The Steam Summer Sale of 2020 Slips Away

Yesterday the annual Steam Summer Sale wrapped up, the mass of discounts were reduced to the usual state of something on my wishlist always being on sale, and whatever sticker collection game they had going came to an end.

Summer 2020

The ongoing pandemic, which is especially acute in the US where wearing a mask is now seen as a political testament, seems like a good time to have a sale on video games.  I’m coming up on four months of working from home and not going anywhere on weekends. There is only so much television I can watch in a day, so gaming seems a likely outlet for me.

The timing of the sale was poor for me.  It landed just as our group was having a bit of a resurgence of activity in WoW Classic, when the new Minecraft world still seemed fresh (and there was a new Minecraft update which I have yet to go into), and then a war began to brew in EVE Online.

The latter, the war in New Eden, has actually eaten up most of my gaming time since it started to boil last week.

Given all that, my need for, and bandwidth to deal with, has been somewhat restricted.  Anything I purchased from the sale was likely to go into my library and sit unplayed, and I have enough titles like that already.

Still, I did end up making two purchases.

The first wasn’t a new game but some DLC.

Space empire building of another sort

I saw that Stellaris had its addons marked down so I figured I would grab those.  I like the game and have played it quite a bit.  It is one I will likely go back to at some point when things are slow.

The second was another remaster.

Retro RTS Remaster

The Command & Conquer Remastered Collection, which came out just over a month ago, was marked down a bit, so I grabbed a copy.

I am still a fan of the RTS genre and willing to play some classics.  I have not, however, played any of the Command & Conquer series before.  Skronk, who has, said we ought to give it a run, and the price, even without the discount, was not too dear.  And, it had been on my mind anyway as Honest Game Trailers did a video about it.

So I have those two to dig into when the war settles down in EVE Online.  Until that happens though, expect more posts about space battles.

Summer Movie League – Spidey Continues the Summer Trend

Week five of our Summer Fantasy Movie League is over, and once again the top billed picture of the week doesn’t quite live up to the forecasts.

Which isn’t to say Spider-man: Far From Home did poorly.  $93 million is nothing to sneeze at.  But, again, the forecasts for the three day weekend were closed to $120 million.  Is there a slump going on here, or is Hollywood just too optimistic?

Of course it was also a goofy week if you were concentrating on the three day box office.  We had the Independence Day holiday on Thursday, so many people, including myself, took Friday off to make it a four day event.

To take advantage of that, both new films this week, Spider-man and Midsommar, opened earlier in the week, with Midsommar live on Tuesday and Spider-man opening with midnight showings once the calendar turned to Wednesday.  That spread out the opening totals beyond the weekend.

That also meant that what would normally have been the Thursday night previews, which count towards the Friday totals, went missing.  Spider-man, over five days, hit new heights world-wide for the franchise, but in the restricted world of FML that only cares about the three-day weekend, things were less buoyant.

And so the perfect pick of the week was anchored on three screens of Toy Story 4, while Saturday was the best performing day for Spider-man.

I actually set my lineup before the decision about whether or not previews would count, opting for Friday as my anchor and when I saw the red banner on FML saying that there would be no preview dollars I thought about changing to Saturday… but then forgot until it was too late.

Still, at least I talked myself out of going all-in on Midsommar.  That turned out to be something of a bust.  With the Saturday estimates it was the worst performer for the week, which in this league actually gives it a $2 million bonus.  It lost that position on Sunday, but regained it for the final tally, keeping a Midsommar heavy lineup from being a complete disaster.

All of which left the scores for the week looking like this:

1. grannanj’s Cineplex – $119,426,550
2. Wilhelm’s Qeynosian Kinetoscope – $103,263,624
3. SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights – $103,095,404
4. Goat Water Picture Palace – $100,200,869
5. Too Orangey For Crows – $99,333,806
6. Cyanbane’s Neuticles Viewing Party – $97,351,254
7. Vigo Grimborne’s Medieval Screening Complex – $96,220,963
8. Conical Effort – $96,063,499
9. Miniature Giant Space Hamsterplex – $91,443,890
10. Po Huit’s Sweet Movie Suite – $91,053,408

For the first time this season the perfect pick was different for the TAGN league than for the standard rules.  With no empty screen penalty 3x Toy Story 4 and 3x Aladdin with two empty screens was the TAGN perfect pick, worth $135 million, while with standard rules the perfect pick was 3x Toy Story 4, 2x Aladdin, and one each of Avengers, Rocketman, and Godzilla, worth $132 million.

However, nobody got the perfect pick in the TAGN league.  Grannanj secured first place by anchoring on 3x Toy Story 4 but fell short of perfect on the filler.

The rest of us anchored on some variation of Spider-man, with Po Huit getting the gambler award for going all-in on Midsommar with just a single Friday screen of Spider-man.  The worst performer bonus kept that pick somewhat viable.

That left the top ten overall season scores looking like this:

1. Wilhelm’s Qeynosian Kinetoscope – $492,063,874
2. Goat Water Picture Palace – $432,993,702
3. Too Orangey For Crows – $424,210,899
4. SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights – $412,022,265
5. Miniature Giant Space Hamsterplex – $402,023,165
6. Cyanbane’s Neuticles Viewing Party – $400,870,204
7. Joanie’s Joint – $378,485,651
8. Conical Effort – $365,338,852
9. grannanj’s Cineplex – $342,066,684
10. Vigo Grimborne’s Medieval Screening Complex – $306,532,223

The week was big enough that there were a couple of position swaps, but not big enough for any radical change.  My big lead from last week stayed intact.

And then there is the alternate scoring for the season, which is starting to spread out a bit.

1. Wilhelm’s Qeynosian Kinetoscope – 42
2. Goat Water Picture Palace – 37
3. Miniature Giant Space Hamsterplex – 29
4. Too Orangey For Crows – 28
5. SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights – 26
6. Cyanbane’s Neuticles Viewing Party – 25
7. grannanj’s Cineplex – 19
8. Vigo Grimborne’s Medieval Screening Complex – 18
9. Conical Effort – 17
10. Joanie’s Joint – 14

The alternate scoring is also starting to deviate from the overall scores some.  At least there were no ties this week.

So there we go, week five done and on to week six.  The lineup for that is:

1. Spider-man: Far From Home – $588
2. Toy Story 4 – $258
3. Stuber – $213
4. Crawl – $204
5. Yesterday – $98
6. Aladdin – $80
7. Annabelle Comes Home – $63
8. Midsommar – $43
9. The Secret Life of Pets 2 – $39
10. Avengers: Endgame – $20
11. Men in Black International – $24
12. Rocketman – $23
13. John Wick 3 – $19
14. Child’s Play – $8
15. Godzilla – $6

It is an off week, with no blockbuster landing in theaters.  It is also an odd week in that no titles dropped off the lineup.  Spider-man contracting to a single pick opened up two spots that were filled with the two new titles this week, Stuber and Crawl.

Neither of those are going to be big, given their opening week positions at third and fourth place.

I have seen a lot of ads for Stuber, though nothing that made me want to run out and see it.  It is what I would call a “Friday night film” at our house.  I have been trying to make a tradition out of watching something silly, stupid, or outrageous if we are at home watching a movie on Friday.  My wife isn’t all-in on that, but sometimes I can make it happen.  Anyway, I don’t have much to say about the movie itself, so I’ll borrow the premise line from the Wikipedia article:

A mild-mannered Uber driver named Stu picks up Vic, a grizzled detective who is hot on the trail of a sadistic, bloodthirsty terrorist. Stu soon finds himself thrust into a harrowing ordeal where he has to keep his wits, avoid danger, and work with his passenger while maintaining his high customer service rating.

With lots of advertising but no real star power behind it, the long range forecast is calling it at around $17 million.  But the forecasts have been over-optimistic pretty much all season, so you have to wonder about that.

Crawl, on the other hand, I only saw as a preview for The Dead Don’t Die.  It is an entry in the… umm… environmental action horror genre maybe?  It is Florida, a hurricane is coming, the flood waters are rising, alligators are wandering around town, and something horrible is in the crawl space under the house.  And, because it is Florida, somebody didn’t evacuate.

Again, no big star power and not as much advertising as Stuber, but it has the horror/disaster aspect that is always good for some box office.  The long range forecast puts it at $15 million, though that number is down considerably from when it started getting tracked.  It seems risky unless it gets some buzz.

So do you even bother with either of these films in your lineup?  Everything else on the list besides Spider-man is starting to age.  My Monday evening gut pick was 1x Spider-man, 1x Toy Story 4, 2x John Wick 3, and 3x Godzilla.  That seems safe, if not inspired, and spends the full $1000 budget.

I tinkered with anchoring on 4x Crawl, but I am not convinced it is worth the risk.  So I keep messing about with other options.

The league locks tomorrow night, so get your picks in.

Local Blackout Coming after Downtime on Friday

CCP has given its promised 48 hours of notice.  Last Friday the company said they would give warning before this happened, and here it is.

Notice has been served

Come Friday after downtime, the local channel in null sec will change from showing everybody in the system to what CCP calls “delayed mode local,” which will work the way local channel do in wormhole space, where people only appear in the channel list if they broadcast in that channel.

This has caused quite a stir, and the forum thread on the topic is closing in on 5,000 posts.

Those very much in favor of this idea see a happy time of uninterrupted destruction in their future.  Skeptics wonder if the change will simply make targets more scarce.  And, of course, the hunted have their own view, some threatening to unsubscribe with the change.

We shall see come Friday and over the weekend I suppose.  I am sure there will be a surge in kills pretty quickly, as those who don’t pay attention to the news find out about the change the hard way.  After that things will likely settle down.

The duration of the blackout is listed as “undetermined.”  It could be short.  It could be the new reality in null sec.

The EVE Online July Update Brings Performance Updates, a New Event, and More

We are in the midst of Summer now, which is generally a slow time for CCP as they crew goes off on Holiday, leaving space to mind itself for a while.

But before people clocked out and headed for their various destinations they put in some work to give us something to chew on for a while.

The Agency

First of all there is a new live event launching today, the Minmatar Dawn of Liberation.

Dawn of Liberation Event

This will feature sites in The Agency interface where you can fight slavers and free the subjugated.  The event will run until July 24, 2018 and will feature rewards including fireworks, SKINs, and cerebral accelerators.

Missile Redux

On the actual code change front, probably the biggest technical item in the patch was the update to missiles to improve client performance.  The current missile graphics went in with the Inferno expansion back in May 2012.  Missiles went from colored blobs of light to projectiles with launch animations, smoke trails, and explosions on contact.

Missile exhaust trails

This made missiles very pretty to watch, but also put a performance demand on the client which had to render all of that pretty launches and trails.  It clearly wasn’t the biggest demand on the client… after all, it took CCP six years to get around to working on them again… but it eventually came up as something to address.  And so there is a Dev Blog on missiles and the work that went into making them perform better.  We are, however, back to missiles being blinky lights in the night again.

Abyssal Updates

Also in today’s update are the changes mentioned at EVE Down Under regarding Abyssal pockets.

All in the update

More POS News

There was also another step on the path to the end of player owned starbases.  Blueprint copies for faction starbase towers will no longer drop.  In addition, the amount of minerals you get for reprocessing starbase towers and modules has been increased.  CCP is no doubt hoping that you will take care of removing some of those yourself via that route.

Wager No More

Also facing removal from the game, though more immediately, is wagering on duels.  This feature went in with the Lifeblood expansion last year.  I’m still not sure who wanted this feature, I do not know anybody who used it, and now I don’t know why they’re taking it away.  Business as usual I suppose.

Fozzie Claws and Zealots

On this ship front, the Amarr Zealot heavy assault cruiser got a drone bay in the hope of making it viable for Abyssal pockets as I understand it, while the Minmatar Claw interceptor got a bonus change from a damage boost to a rate of fire boost, meaning that roaming Claw fleets will be less able to alpha bigger ships off the field.

Notification Reduction

There has also been a change so that corps and alliances will only get notifications that somebody is shooting one of their structures if the shield hit points drop below 95%.  Pinging towers has long been a way to annoy your foes.  I have been out to hit structures in order to provoke a response only to cloak up and warp off when the defenders arrived.  Now you have to be more serious about that.

In addition to the above there are the usual list of small fixes and adjustments that went into the update.  You can find most of the information in the patch notes.  The Updates page seems to have fallen behind and does not have an entry for this patch.

Given the Boot in Fallen Gate

One of the weak points of a primarily quest driven MMORPG is pacing.  If you are going to make quests the focus of you game, then they really ought to be tuned so that a player doesn’t out level them or find the quests growing in difficulty faster than they grow in power.

The former is the usual problem.  As a development team adds more expansions and more levels they often want to help players “catch up” so that they can play in the new content.  This is most easily done by simply reducing the amount of experience required to level up.

And so it is that in aging quest driven MMORPGs like World of Warcraft, Lord of the Rings Online, and EverQuest II, you can easily find yourself out leveling the quest lines… and whole zones if you’re not careful… as you try to follow the prescribed path through the game.

A couple summers back when I was shooting for the Loremaster achievement in WoW… an achievement as yet unachieved by me… part of my plan was to finish out the zones with a character of the appropriate level.  This required me to run with three different characters due to the leveling too fast issue.

Once in a while though you run into the opposite problem.  Such is the case on the Fallen Gate nostalgia server in EverQuest II.  In order to give the server an old school feel the rate of leveling has been throttled back.

That isn’t necessarily a bad thing.  As noted, EQII is an aging MMORPG where out-leveling the early content is comically easy on the live servers.  Some throttling was required.  But EQII isn’t EverQuest, where you can unmindfully move the experience gain slider and not change how people play the game.

In EQ you’re going to go grind mobs with a group at a spawn most likely.  Quests, such as they are in the early EQ content, were all side quests and mostly deliver gear of some sort rather than experience.

In EverQuest II the way forward is via the ubiquitous quest hub.

A likely location in the Frostfang Sea

Technically, EQII wasn’t always as quest oriented.  Back at launch quests were more common than in its predecessor, but were still a bit hidden.  There were no little quest feathers on your mini-map because the quest available markers floating over the heads of NPCs didn’t appear until after WoW launch with its now almost universally recognized exclamation point/question mark quest markers… and because EQII didn’t have a mini-map back then.

So for a few months in the early days you went out in a group to grind heroic mobs because the quest chains would only carry you so far.

That changed in 2005 as the team at SOE added more and more quests to the game to flesh out the zone experiences and accommodate those who expected to level up solo by doing quests.  And then they reduced the experience table and we ended up with the situation on the live servers of having many more quests than you can possibly run at level.

This was somewhat addressed back in 2010 with New Halas and the Frostfang Sea zone with a series of interlocking quest chains that would bring a new player from character creation to level 20 in one smooth progression… a smooth progression only marred by its unfriendliness to groups and the occasional recurring reduction in the experience requirements.

Basically, designed to be smooth in 2010, still relatively smooth in 2017 on a live server.

On the Fallen Gate server however Daybreak has rolled the experience table back to what seems to be a pre-2010 level.  It isn’t comically out of whack, but having skipped most of the Isle of Refuge (where the problem is apparent as well) the quest levels creeping further and further away from my level did start to become a burden, even with my completing the collection quests along the way.

Fortunately, if there is one thing that EQII does not lack for, it is low level content.  As quests started to get three and four levels ahead of me… rewarding gear I couldn’t use yet due to level restrictions, gear that I really needed in order to handle quests that far ahead of me… I decided to take a detour to Qeynos and Antonica where one can unironically kill ten rats for a quest.

Before it was a meme

I didn’t head for Antonica first, as I was only level seven and that zone was really for level ten to twenty, but the mini zones that are part of Qeynos proper.  Or I hit those once I could find them.  Back in the day they used to be connected to the various racial ghettos of Qeynos.  I spent a lot of time in Graystone Yard because that was the home of Dwarves and Barbarians, a zone that also held the entrance to Oakmyst Forest.

But they closed off all of those ghettos and so I was running around for a bit trying to recall how to get into those zones.  If Quasimodo had been about, he would have reminded me about the key to getting around Qeynos; The bells!

So I pottered about those zones, which was a bit of an “Oh yeah, I remember this…” time, perfectly fit for nostalgia, before venturing out to the plains of Antonica to slay some of the wildlife out there.

Beetle infestations are ever a Qeynos problem…

Some time there put me back on track for the Frostfang Sea, so I returned there to pick up where I left off.  The gear that you get as quest rewards is good both in stats and from a cosmetic angle, so I was keen to carry on there… as were many others it seems.

The Frostfang Sea remains popular

There it was all about thwarting orcs, because orcs are orcs and fill the generic bad guy role so often.  I think there might be room in Norrath to make orcs a third faction playable race given how ubiquitous they are.  You could start on the Zek with Emperor Fyst as your mentor rather than the Isle of Refuge.  But for now, killing orcs is still the thing.

Facing the orc onslaught

I came back to the Frostfang Sea well into level nine, so it wasn’t too long before I hit level ten.

An easier achievement on the live servers…

But this is a special server with its own special achievements, so level ten is a two-fer.

Featuring the boot

A special achievement for a special server, and indicative of the reward you get for reaching the exalted level of ten; possibly the most heinous mount ever conceived by Daybreak,

The Pedipowered Posterior Punter

And I might well have eschewed this mount, as I do any of the gnomish contraptions, except that in a world where you are running around on foot any speed boost is a good speed boost.  And, being a “leaper” mount, you also get some jumping/soft landing benefits from it.  That does something to mitigate its look.

Also, it doesn’t stand out too much on my back.

The mount matches the Guardian armor… sort of…

The quest line through the Frostfang Sea ends with the player getting a nice mount… a horse.  I hope I can then use the horse as the cosmetic “look” while retaining the benefits of the boot.  Either way, having it will make getting around quicker and at least one heritage quest will be pretty easy with the speed boost.

Otherwise I am continuing on with the Frostfang Sea.  When I get through that it will be about time to start looking for a guild.

Honest Game Trailers – LEGO Star Wars

While they gloss over the fact that they are referring to three different games, LEGO Star Wars, LEGO Star Wars II – The Original Trilogy, and LEGO Star Wars III – The Cone Wars (or four if you want to count LEGO Star Wars – The Complete Saga which revamped and combined the first two games and is actually my favorite), but the essential point is there, that the LEGO Star Wars games are some pretty decent fun, if not exactly challenging.  My general strategy is, when in doubt break all the stuff.

And, of course, there is now LEGO Star Wars – The Force Awakens, which I just started playing.

Also, a comment on the video; if you want to become the master of character names in the Star Wars movies, these games are great because you have to unlock every damn character they could find.