 2 rolled in two years ahead of HotS and was able to grab the “lesser alternative to LoL” spot in the genre.

But all the same Blizzard isn’t going to let that happen again.  So in there as part of their “Custom Game Acceptable Use Policy,” basically their mod rules, they make it clear up front in the first bullet that they own every aspect of any mod you make for the game:

Ownership: Custom Games are and shall remain the sole and exclusive property of Blizzard. Without limiting the foregoing, you hereby assign to Blizzard all of your rights, title, and interest in and to all Custom Games, including but not limited to any copyrights in the content of any Custom Games. If for any reason you are prevented or restricted from assigning any rights in the Custom Games to Blizzard, you grant to Blizzard an exclusive, perpetual, worldwide, unconditional, royalty free, irrevocable license enabling Blizzard to fully exploit the Custom Games (or any component thereof) for any purpose and in any manner whatsoever. You further agree that should Blizzard decide that it is necessary, you will execute any future assignments and/or related documents promptly upon receiving such a request from Blizzard in order to effectuate the intent of this paragraph. To the extent you are prohibited from transferring or assigning your moral rights to Blizzard by applicable laws, to the utmost extent legally permitted, you waive any moral rights or similar rights you may have in all such Custom Games, without any remuneration. Without limiting Blizzard’s rights or ownership in the Custom Games, Blizzard reserves the right, in its sole and absolute discretion, to remove Custom Games from its systems and/or require that a Custom Game developer cease any and/or all development and distribution of a Custom Game. Please note that your Blizzard account can be subject to disciplinary action in event that you do not comply with Blizzard’s request or this Policy.

Nobody is going to create a whole new genre with their product and then walk off to another company like Valve to get it developed again.  Of course, this policy isn’t a huge incentive to spend time developing something new in the Warcraft III editor, but there it is.  The company has protected itself. (The statement applies to all mods for all Blizzard games, but was updated just before this week’s launch, so people are taking it specifically as a Warcraft III thing since the old version wasn’t so draconian.)

And so it goes.  I’ll still play it.  The MOBA thing doesn’t interest me in any case.  But I’ve already seen people grumbling about this pre-emptive land grab on Discord and Reddit.

Now we just need that Diablo II remaster, the third of the three promised remasters, though some of the original teams says that Blizz cannot make a remaster due to said team’s near disastrous mistake back in the day.  But this could also just be sour grapes as the Blizzard North team seems to be bitter about how things turned out for them nearly 20 years down the road.

Related:

• Ars Technica – How Warcraft II Birthed a Genre, Changed a Franchise, and Earned a Reforging
• Ars Technica – Blizzard now claims full copyright for player-made “custom game” mods
• SparkoMarkoGaming – Warcraft 3 Reforged or Ruined?
• Everwake’s Internet Adventures – Warcraft 3
• Kotaku – Warcraft 3: Reforged isn’t much of an upgrade

RimWorld Sometimes Be Like That

People I know have been getting into RimWorld of late, which got me back to playing it as well.  It exited early access back in October and had actually changed a bit since I last played.  The changes were mostly in detail rather than any grand direction, but I did spot a few.  Having to stay indoors due to some toxic fallout was a new one on me, for example.

Fortunately the few times I have been hit by that it has been a short duration event, though the description indicates that it could go on for a long time.

I usually play the default scenario without mods and my early game often follows a similar pattern.  I try to be careful in selecting the characters I start with, making sure I have some coverage on all skills.  Inevitably I realize later that the person I need to do something, like research, will end up also being the only person who can plant crops and they spend most of their time on planting.

And then there is the usual scramble for shelter, beds, storage, then cold storage to keep food fresh, then actual food, which involves some planting.  Then I try to get by on the few survival meals and the local berries and animals until the initial rice crop comes in.  And then the potatoes eventually are ready for harvest and I find that I have so many that my food storage is full.  But if I have gotten there at least I get through the first winter and can go on expanding from there.  If a blight hits the potatoes though, it can be tough.

We were comparing notes on Slack about the current state of our various games and I mentioned that I was entering what I would consider the end game with my current colony.  I had research up to the point where I could build components and advanced components, which freed me from yet another constraint.  I had two people with high intellect skills that were swapping off on research and were going at it so fast that I was going to be able to fill out the rest of the tech tree.  I had turrets up for some automated protection, IEDs planted around some of the usual attack routes, everybody who could carry a gun had a light machine gun or an assault rifle, save for my best shooter, who had an excellent quality sniper rifle, and I had half a dozen big dogs trained to help in defense. (And to haul, which is the most useful pet thing ever.)

My colony at that point had grown to 14 people.  Most of them were getting along.  Six of them had paired off into couples.  Morale was high.  Meals were lavish.  The place was clean.  About the only complaint involved tattered clothing, which is always a pain because each character clings to their favorite piece of worn clothing like an eight year old.  I make them drop their worst item, they go pick out a replacement from the warehouse of clothing I had setup, the complaint goes away.  Then I allow the old piece of clothing to be picked up, because it is laying on the floor where it was taken off and the character immediately runs back, takes off the nice new pants or whatever, puts on the old ratty pair, and then starts complaining about having tattered clothing again.

Anyway, things were looking good.  I could see the research wrapping up, me building some final items, and then getting the hell off the planet for the win.

However, the AI seemed to sense my hubris and decided to teach me a lesson.

It started off with a big raid.

There were eight in the raid, but it didn’t seem too bad.  They were forming to the south and were not attacking yet.  I looked at a few of them and they had pistols.  They weren’t going to be the push overs that another local tribe was, they were coming at me with spears and bows and I had been mowing them down and sending them flying pretty handily, but it should be manageable.

I grouped my fire team into a sandbag pit at the south of the camp and prepared to lay into them as they approached.  As they attacked things seemed to be going okay until one of the attackers got close and threw a grenade into my defenses, and then another.  That blew out the sandbags, tore a hole though a granite wall, destroyed a turret, and wounded everybody on my team, incapacitating five of them.

A couple of the wounded were still firing and the dogs were out and attacking, so they managed to defeat the raid, but now my colony was in a bad way.  In the rush to get things back together four of the dogs died, the other two were wounded while four of the incapacitated colonists died within the next hour, with a fifth dying off the next day when another raid hit and he was killed by the spears and bows group as I was low on defenders and had to haul him out of his hospital bed to help fight.

So my colony was a mess.  Defenses on the south were gone, there was a big hole in the main building, there was blood and mess everywhere, and no one had gotten around to burying the bodies.  Morale was taking a serious hit.  All three of my couples lost one person.  Everybody was despondent.

RimWorld is as much about crises management as it is about base building.  I likened this situation to being a manager at a high tech firm after a big layoff, something I’ve been though.  You have less staff, the same amount of work to do (if not more), and morale is at rock bottom.

The only good news was that one of my non-violent colonists had managed to recruit the prisoner we had been working on, so I had a fresh person who could handle a weapon.  There was that and the smokeweed crop had matured, so I expected there would be some binges on that front.

When colonist morale gets to low they can suffer a mental break, at which point they go off and do whatever it is they takes them on their own.  Some wander or hide in their rooms.  My main researcher, who lost her husband, went off on a smokeweed binge.

But sometimes the reactions are destructive.  I had one colonist throw a tantrum and start breaking things.  That didn’t last too long and was pretty well contained.  But then another colonist broke and went on a fire starting binge.  He ended up in the cold storage for food, setting fire to the potatoes crop stocked in there.  Apparently frozen potatoes burn very well in enclosed spaces.  The fire in there got out of control, with the temperature rising above 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit, incapacitating the people who ran in, one by one, to try and put it out.

So I had to haul people out of the fire and just let it burn out.  Since it was by the kitchen and the dining area, all of my prepared meals went up in the conflagration.  Fortunately I hadn’t used wooden walls.  Stone kept the fire contained.

But now, with the only remaining cook incapacitated in a hospital bed, the colonists were reduced to eating raw potatoes, which added to the morale problems.  That set off one colonist who went berserk and started attacking people.  He happened to be a melee combatant too, so had a steel gladius equipped.  He killed everybody in the hospital room and the remaining dogs before he himself was shot dead.

Corpses and blood

Then there was another raid.  At least it was the bows and spears team again.  But after that I was down to three colonists, all wounded, the colony was a disaster, there were unburied bodies all over, and all I could think was that my statement about approaching the end game now seemed premature.

And, of course, the three remaining colonist were all complaining about their tattered apparel.

But that is the way it rolls some times with RimWorld.  And it is always fun to see if you can bring things back from the brink.

Battle of Azeroth before Fall, Pre-Orders Now

World of Warcraft news is always big news.

Today Blizzard put up the next WoW expansion, Battle for Azeroth, up for pre-orders at the usual price points, $50 for normal and $70 for digital deluxe, which generally nets you a mount and a battle pet.  With my current battle pet mania going on I know where I might be headed.

Battle for Azeroth

Of course, it is always the details that capture my attention, especially anything that might indicate a ship date, and the pre-order page delivers with this line:

Pre-purchase: Battle for Azeroth will be released on or before September 21, 2018.

September 21, 2018 just happens to be the last day of summer on the calendar here in the temperate northern hemisphere.  It will still be warm where I live in any case.

Next on this list is, “Why should I pre-order this today?”

Well, you get that level 110 boost.  Given how long it took me to use the level 100 boost I got with WoW Legion… I think I used it finally in December… that isn’t a big draw for me.  I wouldn’t begin to know which character to boost at this point.  I already have four characters at level 110, and two more fairly close.

The battle pet and mount may take a while to show up.

Digital Deluxe items will be available on or before the release date of the game.

That is a bit vague.  Ah well, some day.

Gilded Ravasaur and Seabraid Stallion mount plus the Baby Tortollan Pet

So the only possible draw is really the promised Allied Races.

Pre-purchase of World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth makes available the questlines which enable players to access the Highmountain tauren, Lightforged draenei, Nightborne, and Void elves. To unlock Allied Races quest lines, players must have a level 110 character and have met specific questing and reputation requirements on the factions that each Allied Race is aligned with.

Currently I am ready to go on the Lightforged Draenei, not that I need another alt.  The one I am interested in, the Highmountain Tauren require me to get all that rep again with a Horde character.  Fortunately, for my first time in WoW, I actually have a Horde character at the level cap, so it is doable.  More on that later.

As noted, the pre-order page is up and ready to take your money, though beware there is one small hitch.

Requires World of Warcraft and Legion.

Since WoW Legion is still the current live expansion, and has links right into Battle for Azeroth, you can’t just skip ahead if you do not have WoW Legion yet.

Anyway, you can pre-order today though, as with any Blizzard release, there might be a queue.

And for those keeping score, if the release goes on the last day that will put the time between that and the WoW Legion release at 752 days, which puts it pretty much mid-pack for duration.

• WoW Launch to The Burning Crusade – 784 days
• The Burning Crusade to Wrath of the Lich King – 667 days
• Wrath of the Lich King to Cataclysm – 754 days
• Cataclysm to Mists of Pandaria – 658 days
• Mists of Pandaria to Warlords of Draenor – 778 days
• Warlords of Draenor to Legion – 670 days
• Legion to Battle for Azeroth – 752 days (estimated)

I suspect that Battle for Azeroth will ship sooner than that however, maybe another August release.  My prediction was that they would get that shipped and be done far enough ahead of BlizzCon 2018 that they could safely talk about WoW Classic with stealing any of the spotlight from the expansion.  We shall see.

Meanwhile the Battle for Azeroth Q&A broadcast has been going on, so I expect all sorts of additional details to pop up today.

INN Shows Explore the 9-4RP2 Fight

Naturally, even after the big battle was over, there was still much to talk about.  If you want to immerse yourself in the gritty details of what was going on INN ran three shows over the weekend that could help fill you in what went on.  The links below are all to the replays on Twitch, though the recordings will eventually also be available on the INN YouTube channel and, in some cases, Sound Cloud.

The Open Comms Show – January 26, 2018

The Open Comms show can be a bit of acquired taste, at least when the Tito’s vodka is flowing, and it comes on at an awkward time for me, but I try to catch it whenever I can, and I feel lucky to have seen Friday’s show.

The Open Comms Show Advisory, Not Mentioned: Alcohol Consumption

The usual cast of the show, Dirk MacGirk, Dreydan, Rahne, Drunk Canadian, and Blastem2hell, were joined by Arrendis (Goonswarm), Elise Randolph (Pandemic Legion), Jin’taan (Provi Bloc and CSM member), and Progodlegend (TEST) to discuss the fight at 9-4RP2 and the hype beforehand.

Of course, the hype was due to the Reddit post by Progodlegend which went viral and ended up with him on Canadian television talking about internet spaceships.

To Canada, this is now the face of EVE Online

But the real meat of the show is the discussion of the battle itself, helped along by Elise Randolph who remains one of the best and most thoughtful speakers on the game.  One of his insights was that the Imperium essentially won by losing the battle at 9-4RP2 because who is going to attempt an assault on a defended Keepstar now, and Delve has more than 15 deployed already.

The whole show, which can be a sprawling venture over its two hours some weeks, stayed nicely on topic and was worth the time to listen through.

The Meta Show – January 27, 2018

If you are more interested in fight details than the null sec meta, this might be the show to skip I suppose.  With DBRB still in Australia The Mittani was hosting solo with guests Asher Elias (Goonswarm), Vily (TEST), and CCP_Falcon.

There are good details about the fight.  Having Asher along, who organized the effort for the Keepstar campaign, means another view on how things went down.  And getting to hear CCP Falcon speak about the day, including waking up to find that the “million dollar battle” Reddit post had gone viral, was interesting.

However a good chunk of the middle of the show devolved into exploring the relationship between the Imperium and TEST surrounding the fight, with some time aside to rail against CCP for both benefiting from such fights yet setting up a sovereignty system that avoids them, all of which was largely The Mittani speaking, with a few comments from Vily and nary a peep from Asher or Falcon, arguably the two most interesting guests, for long stretches.

Still, it is just an hour and if you’re dying to know if TEST and the Imperium can stay united against the coalition of the north, the answer is in there.

Talking in Stations – January 28, 2018

The ever thoughtful Matterall brought the trifecta of shows about the battle home with the Sunday morning Talking in Stations episode.  Joined by Dirk MacGirk (TNT), Avery Lewis (Pandemic Legion), Keskora Yaari (Ember Sands, WH space), KillahBee (NCDot), MacCloud, PlexedLive (Goonswarm), Qicia (Goonswarm), and Qicia (Goonswarm) along with special guest CCP Fozzie to discuss both the battle as well as the changes coming for Citadels in February, to which there was an update before the show.

Again, more good tales of the fight, with CCP Fozzie saying that over 6,200 people were in system and that, by CCP’s reckoning, more than 10,000 accounts were clearly logged in and either in the system or the various staging systems and ready to jump into the fight if called upon.

There was also discussion of the changes to the Upwell 2.0 plan for February, which hit the forums just before the show.  Among them is the removal of the Gravitational Transportation Field Oscillator (GTFO) defensive module and increasing the final, last ditch repair time from 15 to 30 minutes, something that might have made a difference.  There is also a discussion of the citadel tethering mechanic and its abuse as well as what it enables. (On the latter, in the old days you couldn’t get 200 titans in a POS shield without a lot of them being bumped out into space, but you can stack 200 safely on a citadel without any issue at all.)

Anyway, if you feel the need to wallow in more after action reports about the big fight at 9-4RP2, there is almost five hours of audio to entertain you.

One Hundred and Seventy Million Skill Points

Another milestone in training as, even in the age of skill injectors, I continue to roll on forward the old fashioned way and let my skill points accumulate slowly over time.  Call me cheap… though because I have so many skill points a skill injector only nets me a 150K skill point gain, so I am cheap with reason.  Actually, I am about a day early with this post, but I had posts planned for the rest of the week and nothing for today, so here it is!  The posts never land exactly on the exact mark in any case.

Anyway, another seven months down the line brings us to another post.  Here is my skill point journey in New Eden so far, if you feel the need for the historic precedent behind this post:

• Start Playing EVE Online – August 2006
• Ten million – November 2007
• Twenty million – June 2008
• Thirty million – January 2009
• Forty million – August 2009
• Fifty million – March 2010
• Sixty million – November 2010
• Seventy million – August 2011
• Eighty million – June 2012
• Ninety million – December 2012
• One Hundred and Ten million – September 2013
• One Hundred and Twenty million – April 2014
• One Hundred and Thirty million – October 2014
• One Hundred and Forty million – May 2015
• One Hundred and Fifty million – December 2015
• One Hundred and Sixty million – July 2016

This is how skill points are currently distributed on Wilhelm Arcturus.  An asterisk indicates that the skill point total has changed since last post.

 Spaceship Cmd   51,351,483 (55 of 75)*
 Gunnery         17,197,141 (36 of 46)*
 Fleet Support   12,896,000 (14 of 15)* new name
 Drones          11,704,870 (22 of 26)
 Missiles        10,836,471 (22 of 26)
 Navigation       9,660,314 (13 of 13)
 Engineering      7,253,895 (15 of 15)
 Electronic Sys   7,189,415 (14 of 15)*
 Armor            6,131,137 (13 of 13) 
 Shields          5,994,039 (11 of 13)
 Science          5,462,151 (21 of 39) 
 Resc Processing  4,569,908 (22 of 28)
 Trade            3,271,765 (9 of 14)
 Targeting        3,207,765 (8 of 8)
 Neural Enhance.  3,202,510 (5 of 8)* 
 Subsystems       2,186,840 (20 of 20)
 Scanning         2,045,230 (7 of 7) 
 Rigging          1,312,395 (10 of 10)
 Production       1,157,986 (5 of 12) 
 Social           1,130,040 (5 of 9)
 Structure Mgmt   1,084,784 (2 of 6) 
 Planet Mgmt      1,069,079 (5 of 5)* 
 Corp Mgmt           24,000 (2 of 5) 

 Total         ~170,000,000 (338 of 428)

The additional 10 million skill points saw an additional six skills added to my list, bringing the total up from 332 last time to 338.

Spaceship Command continues its reign at the top of the list.  Internet spaceships does seem to require training that is focused specifically on internet spaceships I guess.  That got a boost this time around from training current skills up to level V.  I finished Transport Ships V, trained Command Ships V for a bit before swapping out, and I have been working on Amarr Carrier V for the last few weeks.  That provides a boost both for me carrier and my fax machine, so seemed worthwhile as a long term goal.

Archon in white

Electronic Systems got a big point boost as I trained up Tactical Logistics Reconfiguration so as to be able to run the Tech II triage module on my Apostle.

Medical White Apostle

On the new skill front, those were actually easy for me to remember this time around.  There were four skills in the Drones category related to fighters that I needed to train up so as to get my carrier skills up to the CapSwarm requirements.  The other two were under Neural Enhancements; Neurotoxin Control and Neurotoxin Recovery, which are related to the use of skill enhancing drugs.

Use More Drugs! The station ad commands it!

Then there is the side effect of doing these posts at regular 10 million skill point increments.  Not only does it track my own progress, but it also tracks how skills themselves change over time.  For example, we now have the category Fleet Support, which is mostly a new name for what was once Leadership.  I am missing only Spacial Phenomena Generation, which is a titan skill.  But that change also heralds the changing in fleet boosts and structure.

Imagine that boost effect on drugs

My skills, broken out by level:

 Level 1  - 2
 Level 2  - 8
 Level 3  - 45
 Level 4  - 101
 Level 5  - 182

182 at level V puts me five up from last time.

As for my “fly all the subcaps” metric that replaced my somewhat dates “fly a titan” metric, I did actually make progress on that.  Another of the Spaceship Command skill I raise to level V was Amarr Industrial, so I can fly the Amarr blockade runners and deep space transports.  That leaves the following on my list:

• Expedition Frigates (Prospect, Endurance)  – 10 days
• Gallente Transports (Occator, Viator) – 20 days
• Loki strategic cruiser (subsystems trained) – 45 mins
• Marauders (all factions) – 90 mins

Of that list, only Gallente Transports is in my current queue, next up after Amarr Carrier.  So, as a metric, that list is getting as thin as flying a titan was.  While I should train up the Loki just for completeness, I am unlikely to train Marauders due to the expense.  Expedition frigates I might do on a whim some day, but they are not at all a priority.  That doesn’t leave much room for change.

So feel free to suggest a new metric, or else I am going to have to come up with one before the next post.  Granted, that gives me some time, as I expect that won’t come to pass until late August or early September.  However, I am likely to forget about the whole thing in the interim.  Maybe I could come up with a skill set that would be “enough” and allow me to move the training queue to an alt on my account.  But what would ever be “enough?”  And then CCP would add some new skills and I would have to chase those as well.

We shall see if I come up with anything before the next post.