The Other Shoe Drops on Facebook Account Requirement for Oculus

We learned last August that Facebook, owners of Oculus since 2014, was going to start requiring all new Oculus users to login using a Facebook account, with a plan to eliminate legacy Oculus accounts by 2023.

This was viewed with suspicion by many who expected that Facebook (motto: Evil is just a question of money, how evil do you want to be?) was planning to collect and abuse data from these accounts.

Happy FarmVille Memories… which apply to Facebook in general for many

And now we have the confirmation.  This past week Facebook Reality Labs (formerly Oculus and I feel like they should put the word “harsh” in before “reality”) posted a blog update announcing that they would in fact be collecting data from your VR usage in order to present ads and make you a focus of targeted marketing.

This, I am sure, surprised exactly nobody.

Your Facebook data will even be popping ads in the Oculus app for you.

The surprising… or perhaps “galling” or “outrageous” is the right word, I am not sure… part of the blog post was where they announced that they were starting to test injecting ads into select VR games based on whatever skeevy data Facebook has collected on you.

On reflection, “surprising” was clearly not the right word because I found the whole thing absolutely unsurprising once I read about it.  It seemed quite on track for Facebook.

I am sure this is exactly what every gamer is looking for, ads based on their every day life, viewing habits, and purchases, showing up in the escapist pursuits.

I mean, I am perhaps not the best one to going on about immersion, it being a delicate line that I can only cross when I am absolutely not thinking about being immersed, a cotton candy sort of mental state that melts away the moment I realize it has happened, but I can guarantee it is never going to happen if I get real estate ads in my game because I liked a Facebook post my wife put up about her latest listing… because spousal support is about all I can manage on their platform these days.

Of course, I don’t actually own an Oculus VR headset… but if I did, I would be disgusted with it I imagine… or myself.  I am sure I’d find something to be mad at.

Related:

• Ars Technica

Ruled by Discord

This post isn’t about the current state of affairs in the real world, though feel free to steal the title for your own post about the current dystopian nightmare we’re living in currently.

No, this is a follow up to a poll I ran… a few months back at this point.

I did a post about The State of Voice in 2020 back in early March about voice software used during gaming, a follow up on a couple of past posts on this topic, which concluded with the traditional poll to get a sense of which voice software people were favoring these days.

The results were a lopsided victory for Discord.

When asked to specify their primary voice software package, there was no contest.

147 Responses to “What is your primary voice application?”

The Other responses were “Google Hangouts” and “Whatever someone else says we should use.”

Compare that to the results of the poll I conducted in 2012:

1. Ventrilo – 73 / 25%
2. TeamSpeak – 70 / 24%
3. Mumble – 57 / 19%
4. Skype – 35 / 12%
5. I never use voice – 29 / 10%
6. Game Integrated – 23 / 8%
7. Console Voice System (Xbox 360/PS3) – 4 / 1%
8. Other – 3 / 1%
   • I don’t regularly use voice at this time – 1
   • raidcall – 1
   • Steam – 1

That pre-dates Discord, which only kicked off in 2015, but it does show something of a shift.

Of course, neither poll is scientific and only represent the demographic of “people who read this blog and whose ad block software even allows the poll to be visible,” so isn’t provably reflective of the actual distribution of voice software usage out in the wild.

It is also impacted by, and reflective of, the downturn in traffic my blog has seen since that 2012 poll was taken, which happened around the my peak of popularity, such that it was.  So only 147 people responded in 2020, while 2012 saw exactly (!) twice as many responses, clocking in with 294.

And yet, the lopsided win for Discord still says something.  Discord is easy, cheap, and works.  When the instance group got back together for WoW Classic we went straight to Discord as our platform of choice.

Yes, that was, in part, because I already had an account.  But we all had Skype accounts as well, that being our preferred voice software back in the day, and Google Hangouts were a possibility as well, being the choice of the one-time Friday Night Strategy Game group.

Discord was just easy, has persistent group chat as well as voice, and has mobile clients as well.  I pay for a monthly channel boost subscription, which is supposed to get us better voice quality among other things, but we didn’t have any problem before I did that.

A Discord server basically gives us so many options over the alternatives that it just seemed like the obvious choice.

The second poll question asked which voice software options people used regularly.  It was a multiple select poll, so you could click on as many as you felt applied.  The results for that were… odd.

Responses to “What voice apps do you use regularly?”

The Other responses were, with one vote each:

• meet.jit.si
• Google Hangouts
• MS Teams
• Microsoft Teams
• Facebook Messenger
• Nothing regularly but not nothing ever

Discord was still on top, but did not get as many votes as it did in the first poll.

There are a few possible explanations for this.  Some people may have only votes on the first poll.  Some may have felt that the second poll implied “aside from your primary” chosen in the first.  And some people may have only voted in the second poll, feeling that they did not have a primary.  Some combo of those, plus whatever else, may be in play here.

And it does show, again, a move away from what were the traditional voice hosting platforms back in the day, Ventrilo and TeamSpeak, at least in the “reads this blog and votes on polls” demographic.

1. Ventrilo – 207 / 27%
2. TeamSpeak – 177 / 23%
3. Game Integrated – 115 / 15%
4. Mumble – 108 / 14%
5. Skype – 87 / 12%
6. Console Voice System (Xbox 360/PS3) – 40 / 5%
7. I still never use voice – 14 / 2%
8. Other – 8 / 1%
   • roger wilco 3
   • Google+ 1
   • ooVoo 1
   • Tin cans and string 1
   • Steam Integrated, Cellphone, Smoke signals 1
   • But I will start to use voice for the first time when SOEmote starts. 1

I think I can spot the Bhagpuss answers in the “other” field on a couple of these.

So Discord “wins” I suppose.  I am still not sure about their business model.  They gave up the idea of competing with Steam as a game selling platform a while back.  But the proliferation of Discord servers… is there any sizable company or group that doesn’t have at least a few dedicated to it… seems to indicate that they have the attention of a lot of people.

Anyway, that is my little report on the state of voice in gaming right now.  We’ll see if I get back to it in another five years or so and who will be dominant at that point.

Summer Movie League – Shaft Shafted but The Dead Don’t Die

Week two of our Summer Fantasy Movie League is in the books and there were some big misses.

First up there was Men in Black International which was expected to land close to the $40 million mark.  Lukewarm reviews, other viewing options, and probably the previous two movies, conspired to chop that down to $30 million over the weekend.  If you anchored on this, you were not having a good weekend.

But your weekend wasn’t as bad as anybody who bet on Shaft.  The sequel to the year 2000 film of the same name was expected to coming in around $23 million, but instead landed just shy of $9 million for the weekend.  Even that $2 million Worst Performer bonus can’t fix that bad landing.

Late Night was on a more even keel.  Expected to make about $5 million in its limited engagement, it brought in $5.2 million.  Right on the mark for somebody.

And finally there was The Dead Don’t Die, which seemed to me to be the prime contender for best performer.  It was also the one film I went and saw this past weekend.  Cracking $2 million would have made it a solid pick at the price, so when it ended up hauling in $2.5 million it was difficult to see anything else taking away its best performer bonus.  John Wick 3 and Booksmart were the next closest two, and they were both a ways from making the cut.

With all of that in place, the scores for the week ended up looking like this:

1. SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights – $80,306,365
2. Wilhelm’s Qeynosian Kinetoscope – $80,306,365
3. Too Orangey For Crows – $76,868,694
4. Joanie’s Joint – $72,344,312
5. Goat Water Picture Palace – $70,251,452
6. Cyanbane’s Neuticles Viewing Party – $68,493,131
7. Ben’s X-Wing Exp(r)ess – $57,592,078
8. Miniature Giant Space Hamsterplex – $54,331,713
9. grannanj’s Cineplex – $52,655,472
10. Po Huit’s Sweet Movie Suite – $49,774,361

The perfect pick was 2x Secret Life of Pets 2, 1x Rocketman, and 5x The Dead Don’t Die.  Nobody went with that, though two of us were close.

SynCaine and I tied (he got first place via the tie breaker) on 2x Secret Life of Pets 2, 1x Godzilla, and 5x The Dead Don’t Die.  Given the pricing, Godzilla just seemed like the right pick last week.  Bhagpuss took third on 2x Secret Life of Pets 2, 1x Rocketman, 1x Ma, 3x The Dead Don’t Die, and 1x Detective Pikachu.  Joanie scored a fourth place finish going all in on Elton John with 7x Rocketman and 1x John Wick 3.  And Goat got fifth with 2x Secret Life of Pets 2, 2x Rocketman, 3x Booksmart, and 1x blank, making them the only one to take advantage to the lack of empty screen penalty this week.

At the bottom end of the list were those who bet on a MiBI + Shaft double anchor, except for Po who doubled down on Shaft, but was somewhat redeemed by four screens of The Dead Don’t Die.

All of that leaves the season scoring looking like this:

1. Goat Water Picture Palace – $161,356,780
2. Wilhelm’s Qeynosian Kinetoscope – $159,861,866
3. Too Orangey For Crows – $151,473,600
4. SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights – $150,188,181
5. Joanie’s Joint – $137,658,042
6. Ben’s X-Wing Exp(r)ess – $133,577,881
7. Miniature Giant Space Hamsterplex – $131,561,839
8. Cyanbane’s Neuticles Viewing Party – $131,081,909
9. Po Huit’s Sweet Movie Suite – $126,711,141
10. Vigo Grimborne’s Medieval Screening Complex – $117,754,888

It is a tight race at the top.  But it is also just week two and there are some weeks ahead where you may end up with lineups that add up to more than your total score right now.

For the alternate scoring, the list looks like this:

1. Wilhelm’s Qeynosian Kinetoscope – 17
2. Goat Water Picture Palace – 16
3. SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights – 13
4. Too Orangey For Crows – 12
5. Miniature Giant Space Hamsterplex – 10
6. Joanie’s Joint – 9
7. Ben’s X-Wing Exp(r)ess – 9
8. Vigo Grimborne’s Medieval Screening Complex – 9
9. Po Huit’s Sweet Movie Suite – 7
10. Cyanbane’s Neuticles Viewing Party – 6

The alternate scoring isn’t very useful early on in the season, with lots of ties and wild changes in position, but at about the mid point it starts to shape up.

All of which leads us to week three where the elephant in the room is Toy Story 4.  Add Pixar magic to good pre-screening reviews and parents needing a summer movie to get the kids out of the house and the total looks like it will pass $150 million.  It will dominate so hard that it has, of course, been split into three days, leaving the week three picks as:

1. Toy Story 4 FRI – $519
2. Toy Story 4 SAT – $473
3. Toy Story 4 SUN – $390
4. Child’s Play – $170
5. Secret Life of Pets 2 – $133
6. Aladdin – $128
7. Men in Black International – $124
8. Rocketman – $63
9. Dark Phoenix – $47
10. Anna $46
11. Godzilla – $35
12. Shaft – $34
13. John Wick 3 – $33
14. Late Night – $28
15. Avengers Endgame – $23

There is pretty much Toy Story 4 and then everything else.  There is no winning this week without some Pixar on your side.  It will be in all the theaters.

Still, there are two other new titles, Child’s Play and Anna.

Child’s Play is a remake of the 1988 horror flick of the same name that introduced the horrible Chucky doll to the world.  This title restarts the seven film franchise, with the change being that the new Chucky won’t be a doll possessed by a serial killer, but a robot doll run amok.  Chucky is said to be WiFi and Blue Tooth enabled, so no doubt that will play into things.

The studio has also been playing up the fact that it is opening against Toy Story 4, putting out posters of Chucky with objects implying that he had killed Woody, Buzz, and other members of the regular Toy Story cast.

The long range forecast for Child’s Play sat at $18 million for opening weekend the last I checked, but horror films are often a surprise during the summer, and a franchise like this has some additional draw, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it did better, positioned as a counter play to the obvious favorite.

And then there is Anna.  This is a Luc Besson title, which gives it a bit of a cult following as an opener.  He is responsible for such classics as Nikita, Leon: The Professional, and The Fifth Element. On the other hand, his followers in the states don’t number enough to guarantee success, as we saw with Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets two summers back.

The current long range forecast has the film pegged at about $4.5 million.  It hasn’t been marketed heavily and there hasn’t been much said or written about it, and what has been said makes it sound a lot like Nikita. The IMBd has it tagged with “one woman army.”  Oh, and there are no reviews yet, always a bad sign, but if you go look for reviews you’ll probably see them for the 2013 film of the same name, which got poor reviews, which people might not notice is the right film.

But it does play against the dominant title of the week, it has Helen Mirren in it (though she is almost unrecognizable in her role), and the Nikita formula worked for Luc Besson before, spawning an American remake and at least one TV series, though the sexy female assassin card has been played a lot since, most recently in Red Sparrow and Killing Eve I suppose.  Maybe it breaks out by being a new alternative this week, but it seems more likely to falter.

Which brings us to the big question of the week, which day of Toy Story 4 to go with?   It is summer, so who knows.  Friday will get the preview numbers rolled in, Saturday will no doubt be big on its own, and then there is always Sunday.  So if you want a full lineup of screens you can have Friday, Saturday, or Saturday and Sunday, all of which will leave you enough room in your budget for filler.

But you have to ask yourself, if there is no penalty for blank screens, do you just go with Friday and Saturday and leave the rest of the lineup empty?  If Toy Story 4 exceeds, that might be the way to go.

Or maybe you just take Friday, 1x Child’s Play, and 6x Anna and hope she breaks out and gets the best performer this week.

Make your picks soon.  The league locks late Thursday night Pacific time.

Being Boosted in Norrath

I wanted to mention my experiences with the recent free level 100 boost that Daybreak was offering a while back.  The time has passed to get the boost… you had until June 7th, which was nearly two weeks ago at this point… but I went and did it back when the time was ripe.  And, in spending some time with the game I thought I would write about it.

Here we go again…

As I mentioned, I have been down the free level boost thing before and have found it… dissatisfying.  But as I find getting all the way from level 1 to the epic triple digit level heights where these well-past-a-decade old games now reside, boosting seems to be the only way I am going to see any recently created content.  You know, the “good” stuff.

The problem with boosted characters is really just context.  When you level a character up you learn the ins and outs.  You can tell when you’re doing well or when you’re doing poorly and when your equipment is really on point or letting you down.  You know how long a fight at level ought to be, what ought to be difficult and what should be a push over.

With a booster character you lack all of that.  You’re given the levels, all the skills and spells, a bag of nice equipment, and maybe a hint or two as to where to go, but then you’re on your own.

Previous times I have made characters in classes I already knew, in hopes that whatever insight might still be lingering in the back of my brain might help, or have boosted up characters I’ve already had, when that was an option.

This time around you had to make a new character and, knowing my lack of success with boosted characters in the past, I decided to try a new class.  I wasn’t going to go crazy and make a mage or anything, but I had never run much with a Shadow Knight, so I made one named Werner.

I was surprised I could get that simple of a name.  Anyway, I created him and logged in at let the game start handing me things.  Being EverQuest II, it couldn’t do this quietly or succinctly, it had to announce a whole list of skills or spells or whatever, give me a box of goodies, tell me where to go, and try to sell me the latest expansion all at once while only giving me a singl 12 slot hot bar, already full.

Welcome, let me first overwhelm you…

I opened the box to see what it had.  I was already wearing the gear, so at least I didn’t have to do that.  The box did have a fabled gear item, but I couldn’t equip that because I wasn’t a subscriber.

I then looked at the instructions as to what to do.

What to when your in Norrath

The flying bit was easy.  I’ll take any mount they hand out, but a good looking one… or at least a non-gnomish one… is preferred.

Flying Away…

I still find it awkward that when you go to fly your angle of attack is always set by your camera angle, which means that you are trying to fly while pitched nose down into the ground because the camera… at least my camera… is always up behind me looking down so I can see things.  Of course, it is pretty much the same thing in WoW as well, but I find it endlessly annoying.

I did not, however, see a potion that would send me to Velious or the Tranquil Sea.  At least not one labeled as such.  There was one for Thalumbra however, and seeing that I didn’t have many other choices, I went with that one.

Potion to somewhere in my bags…

That seemed to work.  At least it got me to an NPC who wanted to send me on some sort of journey.  Of course, that is pretty much all of them, isn’t it?  This one wanted to send me to Neriak to track somebody down, so I obligingly clicked on his teleporting contraption and went on my way.

Neriak, however, was an annoying place.

I mean, it is annoying on a good day, and not just because of the dark elf attitude.  But this was especially annoying.  Something to do with the quest or being in Neriak or whatever seemed to require you to have subscribed to All Access.

All Access something something…

Basically, the whole time I was in Neriak I had this window for All Access up on my screen.  Dismissing it only saw it pop right back up.  Trying to do something in the foreground seemed to offend it and it would jump on top of whatever window or dialog I had going.  It was painful enough that I considered just giving up the whole venture, but the diversion into Neriak ended up being fairly short and I was soon off for other locations… locations that did not demand All Access as part of the plan.

That’s who I am man

It was there I actually had to go up against hostile mobs.  I opened up three hot bars… though the game kept paring me down to one if I logged out and then back in… and looked at my skills to see what I, as a Death Knight… ermmm… Shadow Knight might do.

As it turned out, I think the sneeze emote would have been sufficient.

Boom! Head Shot!

As it turned out the gear they provided was very good.  I wielded god-like power and the ability to one-shot any normal creature and two-shot any named in the vicinity.  I didn’t need to worry about which skill to use, anything with a red background seemed fine.  Hell, auto-attack seemed fine.  I was become death.

Of course, while that is the extreme end from my past experience, where the gear was flimsy enough that every fight was a struggle and dying a repeated adventure, it still wasn’t all that fun.  As somebody once opined, players don’t want the game to be hard, just hard enough that they feel like they are accomplishing something.

Still, it wasn’t all that bad.  I spent a few hours following the chain and killing stuff with a hard look.  But I never got anyplace really interesting.  Nothing grabbed me and got me invested.  In the long ago conflict between WoW and EQII, getting a player invested wasn’t one of the latter’s more glaring flaws.  Now however, WoW seemed to be able to hold me for at least a few month, invested in their story, while EQII… just doesn’t.

Of course, my main character in WoW are all ones I’ve leveled up myself over the years, not ones I have boosted.  So maybe it is more than context.

Anyway, I let things fall by the wayside after a few days and had stopped before the June 7th deadline.  Never say never and all that, but EQII just seems to have lost its edge with me.

Two Years of Minecraft

Two years in and my general reflections on Minecraft haven’t really changed.  As I wrote last year, as a game it does scratch the exploration, building, and persistence itches, yet is often falls flat on the purpose front.

And so I do not spend much time building castles or villas or other grand living spaces, as once built there isn’t much you can do with them.  Instead I thrive on overland infrastructure, blazing trails, building roads, bridges, and rail lines, and making practical rest stop and production areas along the way.

This approach has led me to the inevitable laying of track along the north mansion roadway that I spent several months building.  Happened with the last road I built as well.

A new rail stop along the way

A fast horse is faster than a minecart for travel, and can go where you want, but you don’t need to manage a minecart.  A minecart doesn’t wander off… mostly… doesn’t need a corral, and won’t die in the middle of nowhere leaving you to walk home.  You just make another minecart or keep it in your inventory and when it is time to travel you put it on the rails and off you go.

So I am laying tracks.  Tracks require resources… iron mostly, of which I am perennially short.  But among the improvements I have done along the line at every rest stop is dig a mine and an auto furnace.  That can be slow going, but at many of the stops I piled up an excess of iron because I was mostly interesting in getting cobblestone to lay down the road.  So I have some resources to draw on… and Aaron gave me a few stacks or iron blocks, which got me quite a way down the line.

It does keep me logging in, which is the ultimate test.  As I have noted in the past, what I say I enjoy doesn’t always line up with what I will actually do, so I have to side with my actions as opposed to my intentions.  If I keep building road and rail projects, that must be what I like!

Not that the last year hasn’t delivered new things.  There were three updates to Minecraft which delivered  polar bears, llamas, and parrots… among other things.  They were:

• The Frostburn Update
• The Exploration Update
• World of Color Update

All of which added things to the game that extended my play time with it.  Not bad.

So another Father’s Day has passes and I am still playing… and on the same world.  That means that my stats for that world are pretty much my overall stats for the game.  As I did last year, I’ll put up a few stats (after the cut) just to mark where I stand.

General Items

• Games Quit – 1,205
• Items Dropped – 914
• Chests opened – 16,708
• Trapped chests triggered – 233
• Hoppers searched – 1,237
• Droppers searched – 4
• Records played – 2
• Ender chests opened – 124
• Items enchanted – 71

Travel Related

• Walked – 3,365.36km
• Sprinted – 37.31km
• Crouched – 50.31km (most of it backwards)
• Swum – 23.37km
• Fallen – 12.59km
• Climbed – 37.59km
• Flown – 16.27km
• Dove – 12.71km
• Minecart – 974.71km
• Boat – 237.07km
• Pig – 335.71m
• Horse – 675.6km
• Elytra – 0mm
• Jumped – 150,928 times
• Times slept in a bed – 1,990

Dealing with MOBs

• MOB Kills – 34,693
• Damage Dealt – 94,452
• Damage Taken – 8,171
• Players Killed – 0
• Number of Deaths – 39
• Animals Bred – 1,220
• Zombies killed – 1,908 (killed me 4 times)
• Skeletons killed – 1,182 (killed me 2 times)
• Spiders killed – 735
• Creepers killed – 877
• Zombie Pigmen killed – 278 (killed me 4 times)
• Magma Cubes killed – 239
• Blazes killed – 185
• Cows killed – 162
• Slimes killed – 203
• Sheep killed – 160
• Silverfish killed – 165 (killed me 2 times, both when AFK)
• Chickens killed – 123
• Ghasts killed – 118 (killed me 1 time)
• Cave Spiders killed – 88
• Endermen killed – 76 (killed me 1 time)
• Husks killed – 73
• Witches killed – 87 (killed me 3 times)
• Pigs killed – 53
• Zombie villagers killed – 26
• Rabbits killed – 23
• Squids killed – 18
• Vindicators killed – 11
• Bats killed – 7
• Villagers killed – 4
• Vexes killed – 4
• Evokers killed – 2
• Ocelots killed – 2
• Wolves killed – 3
• Guardians killed – 1
• Strays – 1
• Parrots killed – 1

Some Crafting

• Most Crafted item – Stick (needed for rails, torches, fences, tools, and more)
• Most used item – Pick
• Most depleted item – Pick
• Most dropped item – Grass Seeds
• Most mined item – Stone
• Most picked up item – Potatoes
• Most crafted block – Stone Brick

Another year looms.  We’ll see if I finish my current rail line before the next one turns.

Warcraft – Watching the Movie

Worst. Cinematic. Ever.

-My Daughter, on leaving the theater

We went to go see the Warcraft movie last weekend.

Really, no need to reserve, plenty of seats available

Looking at the movie times I could see that the poor reviews the movie was getting was starting to influence the theater operators.  The movie was showing in almost every single first-run theater in Silicon Valley, the exceptions being a couple venues that tend towards art house sorts of releases.

But the show times were… sparse.  It seemed that the big multi-screen theaters were shuffling their options and cutting back on Warcraft showings.  The big AMC theater near us only had three showings on Saturday for the standard version of the movie.  There were four showings for the 3D version and five for the 3D IMax version, both of which come with a surcharge that boosts the box office take.

Any real summer season blockbuster would have had standard version showings starting every hour and as many 3D running…. which is what Finding Dory has running this weekend.  This weekend Warcraft has two showings each for standard and 3D, but still five for IMax.  I guess if you want to see if, they want to get the most money they can out of you.

And so the movie was a bit of a damp squib on its opening weekend, bringing in $24 million.

That sounds like a lot of money, but lets put this in perspective with other recent opening weekends.

• Captain America: Civil War – $179 million
• Finding Dory – $136 million
• The Jungle Book – $103 million
• X-Men Apocalypse – $65.7 million
• The Conjuring 2 – $40.4 million (opened against Warcraft)
• The Angry Birds Movie – $38.1 million
• TMNT: Out of the Shadows – $35.3 million
• Central Intelligence – $35.5 million (opened against Finding Dory)
• Alice Through the Looking Glass – $26.8 million (opened against X-Men)
• Warcraft – $24.1 million
• Now You See Me 2 – $22.3 million (opened against Warcraft)
• Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising – $21.7 million (opened against Angry Birds)

Warcraft isn’t setting any records, and is down more than 70% this weekend, looking to bring in a meager $6.5 million.  It won’t catch The Angry Birds Movie.  There is a metaphor in that I am sure.  So not a big success.

But look how well it did in China!

-Every over-invested fan trying to distract from the US Box office

You tell me what percentage of the Chinese theater revenues the studio gets to repatriate and we’ll talk about that.  A dollar earned in China isn’t the same as a dollar earned in the US.  The China success is an interesting side story, but not much else.

But how was the actual movie?

We went with a mixed group, myself, my wife, my mother, my daughters, and her boyfriend. (Lord help me.)  Of the five of us (out of a total of 10 in the theater, so it wasn’t going to well already), only my wife had never played the game, so she was our disinterested outsider.  The rest of us were in what I would consider the sweet spot target audience, we had all played the game, had a generally positive view of it, and were not immersed enough in the lore to nit pick anything that might come up.

The Good

The film looked good.  Stormwind looked really good.  The brief glimpse we got of Ironforge looked great.  Lorthar’s griffon mount looked very good.  Orcs looked good.  Magic effects looked good.  Even the fel taint looked good.  Visually, I approve.  This is the main argument for seeing it on the big screen.

Lothar’s griffon fought like a badass.  That was awesome.

That murloc we see in a stream early on.  He was the best.

Also, some amusing asides.

Ok. It makes sense now. #Warcraft #WarcraftMovie http://pic.twitter.com/39gxxmw94X

— Rob to the max™ (@robcopeland) June 13, 2016

The Bad

Don’t see the movie in 3D.  The action includes a lot of camera shake and jumping around that will make you regret your 3D choice, as it just blurs things and will likely give you a bit of motion sickness.

The story they chose to tell is so distant from the current game as to be confusing.  I had one friend comment later about the portal not being in the Blasted Lands, and I had to point out that the portal in the movie was a DIFFERENT portal… we’re up to three portals now I think.  The one in the movie is the one from the Cavern’s of Time mission The Black Morass, which is in the Swamp of Sorrows if I recall right.  They had done that run before, but had forgotten.

The passage of time is not handled well in the film.  I could not tell you if the events in the film took place over a week, a month, or a year.  Travel takes exactly as long as the plot requires it in order to setup the next set piece, and not one second longer.

For a movie that is set in the what is now the distant back story for the current game, it made a lot of jumps and assumptions.  Even the scene with the portal opening for the orcs is pretty much, “Our world is screwed, let’s get another one by burning these unexplained blue people to power a portal.”  I came out of there with more questions than answers.

The story, despite jumping about, still seems to plods along in between the action so I felt every minute of the two hour journey.

Character motivation is pretty scant at times.  Still not sure why Medivh did what he did.

While the story correctly leaves the other races out of the events… it being Orcs and Humans like the box said… the brief glimpses of elves and dwarves were not pretty.  Do not want.

What the hell was Lothar’s griffon doing while he was unconscious?  Did he just give up and go have drinks with the orcs?  He was hanging around, ready to fly him home afterwards.  I expected the orcs to have eaten him at a minimum.

They just had to use the fucking Wilhelm scream.

Summary

Not a good movie.  It deserved the reviews it got.  The viewer ratings are just fan boy backlash.

It isn’t even bad enough to have a hope of being “so bad it’s good” after a while.  It was bland.

There were no real stand-out performances.  Nobody was horrible, but I didn’t come away with a new appreciation for any of the actors.  The plot was muddled and did not do anybody any favors.  Yes, the plots of video games are convoluted to start with, but this just made things worse, not better.  I feel no compulsion to watch it again.

They should have cut this down to a 20 minute cinematic for people to watch before the REAL movie, which should start somewhere between Warcraft III and World of Warcraft, if not later.

Seriously, Warcraft III was considered a huge success because it moved 4.5 million copies back in 2002.  WoW has that many people playing it right now, and has sold many, many more copies, falling only behind Minecraft for best selling PC game ever.  The prime target audience cares about Azeroth in the WoW timeline.

This was highlighted by questions my wife asked about how this related to WoW, wherein I had explain that the green orc baby and the teen mage have to grow into middle and old age respectively before we get to the actual game we started playing in 2004.

The whole enterprise covered production costs, but that doesn’t include marketing and other expenses, as anybody who has every had a “percentage of net profits” deal in such a venture will tell you.  I would guess that any result under half a billion in gross receipts guarantees no sequel, and it would have to somehow climb beyond three quarters of a billion to have a good chance of one.

So if you are a fan, go see it in the theater, if only to take in the scenery.