Through the Dark Portal at Last

All the tension and the build-up and what not over the last two weeks since the pre-patch came to a head yesterday at 3pm my time.

The date finally arrived

I had logged in earlier in the day and set my hunter Tistann up on the rim of the vale where the Dark Portal lay.  About ten minutes before “go time” I logged back in to see the crowd assembled.  It honestly didn’t seem that bad.

The portal awaits

What that picture doesn’t really show is the size of the scrum down in the vale, clustered around where the quest giver with the intro quest would show up.  But all I had to do was get closer to see how dense the throng was.

Nobody was wearing a mask either

There were still technically a couple minutes to go before the 3pm start time, but people were already running towards the portal.  The quest giver was apparently up somewhere in the scrum of people.

There is a quest giver in there somewhere

I am not sure how I managed to click on the quest giver… I certainly couldn’t pick him out of the crush of players, but I managed it and got the quest.

I’ve got a golden ticket!

After that if was time to head through the portal.  I didn’t even get back on my mount.  I started to click it but I couldn’t see myself in the mass and started to move too soon, so I just turned on Aspect of the Cheetah and hoofed it through the portal.  My screen shot time stamp says I made it into Outland at 2:58:41pm Pacific Time.

On the far side there was an almost comic stream of characters running through the portal, pooling up at each quest giver, then moving on to the next.  The last step there was the flight master who was launching gryphons like a machine gun, sending people off to Honor Hold.

Fly my pretties! Off to Honor Hold

At the far end I was in the stream of flights dropping people in Honor Hold.  The stream was non-stop for a while.  I wish I had setup to record a video of it, as it was just one of those things that you only ever seen at moments like this.

Coming in to Honor Hold

Once there I found the quest giver, once again buried in a mass of players, then went around and found the skinning trainer, the leatherworking trainer, and the cooking trainer.  The latter confused me for a moment.  You don’t get trained, you buy a training book from him.

And then I went back to the inn and logged off for a while.  Having refreshed my memory of the starting quests in the beta, I knew there was going to be a huge competition for mobs as the “bowling ball through a python” mass of players tried to move in parallel into the expansion.  As fun as the first night of WoW Classic was, I wasn’t up for standing in line or fighting over spawns.  I went off to do other things.

When I logged back in a couple hours later things had calmed down.  Blizzard had reported a DDoS attack about 45 minutes after the launch, but it appeared to have been cleared up by then.

[#BurningCrusade] We are currently experiencing a DDoS attack, which may result in high latency and disconnections for some players. We are actively working to mitigate this issue.

— Blizzard CS – The Americas (@BlizzardCS) June 1, 2021

Honor Hold had calmed down considerably… which is to say it was still full of people and when I went out to do a couple of the initial quests there were still a lot of people out in the field with me, but it wasn’t completely crazy.

As far as I could tell our server, Bloodsail Buccaneers, didn’t have a queue and wasn’t showing any lag, but it is also the RP-PvE server, so not the most popular in the batch.

It will no doubt remain busy for a while though and I expect that we might see queues come the weekend as those without a lot of free time during the week get stuck into the expansion.

Meanwhile, back on Azeroth, Ironforge was deserted.  I literally saw zero players in the usually active area between the bank and the auction house.

They’ve all gone off

Stormwind was likewise feeling like a ghost town, though its proximity to the Dark Portal meant a few people could be spotted now and then.

Burning Crusade Classic has landed at last.  Outland lays before us, and everybody who could get through the portal last night apparently went.

Addendum:  I didn’t have the foresight to record video, but Ula did.

Some nice images of the opening moments in that video.

Meanwhile, there are already players at level cap.  I think my hunter ended up 10% into level 60.

Tough Act to Follow

We are in the waning days of the Battle for Azeroth expansion in World of Warcraft.  This expansion seems destined to rank down the list in the annals of the game.  It is a bit hard for me to even judge it as an expansion, as I did about as little as you could do and still be able to claim to have played.

Battle for Azeroth

But even with my low commitment to the expansion… I made it to level cap with two characters and unlocked flying, but did little else besides the main overland quest lines… I felt the pain of the expansion.  The whole idea that mobs ramped up in difficulty so that equipping better gear made the game harder… a problem that Blizzard acknowledged but said they didn’t care about… was just the main issue I had to deal with.  But it seemed like everything from the story to the raids was making somebody angry over the course of the expansion.

However, some of my lack of enthusiasm is no doubt related to the fact that the previous expansion, Legion, was one I did enjoy.  I played that through pretty thoroughly… for me at least, no raiding, but I ran the instances via LFG… and came away feeling pretty satisfied.  I liked the story, the zones, the mechanics of the classes I played, and I honestly felt a bit robbed when my legendary weapon abilities went away.

So I wonder how much of my disappointment… or at least my lack of enthusiasm… lays in the fact that I enjoyed Legion more.

I have, in the past, tried to articulate the problems with expansions.  They must, by necessity, reset the game in some way, undo what has gone before, in order to give you new things to accomplish.  They also stand as waypoints where  a company can assess features, add new ones, and adjust things that players were complaining about.  For WoW, the latter always involves an update to classes because there has literally never been a time in WoW when somebody wasn’t loudly and repeatedly complaining about their favorite class being bad on some other class being too good.

That means there is almost always a shake up to the status quo, something that will make some slice of the player base pack up and walk away.

And yet some expansions are recalled fondly.  Maybe not by everybody, but there is often something of a consensus about what was a good expansion and what was not.  The good ones mentioned are often:

• Wrath of the Lich King
• Mists of Pandaria
• Legion

While the bad list tends to be:

• Cataclysm
• Warlords of Draenor
• Battle for Azeroth

But there is clearly a pattern to that, and a regular “every other expansion sucks” seems a bit too convenient.  So I wonder how much the quality or popularity of a specific expansion influences that of the expansion after it and how much the expansion before it does the same.

As I noted above, my enjoyment of Legion might very well have shaded my reception of BFA.  Maybe.

More certainly, my time spent with Wrath of the Lich King, where I played from the last few months of The Burning Crusade and straight through the whole time it was live, made me less receptive to Cataclysm.

I have softened a bit on Cataclysm over time.  Destroying the old world still seems like a mistake… unless you think somebody was playing the long game and that Blizz meant to do WoW Classic the whole time.  And giving people flying out of the box was problematic.  But there was still some quality content there, including possible the prettiest zone in Azeroth, Vashj’ir.  And when we went back and did the instances, especially the 5 person heroic versions of Zul’Gurub and Zul’Aman, those were a good time.

And it is quite arguable that my enjoyment of Mists of Pandaria… I skipped the first year of it, but then played it through until Warlords of Draenor hit…  was colored by my dislike at the time of Cataclysm and the fact that I stayed away from WoW for at least 18 months before getting into it.

Which, of course, brings me into another cycle with WoD, and the story continues.

Are the ups and downs of my relationship with World of Warcraft because of the expansions and their merit (or lack thereof) or due to my own expectations being set or mis-set by over exposure or hype?  Should we be thus optimistic about the coming Shadowlands expansion, it having followed one of the down expansions?

Every expansion is its own time in the WoW continuum, and yet none of them exists in a vacuum either.  Each one builds on the past and sets expectations for the future.

Ashes of Creation Kickstarter Campaign Closes Big

Ashes of Creation has reaped Kickstarter success in a pretty big way.

Something about this logo says “Ashes of EverQuest Next” to me

The campaign brought in more than $3.2 million on a $750K ask, largely by running their campaign by the numbers… numbers which included a long run of pre-campaign news and updates and plenty of warning that the Kickstarter was coming.  The Choice/Change/Consequence message about the world they intend to create seemed to resonate as well.

The final tally when the campaign closed early this morning was:

• Amount Pledged: $3,271,809
• Total Backers: 19,576
• Avg. Pledge: $167

That is a serious haul, representing 436% of the campaign’s base goal.  That number puts it ahead of other such Kickstarter campaigns like:

• Camelot Unchained –$2.2 million
• Star Citizen – $2.1 million
• Shroud of the Avatar –$2 million
• Crowfall – $1.7 million
• Project: Gorgon – $74,781

I actually wonder what Ashes of Creation brought to the table that let it out-pace some of those campaigns.  Part of my view of such campaigns is that a big name in the industry is needed to get attention and bring in the backers.  Certainly the top four campaigns on the list above were driven by the names involved.

And then there is Ashes of Creation.

Let’s be honest here.  There is nobody listed on that campaign that has anything like the history or notoriety of Mark Jacobs, Chris Roberts, Richard Garriott, or Gordon Walton (and Raph Koster, whose name was tossed around during the Crowfall campaign).  They don’t even have a Brad McQuaid level of name.  Not even a Mark “Sad Trombone” Kern to hang their hat on.

What does this mean?

Is the star power of famous names overrated?  I have always assumed that having the draw of a known name was a key aspect to success, but what should I think now?  Do such names come at a cost?  Certainly both Mark Jacobs and Lord British had to spend time explaining away past mistakes during their Kickstarter runs. (Jacobs gave us a mea culpa with some blame for EA, while Garriott just pointed fingers at EA and NCsoft.)

Without a name did Ashes of Creation just do a much better job of laying the groundwork for success before launching their campaign?  Certainly there was a long string of articles about the project before it hit Kickstarter.

Is Ashes of Creation really offering something different, something that would spark this level of success?

Or has the environment changed?  For a stretch there was a whole cloud burst of MMORPG Kickstarter campaigns, including the five I listed out above and more.  Since then things have quieted down.  Was the market just ready for another run at the fantasy MMORPG holy grail?

Personally, I have too many undelivered projects to consider investing in yet another one, but clearly others were not held back.

Whatever it was, it was certainly op success.  You can go see the Kickstarter campaign for details or look at the campaign on Kicktraq to see how the funding progressed.

Now to see if they will have anything to deliver come the December 2018 date listed.

And, of course, we shall see how far their post-campaign funding goes.  The asking for money never stops with these projects.

 

A Carrier Dies in Deklein

The evening started out on a now familiar note, a Jabber ping about the MBC blockade of the Quafe Company Warehouse and the need to run them off.  A Hurricane fleet on Thomas Lear did the trick for a bit.

The enemy came back and put a bunch of carriers on the undock and launched fighters, so we docked back up and switched doctrines to try a different tactic against fighters in our search for a way to kill them more quickly, especially when they are coming at us in a mass.

Carriers and Fax machines on the undock

That did not go as well as planned.  We killed fighters, but lost enough ships along the way that I am sure we came out on the short end.  I was actually flying logi, so was mostly busy just trying to rep Thomas as they kept head shotting him.  A mass of fighters focused on one ship will do that.  I did launch my single combat drone and it obliged me by getting on a few kill mails.

We ran around with that for a bit then docked up.  A participation link was generated and we stood down from the op.

Probably the most amusing aspect of that was having The Mittani on coms and in game with us.  He was manning the guns on a citadel, which I understand is the new fun time activity for GSF directors.  Plus, as I understand it, when a citadel gunner targets you, it tells you who has their finger on the trigger, so people know they are being blapped by Mittens himself.  Another way to send his regards I suppose.

A while later, as I was sitting at my desk, another ping came up.  This one was for a bomber op on Asher Elias.  I hadn’t been out in a bomber in ages and I make it a point to go on any Asher fleet I can, so I logged back in and strapped into a Purifier I had in my hangar.

We rolled out of the station and traveled off to meet a black ops battleship in another system that jumped us up to Fade.

Bomber bridging off a Sin black ops battleship

Once up there we met up with another black ops battleship that was positioned to drop us on a ratting carrier.  However, there were problems getting the cyno up.  At the far end the target, wisely, had set up a cyno inhibitor, so our advanced pilot on the scene was unable to bridge us in.  There was some discussion as to whether covert cyno generators were blocked by portable cyno inhibitors or not, since they are not affected by system-wide cyno jamming arrays.  In a quick search I couldn’t find anything definitive on that, but our experience indicates that portable cyno inhibs do block covert cynos.  Live and learn.

Our primary mission having been aborted, we headed off to a secondary objective.  We were to baby sit a tower that was being put online by GSOL.  The tower just happened to be in Deklein.

There is a strange feeling flying though Deklein now, all those system I grew to know so well and flew through freely in a time now gone.  I can’t quite find the words to explain it.  I want to say something about dwarves returning to Moria, but that overstates the feeling.  Still, there was an “all this used to be ours” sense along with a feeling of emptiness.  Not emptiness within ourselves, but in space itself.  Systems that used to always have activity were now quiet and empty as we passed through on our way to the tower.

Our path through Deklein

And the feeling of familiarity grew more intense within me as we entered what used to be TNT territory back when I joined the alliance in 2011.  We gave it up just about a year ago during the realignment and consolidation period, so as to make our space more defensible.  Pity that didn’t work out.

We did pick up a couple of followers from Solyaris Chtonium, the owners of that section of Deklein, and members of the Guardians of the Galaxy coalition, in stealth bombers as well.  We managed to pop a couple of them on the gate when we hit our destination system.

From there we headed to the POS tower that was going up, spread out, and cloaked up as the online timer counted down the remaining fifteen minutes.  We just had to keep it safe.

And then a Chimera landed on grid with us at the tower and launched fighters.  He must have known we were there as he cycled his smart bombs a few times in hopes of getting a lucky hit on one of us.  However we were all well off from him.  He set his fighters on the tower and then warped off.

A flight of Templars attacking the stick

It was neat to be able to sit and watch the groups of fighters zoom about the tower in their formations, though there was a question as to whether or not fighters are supposed to carry on shooting targets when the carrier that launched them warps off grid.  I know so little about the new fighters and how they operate, beyond that they generate a kill mail if you kill a full squadron of them.

That question became moot when the carrier pilot warped back to the tower.  At that point, as we watched him sitting there, it became a question of what we should do about him.  We had enough points to hold him down, but could we kill him before help arrived or his fighters shredded us.  We decided to give it a try.

Chimera pointed and painted

He only managed to knock off two bombers before we were able to bring him down.  It was a close run thing though, as help arrived on grid just as we were getting him into structure.  We overheated our launchers to hurry things along and he obliged us by exploding.

Then it was time to do what stealth bombers do, run away and cloak up.

In the mean time the tower went online and a Pandemic Horde frigate fleet showed up to help Solyaris Chtonium.  We bounced around a bit and watched them shoot at the now online and fueled tower, though if they were planning to reinforce it they were going to be there for a long time.  They did try to chase us for a bit, which allowed us to get back on grid, kill the fighters hanging in space and destroy the wreck before warping off again.

On one of our bounces Asher found that we were lined up just right for a bombing run, which managed to take out several of the Solyaris Chtonium stealth bombers that were on grid with PH.  My own launcher was offline, so I didn’t get in on that bit of fun.

At this point RiotRick, the leader of Solyaris Chtonium, was being salty in local… that is everybody’s new favorite term, right… so Asher put us back on grid with the hostiles and had us uncloak, pop him, and warp off.  I am sure that did not improve his mood.

After that it was time to slip away.  We headed to a GSF citadel a few jumps off where a Panther black ops battleship sent us back to low sec a few jumps from home in Saranen.

Not an epic, war changing operation, but a fun little fleet where we got a few choice kills and completed our objective.  In addition the battle report shows we came out pretty well on the ISK exchange, though it only shows about half of the PH pilots.  You don’t get on the report if you don’t get on a kill mail.

So that was our time in Deklein last night.  I am looking forward to returning again soon.  In the mean time, here is a gallery of screen shots from the evening.