CCP Edges Ever Closer to Selling Ships in EVE Online

CCP announced a new Destroyer Pack for sale this week on the web store store.

Limited time availability

For $24.99 you get the following:

• 500,000 Skill Points
• 110 PLEX
• Catalyst Sapphire Sungrazer SKIN
• Cormorant Ghostbird SKIN
• Coercer Ardishapur SKIN
• Talwar Valklear Glory SKIN.
• 100x Cap Booster 150
• 6x Agency ‘Pyrolancea’ DB3 Dose I booster
• Eifyr and Co. ‘Rogue’ Acceleration Control AC-601 implant.

New to packs, so far as I recall, are actual in-game items, including 100 cap boosters, some drugs, and an implant.

Now, they are kind of crappy items… a hundred Cap Booster 150s isn’t exactly the gold ammo we’ve been dreading since the “Greed is Good” internal article a decade back… but they do represent a baby step in that direction.  We know where we are headed, it is just a question of how soon we get there.

I suppose, for me, the amusing bit is the now complete acceptance we have for selling skill points.  That the Destroyer Pack threw in half a million SP seemed about par for the course, the culmination of a long run of pushing the monetization boundaries starting with skill injectors.  But I threw in the towel on the skill point front about a year ago, though my acceptance hasn’t stopped CCP from being dumb about skill point sales as late as this past March.  Being dumb is far the greater sin for me now.

I harbor some indifference to the whole thing at this point.  Part of it is the non-stop creep of monetization schemes across the industry makes this look pretty mild, and part of it ties back to a post I wrote earlier this year about the fact that the cost of an MMO subscription has been the same for 20 years while the price of everything else has gone up.  Fans are completely hostile to paying any more, and with subscriptions down for games like EVE Online, the only options to keep developers working on the title is to monetize elsewhere.  While we get our backs up at anything that carries even a hint of “pay to win,” that is exactly the sort of thing that people are willing to pay for.

In the end we get what we deserve.  And, as Star Citizen has proven, selling ships can be quite lucrative.

Introducing Your CSM15 Representatives

The votes have been counted and the results are in.  The CSM15 election is over.

Now we’re… uh… done

A total of 36,120 ballots were cast, up about 4K from the CSM14 election.

In about a half an hour dissection of the votes, CCP Dopamine and CCP Aurora went through the election round by round.  But when the final round was done these were the ten candidates left standing.

The CSM15 Slate

Alphabetically, they are:

• Brisc Rubal – The Initiative
• Gobbins – Pandemic Horde
• Innominate – Goonswarm Federation
• Kenneth Feld – Pandemic Legion
• Maria Taylor – Fraternity
• Merkelchen – Goonswarm Federation
• Mike Azariah – The Scope
• Phantomite – Same Great Taste
• Torvald Uruz – Abyssal Lurkers
• Vily – TEST Alliance Please Ignore

I was off a some from the guesses I made when voting opened, but out of a bag of 13 I thought were likely, eight of them made it.  Out of the winners there are 7 null sec candidates, 1 low sec, 1 streamer, and 1 high sec newbie helper.

Gobbins and Merkelchen were the first two candidates to meet quote to be elected, making it in the first round.

The Imperium ballot again proved to be about three candidates deep in influence.  It was able to get Merkelchen and Innominate in, passing a few votes on to Brisc, but otherwise failing to lift anybody else down ballot who didn’t have a voter base of their own on which to depend. (The ballot is in the comments of this post if you are interested.)

Congrats to all the winners.  I will like the dev blog with the voting data once it is posted.

Quote of the Day – The Button Label is Bad

Alright then, I think to myself. I’ll just repurchase another Ibis. They appear to be cheap, and I had made a whole big chunk of ISK from tutorials…

-Massively OP, Choose My Adventure Column

Chris at Massively OP headed into EVE Online for the latest round of Choose My Adventure and, unsurprisingly, it has been a tough time.  Welcome to New Eden, same as it ever was.  The new player experience remains… challenged.

But what struck me out of post of familiar woes was the line quoted above, because there is literally a button in the station/structure UI that will give you a brand new rookie ship… or “corvette” as they are now styled… on demand.  It isn’t even hidden away, being located right under the undock button.

The button and the hover help

Back in the day the game used to just give you a rookie ship if you docked up in a capsule.  It was changed to a button a while back.  I am going to guess they did that because somebody did a database query on “Ibis” and found there were more sitting in stations than there were total user accounts ever created.  I went on a cleaning up campaign a few years back to destroy all the ones I had cluttering up my hangars and when I searched today I have 26 still hanging around on my main.

Ibis results…

I was going to show the whole list, but I thought that one in 6RCQ, which I repackaged for some reason, like I was going to move it somewhere, was more amusing.  It isn’t like I couldn’t get one where ever I went.

Anyway, looking at that button I realized that the label on it isn’t as helpful as one my think.  *I* know what it means, but I know because I read the patch notes at some past date about the change.

But is it descriptive enough to somebody who wasn’t there when this change went into effect?  To somebody new to the game?  You know, the people who might actually need a new Ibis or other rookie ship?

The button says, “Board my Corvette,” which sounds a lot like simply “get in my ship.”

And the tool tip/hover help text is an example of the classic mistake for that medium, as it just adds three unhelpful words to what the button already told you, which fails to clarify anything if you didn’t understand what the button meant in the first place.  This is the equivalent of finding out that somebody is deaf and then just speaking louder.

The tool tip ought to say “Get a replacement starter ship for free!” or something else more instructive.

I am reminded of CCP Burger’s priority list from the first CSM14 summit minutes:

1. Stop the bleeding
2. Fix the stupid
3. Excite and teach
4. Incentivize return

-CCP Burger on CCP’s focus, CSM summit minutes page 6

I think we may still be in the “Fix the stupid” stage.

Summer Movie League – Pets and Phoenix Falter

The first week of our summer Fantasy Movie League is in the books and was marked by the two big releases falling short of projections.

Both the Secret Lives of Pets 2 and Dark Phoenix opened up last week, projected to be $50+ million and $40+ million respectively, but neither made their mark.  Instead SLP2 was just past $46 million and Dark Phoenix only crossed the $32 million mark.

Instead, the anchor of the week for the perfect pick was 3x Aladdin, which ended up somewhat over the modest projections for it going into its third week.  The perfect pick of the week ended up being 3x Aladdin, 1x John Wick 3, 1x Avengers: End Game, and 3x A Dog’s Journey, the latter also being the best performer of the week.  That was worth $101 million.

Nobody in our league went with the perfect pick, or even anchored on 3x Aladdin, and the scores sorted out as follows:

1. Goat Water Picture Palace – $91,105,328
   
2. Vigo Grimborne’s Medieval Screening Complex – $80,360,143
   
3. Wilhelm’s Qeynosian Kinetoscope – $79,555,422
   
4. Miniature Giant Space Hamsterplex – $77,230,126
   
5. Po Huit’s Sweet Movie Suite – $76,936,780
   
6. Ben’s X-Wing Exp(r)ess – $75,985,803
   
7. Too Orangey For Crows – $74,604,906
   
8. SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights – $69,881,816
   
9. Joanie’s Joint – $65,313,730
   
10. Cyanbane’s Neuticles Viewing Party – $62,588,778

Goat led the pack anchored on SLP2 and Aladdin, but was boosted by six screens of A Dog’s Journey, which earned an extra $2 million per screen by being the best performer.

I was apparently the only one who decided to see if the lack of penalty for empty screens would make it worthwhile to pile on higher priced features.  If you use the Cineplex Builder it will always give you a full lineup as it does not seem to adapt to the rules of individual leagues.

Different Rules are Different

But I went with 1x SLP2, 4x John Wick 3, and 1x Bharat.  Not a huge pick, but enough for third place, though that was in part because I got the $2 million bonus per screen for having picked the worst performer of the week, Bharat.   I was also the only one to do that.  Not suspicious at all.

And so it goes, one week in.  Being the first week, the one score list is all I need, but now we are on to week 2 and four new releases.  Here are the overall choices:

1. Men in Black International – $536
2. Secret Life of Pets 2 – $352
3. Shaft – $334
4. Aladdin – $271
5. Dark Phoenix – $205
6. Godzilla – $143
7. Rocketman – $130
8. Late Night – $96
9. John Wick 3 – $80
10. Avengers: Endgame – $56
11. MA – $55
12. The Dead Don’t Die – $28
13. Detective Pikachu – $26
14. Book Smart – $11
15. A Dog’s Journey – $11

First up on the new titles is Men in Black International, which is expected to top the week, if only just.  Well, it is expected to get to nearly $40 million, but that doesn’t feel like much after the pre-summer blockbusters that have already launched.  Still, it is a soft week, so it will be king.

On the plus side, Men in Black is a well known franchise and people really liked the first one.  On the downside, the two sequels did not bring much new to the franchise, as the Honest Trailers review of the series points out.  And there is Will Smith playing the genie in Aladdin rather than wearing the dark suit.  Oh, and the reviews so far stink.  Still, if you’ve already seen Godzilla, John Wick 3, and Avengers: Endgame what other options do you have?

I guess there is Shaft.  They got apparently the only person worthy of playing John Shaft, Samuel L. Jackson, to take the starring role… and I say that because he was who they tapped for the Shaft reboot of the same name back in 2000 as well.  I believe this is actually a sequel to the film from 19 years ago, and takes place 20 years down the line in the story as well as in reality, so SLJ makes perfect sense.  But the original Shaft films were very much of their time back in the early 70s and I am not sure how well that translates to 2019.  That it took nearly 20 years to get a follow on doesn’t bode well.

Shaft is currently pegged at about $23 million, which would mark it for 3rd place in the box office this weekend.

Then there is Late Night, which stars Emma Thompson as the only female late night talk show host on the air who turns to Mindy Kaling when her ratings begin to drop off.  The film is being distributed by Amazon Studios, isn’t expected to be big enough to get make the long range tracking list, is priced into 8th place in between John Wick 3 and Rocketman, and will probably be on Amazon Prime in a month in any case.  Somebody projected $5 million for it.

And finally there is The Dead Don’t Die, which might seem like a Game of Thrones reference, but isn’t.  As a low budget zombie film, you might dismiss it, having seen it priced way down the list, just ahead of the aging Detective Pikachu.  It might not even crack $2 million.

But then you go and look at the cast… which includes Bill Murray, Adam Driver, Tilda Swinton, Steve Buscemi, Danny Glover, Rosie Perez, Carol Kane, Selena Gomez among others… and you wonder how this cannot simply make more than that.  Seriously, the name didn’t register with me, but once I looked it up I wanted to go see it, and zombie films are not really my thing.  Even with mixed reviews it feels like it is priced too low to me.

So with that in mind my early week lineup is 1x Men in Black, 1x Aladdin, and 6x The Dead Don’t Die.

Picks lock late night tomorrow, so get yours in soon.  Next week we will face the juggernaut of Toy Story 4, guaranteed to be a 3 day split.

Abyssal Pocket Mania

But what has it got in its pocketses, eh?

-Gollum Aideron, Jita Local

Abyssal pockets, of which I was somewhat dismissive back when the Into the Abyss expansion went live, calling them “…solo PvE death dungeons… in space!” in my post about the expansion launch, have turned out to be popular.  Very popular.  Far more popular than I expected.

The lure of something new, the chance to make some fast ISK while prices were high, and the challenge of fitting for and fighting this new time limited content has combined to capture the focus of New Eden.

You can watch the page on zKillboard and see all the ships getting blown up every day. (Or if you just want to see the 1 billion ISK and up deaths, there is this page.  Even some pods can make that list.)  Trillions of ISK worth of ships have been destroyed so far in Abyssal pockets and players I never expected would go for PvE content have been draw in to the challenge of them.

I am seriously waiting for the Dev Blog from CCP on how things have gone… once they get the May MER and the CSM 13 election results out.  Abyssal fever may not last, but for the moment it is everywhere.  Streamers picked it up right away, though that was not without controversy.

CCP gave some streamers from stream fleet five calm Abyssal filaments (one of each type of the lowest tier) about half a day after the Into the Abyss expansion went live in order to get people streaming the sites that night.  However a streamer who did not get in on the free filament deal got angry on Twitter with the usual complaints about favoritism and fairness that come out whenever somebody else gets something for free. (People rarely complain about this when they are the recipients.)

This tempest in a teapot led to a side debate about the sanctity of the New Eden economy as well as everybody getting a free Abyssal filament, but the streamers were on the job all the same showing off the pretty new content.

Oddly, a lot of people excited about Abyssal pockets were not people I would have pegged for it, which is to say people who actually PvP regularly.   There seems to be a cross interest in the need to fit well and the constraints and difficulty of the content.  There has been a lot of chatter about Abyssal pockets.

Of course, not everybody is happy… but then I don’t think there is a feature in any game anywhere that could make all fans happy.  And those unhappy were not exactly a surprise.  There is a slice of PvE players who both seem to hate the dull current mission content but who also insist that they won’t run any PvE content that doesn’t have a predictable reward.  You cannot answer the “what’s the ISK per hour” question with any certainty, and that makes some people angry.

And the randomness of the rewards is clearly a thing here.  I have been through sites where none of the rooms dropped any rewards and sites where all three rooms have had something for me.

And that statement is a clear indication that I have spent some time running Abyssal pockets with the crowd.

My main problem with the content is that I am a cheapskate and I don’t really want to invest in expensive ships that I am likely going to lose.  So I have taken a different tack, which has been to fly the cheapest ship I can put together on an alt and still survive.  While the market for heavy assault cruisers is booming… and prices for them keep going up as demand tries to drain the market… I have been trying to keep expenses down by sticking with T1 hulls.

My first run was with a medium blaster Thorax I had sitting on an alt.  It was already insured and fit, so I just jigged it around to be a little more tanky, grabbed some faction drones and ammo, and headed off willy nilly into an Abyssal pocket.

Thorax on the move

The Thorax wasn’t a huge mistake.  It actually made it through one calm pocket, but that was mostly on accident.  However on the second run I hit a room that was all fast frigates and I found I had brought nothing to slow them down.  So while my drones worked away my blasters couldn’t touch the ships.  The frigates burned me down before my drones could finish their work and that was that.

About to collect my insurance money

Once my Thorax was kindling for the Abyssal fire, I decided that a Caracal might be a better choice.  My alt has some missile skills.  They couldn’t do tech II heavy missiles, but they could manage meta launchers and faction missiles.  Add in a pair of faction drones, a couple of ballistic computers and a target painter to help damage application, and then pile on resists and a shield booster and I figured it might work out, and it wasn’t even that expensive.

Caracal in the pocket

That again seemed to work out fine for a few runs.  But then I drew a room with five striking Davamiks, the Triglavian frigate, and then damage application became an issue.  Theirs was really good and mine was not.  I managed to burn one down, but they were hot on me.

Davamiks on parade… and my drones on the wrong target

I wasn’t too concerned about my drones as I was learning that I needed a shield buffer and not shield boosts.

Caracal brewing up in the pocket

I dug around looking for some buffer tank examples of Caracals and hit upon the post over at INN about various Abyssal pocket fits, which included a Navy Caracal.  Since my alt could do tech II light missile launchers, the rapid light launchers in that fit were an option as were the fury and precision missiles.  The Navy Caracal is considerably more expensive, but its price hasn’t spiked up the way the popular Gila or Ishtar has, so I thought I would give that a try.

Caracal among the rocks

The buffer tank and rapid light launchers with tech II missiles worked much better.  I hit a point where I could run any of the calm pockets with my alt.  There is, of course, a temptation to start running the next tier up.

As for loot, as noted above, it can be fairly random.  I have ended up with a few BPC drops for the new disintgrator ammo and some of the raw materials for building the new Triglavian ships and weapon systems, either of which makes a run easily profitable.  Filaments are the other main drop, and there is a market for them, but supply is pressing hard on demand, forcing down the prices.  The day after the expansion went live calm filaments were nearly 20 million ISK on the Jita market.  The next day they were under 10 million.  Now they are hovering just over a million each.

I am certainly not going to get rich running the tier 1 sites.  But I am mostly playing the tourist right now.  I’m going in to see the various scenes and take screen shots, a gallery of which you will find below.  Whatever else you want to say about Abyssal pockets, they sure are some pretty stretches of space.

Minecraft Grand Unification Theory

I do not pay much attention to E3, primarily because it tends not to focus very much on my genre of choice and what it does generally focus on is consoles and console titles from a few large companies.  Not really my thing.

So I let the news from E3 flow by.  I watch is stream past on Twitter and glance through the headlines in Feedly, but do not it much mind except when somebody does something silly. I think I posted about Sony’s PlayStation 4 demo and how they tore into Microsoft’s Xbox One demo the day before on topics like price and used games.  But used games were a burning issue back then, until the industry admitted aloud that being able to trade in used games at GameStop was likely inflating new games sales and so benefiting from the arrangement despite all their bluster about used games being morally equivalent to theft.

This year a tidbit of info actually caught my attention.  Microsoft actually had something to say about Minecraft.

Microsoft has owned Minecraft for a while now, having paid creator Notch $2.5 billion back in late 2014.  This got them the two branches of Minecraft, the Java version, the original, which runs on PCs and which allows you to host your own server and has mods from here to the moon and back, and the console, pocket, Win10 version, which only got shared server hosting relatively recently and which makes money via a cash shop for special skins and such.

Basically, there is the “would have been amazing and lucrative if they had just stopped there” Java version and the “OMG! The cash shop train has no brakes!” money machine console branch.

Microsoft seems to have pledged to unify these two branches into a single product line.

New World Order

This has me a bit concerned.

I would have been more concerned a year or two ago, when the console version was nowhere close to feature parity with the Java version. Microsoft seemed to be heading towards “we’ll just cripple all the hosting and flexibility and mods you love” path a while back with its Windows 10 version of Minecraft.

The two branches have grown a bit closer since then, but it is still an open ecosystem of mods and server types versus a controlled cash shop ecosystem, so Microsoft’s.   So when Microsoft says that the basis for this unification plan is the XBox Live service it is tough not to cringe.

I wouldn’t mind some improvements to the PC version of Minecraft.   Being written in Java gives it flexibility, but also hinders it on the performance front.  And optimized version written in C++ with better file handling would be a good thing.  But if the price is giving up all mods and the ability to host your own server and create things like Wynncraft and such, I would probably stick with the Java version and its stone age file structures.

Fortunately, despite that splash screen from their presentation, the single unified Minecraft platform seems to be well off in future, if it is actually planned at all.  The early reporting I saw from sites at the presentation said Microsoft would be pulling “all versions of the game” together.  I don’t know if that was bad reporting, a bad presentation from Microsoft, or sloppy terminology somewhere along the line, but the statement on the official Minecraft site seems less dramatic.

Over there the line is that they are unifying all of the versions sharing the C++ code base, shedding all of their various names (e.g. Pocket Edition, Win10 Editions, Xbox) and renaming them all as just Minecraft, while the original, open version on PCs will now be called Minecraft: Java Edition.

The official site also indicates that the coming graphics upgrade will also skip the Minecraft: Java Edition, leaving us to our classic look, though there are enough graphical mods out there that you’re pretty much covered if you want fancier views. (The PlayStation versions seem to be in limbo on where they will end up though.)

Of course, that tilts worry the other direction.  Is Microsoft putting the Java platform version of the game out to pasture?  Is it better to be on the neglected track or to have Microsoft unifying the Java platform?

Either way, nothing is likely to happen any time soon.  We just got the 1.12 update for the Java version, so we’re still in that waiting period where all the mods and special servers have to work to catch up. (Even though our server doesn’t have any mods, I am waiting for Minecraft Overviewer to catch up so I can render updated maps.)  I am more likely to get my Mineserver delivered before anything drastic happens, and once I that happens I need never upgrade versions again.

Still, for a little while I was intrigued with the idea of being able to use the iOS Minecraft Pocket Edition on the iPad to log into our server.

Honest Game Trailers: Warcraft

To celebrate the movie, here is a look back at the games which spawned it all.