Unfinished Business in Azeroth

It isn’t as though I am avoiding Outland, I am just having a bit of trouble letting go of Azeroth because there are still things to be done there.

Out with friends

I mentioned last week that I had run my druid up from level 36 to 58 since the pre-patch hit, which enabled him to head on through the Dark Portal.  And through he went.  But after doing the first few quests and getting some gear upgrades, he was back in Azeroth again.

He was back in part because I wanted to see how the gear upgrades would fare in places like the Eastern Plaguelands.  But mostly he was back because I needed thorium.

I needed thorium because my druid had picked up mining and herbalism as trade skills and, while I managed to get the latter up to 300 long before I hit level 58, mining was another story.  You cannot mine fel iron in Outland until your mining is up to 300 and his was still 280.

So there was mining to be done and thorium was where the skill ups were to be had and that was all back in Azeroth.

A rich thorium find

I do sort of wonder why there are Azerothian herbs in Outland… you find them all over Hellfire Peninsula… but no thorium.  Hellfire and the Blasted Lands look similar enough, at least at a glance, so tossing a little thorium into the former seems like it would fit the pattern.  But no.  Or at least I’ve never seen any thorium.

I also needed thorium for Wilhelm.  His trade skill is engineering and to make that last run up from about 285 to 300 he needed a bucket or two of thorium bars.

And then there was Viniki, who took up blacksmithing.  He too needed thorium… about 400 bars of it to go from 270 to 300, since the path forward for him needed about a dozen bars per skill up if he followed the least resource intensive way of leveling up.

That is a lot of thorium, and all the more so when a small thorium vein might cough up 3 ore if you’re lucky, while a large vein could be good for as many as 6.

This was all complicated by the fact that everybody and their dog has been out hustling for thorium nodes because they also need the skill ups or because they want to make some gold.  That hot market I mentioned last Friday?  It is still going strong with a huge demand for mithril and thorium.

If I didn’t desperately need the thorium for trade skills I might be making even more gold.  Still, I picked up enough mithril along the way to have something for market.

And I was not the only one in the group our working on that sort of thing.  Fergorin decided to go with jewel crafting as a profession, a new one that came in with Burning Crusade, so he too needed to mine himself up into and through thorium.

Ula was also out working on enchanting, which she took up in addition to being our tailor, in order to get herself up to 300.  Viniki managed to get far enough up in blacksmithing in order to craft the arcanite rod, which covers the last tier of enchanting.  Fortunately Skronk was able to transmute arcane crystals into arcanite bars to make that. (The transmute also required thorium, so add that to the list.)

I did managed to get Alioto up to 300 mining (along with hitting level 60) and Wilhelm up to 300 engineering, but Viniki is still stuck at 280 blacksmithing, so there is some work to be done there.

In addition to all of that, Potshot (who plays Skronk and Fergorin, keeping the names straight is a chore all around I guess) also took to heart a comment about Hellfire Ramparts having encounters that suited a shaman.  So he rolled up a Draenei shaman and started working him up through the levels this past weekend as well.  Alioto took some time out to shepherd him trough the Deadmines, which was fun.

Blowing the door in the Deadmines

It is a long climb from character creation to Outland, but it isn’t impossible.  I managed to get most of the way there with Alioto.  Still, we might not have a shaman healer in the group for a while still.

Then there is the epic mount question for Wilhelm, Fergorin, and Beanpole.  We still have things to take care of on the Azeroth side of the Dark Portal.

The Steam Summer Sale 2021 Arrives

It is that time of the year… or one of those times of the year… when Steam has a bigger than usual sale.  Welcome to the Steam Summer Sale 2021.

Here we go again!

In addition to most everything on my wishlist or in my library being discounted… hey, Valheim is even 10% off… Valve has a little Forge Your Fate feature for the sale that is supposed to help guide you towards titles you might appreciate.  I will have to see if it has any influence.  So far it has just guided me to pages that suggest things already on my wishlist.  Maybe I am doing it wrong.

Anyway, the sale is here.  At this point I post about the sale more out of habit than actual enthusiasm.  Steam has long since cured me of being excited about video game discounts, instead making them something I expect.  But at least it got me to log into Steam I suppose… boy, do I have a lot of updates queued.  Maybe I will see something new and interesting.

Sergeant Bly Leaves Us at the Altar

We go together for a Father’s Day run at Zul’Farrak, though we were time constrained with a hard stop time, so when we got online we made a plan as to what we would do in the instance.

ZF is an odd instance in that you have path choices and can bypass some of the bosses.

We met up in Gadgetzan and got lined up.

The stable master there has the same staff as Ula

Our lineup for the run was:

• Moronae – level 49 night elf druid
• Viniki – level 49 gnome warrior
• Skronk – level 48 dwarf priest
• Ula – level 48 gnome mage

We grouped up and rode on out to the instance where we got ourselves buffed up and ready to go.

Inside the instance

Since we last met up, Moronae had made the run to Feralas and finished up the Screecher Spirits quest, so our first goal was to get him the two tablets needed for the follow on quest.  That meant turning right at the fountain to take that path to Theka the Martyr who holds the first of the two tablets.

While there is some mandatory trash to clear all the way to the fountain, once you get past that you can bypass quite a bit of the mobs.  There is a little set of huts through the first doorway in the wall past the fountain that we have cleared on past runs, but this time we just walked on by.  There were three walkers in the corridor to Theka, but after that there is just him and the scarabs.

Theka and his friends

Theka isn’t particularly difficult, you just have to make sure you don’t do any AOE or the nearby scarabs will join in, so we had the first tablet in no time.

After that we bypassed Antu’sul and Witch Doctor Zum’rah, with all his zombie fun, heading straight for the stairway.

Those stairs again

Finishing the stairs event was our second goal for the run.  We learned last time that we really ought to clear out everything in the area, lest they become complications for us later.  Having a few extra elites pile on us is likely what made us wipe.

Once that was done it was up to the top of the stairs to get Bly and his companions out of their cages.

Bly and friends uncaged

From there we followed pretty much the same plan as last time.  Bly and his crew are pretty strong and the non-elites don’t really do much to them, so we focused on the elites coming up the steps, pausing to drink or bandage at need. That went well and we cleared the lot and started down to the bottom again.

All done on the steps

Down at the bottom we were able to dispatch the two named trolls and their non-elite helpers without much problem, thanks to Bly and his companions.

And then we got distracted for a bit.

Both Moronae and I announced that we had gotten Nekrum’s medallion, which updated a quest we had.  Neither Ula nor Skronk got the medallion.  As it turned out, they did not have the quest.

Only two of us had the quest

So there was some discussion as to where the quest came from, was it shareable, and then some research online as to where to get it.  And while that was going on Sergeant Bly and his companions all went into a crouch and started the animation that one associates with a player using their hearthstone to recall.  And then they disappeared.

They’re gone now

Which left us with the event incomplete.

We still had to kill Bly in order to get the Divino-matic Rod for the other quest… which we all had… and, I believe, to unlock the gates to the final boss.  But the quest remained unfinished and the gates remained firmly locked.

A gnome should be able to get under that!

Had we done this right and killed Bly, we could have closed out Zul’Farrak and been ready to move on.  The final boss, to my recollection, is pretty quick, so we had the time.  But now we will have a return trip.

We then went up the side path to the area around Gahz’rilla and grabbed the mob that dropped the other tablet that Moronae needed.  Then, seeing we had some time left and that Moronae was very close to level 50, we cleared out the area around the pool, getting him his level.

Then, since we were there, we summoned Gahz’rilla again just to kill him again.

You rang?

After that we mounted up and rode on out of the instance… successfully this time… and headed back to Gadgetzan.  Moronae and I both had the Nekrum’s Medallion quest to turn in while Skronk and Ula had to go figure out what they needed to do to pick it up.

In the course of things Viniki was also very close to level 50, so I ground out some mobs until he leveled up as well.

So we will be back for at least one more run at ZF.  We’ll see if we can get it right this time.

Wartime MER Finally Sees Delve Eclipsed

It is time for another EVE Online Monthly Economic Report, as CCP released the May edition last week.

Going with my desire to give these posts a theme I am happy enough to have had one served up to me, which is the war in the north.  Back in mid-May the Imperium packed up their supercaps and titans and what not and took it on the road, ending up in a staging system in Pure Blind.

With that the word went out that the protective defense umbrella was gone and that anybody who undocked in Delve to rat or mine was doing so at their own risk.  Of course, despite this having shown up in every coalition channel I frequent, people missed it or ignored it and the slaughter in Delve has reflected that.  Lots of Rorquals down.  So The first chart up will be about destruction.

April 2019 – Mining Value by Region Bar Graph

The charts either show the values clearly, but not well sorted, or sorted by values, but the values are not always clear.  But in grabbing the values from the raw data, the top five regions for destruction were:

1. The Forge – 3 Trillion ISK
2. Delve – 2 Trillion ISK
3. Detorid – 1.7 Trillion ISK
4. The Citadel – 1.6 Trillion ISK
5. Tenerifis – 1.5 Trillion ISK

The Forge is, of course, the home of Jita a suicide ganking.  It is always at the top of the list.  Then there is Delve, where those not paying attention have paid the price.  Detroid and Tenerifis are locations where war has been running in the south, while The Citadel is another prime suicide gank location.

Tribute, where we are bringing war, was down in 20th position with just 718 billion ISK in destruction for May.  Of course, I expect that to be up for the June report, since we didn’t start killing Keepstars until then.

Compare that top five with the April numbers.

• Detorid – 2.3 Trillion ISK (war)
• The Forge – 2.2 Trillion ISK (ganks)
• Delve – 1.5 Trillion ISK (business as usual I guess)
• The Citadel – 1.3 Trillion ISK (ganks)
• Black Rise – 1.2 Trillion ISK (no idea, I thought low sec was dead)

Delve was up half a trillion ISK in May, and that was only half a month without the usual defense coverage, so it could be up further in June.  Jita ganking was up quite a bit as well.  I wonder if that has to do with war related shipping.

As for economic activity, Delve remained the top region for mining in May by a long shot.

May 2019 – Mining Value by Region Bar Graph

Again, the Delve defenses were down for less than half of the month, but still Delve pulled in 4.9 trillion ISK in value, while the next most active region, Esoteria, home of TEST, had 2.7 trillion ISK.

But that was a huge drop when compared to April, where Delve mining was valued at 9.8 trillion ISK and Querious, where the Imperium goes moon mining once a month, clocked in at 2.7 trillion ISK.  Esoteria was in third place with 2.4 trillion ISK.

Since mining value is based on the price of minerals, we have to see if that changed, which gives us another chart.

May 2019 – Economic Indices

Mineral values stayed flat, so the changes between April in May appear to be largely due to the volumes mined.  Delve mining was down quite a bit, no doubt to people deploying and those who didn’t getting blown up more often or having their excavator drones stolen, the latter being a tactic I read about recently.

But the real change comes with NPC bounties.

May 2019 – NPC Bounties by Region Bar Graph

For the first time since I started looking at the MER, Delve is not the top region when it comes to bounties.  Branch was in first place for May.

1. Branch – 5.6 Trillion ISK
2. Delve – 5.1 Trillion ISK
3. Detorid – 4.1 Trillion ISK
4. Insmother – 3.4 Trillion ISK
5. Esoteria – 3.2 Trillion ISK

Branch is home to a few alliances that are part of Dead Coalition, formerly GotG.

Branch is actually down over a trillion ISK when compared to April, but Delve was down almost 3 trillion ISK in bounties over the previous month.  With that, and war coming to various regions in May, overall bounties were down significantly on the sinks and faucets chart.

May 2019 – Top Sinks and Faucets over time

That puts the bounties down to about a war time low in 2017, though not quite down to the Casino War level when the Imperium was homeless and then busy taking over Delve.

Total bounties across all regions were only down 2 trillion when compared to April, but May started with a pre-war peak before the line began trending down.

All of which sets things up for the June report, which will include a full month of war, destruction of ihubs and structures in Tribute, and all that goes with it.  I expect the ratting and mining numbers will be down even more so with that.  But not destruction.  Destruction should go up.

As usual, all of the charts and data are available in the dev blog for the May 2019 MER.

The Return of the Mystery Code

The Mystery Code is back.

Yes, that Mystery Code Kronk

Being away for a week… literally at sea for several days with only some extremely slow satellite base WiFi which would barely load the main Google page when the whole ship was awake and trying to use it… means I feel there is some catching up to do.  Everything that posted last week, save for yesterday’s post that I wrote on my iPad at LAX while waiting for our flight home, was written in advance and scheduled to post.  But there are things I would have posted about last week, had I been home, if only to mark that they happened.  There is never a completely dead week.

Anyway, the first, and probably easiest item on the list, is the return of the Mystery Code.

The Mystery Code was part of the EVE Online Second Decade Collector’s Edition package that CCP put out back in 2013 to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the game.

All the stuff

A number of things were included with that, including a coffee table book, a CD of some of the well known sound track pieces played by the Icelandic  Symphony Orchestra, and a copy of the board game that CCP created to help get funding rolling for their crazy internet spaceship plans, a Rifter shaped USB hub, and that little black card with the title “Collector’s Edition Mystery Code.”

The Mystery Code Card

I still have the card from one of the two Collector’s Editions I ended up with.  (I bought one, then CCP later gave me another one via a PR company they were using on the idea that a) I would write about it and b) that would make some amount of difference in the world.  I gave away the second Mystery Code in a screen shot contest.)  I did not have to dig too deep in my office to find it.

Mystery Code Card

The idea of the Mystery Code was that people who shelled out a hundred bucks or more for this collection of fluff and nostalgia would have something special that would set them apart going forward.  Initially it got you a PLEX (back before the 500 for 1 split), some cosmetic items, and a special ship in the then upcoming EVE Valkyrie.  But the idea was that there would be other exclusive items available to Mystery Code holders going forward.

Unfortunately, CCP didn’t really set expectations as to how often we could expect rewards or what they might be.  I guess that is the “mystery” aspect of it all, even though they tried to demystify it in a blog post. They key quote from that I suppose is this tidbit:

This is just the beginning of what the Mystery Code will unlock. In the future, whenever we have big things happening—not just across the EVE Universe but across all CCP games—you will find a Mystery Code element to enjoy.

There’s much more planned we can’t discuss right now, but you can rest assured that as we continue our journey into the Second Decade with you, the Mystery Code will be your perfect traveling companion.

Much more planned.  There isn’t a specific promise of regular intervals, but it isn’t hard to read into that a potential bounty beyond what we have actually received so far.

This has led to a regularly recurring series of posts over on Reddit over the years about what the hell happened to the Mystery Code.  As noted in this thread, we have received a couple of items since, but the Mystery Code has otherwise remained somewhat aloof and we haven’t seen anything show up for a few years at this point, back in February 2015.

With the 15 year anniversary of EVE Online this year there was some restrained hope that we might see a revival of the Mystery Code, but with layoffs and restructuring and general changes at CCP there was also speculation that the company might not even have the capability of handing out goodies to those holding the Mystery Code.  Its days seems well in the past.

And then, as I was swilling Pacificos at Mauricio’s in Puerto Vallarta, CCP broke its years long silence on the Mystery Code and gave us something.  We got:

• 1x Men’s SARO ‘Black Troop’ Combat Suit
• 1x Women’s SARO ‘Black Troop’ Combat Suit
• 1x Pacifier SARO ‘Black Troop’ SKIN (Permanent)
• 1x Enforcer SARO ‘Black Troop’ SKIN (Permanent)
• 1x Monitor SARO ‘Black Troop’ SKIN (Permanent)
• 1x Marshal SARO ‘Black Troop’ SKIN (Permanent)

The cosmetic combat suits are nice I guess, if you like that sort of thing.  At least the top half of them show up in your portrait in-game.  But the SKINs, which are black and white police models with what appears to be red and blue flashing lights… those are very nice.  I am all over that.

Mystery Code SKINs and outfits

As soon as I was able to log in after my return home the whole set was there for me waiting to be redeemed.

Ready to claim

If you have a Mystery Code you have to redeem these items within 90 days or they will disappear.  Don’t let this linger, grab them soon.

So there we go, the Mystery Code is still alive and has delivered after a long hiatus.

Now, of course, the timer starts again.  I expect that at some point before next Fanfest a thread or two will pop up on Reddit wondering if CCP will ever give Mystery Code holders something else.

Thrill of the Hunt Not Thrilling Enough, Being Removed from New Eden

About a month ago I posted about how CCP had added what they called a “recurring opportunity” to EVE Online in the for of a daily quest called “The Thrill of the Hunt.”  All you had to do was undock and blow up a single NPC ship and you would be rewarded with 10,000 skill points.

The offer…

The plan seemed to be to entice more people to log in, to get more people to undock, and to provide a reward that would be significant for newer players.

The move was controversial… though, I say this in the context of EVE Online, where some pretty trivial stuff seems to get people inordinately worked up on a regular basis… with people angry about other people getting free skill points, about the skill point reward being too much, or not enough, and about the mere idea of introducing anything that looked like a daily quest into the game because then we will all be “forced” to go do it.

With nearly 160 million skill points in the bag already, I wasn’t dying to undock my main just to get another 10K.  But I played around with a couple of alt characters.  On my main account I ran one out daily to see if just that 10K daily feed would get me anywhere useful.  On my alt account I switched the training queue from my main alt… sitting at 115 million skill points and training level V skills just because… to a new character to see if that added 10K would be worthwhile.

I gave up pretty quickly on the character without a skill queue… 10K a day is like the skill queue running at 20% of normal speed, which is to say very slowly… but kept logging in with the other, running a level 1 mission daily to get that kill and earn a bit of ISK.  Getting what adds up to about 5 hours of free training a day… or a skill injector every 50 days… did make a noticeable difference in the skill climb from new player into being able to do something.

In a game that puts you in space and then makes you wait while skills train almost immediately, being able to dump 10K SP into a new skill, bumping it up to level II or III right then, can be quite the boon.

Apply skill points now

However nice that might be for new players, or the obsessives with alts like myself, it became clear yesterday that new players were not the goal here.  Getting more people to log in was the goal, as noted in this post by CCP Rise:

I’m here to let you know that on Tuesday, in the 118.6 release, we are planning to remove the recurring opportunity “Thrill of the Hunt”.

Our hope in releasing this feature was to gain insight on how direct, daily rewards might effect and improve engagement in EVE. I can’t go into too much detail about results but I thought you guys might like to know a bit about what did happen after it launched. The biggest conclusions we can draw so far (though we are still gathering and analyzing data) are that recurring opportunities did have a significant effect on player activity in game. We saw a pretty big bump in the share of folks heading out to kill something each day, and we heard some feedback that this in turn led to some pretty funny situations (read: kills). On the other hand, we saw very little change in login behavior, i.e. if you weren’t planning to log on anyway, the 10,000 free SP boost wasn’t really going to change your mind. This is really important for us and by collecting solid data with a fast and simple feature like recurring opportunities we will be able to make better decisions as we work on larger things in the future, such as the Shadow of the Serpent event, which begins on Tuesday in the 118.6 release.

I want to thank all of you for taking the time to talk with us about the feature, both online and in person at Fanfest. While there were certainly concerns from you guys, the conversation stayed mature and productive which is fantastic for us and we really appreciate it.

Basically, nobody logs in just to get the 10K SP, so CCP is killing the feature.

I cannot say that I will miss it personally.  I’ll just stop working that character as diligently, since it will go back to being easier to just setup a long skill queue and come back in a few months.

But I am a little disappointed that the sole metric that mattered to CCP was people logging in, that no other benefit was deemed to be worth the effort.  As I wrote above, for me playing a new character with the default set of skills trained, having that 10K boost was an almost immediate thrill.

But I have so many skills trained on my main that I might also be a bit more aware of all the skills I didn’t have.

Anyway, you have until the patch deployment on Tuesday to collect your daily 10K.  That is an extra 40K SP just waiting for you.