The Dark Portal and Outland a Week Later

Last week I was keen to get through the Dark Portal and into The Burning Crusade the moment it was available.

The Azeroth cannon shooting people into Outland

I made it through with the first rush, got to Honor Hold, and even completed a couple of quests.  I logged in my other level 60s and got them through the portal a bit later, had them upgrade their trade and gathering skills and had a bit of a look around.

I was even there when somebody dragged a Fel Reaver into Honor Hold.

How could I have missed?

After which I went back to playing my druid in the vanilla content.

Part of that was because Hellfire Peninsula was quite crowded.  It wasn’t that people were being mean.  Some were being quite nice.  A mage came by and offered me some conjured food and water at one point.

Some people are just nice

But even when people are trying to be pleasant, crowds do make for competition over mobs and objectives and such well beyond my tolerance at times.  Meanwhile, back in Azeroth, things were relatively quiet… unless you were working on a harvesting trade skill… in that case it was also a bit trying.

More than that, however, I was having fun with my druid.

Having just done many of these quests recently… and with my pally, which made them all the more excruciating at times… running through them again with knowledge, stealth, and the improved quest experience have made this oddly joyful.

Since the pre-patch I have managed to move him from level 36 to level 52 without feeling like I have had to dedicate myself to the task.

Part of that was the exp changes.  The amount of exp needed to get from 30 to 60 was reduced by 15% and the amount of exp given for quest turn ins was boosted.  That helped smooth out the somewhat rough ride from 35 to 60.

The fact that a pile of quests got added into the game in and around Theremore also gave a needed boost to the previous quest gap around level 40.  But, in addition to that, a number of quests that required you to defeat elite mobs had those mobs changed to normal mobs, turning those into quests one could solo.  So Overseer Maltorus, who is at the intersection of two quests in Searing Gorge, can now be handled without needing to form a group.

You are now soloable Maltorus

Quests are now appropriately marked as “group” when they need more than one player, which was not always the case.  Maltorus there was kind of a surprise elite once you made your way to him, as the quest didn’t warn you about his elite status before.

And quests are a bit easier to find.  Quest givers show up on the mini map and quest turn ins, even inanimate objects, now have the big question mark above them.

This should really be the WoW logo

That actually helps a lot more than you might think.  I especially recall a quest in Feralas where you had to find a lost satchel in a gnoll camp and the quest description described it as being in a shaft of sunlight, which was true if you happened upon it at exactly the right angle.  But now it has the big question mark on it, so you can focus on clearing the gnolls to get to it without wandering past.

Basically, after having done it “the hard way” twice through with a hunter and a paladin, making a post patch run feels light and fun… though, as I said, having stealth helps too.  I simply avoid a lot of trouble.  So my druid is 52 and is just finishing off Tanaris and the Hinterlands, after which he will turn to Un’Goro Crater.

I will probably keep running with the druid up to 60 before I really start focusing on Outland.  Outland will wait for me, though I keep seeing reminders that it is there.

Is this effect from the Deluxe Edition special Outland hearthstone?

If you found that the grind of old school vanilla was getting you down, but you think Outland might appeal, the path there is much smoother.  It isn’t “do it in a weekend” quick, the way the path to 50 is in retail WoW is, but it is much more friendly than it was before.

Starting Off with Minecraft Dungeons

As I mentioned in the month in review post, I bought a copy of Minecraft Dungeons last month and actually found some time to play it this past week.

It is Minecraft and Dungeons

I am going to get my negative vibes out of the way first.

It is kind of a pain in the ass to buy the game on PC.  That you have a Mojang account cuts you no ice, you have to have a Microsoft account.  You probably have once if you have Windows 10, since they require it, but you may not remember that the login for that is probably in your password managed under a URL that doesn’t have the word “microsoft” in it. (Look for “live” on the list.)

Then there are three different versions, a Windows 7, 8, and 10 version, a Windows 10 version, and a Windows 10 Hero version, which will get you the next few DLC packs they push out.  But otherwise, I couldn’t really tell the difference between the first two… the descriptions were paltry in the extreme, so bought the first one because… more support is better?  I don’t know.  Maybe I made a mistake there.

And then there is the fact that the game has its own launcher, which may sound like a nit pick, but there is a button for it on the damn Minecraft launcher that, before you buy the game, gives you a link to the store page and, which after you buy it, comes up with a button to launch its launcher.  I mean, WTF?

That button is a lie

Minecraft Dungeons is also clearly a console game that they also brought over to Windows.  The opening page starts in with all the controller buttons you need to activate this or that.

My keyboard does not have most of those

That also probably explains why there is no built-in functionality to take screen shots.  I had to hit print screen and tab out to paste images into Paint.net to get what you see here.  I tried to use the nVidia GeForce experience to take screen shots, but the game is too new to be supported in that yet, and I didn’t want to go dig up my Fraps account just for this.

After 45 minutes of buying then trying to install it some place besides the default location… and being warned not to uninstall for heaven’s sake… I was perhaps not all that favorably disposed towards the game.

And, in the end, it isn’t actually Minecraft… you cannot punch trees or build or whatever and it is click to move as opposed to first person perspective.  But if you’re making an action RPG Diablo clone, being able to build a redstone sugar cane harvester probably isn’t a requirement.

That is what it is after all, an action RPG with a Minecraft skin on it.  And the game meets expectations there.  Zombies groan, skeletons rattle, creepers go “sssss… BOOM,” and so on, while you and your blocky avatar move through the game.

A skeleton and a baby zombie!

The UI will be familiar to anybody who has played a Diablo or Torchlight or most any action RPG, with perhaps the arrow count standing in for the mana bulb, as there isn’t any magic casting classes… as there are not really classes.  You’re just a Minecraft protagonist.

Once you play through an intro that sets the story, you end up in a base from which you will head off on your adventures.

The center of the base

The base is pretty sprawling, and I assume  you end up unlocking things as you go along to make some of that space meaningful, but as you start out there are mostly just a chest here and there you can open to collect some of the game currency, which are emeralds of course.

Unlike Diablo, Minecraft Dungeons is mission based.  You go to the mission table in your base, click on it, and choose from some of the missions currently available to you.

Some early missions

Each mission has its own story which ties it into the over arching story of the game, and each has its own set of discreet objectives, bosses, and what not you need to overcome in order to finish.

This is not a bad thing.  While you don’t get a sense of a world as you are teleported into each mission and return back to your base, it isn’t a giant leap away from something like Diablo and its waypoints and quests.  It works.

And there are, of course, chests and loot and upgrades to be found as you run through missions.

Some new stuff!

You can find better gear, and there is an system of enchantment points that let you improve the gear you have.

The thorns enchantment

That gives you the whole optimization element where you have to decide on gear, the benefits it provides, and the enchantments it offers, the latter of which can be different for items that are otherwise the same.

And you can salvage gear you do not want for emeralds and a refund of the enchantment points you have spent on a particular item.

Things start our light and charming, the game play is easy, and it was quite the delight.

Look, a gelatinous cubes!

The missions have a map that shows you where you are and what areas you have yet to poke your nose into (because chests are always a possibility in every side path) and little arrows point you towards every objective, so you are unlikely to ever feel lost  Even death has a light touch.  I did a jump roll into some water and died… no swimming here I guess.

It was bound to happen

You get a set number of lives per mission, but when you die you get dropped back at a safe spot and can just carry on.  But if you die to many times you get sent back to your base to start over again.

After a couple of missions I was pretty happy with the game.  I showed it to my daughter, who liked the idea, and considered getting a copy for my Switch Lite.  It seemed like it might be a good title to play on that.  There is no cross platform play… or even cross platform saves/accounts… but I wasn’t so dug into the PC version that I felt I couldn’t change over.  You can play with up to three of your friends, which on the PC side is controlled through a friends list, though how that really works I haven’t seen yet as I have nobody on my list.

And then I got to the content gating mechanism.

While you have levels… because levels will never die… and gain enchantment points with each level, you also have a power measurement based on your level, gear, and enchantments.

Each mission has a recommended level of power you ought to have to take it on.  After the first few missions I ran though I was at power level 6 and the next range of missions were suggesting 10.

It isn’t a hard barrier.  You can run the missions with a power suggestion higher than your actual, but they are tuned for that suggestion as a minimum.  Still, you might get a gear drop that will boost your power as you go through.

Or you can re-run past missions.  You can actually dial up their settings from their default to something more challenging, which gets you better drops.

Mission settings

I am less enthused with that option because, with all the charm and cuteness and Minecraft feel to the game, none of the levels were really interesting enough that I was thinking, “I want to do that again!” when I was done.  I was far more, “Okay, let’s get the next mission going!”

Still, it feels a bit thin so far, though I need to measure that against the $20 price.

And I am also not that far into the game yet, so perhaps I have not hit the more interesting missions.  It is light and easy to pick up though.  It just needs to clear the “compelling” hurdle for me.

EVE Online Gets the Gathering Storm Login Campaign

With the coming of the new EDENCOM ships CCP has a couple of events planned, the first of which is the Gathering Storm.

The coming arcing vorton projector weapon illustrated

This comes in the form of yet another login campaign and runs from today, June 9th, through to downtime on June 15th, during which Alpha and Omega clones can log in daily to collect five different rewards.

The rewards menu

Alpha and Omega clones alike get some skill points and gift boxes.  Omega clones alone will get skill books for the new weapon system and two of the three coming ships.

You just have to log in for five of the six days of the even to collect them all.  When this event is over the next one will begin.

Quote of the Day – The Trolling Loophole

We rejected Active Shooter because it was a troll, designed to do nothing but generate outrage and cause conflict through its existence…

-Doug Lombardi, Interview with Ars Technica

Earlier in the week we saw the blog post from Steam announcing its new “anything goes” policy towards what sort of games will be allowed on the service.  I wrote about that myself and linked out to just about everybody else who did as well.

For me the most outrageous aspect of the whole thing was probably Steam’s line on whether allowing a game on their service constituted an endorsement of that game and its content and, whether you can take seriously their personal rejection of a controversial or offensive game while they also take a cut of the sales price.  There is, at best, a conflict of interest there and, at worst, a transparent and hypocritical attempt to protect their reputation from the consequences of their choices.  Because, in the end, Steam makes those choices and profits from them.

The only thing things that would keep a game of Steam with this new policy would be actual illegality or “straight up trolling.”

Determining what is legal is a minefield in and of itself given the number of jurisdictions Steam serves.  And we have already seen discreet jurisdictions (e.g Canada, The EU, The US) that believe their laws apply to the whole world.  So at the end of my last post on the topic I wondered if this alone might cause Steam’s policy to remain effectively unchanged.

What I tended to discount was the concept of “straight up trolling.”  After all, what is trolling?  It seems to mean different things to different people.  How far does somebody have to go to be a troll.  I see people get called trolls for seemingly innocuous things or for even just disagreeing with people.  So where would Valve stand on trolling?  What does the word mean to them?

Well, we got some insight into that in the article linked at the top.  The game Active Shooter won’t be making it onto Steam because it falls into the troll category.  Is this Steam’s out?  Will they be able to vote their conscience by declaring things they don’t like as trolls?  Will anything controversial end up tagged as such?

I suspect Valve is going to be pressed as to what constitutes a troll.  There are some hints in that article, but nothing like a firm line drawn to separate the trolls from the flock.  I mean, if you’re going to make “zero effort cash grab” a measure, I’m going to point at some titles already on the store and ask how they’re still allowed.

I also strongly suspect that Valve will never want to, or perhaps even be able to, make a definitive set of rules as to what makes the cut and what does not.  In part, that is due to how humans behave.  The moment you draw a line somebody will step right up to it just to test you.  This is why EULAs and Terms of Service documents for online games always give the game companies an out, a free hand to punish or ban people for circumstances unforeseen, and why the rules of conduct are almost always annoyingly vague.

Which brings me back to their blog post earlier in the week.  Why bother sapping their credibility with claims that they’ll let games on their service that they’ll hate as much as some of their players if, in the end, they’re as like as not still going to refuse the same games after the policy change as they did before?

Atlantic Fleet

Back in January I took my refund from the Hero’s Song debacle and picked up a couple of games off of Steam with the money.  Refunded money is like found money and should be spent immediately.  I grabbed Orwell, Death Ray Manta, and Atlantic Fleet, something I even documented on a Friday bullet points post. (I had forgotten about that until I went to make a tag for Atlantic Fleet and found I already had one.”

I let Atlantic Fleet sit for a bit, finally picking it up to play last month.

Atlantic Fleet by Killerfish Games is a tactical turn-based naval combat simulation that focuses on the war between Britain and Germany in WWII.  You can replay the surface and submarine encounters that characterized the Battle of the Atlantic before the US Navy showed up.

For a game that is $9.99 it has a lot to recommend it.

The models of the ships and aircraft are good.  The game runs well, being both stable and resource efficient.

The mechanics of the game are reasonably simple once you grasp them.  For complexity, the game lies somewhere between the first person whimsy of World of Warships and the grognard impenetrability of Storm Eagle’s Jutland series.

There is a tutorial that guides you through playing the game.  It doesn’t exactly hold you by the hand and guide you… it throws up a text box that requires you to both read and comprehend what it is telling you, so you need to take a minute rather than just jumping in… but there isn’t a lot to learn so once you get the basics things fall into place.

Once there you can pick one of the pre-set scenarios or start a campaign.  I prefer the scenarios, which cover a range of historical engagements.  I gravitated to the pursuit of the Admiral Graff Spee, an encounter that my grandfather deemed important, making me memorize the names of the British cruisers involved. (Achilles, Ajax, and Exeter.)

Of course, all is not perfection.

I found the basic AI to be a bit simple.  It does what it needs to do and at least doesn’t lock on and hit with every shot.  But it doesn’t seem quite up to the task of dealing with even a dolt like myself.  I have played the Graff Spee scenario a number of times, playing each side, and I have never lost outright.  My first run, when I was just learning and made many mistakes, I managed to sink the Graff Spee with desperate torpedo run, though I lost two cruisers, with a third damaged, in the process.

Later, when I figured things out a bit, I could zero out the Graff Spee without loss and then re-run the scenario and kill all three British cruisers and sail away barely touched, like Captain Langsdorff’s dream.

The Bismark scenarios likewise led to some different historical endings.  I managed to sink both the Bismark and the Prinz Eugen with HMS Hood and HMS Prince of Wales.

Bismark, turrets wrecked, going down by the stern

I appreciate that you can use your skill to change historical events.  HMS Hood doesn’t always have to explode… though I made that happen.

HMS Hood goes up just like it did in 1940

It was more a matter of my being able to change events, sometimes drastically, by just watching how the AI works rather than because I posses some special skill at naval combat. (Which I most certainly do not.)  You can engage the “hard” level AI and “elite” AI gunnery, but that quickly becomes pretty viscous.  AI is always a dicey issue because you want a game to be accessible (i.e. shouldn’t dunk new players mercilessly) but if it is too easy then things become tedious quickly.

This isn’t a huge fault, and given the game price the AI is pretty good, but it did strike me initially.  And the default AI fights on to the bitter end.  I had the Hood firing away at me still when its rear turrets were swamped by sea water washing over the rear decks.

Under the waves, submarine combat is just okay.  You get to lurk and go to periscope depth and unleash your deadly fish.

Avoiding detection

But this is not a submarine simulator, and the submarine aspect feels very simplistic if you have ever played one.

The submarine scenarios emphasize this.  They tend to start with the sub in position.  You launch your torpedoes then dive and evade.  If you aimed true and hit your target, you win.  If you missed you likely lose.

HMS Glorious takes three torpedoes

Meanwhile anti-submarine warfare feels very simple and haphazard… which makes it pretty realistic for the time.  You get a sonar contact with an estimated bearing and range, and then you either pop away at periscopes with you guns or you drop depth charges.  Both tend to feel like throwing stones in the ocean which, again, is probably realistic.  The most exciting moment in ASW for me so far was having the HMS Queen Elizabeth fire her 15″ guns at my periscope.

Then there is the aircraft component which I found unsatisfying.  I am not sure what I would suggest as an alternative, but even in a simple simulation like Atlantic Fleet the aircraft feel tacked on.  The aircraft models are nice though.  I will give them that.

But perhaps the most unsatisfying part of the game for me is how turns are managed.  I don’t mind turn-based combat.  Not everything has to be real time and one likes a respite now and again to assess the situation.  But how turns are structured, and how that structure influences the game irks me a bit.

Let us say you have a scenario with two friendly ships and two enemy, which I will designate F1 and F2 for friendlies and H1 and H2 for the hostiles.  This is how a turn plays out:

You give F1 its movement order, then F1 moves.  After that you select F1’s firing option, then F1 fires.  Following that you do the same thing for F2, each moving and firing in their own turn.  Then H1 moves then fires, followed by H2, which moves then fires.

A little clunky, but not the end of the world.

However, in order to fit this all together, the firing phase is rather simple.  You designate your target then select which of the weapon systems on the ship you care to use.  For a battleship, as an example, you can use main armament with armor piercing rounds, main armament with high explosive rounds, secondary armament with AP rounds, secondary armament with HE rounds, torpedoes, or a star shell to light up targets for night combat.

So you can fire your main guns, or your secondary guns, or torpedoes, or an illumination shell.  They are all mutually exclusive.  Furthermore, your guns get to fire every turn, there being no reload time differential between main and secondary armament.  Effectively a battleships 15″ guns fire just as fast as a wee destroyers 4″ guns or a cruisers 8″ guns.

Torpedoes do get locked out until they reload, so you cannot launch a spread of those every turn.  That would be completely unbalancing.  But when it comes to the choice between primary and secondary guns, you wouldn’t ever fire the secondaries unless the mains were knocked out.

Ideally, I would have preferred to have a simultaneous scheme where you give movement and firing orders for all weapons systems and then the turn resolves, accounting for timers for things like guns with differing rates of fire.  That would have been a better solution.

However, that is asking a lot for ten bucks.

And for that price the game delivers some pretty good value.  In addition to the historical scenarios, you have a wartime strategic simulation campaign, where you place your ships and fight battles as they come up, along with a “build your own navy” campaign where you have to earn ships as you go along.  The former is pretty amazing and intense, the latter is a bit silly, but all told you can fight a lot of battles.  I like the historical scenarios, which are quick battles, and the ability to create your own line ups for such encounters.  I’ve been battling the Tirpitz against various Royal Navy battleships.

So, to sum up, Atlantic Fleet might not be the naval combat simulator you want, but it is likely the one you need.  If you have a naval combat itch to scratch, this will do it for you at a reasonable price.  Well worth the time and money.

Meanwhile Killerfish Games has a Pacific Fleet version of the game in the works according to their site and just launched a new title called Cold Waters.

Now available

Cold Waters is a simulation of the naval actions in Tom Clancy’s book Red Storm Rising. Those actions were based off of a scenarios played with the table top game Harpoon which was later turned into a series of computer games which included the events from the book, making this new game a re-imagining of a conversion of an homage or something.  I am not sure.

But it is $39.99, so I will be interested to see what the reviews say about it.  That is past the point of impulse purchase price for me.

Delve – We Build and We Sell a Few Things

We are a week into June, so the time was right for the May 2017 economic report for EVE Online to show up.

As expected, dipping into the data shows Delve still at the top when it comes to ratting and mining.  The Imperium still care bears the hell out of its systems. It is a selling point for the coalition.

May 2017 – Stats for Top 20 Regions

We shall if the Rorqual and anomaly changes coming on Tuesday will put a dent in the mining side of that.

For other economic indicators however, The Forge region, with Jita in the role of central trade hub of New Eden, still ranks supreme.

All Road lead to Jita

For the market size The Forge has no competition, ringing it at 600 trillion ISK for May.

May 2017 – Total Market Trade Value by Region

Domain, the region with the next highest numbers, hosting the trade hub of Amarr, only showed 75 trillion ISK for May.  Surprisingly though, third place doesn’t fall to the regions that are home to the tertiary trade hubs of Hek or Dodixie.  Instead, Delve is in third place with 24 trillion ISK for May.  Not bad for a region held by a single coalition.  We sell a lot of stuff to ourselves.  Certainly the market in the Keepstar in 1DQ1-A seems to have most things I need.

A lot of what appears on our market is shipped in from Jita.  The groups running the shipping services run the Jita to Delve route frequently.  But we do build some of our own stuff as well.

May 2017 – Total Production Value by Region

The Forge is out in front again with 26 trillion ISK in value manufactured.  With Jita being what it is, people want to produce close to market, so The Forge at the top of the list, with adjacent regions of Lonetrek and The Citadel putting up solid numbers as well due to proximity.

But second place goes to Delve which manufactured 20 trillion ISK in goods.  I am sure capital and supercaps figure heavily in the mix.  But there are engineering complexes all over key systems in Delve building things.  You could see a couple in my post about the TNT Keepstar, and when you go into KarmaFleet’s home system your overview is pretty much overwhelmed by citadels and engineering complexes.

So I guess if ratting and mining numbers are seen as selling points for the Imperium, then we might also have a line there for manufacturers as well.

Minecraft 1.10 The Frostburn Update

Yesterday saw the release of Minecraft 1.10, to so called Frostburn Update.

The pace of major version releases of Minecraft has always been a bit erratic, but the long stretches where 1.7 and then 1.8 were the current releases made me wonder if the release cycle was settling down to an approximate year-long interval between drops.  That would let mod makers and those maintaining their own versions of the server software to keep up.

And now we have version 1.10, after having gotten version 1.9 just at the end of February.  A lot of mods haven’t been updated to 1.9 yet and now we have a new version.  Life in development; everything you depend on is either updated too quickly or not at all.

This is the list of features that come with 1.10 (A more detailed list here):

• Many bug fixes
• Added Polar Bear
• Added Husk and Stray
• An auto-jump option
• Improvements to some commands
• Structure blocks for custom maps
• Underground fossils made from bone blocks
• Added Magma Block
• Added Nether Wart Block and Red Nether Bricks
• Some huge mushrooms can be even larger
• A rare chance to find lonely trees in plains
• Find abandoned mineshafts filled with gold in mesa biomes
• Villages generate better paths between the buildings
• More variations of villages, based on the biomes they are built in
• Endermen have been spotted in the Nether
• Removed Herobrine

We all like the “many bug fixes” part I bet… unless we were doing something that depended on a bug to operate.

I got to take a peek at Minecraft 1.10 as our server was upgraded right away.  Among the options you give up when hosting on Minecraft Realms is the ability to choose what version your world runs on.  You are always running on the latest stable release.  So when I logged in last night it was, hey presto, new version installed and running.

When I logged in the first thing I noticed was auto-jump, which is on by default.  This is a feature from Minecraft: Pocket Edition (which I have on the iPad and will write about some day) that manifests itself largely by not requiring the player to jump (space bar) when climbing a block.

I got used to that pretty quickly, though now I have to wonder if there is any advantage to putting in stairs any more.

Then I ran off to see what else I might find from the new release.

One disadvantage of having a world that already has a large explored area is that to get some of the new things, they have to be generated post-patch.  So in order to see changes to villages or the promised new mesa biome abandoned mine somebody on the server has to go out exploring some more because old areas don’t regenerate, you have to find new ones.

And if I find another mesa biome, I’ll probably end up building a rail line to it.

But the new mobs can spawn even in old areas, so I could potentially find a polar bear, a husk, or a stray.  Given the latter two are, respectively, a new type of zombie that spawns in desert areas and a new type of skeleton that spawns in icy areas, I though a polar bear might be the best option.  So I went to the nether and used the transport hub there to get to an icy biome.  After a couple of day cycles searching around, I found a polar bear.

Polar Bear time

Of course, once I found him I had to call my daughter over to see the polar bear.  Annoyed at me shouting across the house to her for some dumb Minecraft thing, she was immediately enamored with the polar bear and wanted to know if it could be tamed or ridden or what.

The power of cuteness… even blocky cuteness.

As far as I know though, the polar bear cannot be tamed, though you can apparently put it on a lead and tow it places.  Maybe I will bring one do a desert biome.

Anyway, Minecraft 1.10 is out there and our world has been upgraded.