Friday Bullet Points from Outland

Bullet points posts are often tidibits of news that I want to mention.  This time around it is mostly just about me and Burning Crusade Classic, with a couple of news items mixed in, just to get them all into a single post.

• A Druid for Outland

I have somehow managed to get my druid, who was level 36 when the pre-patch hit, all the way to level 58.

Level 58 out in Silithus

I will say again that the leveling path from 36 to 58 has been smoothed out considerably with the 2.5.1 patch.  The dead spots seem to be taken care of with new, or newly visible, quests.  I know the stuff in Theremore is new, but the fact that available quests appear on the mini-map means I probably picked up more quests that I likely missed the fire couple of times through the content.

This now gives me four characters available for Outland.  I suppose that means I should stop screwing around so much and go play in Hellfire Peninsula.  I do wonder if my druid should bother at level 58 or wait until 60 to go through.  There are still plenty of quests for him in Azeroth.

Plenty of quests at Lights Hope Chapel still

On the flip side, there is a lot of hugely improved gear if I go through the portal.  We shall see.

• Hot Market

I mentioned previously that the pre-patch before Burning Crusade Classic was clearly pulling people back into the game, with my primary evidence being the number of pages of auctions that were coming up in Auctioneer.  That number had sagged down into the mid-to-low 200s towards the end of WoW Classic, but jumped into the 600s with the pre-patch.  And now with the Dark Portal open and Outland at our feet, that number can reach into the mid 700s over the weekend.

There is a lot of economic activity going on, at least on the Bloodsail Buccaneer server, with demand for commodities that aid in leveling up trade skills being particularly in demand.  As such I have managed to make a bit of gold in the game for once.  Not a ton.  I am just not that invested, so to speak, but before the pre-patch I was worrying about scraping together the 350 gold for the Paladin Charger quest, thinking I would need to loot my other characters.  Now, a few weeks later, I have that much gold just on my pally, so I am happy with that.

• Fast Market

For a bit there after the patch, and even more so after the opening of the Dark Portal, the auction house was starting to drag quite noticeably when it came to searches.  People were complaining and Blizz looked into the issue, applying the following hotfixes:

• Implemented settings changes intended to lower the time it takes to search the Auction House.
• Players who list, bid, buy out, or cancel a very large number of auctions may now incur a delay between consecutive actions.

The latter is one of those annoyances that keeps coming up.  I am not sure what advantage is bestowed by listing dozens of the same thing, often a commodity that would sell fine as a stack, as a bunch of singles, aside from maybe trying to obscure your competition by driving them off the first page of results.

Anyway, Blizz says they are monitoring the situation.

• Falling for Shattrath

I have already fallen to my death in Shattrath trying to run for the elevator out in front of the inn in the Aldor area.  This is one of those “seriously, why did I just do that?” recurring events that I remember from the expansion back in the day.

I’ll step out of the Aldor inn, get on my mount, and as I ride towards the elevator, it will already be at the top so that, just as I get close it starts to drop and I instinctively jump for it.  The descending platform and my forward motion then carries my over my  target and I fall to my death.

I did this often enough back in the day that with my pally I got good at hitting Divine Protection to save myself.  But this time I did it with my hunter who has no such option.  A passing priest ressed me, which saved me the run back at least.

As for “Why Shattrath?” that is where the portals back to the main cities are, which include the auction houses.  Shat isn’t one of my favorite cities in the game, but it is the transit hub for Outland.

• Arena Season 1

Finally, Blizzard announced the start of Burning Crusade Classic Arena Season 1 for those who were waiting for more PvP options.  Available to teams of 2, 3, or 5 players, rewards include gear, titles, and even a special mount.  Not my thing, but everything doesn’t have to be about me.

Blizz did make a mistake and enabled some season 2 rewards, then had to track down the 81 players who cashed in on that.  The transactions were reversed and the honor refunded.

Minecraft Village Population

I mentioned late last month that we had gone back for a bit of Minecraft.  Skronk rolled up a new world on Minecraft Realms and we started running around.  During a bit of exploration… which in the usual Minecraft way felt like I wandered for days but ended up not being that far from our initial base… I ran across a town out in a plains biome.

A new town discovered

As our first town seemed to be well under way with everybody working on it, I decided to look further afield and managed to stumble back to the town I had run across.  I made that my project.  I had already thrown up a few walls to protect it on my first pass, but on my return I settled in to do the things I usually do when I set up shop in a village.

First up, once things are mildly secure, is generally to dig a mine.  This village had a house over a fissure in the ground, which is where I chose to start digging down to level 12, where the good stuff is.

I fixed up the entrance to make it look nicer

As I hung around a bit, I noticed the villager count begin to go up quite rapidly.  I know that they changed how villagers spawned with the Village & Pillage update last year.  And I even played with a new found village when the update landed.  But there have been some updates since then and I wasn’t quite ready for how fast villagers proliferate now.  As I hung around improving the town, they started multiplying.

Villagers congregate at the town center… also, my dog

Another thing that went in with the Village & Pillage update is that villagers now seek out a bed to sleep in at night.  Villages now come with more beds, but as the population goes up, so does the race to get a sleeping spot every time the sun sets.

This doesn’t make getting the night to pass easy.  Villagers also have a slightly earlier allowed bed time than players.  They all jump into bed before you’re allowed to.  It got to the point where a villager ran down the mine stairs and took my bed down there before I could get into it.

Fortunately, there were sheep about so I was able to make some more beds.  I even built another house in order to give the sprawling villager population places to lay their heads.

Villager flop house

I noticed that most of my new villagers were unemployed, wearing the plain brown rather than the attire.  I had to go look up why the villagers were not specializing, and it appears that they will only do so if one of the new work stations related to the professions are available in the town.

I went around town and built work stations for all the professions and soon the brown coated villagers began to specialize.

A shepherd and his loom

I soon had a town with all the professions covered, and some extra villagers to cover if I came up short.

One of the other changes is how iron golems are summoned.  If a couple of villagers get together and don’t see one near by, they can summon one, which led to a profusion of defenders in the village after a while.  There were fifteen wandering the grounds at one point.

Half a dozen golems in this picture alone

Anyway, I ended up doing quite a bit of work around the town.  I even started working on an upgraded wall.  We’ll see how far that goes.

The village so far, from the same angle as the first screen shot

But after a while there is always the urge to pack up and go explore.  There are some key biomes out there we need to find.  I’ve run into a few jungles nearby… you can see some bamboo in the town if you look close, and a jungle tree on the far side of town… but a mesa biome for colors would be excellent.

Where Does The Age of Kings II Definitive Edition Fit?

The golden age of the Real Time Strategy genre is nearly 20 years gone at this point.  Like most ideas in video games, it first made a splash in a raw form, in this case via Dune II ,and then saw change in great leaps, some of which made companies, as the original Warcraft did with Blizzard.  There was lots of variety as new titles rolled out.

Then somebody “won” the genre, created a title that seemed to perfect some aspect of it… that was probably StarCraft… after which the genre tapered off.  It didn’t die, but like MMORPGs or Facebook games, it stopped getting so much attention.  It was no longer the hot new flavor to chase.

In around the peak of the genre came Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings, one of my favorite RTS titles.  I’ve written about it before, but in summary it was kind of a big deal for myself, friends, and co-workers.  Back in the days when IT wasn’t policing every PC in development for unauthorized software, we would play a couple of games at the office every Friday night.

So you might think I was pretty excite to hear about Microsoft announcing Age of Kings II – Definitive Edition last week during E3.  Except, of course, I am not.

The Age of Empires trio at the Microsoft site

I mean, I should be happy that Microsoft has finally dusted off the web site for the franchise, which was locked in 2001 for about 15 years, and decided to pay attention to the franchise.  As late as four years ago there was a banner ad for the original XBox on the franchise page.

But there are a few issues for me.

The previous remaster, the Age of Empires Definitive Edition didn’t exactly make a splash.  After a big announcement two years back, it was quietly released on the Microsoft store eight months later where little seemed to be said about it.  It remains an exclusive there last I checked, though there seems to be some plan to bring it to Steam at some point.

I was also more than a bit convinced that the AoE remaster was little more than a marketing scheme to draw attention to the planned Age of Empires IV, so this might just be more of the same.   Also, given that I wasn’t big on Age of Empires III and that all we got was a vague trailer about the game, I wasn’t too excited on that front regardless.

But the primary reason I haven’t been all that thrilled about the Age of Empires II – Definitive Edition announcement is that we already got an Age of Empires II remaster just over six years ago.

Hidden Path Entertainment, who did the wonderful Defense Grid and Defense Grid 2 tower defense games, did a remaster of the game back in 2013 that included:

• Re-mastered for high resolution displays 1080p+.
• Enhanced visual engine with improved terrain textures, water, fire and ambient lighting effects.
• New Steamworks features: Achievements, Leaderboards, Matchmaking and Cloud support.
• Share user created content with Steam Workshop support.

Not only that, they also updated the unofficial expansions for the game and even added another one just last year.  When steam does stats, Age of Empires II – HD Edition is always doing surprisingly well given its origin in the last century.

Basically, there is already a happy and thriving Age of Empires II community on Steam that is good with the game, so a new version from Microsoft just raises uncomfortable questions… like what happens with all of the Steam Workshop stuff people have created and what about those three expansions?

What does Age of Empires II – Definitive Edition really bring to the table, besides 4K graphics, and what will people lose if they go there?

I personally think that the graphics upgrade and a remastered sound track is insufficient to get people to buy another copy of a game they have probably already purchased twice at this point.  Or that seems to be a common thread in the reactions to the press release on Steam.

The press release mentions three new single player campaigns to be released with the Definitive Edition, and four new civilizations as well, which makes this seem even more like a branch that will be incompatible with the HD Edition.

Microsoft also seems to have learned from the Age of Empires Definitive Edition and will be launching the new game straight onto Steam, where the fan base has resided for years now.

However, even that move gives me pause.  Are they planning on supplanting the HD Edition on Steam?  Hidden Path may have done the HD Edition, but Microsoft owns the title and all the rights.  If they want to yank the HD Edition in hopes that the fan base will be compelled to buy the Definitive Edition, they can do that.

I don’t think they will keep you from playing the HD Edition if you already own it.  It will likely still be there in your library.  But they can certainly disappear it from the store, take down the Steam Workshop, and remove all evidence of the expansions that have appeared since they last cared about the game.

Furthermore, it Microsoft being tone deaf and heavy handed isn’t exactly out of character for them as a company.

I hope that they will find a way to embrace the current and thriving Age of Empires II community that exists on Steam.  Age of Empires II – Definitive Edition is due out this fall according to the press releases, so I imagine that we will see how they plan to play this soon enough.

Keepstar Down in P3EN-E

In the wee hours of the morning… 1:30am here on the Pacific coast, 4:30am on the east coast… the final timer for the Keepstar in P3EN-E in the Vale of the Silent ended.  An Imperium fleet had been gathered for that moment and proceeded to destroy the structure.

Keepstar kill mail

I choose to keep on sleeping rather than spend a couple of hours forming up with a fleet, traveling, shooting, then schlepping back home, a choice many of the people who engaged in last week’s double Keepstar kill appear to have taken as well.  There were 859 pilots on the kill this time around, down from over 1,500 on each kill last week.  I guess one Keepstar isn’t worth missing a few hours sleep in the middle of the night.

The kill mail shows the usual giant blob of titans, supers, and smaller capital ships, though this time around it looks like the supers did the bulk of the damage with fighters and then everybody else was jumped in to get on the kill.

The grinding of PanFam space continues.  There are more structures left to kill, including a Keepstar in SH1-6P, where the ihub is already under assault.

The Great New Eden Shuttle Abandonment Festival

Otherwise known as the Federation Grand Prix.

See, I’m not making this up

In order to celebrate Federation Day in the Gallente Federation this event has been staged that celebrates neither democracy nor the Gallente Federation so far as I can tell.

It is, yet again, based in The Agency interface, home of nearly all PvE and like events (save for Abyssal pockets… so good PvE isn’t in The Agency I guess), which is probably why I didn’t notice that it was actually a thing until I saw somebody complaining about it on Reddit.

That complaint actually got me interested in the event.  I bypassed what the write said to look at all the prizes he had earned.  He had quite a range of SKINs and boosters.  Being in Reavers, I clearly love SKINs and boosters, so I wanted to know how I could get my share of them.

The complaint seemed to be that the event was boring.  I’m pretty sure that is true of all events in The Agency, so I wasn’t deterred.  Besides which, he maxed out his even points in one 12 hour sitting, so it could have just been burn out talking.

The event itself is pretty easy, you just fly places.  Again, I fly places all the time.  I could do this.

I logged in an alt to give this a try and opened up The Agency.  It told me to fly to the Luminaire system and warp to the Federation Grand Prix beacon.  Since it would involve flying places after that, and the type of places were unspecified, I decided to use a stealth bomber my alt had to hand.  It had a warp speed rig to speed it up and a covert ops cloak to get me out of any trouble.  So I jumped in and flew off to Luminaire.

There I saw the beacon in the overview and warped to it.

Right there in the overview

The event site is pretty much the generic structure The Agency uses for all such events.  I didn’t even get a good look at it the first couple of times.

You’ve seen this structure before

When I arrived I got a notification that something in The Agency had been updated, so I opened that up and clicked on the event.  That gave me a destination, a beacon in a system 11 jumps away, with a timer to get there.

Fly to the thing!  You had 11 minutes

Well, that seemed doable.  So I opened up the route planner, put the system name in, and followed the path to the destination.

On the way…

So I flew manually from gate to gate to the destination system, then warped to the beacon, which was again in my overview and, upon landing there, saw The Agency update.  I now had 2 points.  Meanwhile The Agency was also telling me to go back to Luminaire to do the whole thing over again.  And I figured I was committed.  I had two points, and you need at least 5 to get a prize, so I headed back.

The prize interval

The next time it gave me a four point journey which.  That was further, but it gave me more time, about a minute a system.   When I completed that I got the first prize box.  That box gave me four SKINs, two boosters, some fireworks, and a couple of collectible items which, for the effort, seemed like a pretty good deal.

While I had to agree with the Reddit post that, as far as interesting activities in game go, this was really shit, I could bear it for a couple more runs for more SKINs.  So off I went.

The next one was another four point journey off to another system.  Only this one didn’t have a beacon when I arrived.  As I later found out, the destination was off one of the stations.  But I while I was trying to figure that out the timer ran out and I found I had gone 18 jumps for nothing.  Back to Lumiaire.

The next one seemed really hard, 25 jumps and only 18 minutes on the clock.  You already need to be going about 5 AUs a second to finish comfortably, so don’t bring a battleship, but this seemed to be stretching things.  But I set off, figuring that they wouldn’t set me a task I couldn’t complete.

Of course, along the way I figured out what was wrong.  I had the route planner set to take me via the safest route.  Had I chosen shortest it would have been just 17 jumps.  Still, I nearly made it… in fact, would have made it with seconds to spare… except  that it was another no beacon destination and I chose the wrong station to warp to.

Back I went.

I did start to notice a pattern as I flew this time.  First, a lot of people seemed to be using shuttles in order to fly the race.  That wasn’t a bad plan, they are cheap and warp at 5 AU a second.  A perfectly viable option.

But EVE Online players are all about efficiency.  Every time I landed at a destination beacon, I noticed that there were often dozens of abandoned shuttles hanging about in space.  Apparently the plan was to acquire a shuttle… and somebody is probably making money in Lumiaire selling shuttles now…, set your death clones in Luminare, warp to the start beacon, then head to the destination.  Once there you leave your shuttle and self destruct.  I’m not sure why not destroy the shuttle too, since they are leaving it behind, but the fact that they are there tells the tale I guess.

One page of many shuttles

You can tell they are empty because there is no player name, just the ship type repeated.  You could jump in them and fly off with them if you wanted.  I’m not sure why you’d want them, but you could.

Unsurprisingly, systems with race destinations are currently ranking high on the DOTLAN most violent systems charts for high sec and low.

Anyway, I got another destination in Luminaire that sent me across part of Syndicate, which was both a six point mission and made me feel good about having my stealth bomber.  I got there successfully and back safely.  Another shorter run and I had my 15 points.  I docked up to claim my prize and all I got was cerebral accelerators.

Not that those are bad.  I’ll use them.  But I was in this for the SKINs.  And after the first box being so generous, I felt a bit let down.  Still, I was a bit invested now, and it was only another 15 points to the next prize box.  I figured I could hack it.

I got a 2 point run that I dispatched quickly enough.  Then I drew a 4 point run that ended in low sec.  While in the past runs had gone through low sec… even null sec… they always ended in a high sec system.  I figured the likelihood of the beacon being camped was high.  After all, the pile of abandoned shuttles would be a dead give away.  I’d be careful, but off I went.

Purifier on another run

When I entered the destination system I could see the beacon on the overview.  I just needed to warp in and then get away.  I figured I could cloak, warp in at 20km, then turn around and slip away without anybody seeing me.  So warp I did.

And, of course, I landed on a pile of freakin’ abandoned shuttles which both decloaked me and managed to bump me as I aligned out for just long enough for a Condor to point me.  I shot back, but torps don’t apply well to frigates and was dead long before I got him close to armor.

But at least I figured I had gotten my 4 points.  He could shoot me and send me home.  But he didn’t want to pod me.  He pointed my pod, but then unlocked me.  No need to take the standings hit I guess.  So I boarded one of the shuttles and headed back to Luminaire.  My lust for SKINs had cost me more than just buying them probably would have cost.

I guess there is an interesting/danger aspect to the event, at least when it passes through low sec or null sec.  But for the most part it is a pretty dull event.  Somebody has to do it if I want to buy the SKINs, but it doesn’t need to be me personally flying it.  I just have to wait until near the end of the event when prices are sagging.

Addendum: On returning to Jita I did find that selling the cerebral accelerators more than covered the cost.  Still, this race event doesn’t excite me.