Where Does WoW Classic End?

Just last week we launched into The Burning Crusade in Blizzard’s WoW Classic experiment.  We will likely spend close to two years playing that.  Maybe less.  The thing about doing a retro server is that everybody who doesn’t already know the dance steps can find them online, so a lot of people move at a much quicker pace.  I’ve already gone from “Hey, that’s the first level 70 I’ve seen!” to seeing them all over.

Still only level 60 still as I head to Hellfire Peninsula

After Outland I fully expect that we will move into Wrath of the Lich King Classic, just to finish off what I will call The Classic Trilogy.  That probably gets us out into 2024.

But then what?

I would argue that “classic” ends with WotLK and that Cataclysm, though it is more than a decade in the past at this point, marks the “modern” era of World of Warcraft.  And while there are descisions to be made about WotLK… it was during that era we got Dungeon Finder and achievements, both of which remain of debated value… Cataclysm really represents a leap.

Which isn’t to necessarily say that Blizzard couldn’t or shouldn’t roll the classic train on into Cataclysm, but it does represent some issues.

First off, unlike EverQuest, which is ever the model for these sorts of plans, and all the more so since Holly Longdale is driving the WoW Classic team at Blizz, Cataclysm went back and changed old content.  This differs from the EverQuest model where they just piled on new content by adding zones and maybe adding an NPC here or a teleporter there to the past world.  Cataclysm represents the destruction of vanilla WoW yet again and a lot of the push behind the whole WoW Classic experience was from people, myself included, who were somewhere between annoyed and filled with white hot rage that Blizz did this.

Does Blizzard want to re-ignite those memories of betrayal?  And, probably more importantly, is there demand for a fresh start for Cataclysm?  If there is enough money on the table, I have no doubt that Blizzard will try to claim it.

And I have softened a bit on Cataclysm over the years.  Some of the content was good.  The instances were all interesting.  But none of that has changed over the years and when Blizz already has the post-level squish, fully scaling, parallel paths experience available, do they bother rolling to Cata?

The Shadowlands level squish parallel experience

I suspect there would be demand for a fresh start for any expansion with a rush of people all together and all the content to re-explore.  But the hitch for Blizz is that it isn’t as easy as it is for EverQuest.  Over at Daybreak these sorts of things are done on one or maybe two servers at a time.  It is easy to handle and contain.  WoW Classic went live with more than 150 servers.  And then they had to add some more when Burning Crusade Classic hit and they had to split out the people who wanted to stay in the land of vanilla.

So it isn’t a trivial exercise moving forward.  And they have to make the decision about whether or not to move everybody forward.  I suspect that there is a faction at Blizz that believes you progress or you die off, that this classic ride ends with a whole bunch of people at whatever post-Shadowlands expansion they’re at  when and if they catch up.

I expect, however, there will be a loud group in the community that won’t want to go past WotLK.  Will Blizz off another era split?  Will they offer one for Burning Crusade Classic as well?  Will the classic experiment require Blizz to create a whole pantheon of expansion locked, never to progress, special snowflake servers?

I know that seems ideal to some, but I suspect that it won’t be as nice as it sounds, that some expansions will be more favored than others, that the overhead will be large and confusing, and that Blizz will need to make transfer/clone forward options available all the way along at a price lower than even $15. (Also, how many versions of WoWHead and Icy Veins will we need?  One for each expansion?)

But the flip side of all of that is what do they do if they just stop at WotLK, that “classic” really is just the first three seasons of the game and everything after Cataclysm is ignored?  I suspect that Blizz just re-rolls WoW Classic again and launches into that hype again.  It will have been at least five years since the first rush to old Azeroth, and the EverQuest team has demonstrated that nostalgia is an evergreen source of money.

Will it be another 150+ server event that has a big impact on the company financials?  I don’t know.  I suspect that it won’t be that popular, but the draw of WoW is not to be discounted.  And what happens with the previous classic servers if this hits?

Those are a few options and I am sure I could come up with more.  Blizzard has time to think about this.  As I noted above, I expect that WotLK Classic is a given and that we’re at least 18 months away from that being a thing.  But at some point they’re going to have to make a call on direction and plans.  I am already curious as to where they will go.

Where do you think the classic experience is heading?

Shooting Our Own Structures in Delve

As I posted last Friday, the Forsaken Fortress update has led to a plethora of structures ending up in the new “abandoned” state, which means that they can be killed without any intervening timers and there is no asset safety, so all the stuff inside drops into space and can be looted.

The latter represented a considerable shift in policy for CCP, which had previously said that nobody would trust Upwell structures if you could lose all your stuff from them.  Times change.

So there were suddenly structures in the “abandoned” state all over New Eden, including down in Delve.  While alliance structures are maintained by GSOL, and active corps maintain their own, there were apparently some alt corp structures about that had been left untended and unfueled, which left the coalition with a choice.

They could leave them be, which would be an invitation to outsiders and random passers by to try and kill them and carry off the loot, or we could kill them and loot them ourselves.

I suppose the post title gives away which option was selected.

The Mittani announced on the Saturday Fireside that we would be purging abandoned structures in our territory.  Attempts had been made to contact the various owners, and shooting blues wasn’t anybody’s first choice, but letting somebody else get the kills and the drops was declared to be worse, so we would be blowing them up.

The announced plan was to nationalize the loot.  We would go from structure to structure, blowing them up, while GSOL followed behind to haul off the drops to be processed, re-used, or sold off, with proceeds going into the SRP fund.

After the Fireside a fleet went up to start in on the job.  It was a Muninn fleet, and all I had handy for that was a Scimitar, but you can always throw some combat drones in the drone bay, so I went along with that.  We shoved off to the first shoot.

Being bridged off to our first targets

The targets were an Azbel and a couple of Raitarus.

Abandoned Azbel

And Azbel is a large structure, so it took us a while, though we were able to hit the damage cap and still get some people to start on the other two structures.  With no opposition… nobody was going to jump into the gunner’s seat or rush to the defense… I even drove an alt out there in an Ibis just to get him on one of the kill mails.

An Ibis at a Raitaru destruction

Once the three were down came the dull bit, as we had to fly cover for GSOL to pick through the station hangars and pull out the good stuff.  Everybody’s individual station hangar gets kicked out with the destruction and is floating around in space.

A station hangar in the wild

We also had to listen to the FC warn people time and again not to go start grabbing loot for themselves.  Fortunately there were not too many hangars to go through, though it still took time.

The hangar containers around the Azbel as it explodes

After that was done we were off to a Fortizar a few systems over.  This was a different story.

The shoot went as expected and the whole thing blew up nicely.

I never get tired of these explosions

But this Fortizar was one of the early ones set down in Delve, which meant that a bunch of people had ended up using it over the years.  It was owned by an alt corp with one person in it, and that person, who apparently had gone missing.  It kicked out a lot of station hangars.

The hangar ball from the Fortizar

That is not nearly as many as the Hard Knocks Keepstar we blew up in wormhole space about a year and a half back, but it is still a sizable number of cans floating in the aftermath.

You might be able to spot the icons of ships… including freighters… checking through the containers.  All those yellow cans needed to be gone through.  And, as before the FCs had to warn off… and blow up in a few cases… people who just could not keep their hands off the loot.

Meanwhile, we sat there and watched.  Without much to occupy us, attention was on the loot spotted and the ships being ejected from the hangars.  I had to go into the “no chatter” channel to avoid that, after which I could only hear the command channel broadcasts to us, which were often asking people to stop talking about every ship that showed up on the overview.

To get at ships people had stored away, they have to be ejected into space… and there were a bunch of ships.

Ejected ships on the overview

You can tell they are unoccupied as the pilot name is the type of ship on the overview.  Also, being unpiloted, they show up as neutrals in space.  Some very big toys were discovered that way.

A Nomad jump freighter somebody left behind

And there were a few strange ones as well.

Wait, what?

I am not sure how you get an unoccupied capsule, but there it was floating in space.

We were occasionally tasked to warp out and blow up some of the ships that were not worth flying off.  This also became something of a fiasco.  People were quick to lock and shoot, so I didn’t bother launching drones, but some pilots couldn’t resist just shooting at whatever ship was on their overview despite.  Over and over voices from the command channel would tell people to only shoot broadcasted targets and then would start calling people out for shooting things that had not been broadcast.

The kill mails for these ships showed whose hangar they came from, which was another odd element as I saw a couple from people who I know are active.  I guess they didn’t get the in gaming warning about the impending destruction.  That seems about on par for this.

All in all it was quite trying and I ended up just docking up in another structure and playing Minecraft, still listening to FC coms in case something was needed, but otherwise unenthused by the op.  The FCs eventually stopped letting people shoot ships because a few people couldn’t follow instructions.  It was painful to listen to.

I feel for the GSOL team, who had to slowly pick through all of those cans in space.  The haul was said to be impressive, but it is dull work… though not as dull as having to just sit and watch it.  After the three hour mark we got a PAP.  The fleet was going to carry on in a semi-permanent state until they had hit all the structures on the abandoned list, but I was done with that for the day.  I flew back home.

The work carried on.  There were more structures to take care of, though not as many as in high sec space, where the big stories about this have been focused. I hope there were not too many more as full as that Fortizar.  GSOL was being worked hard to take care of just one structure like that.

And it is all a side effect of the changes CCP made with the Forsaken Fortress patch.

Keepstar Nocturnal Mission

I was up because it was hot.  It had peaked over 100 degrees in the afternoon in Silicon Valley, and even as midnight approached the temperature hung in the mid-80s.  It was too warm to get to sleep easily, so why not just stay up and see a couple of Keepstars blown up?

Given how long they have been around, there haven’t been that many Keepstar kills.  The list of losses over at Zkillboard isn’t that long, even if you add in the couple that didn’t register correctly.  I’ve been around for a few of the kills… including multiple Circle of Two Keepstars… but it is still something of a special event to see one explode.

And that was my initial plan.  Very low commitment.  I was just going to slip into M-OEE8 with an alt in a stealth bomber and watch the fireworks there.  We had a couple of citadels parked around the target, so I could tether up and watch.  So nearly an hour ahead of time I was setup and watching.

The M-OEE8 Keepstar awaits

There were actually multiple targets on grid, but only one really mattered, and the timer was counting down.

Other targets on grid, with blues on their own citadel

That would let me watch one Keepstar, but there was a second one in 0-YMBJ that was set to come out about 30 minutes after the first.  For that one I logged in with my main.  The target was just one jump over from our staging, so I would just stealth bomber over to watch that one as well.

And then the calls for fleets started going up.  There were nearly 2,000 pilots logged into our staging system, and I decided to go with one of the Baltec fleets.  I already had a Megathron.  That would get me on a kill mail or two.

But then they needed logi… somebody always needs more logi… so I bought an Oneiros, put on the Emergency Response SKIN, stuffed a Bouncer and four Warrior IIs in the drone bay and undocked.

Oneiros ready to go

Sothrasil was our FC, and he warped us off to the Athanor off the undock, then back onto the titan that was going to bridge us.  However, everybody was so anxious to go that there were dozens of titans crowded in and it was tough just to click on the correct one.  The call had to go out for titans to dock back up because they were bumping the bridging titans.  We got to hear about that because it was another operation with all fleets on the same voice coms.  But things did clear up for us and we were bridged into M-OEE8.

And from there we gated one system over to E-OGL4 to shoot a Fortizar that was already out.  We landed in close enough that I was able to put a Warrior II on it before we anchored up and motored well out of drone range.

You can almost see the Fortizar

That went placidly as nobody bothered to gun the Fortizar until it was almost dead.  When somebody did show up they turned on the PDS and killed my drone, but the structure was down to 5% at that point, so I was on the kill when it exploded.

The Fortizar explodes as we align out

Meanwhile, back in M-OEE8, more ships were piling in.  Super carriers were putting fighters on the Keepstar the warping to tether up while a range of third party fleets from TEST and Dead Coalition… and even a couple of NC/PL ships… were hanging about watching the structure get chipped away, waiting for their moment to get in range to take a few shots so as to get on to the kill.

Supers strewn about the field

Sothrasil brought us onto the Fortizar on grid with the Keepstar where we tethered up and waited our turn to take a shot at the big target.  One person in our fleet, alleged to be a non-English speaker, warped off to the Keepstar to get his shots in on his own and was blown up for going off on his own.  About the same time a carrier pilot in an Archon trying to control their fighters ended up warping to the Keepstar and was likewise blown up.

Archon sacrificed at the altar of the Keepstar

Somebody ran out in a blockade runner to try and look the wreck, but I don’t think they made it out safely.

Caught grabbing the loot

My alt in his stealth bomber decloaked and put some torps into the Keepstar, then warped back to tether up and watch the outcome.

Sothrasil then had us align and we warped in to take out shots.  I dropped the Bouncer II I had brought along and set it to firing a few rounds before scooping it up.  We then aligned back just as the call for the titans to jump in came over coms.

Our little fleet visible as the titans land in front of the Keepstar

Asher was directing the titans.  The plan was for them all to land and then use their doomsday weapons in order to send off the Keepstar in style.  It didn’t quite go to plan… people shot their

weapons early… but it still looked pretty neat.  I put my camera on the Keepstar and got some pretty shots through the uprights.

Doomsday beams of many colors

A bunch of screen shots were posted in chat, so I’ll link to some of those if you want to see more of that moment.

• Titans landing
• In the titan pack
• Titans on grid
• Firing through some Baltecs
• Doomsdays starting to fire
• The titans in a blue glow
• Full firing
• More firing
• Doomsdays going
• Keepstar blows

The Keepstar blew up, most everybody got on the kill mail (more than 1,500 people recorded), the titans got their money shot, the operation was a success.

Keepstar blows up

Now there was just the matter of the other Keepstar, now out of its timer and repairing, eight jumps away.  When the M-OEE8 Keepstar blew I immediately sent my alt in his bomber off towards the gate to get to the next target.  For the first couple of gates it was like swimming through molasses due to time dilation, but it soon cleared up and he was moving quickly.  Fortunately there were no gate camps.

Over in 0-YMBJ a fleet of carriers had been sent to put fighters on the Keepstar to stop the repair timer and chip it down to get it ready for the kill.  However, the fighters had been doing a very effective job and there wasn’t much left to shoot when my alt arrived, and he was there ahead of the whole fleet sitting in M-OEE8.

Calls were made to pull some, then all fighters as the fleets began jumping in.  People were getting antsy about getting on that second kill so, despite being told to take a shot and stop firing, people blazed away with all they had.  As titans landed, more doomsdays were set off, without much regard to who might be in the way.

Somebody blowing up in the pack

I put my alt in range and set torpedoes flying, but my main was still in M-OEE8, sitting on a titan waiting for the bridge to go up.  Meanwhile people were calling the percentage left on the Keepstar, getting everybody worked up.  The call was 8% left when our bridge finally went up.  But there was traffic control and many of us stayed in the jump tunnel for a long time.

When I finally landed, there was only 2% left on the structure.  I immediately dropped my Bouncer II and set it on the Keepstar.  I was just in time, but others in our fleet landed too late.  The Keepstar quickly exploded.

The second Keepstar blows

Still, more than 1,500 people were on that kill mail as well.  I managed to get on there with both accounts.

After that it was just a matter of getting everybody home.  On the bright side, we were all just one gate from our staging.  On the downside, it was now 1:30am local time for me… and much later/earlier some others… so people were sluggish about getting going and the subcaps had to sit around and make sure that all the big stuff got out safely.

The Mittani got on coms… it must have been 3:30am for him, though he is younger than I… and congratulated us on the kills and said that we needed to work out how to move this many people around between kills, since some people didn’t get on both as promised.

We were later informed that, with these two Keepstars, the total value of structures and ihubs destroyed in Tribute now exceeded 1.7 trillion ISK.  Somebody is going to have to go kill a lot more Rorquals back in Delve if they want to claim that equal damage is being done back there.

Slowly but surely the capitals drained out of 0-YMBJ and we were able to go home ourselves.  We docked up, I logged out, and then headed off to bed.  It was still hot in the house, but it was a little less so than earlier and I was now tired enough to drop off to sleep.

A Venture to HED-GP

Ranger Gama was back again with another frigate race for Reavers.  You may (but most likely do not) recall the race I wrote about back in December that had us racing Daredevils about the north.  That was enough fun that Ranger has made it a semi-regular thing in Reavers.  There was a second race a few months back that I missed, but I was around this weekend for the third one.

As has been the case in the past, Ranger Gama wouldn’t tell us where we would be headed in advance, nor what we would be flying, aside from the fact that he figured some of us might need to train up the skill.

That prompted me to see if there was any frigate that I could not fly.  Aside from the new Triglavian frigate, the Damavik, I seemed to be covered.  But if I had had to guess, I would have said the Venture was a likely candidate, being a mining frigate.  And, sure enough, when the time came Ranger Gama had some specially fit Ventures for us.

A Venture waiting to race

Ranger only had a few to hand out, so only the first 9 people who joined fleet were going to get one, which led to me hitting refresh on the fleet finder until his fleet advert popped up, at which point I joined (followed shortly by a couple other people) before the ping for the fleet was even sent out.  The fleet had to be disbanded until the ping, at which point people piled back in.

There were more people than frigates, but the fit was simple and cheap, so a couple people were allowed to buy their own in order to join.  As you can see from my eventual kill mail (we’ll get to that) it just fit a pair of mining lasers, a festival launcher, an MWD, an AB, a survey scanner, and a Nanofiber in the low slot.  We did get rigs to let us warp faster, so at least we had some speed.

There were questions about what we were allowed to do.  Not allowed was changing the fit.  Everybody had to race with the fit provided, though a couple of people felt that meant they could add some drones.  But otherwise people were allowed to run with implants if they so desired and take any route or mode or transportation they wished, so long as they stayed in their Venture.  We were then given the route and were sent on our way.

The race route

We started in 1DQ1-A, the capital of the Imperium, and our first waypoint was HY-RWO in Catch.  Most people headed straight down the most direct path, but four of us, myself included, got out GARPA to check the local jump bridge network, and turned the other direction to catch a jump bridge that shaved nearly a dozen gates off the route.  That put the four of us, Sicarius Bile, Grodd Gandar, Zarakik, and myself, way out in front of the pack.  In that group of four I was the second through the jump bridge.

The gate route, all 52 jumps

Part of the idea of the race is that hostiles along the way will cause trouble for the leaders who may (or may not) choose to share intel on what is happening.  However, Saturday night in Catch seemed to be pretty quiet.  TEST and their allies in the Legacy Coalition were not out roaming their space along our route, so the four of use made it to U-QVWD without incident.

Sicarius Bile got there first, and I jumped into the system just after.  I waited until he said he was on the TEST Keepstar in the system before warping to him and then moving off to pull distance while staying on grid.  Since grids… what is essentially the local bit of space where you can see other players and structures… are pretty huge now thanks to citadels, there is a lot of room to work with.

Nobody came out to molest us however.  I did see that there were a couple of player corpses on the undock of the Keepstar, which I suggested ought to fetch a prize bonus if collected (which somebody then did, because of course they would) but otherwise not much happened.

On grid with the Keepstar in my Venture

As we were winding down our five minutes on the Keepstar those who did not take the jump bridge began to arrive.  Asher seemed to be at the back of the pack, but unperturbed, with a calm in his voice, which made people suspect that he had a plan.

Then the early four headed out for the loop around TEST space.  During that run the lineup of the first four changed as Zarakik passed me.  I suspect that he might have opted for the warp speed implants.  But later he said that he was physically close to the London data center where the EVE Online servers are, giving him a consistent 7ms ping, which basically allowed him to load system faster than I could, eight time zones away from London, allowing him a small but tangible head start through each gate.

We started arriving back at the Keepstar for our second five minute stay on grid just as the last of the second group was leaving after their first.  Somebody in the second group tried to use the drones they packed to thin out the pack, but that did not work out.

I made a bookmark on the first stay so was able to warp straight in and start my five minute timer.  Again, there was little to remark on during our stay.  An interceptor undocked, but didn’t seem to have any use for us.  We speculated what they might be saying on their intel channel about a small gang of mining frigates hanging out around their Keepstar, but whatever it was, nobody came to get us.

So after our five minutes elapsed, we headed out for the final waypoint, Sicarius Bile in the lead, Zarakik next, and myself and Grodd Gandar close behind, smug with the distance of our lead.

And then we all died in SV5-8N, just one gate shy of the finish line.  Brave had a gate camp with drag bubbles up on the HED-GP gate.  Sicarius Bile died first and told us about the gate camp.  Then we proceeded to pile on and die, one by one, until eight of us were down.

Who is missing a jacket?

We didn’t all just bumble in with a direct warp.  I, like most of the later group, tried to find a bounce point which might bring me in behind the camp and let me get to the gate without getting caught.  But they had four drag bubbles up arrayed about the gate so that there was no joy on that front.

That left Asher Elias, Locke Erasmus, Elisha Okaski, and Boris Agnon (who got away in his pod) still in the race.  Back in 1DQ1-A I asked if I refit a Venture if I could just race to HED-GP, but the ruling came back that I would need run the whole route again for it to count.  Given that the alternate route to HED-GP was another 34 gates, I didn’t think it was worth the effort.

It got quiet on coms as those left considered their options.  A long diversion from the easy path seemed to be the choice.  And then Asher called out that he had made it, long before he could have run the full way around.

He told us that he looked at the killmails that we had linked and started convo’ing the FC of the gate camp to bribe him to be let through.  As it turned out the FC just wanted Asher to bring a fight, and since Saturday Night Swarm was starting in HED-GP in just a bit… that was why it was the end point of the race… he was able to offer that up.  So they let him through and he won.

We asked what other plans he might of had, since he seemed to linger behind as the race started, so there was speculation that he might have been looking for an opportune wormhole to get an edge.  However, it came out that he convo’d TEST (and former GSF) FC Vily to ask him to set Asher blue to TEST so he could use TEST jump bridges.  Vily told him he couldn’t do that himself, but would try to find somebody who could.  It looked like Vily was good to his word and actually did get Asher set blue, but nobody got back to Asher so he ended up not using the jump bridge network.

Then after a time, Locke and Elisha made it to HED-GP via the long route and we had out winner.  The prize pool of 1.5 billion ISK was divided up, with 50% slated for the winner, 30% for second place, 15% for third, and 5% set aside for the first person to arrive in a pod.  Those finishing the race were:

1. Asher Elias
2. Locke Erasmus
3. Elisha Okaski

Boris Agnon opted not to take the long way around in his pod, so the 5% for that was rolled over into the prize pool for the next race, along with Elisha’s prize money at his insistence.

And so the third Reavers frigate race ended, with most of us dying quickly at the gate camp in SV5-8N.  Brave popped me so fast I did not have a chance to launch fireworks at them.  Somebody had enough time to grab a direction scan of the camp, but that was about it.

What was waiting on the gate?

Despite not getting a prize I ended up 103,545.20 ISK ahead for the evening, that being the payout for losing an uninsured Venture.  I went with a clean pod, so losing that cost me nothing.

There was some talk as to what else we could have done with the race.  Since we were in mining frigates it was suggested that filling our ore holds ought to be a requirement… something Locke said he did anyway… but as not everybody had mining skills (the advent of skill extractors meant a lot of combat pilots ripped out the mining skills they trained as newbies back in the day) that was set aside.

Ranger Gama has promised to hold another race in the future.  We will have to see how that plays out and what surprises he comes up with.

RAZOR Leaves The Imperium

It was announced in a broadcast earlier today that RAZOR Alliance would be leaving The Imperium.

RAZOR Alliance – June 11, 2016

RAZOR Alliance held sovereignty up in the Tenal region, along with The Initiative and Executive Outcomes until the Drone Walkers broke off from Legion of xXDeathXx back in April to join the offensive against The Imperium.

RAZOR is the fourth alliance to leave the coalition since the war began back in January.

The Imperium – June 11, 2016

As when SMA left The Imperium, RAZOR is retaining blue standings with The Imperium.

RAZOR takes with them over 1,200 capsuleers, down from over 3,000 at the start of the year.

RAZOR has always been one of the more independent alliances within The Imperium, conducting their own deployments, including the one that pushed Intrepid Crossing over the (Cobalt) edge back in 2012.

There hasn’t been any word (leaked) yet about what RAZOR’s plans may be.  They had been working with The Initiative and LAWN in the Syndicate region to drive out The OSS and control the money moons there, and they appear to have picked up a system in Cloud Ring.  We shall see where they end up.

Meanwhile, rumors about the war’s end continue to seem premature.