Exploring This is World of Warcraft

I always enjoy the Carbot Animations videos about Blizzard products.  The ability to capture what is often the essence of something like Diablo with some simple animations, an absurdly familiar situation, and a few of the in-game sounds is amazing.

And the quality of the work has made the channel a success, leading to items in the official Blizzard store based off of the videos including the StarCraft Cartooned graphics pack for the remastered game.

But the most recent video… This is World of Warcraft… it is a bit of a punch in the gut.  It captures in its way the nostalgic experience of World of Warcraft and its move from early innocence to the state of the game today in a way that managed to make even me a bit misty eyed.

Back when I was much younger

This could be the Sayonara Norrath for WoW.  So take three minutes to watch it.

Did you watch it?  Because I am going to write about it.

The first cut response is how well it captures the arc of the game for many people, the early joy, making friends, conquering raids, and all the things we’ve heard.  The expansions come, and they’re good too, mostly, as they pile up.

The expansion pile

And Blizzard starts introducing new things like paid mounts, which are accepted enthusiastically by the fans.  But as time goes on and the game seems less unique and less special.  Our protagonist feels the world emptying out.  The magic is gone, sunk by Blizzard’s hamfisted handling of the game.

And then WoW Classic comes along and the world is special again.  But monetization creeps in and seeing the special packs and mounts in Burning Crusade Classic our protagonist feels lost and cheated by Blizzard again

Money invades the classic experience

They exit the game, ending the video.  The magic is dead.  Fade to black.

That is a pretty much on-point story that a lot of people tell, and such a punch in the gut that I have to wonder where the channel is headed.  It almost felt like a sign off.

So many feels.

But it really isn’t comparable to Sayonara Norrath.  That video, which pre-dates the launch of World of Warcraft, is about the memories of a guild that has decided to move on.  They have changed, the world has changed, and while they have many memories, those are in the past.

This is World of Warcraft is what you would get if the Mirage guild of Sayonara Norrath hung on for another fifteen years, trying to live EverQuest as it was back in the day, forever comparing the good old days to whatever expansion or update or free to play scheme or company change or special server Daybreak came up with.

So This is World of Warcraft feels like it heaps blame on Blizzard for wrecking what was once a happy and formative experience for many gamers… millions of gamers.  And I get that.  But I also question it.

I have been on about the static nature or subscription pricing lately… it was $15 a month back in 2004, it is still $15 a month here in 2021… and the unrealistic expectations of players.  The response to paying more is almost always negative.  The companies themselves are viewed as greedy and unresponsive… something that Activision Blizzard hasn’t helped with given the obscene compensation some of their senior execs get… and are often blamed for ruining our gaming experience through monetization.   Over in EVE Online players are up in arms… again… about CCP doing that as well.  We want our peak enjoyment at all times at the price we were paying back when my college age daughter was still in diapers.

How realistic is the expectation that World of Warcraft should feel as fresh and new now as it did back in 2004?  How, with eight expansions in the can now, was Blizz supposed to maintain that sense of simplicity and innocence while cranking out a full fledged expansion every other year?  And how, with subscriptions down and the cost of everything going up, were they supposed to be a viable business without finding another revenue stream?

How much of the fact that we don’t think WoW now feels like WoW of old is grounded in unrealistic expectations that a party should remain fun for fifteen years running?  Blizzard gave us something amazing in 2004 and we’re all kind of pissed off that it isn’t as amazing and as fun in 2021.  Is that realistic?  WoW is practically The Simpsons when it was 15; still something good there, but nothing like the first half a dozen seasons.

I can sit back and objectively dissect the faulty logic of our expectations, and yet I too feel them.  I just want the game to be as fun as it was back… whenever… and to feel that joy.  I am part of the problem too.  I see Sayonara Norrath and my first thought is always “Hey, I should go play that again!” and not “What a special time that was.”

So bravo to Carbot Animations for stirring up all these conflicting feelings.

I’m still playing Burning Crusade Classic.  I want to play it because it was, and still is, a good game. (And hey, it is only $15 a month!)  But part of me does want it to be 2007 or whenever, to feel like I did when I was that much younger.  It is a flaw in me, a flaw in many of us.  Letting go is hard and some of us won’t do it until we’re forced to.  It is complicated.

The Last Keepstar out of Cloud Ring

Yesterday the Imperium formed up again to cover the removal of the last of our Keepstars from Cloud Ring.  It was another big form up, a display of strength, a “filthy blob,” as streamer EVELog called it back when we dropped a huge force to cover the Keepstar deployment to 6RCQ-V two years ago.  I wish that clip was still available.

It wasn’t quite that big of a blob, but there were still a lot of big ships on grid and over 2,000 of us logged in and moving to cover the operation.  Fortunately the last Keepstar was only in B-DBYQ, on the other side of the gate from our staging in J5A-IX, so the move to get there was the least painful of the three operations.  The Mittani was even spotted undocked in a Revelation.

Over the Keepstar logo

He had to have chosen that spot on purpose.

The movement of the fleets followed the usual plan, with subcap fleets warping ahead to cover both sides of the gate, then capital ships gating through by fleet, aligning to the Keepstar, the warping off to tether up on it.

There was word that PanFam might make a move to interfere with this last Keepstar removal, but that apparently meant a small interceptor gang hanging around for a bit before being chased off once the subcaps were stationed around the gate.

The final Keepstar from the J5A gate

A few other people did show up, either by accident or in order to watch the spectacle.  Those that got too close were shot pretty quickly.  A rather surprised Tengu pilot managed to get shot by a titan… op success maybe?  They were carrying a covert cyno though, so they were up to no good.  I managed to get paints on a Stiletto that wasn’t quite fast enough to get away.  Nothing slowed us down and the pile on the Keepstar began.

There we are

There were some stragglers who missed previous withdrawal ops who jumped their capitals into the system, but before the Keepstar removal began the cyno jammers were turned on to keep any hostile capitals from showing up.

Getting our jam on in 1 second

And then, once things settled down and everybody was on the Keepstar, we sat and waited for a bit.  I put my camera at a set angle and managed to get a before and after shot.

Keepstar is there

Keepstar is gone

So it goes.  I even managed to slip into a fleet with my alt Claude Ring, which I created about four years ago and held onto for just such an opportunity.  He asked in Local why the Imperium was leaving him.  Then, when he spoke up back in J5A, people said they thought they were done with him.

That was pretty much all I created that character to do.  He has barely enough skills to fly T1 logi in newbie fleets, just so he could be there.

Meanwhile, we started running the whole op in reverse, with subcaps on the gate and capitals aligning back out.

Capitals aligning to the J5A gate

Some warps and a lot of tidi later, everybody was back at the Keepstar in J5A.  After that, there were move ops to reposition forces.

Flight of the Faxes

Later on today, at the regular Saturday fireside, The Mittani will be giving us a war planning update and is expected to announce some new ops coming up.  We still have a week to go before the NIP between the Imperium and Legacy Coalition expires.  We are still working on bring up ADMs and getting supplies laid in.  If nothing else happens it will be a long week of waiting.

That EVE Online Starter Pack Controversy

So as not to bury the lede (one of my favorite things) the title refers to the updated Starter Pack which you can get from CCP’s EVE Online DLC page.  It includes one million skill points and runs just $4.99 currently.

There are, and have been for ages, some reasonably priced packs you can buy to give yourself a leg up on the game.  They have come in assorted flavors.  In the past they were sometimes related to professions like mining or exploring or even combat.  Now they are more generic.

The reasonably priced packs

And then, of course, there is the Galaxy Pack, for the more whale-ish of customers.

The Galaxy Pack!

The theme of these packs has been pretty consistent over the years since Alpha clones showed up.  You get some Omega time, to get you a taste of being a subscriber, you get some PLEX so you can buy something in the cash shop, and you get a some cosmetics, something nice to wear and/or a ship SKIN.  Maybe there is an implant or a multiple character training cert, but that was about it.

Even the Starter Pack used to be mostly that.  It’s previous payload was:

• 7 days of Omega, ensuring Double Training and many more benefits
• 250,000 Skill Points, giving you a head start in skill training
• Skill and Damage Booster (Cerebral Accelerator)
• A stunning bundle of starter ship SKINs
• Blood Raider apparel

For no doubt emotional reasons, 250K SP as part of the bundle wasn’t viewed as a betrayal by CCP.  That much was available via a friend referral.

However, CCP changed the Starter Pack so, as the screen shot above indicates, it includes:

• 1,000,000 Skill Points
• Skill and Damage Booster
• A stunning bundle of starter ship SKINs
• Blood Raider apparel

No more Omega time and 4x the skill points now.

And some people are quite angry about that change; specifically the move to handing out a million skill points.  That crossed an emotional barrier.  And I can see why.

In the three years since what I called the Mardi Gras Release in February of 2016, which brought Skill Extractors and Skill Injectors into the game, the whole skill point market has put a lot of players on edge as they have expected CCP to step over the line and start injecting skill points into the game for cash.

Skill Injectors have also been blamed, and not without merit, for ruining the game already, for specific definitions of “ruin.”

The intentions were, if not pure, at least not straight up evil as presented.  With a then 13 year old game based on the skill training queue, there was a large negative perception that new players could never “catch up,” could never be on an equal footing with those who started before them.

The long held vet opinion that this meant players had to learn the game and that newbies have a place in fleets in things tackle frigates and should work their way up the ladder the same way we did back in the day fell on deaf ears.  Nobody wants to be told to do it the hard way, they want to fly a titan today.

And with PLEX able to turn real world money into ISK and then with ISK able to buy Skill Injectors, anybody with enough cash could fly a titan today.  New players could catch up.  Problem solved.

Well, sort of.  The more likely scenario was this.

Iron Bank buys ALL THE SKILLS

More so than new player, old hands ended up buying Skill Injectors to boost up titan alts and now we have more titan pilots in the game than CCP ever imagined would be possible.

But this did not lead to a wide player revolt like Incarna for a couple of mitigating reasons.

First, you had always been able to buy characters in EVE Online, so technically you could buy your way into a titan pilot before, though getting the ISK was for it was a challenge.

Second, this was not introducing new skill points into the game.  All of the skill points would be extracted from the current player base.  In fact, because of the diminishing returns of Skill Injectors… somebody like me only gets 150K or the 500K skill points an injector contains… it was actually removing skill points from the game.

350K SP go to waste for me…

But most important was what the dev blog about Skill Injectors stated:

It’s very important to note here that this means all the skillpoints available to buy on the market in EVE will have originated on other characters where they were trained at the normal rate.  Player driven economies are key to EVE design and we want you to decide the value of traded skillpoints while we make sure there is one single mechanism that brings new skillpoints in to the system – training.

The mob was mollified, if still wary.

And then CCP started straight up selling skill points they injected into the game.

The daily Alpha Clone injector

This was the daily Alpha Clone injector, which came into the game back in November of 2017.  I thought surely this would be the breaking point, that the mob would come unglued and that there would be rioting in Jita and so forth.

But there wasn’t.  The Alpha Clone injector had just enough limitations to be mostly palatable, or at least not worth an insurrection.   Those limitations were:

• Only one Daily Alpha Injector may be used per day, per character [not account] (resets at downtime)
• May only be used by characters in the Alpha Clone State
• Can be purchased in the NES for PLEX or purchased for your regions real money currency via secure.eveonline.com
• Can be activated to immediately to add 50,000 skill points to your character’s unallocated skill pool (roughly one day worth of Omega training)
• Can be traded on the in-game market
• Does not award Omega Status

Still, the seal was broken, CCP was just injecting skill points into the game for cash.

I guess CCP had been generating them on occasion before, giving out skill points as compensation for game problems.  But the lid was well and truly off last November when they added in the login reward mechanism, and gave us some skill points just to test it out.

And then came the 16th anniversary where any Omega logging in for 16 days got ONE MILLION skill points.  At that point you could argue that CCP was just printing skill points for cash… cash via Omega subscriptions, but cash none the less.  CCP created skill points were now the norm.

Which brings us to today and the Starter Pack and the straight up “give me five dollars and I’ll give you a million skill points” deal.

Things have moved along incrementally.  If you have accepted everything CCP has done up to this point it is a tough be taken seriously if you argue that this is the breaking point, that CCP has gone beyond the pale, that CCP has broken faith with players, that the Pearl Abyss cash shop gold ammo power selling apocalypse is upon us, because we were practically there already.  Why didn’t you say something before?

And, Jin’taan’s unlikely work-around aside, you can only apply one Starter Pack per accoun., (Along with some other fresh restrictions, threw in only after people began to object loudly.)  So what is the big deal?

The flip side of that is how the incremental changes have continued on, which means that they will likely continue on going forward.

Today is it just the Starter Pack, which you can only use once per account.  But if that is okay, if we accept that, then how soon until skill points are part of the Meteor Pack or the Star Pack?  How soon until that $99 Galaxy Pack comes with a Skill Injector or three filled up with skill points CCP created just for that purpose?

That is not at all a stretch.  CCP has been close to this in the past.  They used to sell industry packs that came with Aurum, the old cash shop currency.  At one point Green Man Gaming was selling those for a dollar each (they were normally $10) and there was no limited per account.  So seeing that happen with skill points is very easy to imagine.  After all, CCP didn’t add them to the Starter Pack by accident.  Somebody thought that was a good idea, and nobody objected to it.  Somebody within CCP will always be looking for ways to boost revenue, and skill points are always going to be there as a temptation.  CCP edged back some when it got push back, but the company is certainly looking for that next step forward.

It is hard to stand up to any incremental change because it can be argued away as not being radically different from what you had accepted before.  But in the face of an ongoing march of incremental changes that set a pattern that appears to lead to an unhappy conclusion, it doesn’t seem exactly radical to reach a point where you can see the pattern and feel the need to push back on it.  At some point the frog realizes that boiling is in its future.

So I get why somebody like Manic Velocity, a passionate member of the community, has found his breaking point with this move. (I wonder what would have happened had he made it onto the CSM.)  It isn’t that the move is so radical, it is that it appears to be yet another step on the path towards a game we won’t like.  Sometimes you reach a point where you just can’t go along with it any more.

Most people won’t mind though.  Some people will complain.  On Reddit there will be threads about betrayal, predictions about the next steps, and calls for protest that will be ignored by the vast majority of the community.

I’m aware of the situation, but I am unlikely to walk away from the game.  I see the path being trod, but I am of a fatalist bent and cannot see CCP deviating far from that path as time goes forward.  We can perhaps slow their pace, but in the end they will get there.  CCP will continue on down this trail.  They pretty much have to.  The game isn’t growing, they have no other products, past attempts at other products have failed, so what is left?  Monetize harder!

Meanwhile, the retention rate of new players will remain weak.  I don’t think CCP is capable of addressing that, and I am skeptical that there is anything they could do in any case.  And as time goes forward the older player base will erode… from tiring of the game or from whatever outrage comes along… which will also hurt new player retention… until the population hits a tipping point and the economy starts to collapse.

Then there will be huge inflation as the endless ISK from NPC bounties chases the dwindling PLEX supply while the Jita market deflates otherwise as fewer and fewer players buy ships and modules and ammo and what not.

CCP will step into try and stabilize things.  They’ll hit NPC bounties hard, but that will just drive more players away by then.  They will setup NPCs to sell things again, putting an effective floor on the price of minerals the way shuttles used to, but driving out miners and industrialists.  Pockets of null sec that can maintain self-sufficiency will keep fighting, throwing excess titans at each other and dropping low power Keepstars with abandon as the PCU dwindles.  It will be hilarity, a Mad Max post-apocalyptic spaceship demolition derby, in the midst of tragedy.

The last gasp will be CCP putting out a fresh server so people can start anew.  That will be fun for a bit, but it will kill TQ and signal the beginning of the end.  CCP won’t change their ways and all the old problems will crop up, in weeks or months this time rather than years.  We have seen that in every retro server.  The go back in time only accelerate it.

Eventually a few old players will be sitting around chatting in local about what a great game it was.  What other online game let you do even half of what EVE Online did?  What a wild ride it was while it lasted. And then Sadus will remind us that WoW was the first MMO.

Or maybe it will all work out.  We’ll see.  Either way, CCP has a PLEX sale going, because of course they do.  It is the end of the fiscal quarter and CCP has to make Pearl Abyss happy with their numbers.

The Triglavian’s only known weakness: PLEX

Because if they don’t make Pearl Abyss happy… well… buy some PLEX today or we’ll be buying skill injectors and gold ammo tomorrow.

Other coverage:

• CCP Dev Blog Response
• Massively OP
• Imperium News

Summer Movie League – Clever Girl

Week four of our Summer Fantasy Movie League saw me floating down the coast of Mexico on a cruise ship, so last week’s post covering week three had to be written before Saturday preview numbers were even posted.  No scores listed.

Likewise, I had to make my picks for week four while at sail in the Pacific over a satellite WiFi option that cost daily what an MMO subscription generally costs monthly and which ran about as fast as a 1999 modem connection in the middle of the night when nobody else was using it, and barely ran at all during the day when everybody was trying to update their Facebook status.

Still, there was unlimited soft-serve ice cream, so it wasn’t all bad.

Late Monday night, when the internet was semi-usable I did manage to get onto FML and see the results for Week 3, where I managed to hold on to first place in the TAGN league despite not exactly hitting it out of the park.  I did okay, but only in the defensive sense that I did not screw up badly.  I made it to fifth while grannanj’s Cineplex took first place.  So congrats go out for that.

I was also able to make my picks for week four.  As I noted, I was not keen on dinos, a personal bias of mine.  Generally I try to at least explore such a bias to see if I am cheating myself out of a good pick by “wishcasting” a future that comes out like I think it should rather than how I might actually.

But with my connectivity such as it was, there wasn’t a lot of opportunity for research.  I couldn’t even make my picks with the FML app on my phone, I had to log into the web site, the latter seeming much more tolerant when it comes to timeouts.  If the app can’t get the JSON payload in about 20 seconds it gives up, and nothing was happening over that connection in 20 seconds.

The choices I had to work with in my narrow window of active connection time were… um… I’m not ever sure I can recreate the list at this point.  When the new week goes live a lot of the data on the last week disappears.

Anyway, Jurassic World was split in the usual three way across the weekend while The Incredibles 2 was an expensive ticket, ringing in at budget busting $725.  But it also over-performed on its opening weekend and looked to be a strong contender again, so I went with it as my anchor.

That didn’t leave me much additional room for filler, so I loaded up on the filler that would fit, with three screens of Ocean’s 8 in the mix.  Initially I had more and A Wrinkle in Time as my final filler, it running at only $6.  Then I pulled back from that, wondering how A Wrinkle in Time was even on the list.

It turns out the distributor pushed it out with a discount rate to a bunch of dollar threaters and drive-ins in hopes of getting the film over the $100 million mark for the domestic box office.  Somebody’s bonus was probably riding on that.  However, the film did not deserve to be a pick this week.  Hell, they were showing it on the cruise ship at the mid-deck pool one night along side a lot of films from last summer. (I finally saw Black Panther on the ship sitting by the pool.)  There were at least a dozen films that deserved to make the cut ahead of A Wrinkle in Time, and it did poorly enough that I was glad to have avoided it.  My final lineup ended up with 1x The Incredibles 2, 3x Ocean’s 8, 1x The Avengers, 3x Book Club.

Summer Movie League – My Week Four Pick

I copied that to all my leagues, after which I was back to the cruise, hanging out with the family, and trying to drink my weight in Pacificos at every port of call, a venture helped along by the fact that it seemed impossible to order just one.  They seemed only available in pairs or by the bucket.

We returned home Saturday afternoon to find the cats scolding us for being away and the weather considerably warmer than what we left in Mexico.  It was in the high 80s south of the boarder but near 100 at home.  But it was, as they say, a dry heat.

Then the folly of my disregard for dinos became apparent as Jurassic World did better than expected.  Not as wildly as The Incredibles 2 did the week before, but sufficient to make all the best picks require an anchor on a pair of its days.

The TAGN league, without bonuses, ended up with a different perfect pick than the normal league.   With bonuses 2x Sunday and 6x Ocean’s 8 was the perfect pick, the latter getting the best performer boost.  Without bonuses though, the best best was 2x Saturday, 4x Ocean’s 8, and 2x Will You Be My Neighbor.

Summer Movie League – Week Four Perfect Pick

The week’s scores ended up looking like this:

1. I HAS BAD TASTE – $149,011,139
2. Darren’s Unwatched Cineplex – $148,790,862
3. Vigo Grimborne’s Medieval Screening Complex – $145,559,483
4. Miniature Giant Space Hamsterplex – $143,810,831
5. Kraut Screens – $143,621,570
6. Paks’ Pancakes & Pics – $142,299,162
7. Biyondios! Kabuki & Cinema – $141,474,176
8. Too Orangey For Crows – $139,293,799
9. Skar’s Movies and Meat Pies – $138,485,522
10. Po Huit’s Sweet Movie Suite – $132,639,108
11. Ben’s X-Wing Express – $132,639,108
12. Wilhelm’s Abyssal Pocket Playhouse – $120,433,130
13. Goat Water Picture Palace – $118,288,783
14. Corr’s Carefully Curated Cineplex – $117,948,704
15. grannanj’s Cineplex – $112,270,121
16. Joanie’s Joint – $109,582,467
17. SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights – $108,103,696
18. aria82’s Cineplex – $106,527,489
19. Bean Movie Burrito – $13,087,528 (did not pick)
20. Aure’s Astonishingly Amateur Amphitheatre – $0 (did not copy picks)

Isey of I HAS BAD TASTE won the week and also got the best possible score for the league having grabbed the perfect pick.

Darren was close behind having gone with what ended up being the perfect pick for leagues with bonuses.

After that, down to 11th place, are the people who anchored on two days of Jurassic World.  There there is a $12 million gap and the start of the people who anchored on The Incredibles 2, or who did not pick or forgot to copy.  I guess, sitting there at 12th place, I can take solace in the fact that I had the best Incredibles 2 lineup.

The sad trombone for the week goes to SynCaine who forgot that I left the empty screen penalty on for the league when I removed the bonuses.  His two screen lineup of The Incredibles 2 and Friday Jurassic World scored pretty well, but eight empty screens pulls $16 million off of his total.

That left the league standings looking like this after week four:

1. Vigo Grimborne’s Medieval Screening Complex – $413,420,828
2. I HAS BAD TASTE – $407,058,524
3. Paks’ Pancakes & Pics – $403,218,563
4. Wilhelm’s Abyssal Pocket Playhouse – $397,307,676
5. Kraut Screens – $390,019,856
6. Miniature Giant Space Hamsterplex – $389,940,553
7. Goat Water Picture Palace – $387,113,020
8. Corr’s Carefully Curated Cineplex – $383,706,911
9. Po Huit’s Sweet Movie Suite – $382,929,377
10. Ben’s X-Wing Express – $376,737,891
11. Darren’s Unwatched Cineplex – $374,008,116
12. SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights – $368,319,886
13. grannanj’s Cineplex – $366,567,247
14. aria82’s Cineplex – $323,895,524
15. Joanie’s Joint – $306,167,311
16. Biyondios! Kabuki & Cinema – $299,887,221
17. Too Orangey For Crows – $296,721,502
18. Skar’s Movies and Meat Pies – $221,482,730
19. Aure’s Astonishingly Amateur Amphitheatre – $208,549,279
20. Bean Movie Burrito – $168,373,959

This week saw some shifting in the standings, but I still think my working theory/plan for the season, that the removal of bonuses would keep the pack tighter and the competition closer, seems to be working out… sort of.  The changes with how FML works with the whole need to copy picks across leagues, plus the early lock time, plus the not clearly indicated rule set have all hampered the league, and there is no change of rules that will help somebody bounce back after they miss a week.  Only Liore seems to have that power, as she missed a week last summer and still won the season.

I did drop a couple of people from the standings who have missed a few weeks already, so we are down to 20 players in the league.

And that brings us to week five.

Incredibles 2              $591
Jurassic World SAT         $356
Jurassic World SUN         $278
Uncle Drew                 $275
Jurassic World FRI         $266
Sicario 2                  $201
Ocean's 8                  $97
Tag                        $64
Deadpool 2                 $41
Solo                       $31
Sanju                      $30
Won't You Be My Neighbor   $24
Hereditary                 $24
Superfly                   $22
Avengers: Infinity War     $18

It is an odd week.  After two successive blockbuster opening weekends we have a bit of a quiet week for new features.  There are three new titles on the list this week, Uncle Drew, Sicario 2, and Sanju, none of which are expected to break any records or threaten the current big titles in play.

Uncle Drew is a basketball… Comedy?  Parody?  Homage?  I’ve read the Wikipedia article and I am still not sure.  My getting anything isn’t a requirement for success, but it might be a measure of messaging I suppose.  Also I am not sure if it showing up after the annual Warriors/Cavaliers tournament… I mean the NBA championship… is good positioning or not.  The long range forecast puts it somewhere between $15 and $18 million, but I have no gut on this one.

Sicario: Day of the Soldado, to give it its full name, is a sequel to 2015 film of the same base name about drugs, smuggling, and violence on the US/Mexican boarder.  The original has a slow September opening, only widening to 2,600 theaters on its third week when it brought in $12 million based on the positive buzz it created.

The sequel is going straight for the big opening, but has been referred to as a “hot mess,” while the long range forecast from last week pegs it under $15 million for the weekend.  While I liked the original, it is a bit niche and the follow on seems like an unnecessary appendage to the story.  But in Hollywood they figure a sequel is worth 85% of the original, and the first one did $84 million at the box office.

And then there is Sanju, a Hindi language biopic about Bollywood actor Sanjay Dutt.  There was some controversy about a scene in the film to which the government of India objected, but I am not sure that is enough to propel a foreign language film high enough onto the US box office list to make the cut for 11th spot on the list.  Theater count is estimated at 350, which is about what Won’t You Be My Neighbor? had for week four, and it did $1.8 million… but it isn’t in Hindi and is about a US cultural icon.

The modest means of those three titles meant that Jurassic World stays split over three days again this week while The Incredibles 2 stays at the top of the price list.  Meanwhile there is some close prices filler from which to choose.

So there we go.  As usual, I will put my Monday Hot Takes league picks here.  I went with 2x Saturday, 1x Ocean’s 8, 4x Deadpool 2, and 1x Hereditary.   That is a pretty research free lineup, but I feared to avoid dinos for a second week running lest they surprise and bit me in the ass yet again.  Won’t You Be My Neighbor? might end up a better bet than Hereditary, depending on what the eventual screen count is for the week.

Get your picks in now, or copy them over.  The league locks in less than 24 hours from when this post goes live.

Blogger Fantasy Movie League – Week Four

We are about a third of the way through the 13 week summer Fantasy Movie League, but there are still a host of potential blockbuster movies out there.

This week saw most of our group making the decision between Transformers: About Last Night and Wonder Woman to anchor their picks.

As with last week, it seemed pretty clear who would take the top spot in the box office.  Transformers was set to win, but would it win by enough to make it a viable pick.  As noted previously, you have eight screens to fill and a $1,000 budget.  If you invest most of it in a big movie, it has to pay off.  The prices of the week four picks:

Transformers               $560
 Wonder Woman              $286
 Cars 3                    $278
 All Eyez On Me            $104
 The Mummy                 $73
 Pirates                   $58
 47 Meters Down            $55
 Captain Underpants        $45
 Rough Night               $39
 Tubelight                 $34
 Guardians of the Galaxy 2 $32
 Beatriz at Dinner         $17
 Megan Leavy               $16
 It Comes At Night         $13
 The Book of Henry         $11

As the week began, estimates for Transformers were up in the $70 million range, which made it a safe pick.  Grab that and a few good cheaper picks to back it up, and you’re set.  And then the reviews hit and the early opening numbers came in and estimates fell through the floor, with its weekend pull down at $45 million.

Meanwhile Cars 3 and Wonder Woman were both being estimated at around $27 million.  Pick two of those and you beat Transformers for about the same price.  It was something of a toss up between Cars 3 and Wonder Woman for me.  Wonder Woman was still going strong, but Cars 3 was still the big kids movie and only in its second week.

I decided to go with Cars 3 on three screens.  Then I started picking and choosing what the other five picks ought to be.  I ended up with this selection.

My selections and how they did

I wasn’t totally sold on this set, but I couldn’t come up with anything better and then I realized it was after 9am on Friday, selections were locked, and I was stuck with it.

9am is the big reveal, when you get to see what everybody else picked.  Nobody picked Cars 3 aside from me.  Everybody else was down with Transformers and Wonder Woman or else they picked Wonder Woman to fill two or three screens.

The closest mirror to my own picks was Liore, who went with three Wonder Woman, two Captain Underpants, and three Beatriz at Dinner.  Given her ringer status in the group, I felt a bit encouraged by at least the shared pattern.

As it turned out, Wonder Woman did about a million dollars more over the weekend than Cars 3.  However, my savior was 47 Meters Down, which not only clocked in at $7 million, but which got the nod as the best price/performance pick of the week, boosting my total by $2 million per screen showing it.  That was enough to put me at the top of the list for the week.

1. Wilhelm’s Clockwork Lemon Multiplex – $95,679,946
2. Dr Liore’s Evil House of Pancakes – $88,567,091
3. Pasduil’s Popcorn Picturehouse – $87,759,467
4. Void’s Awesomeplex – $87,244,395
5. Ocho’s Octoplex – $85,011,942
6. Moderate Peril’s Sleazy Porno Theatre – $84,410,311
7. Murf’s Matinee Mania – $81,825,392
8. Bel’s House of Horrors – $81,603,369
9. Syl’s Fantasy Galore Panopticum – $80,899,156
10. Braxwolf’s Waffleplex – $76,460,030
11. Clockwork’s Cinesplosion – $17,190,425

Clockwork apparently started to pick, filling in two screens, but then didn’t finish, leaving six empty screens.  Each empty screen comes with a $2 million penalty, so Wonder Woman and Captain Underpants teaming up were not enough to save the day.

Of course none of us picked the optimum selection, which was Transformers and seven screens of 47 Meters Down.

Week Four’s Optimum Picks

Weekly wins so far:

1. Liore – 2
2. Braxwolf – 1
3. Wilhelm – 1

Liore not taking the week did not do much to shake her from her leading position in the overall season running.  At the end of week four the totals are:

1. Dr Liore’s Evil House of Pancakes – $416,272,621
2. Wilhelm’s Clockwork Lemon Multiplex – $390,585,663
3. Pasduil’s Popcorn Picturehouse – $382,306,139
4. Moderate Peril’s Sleazy Porno Theatre – $371,138,496
5. Ocho’s Octoplex – $364,953,950
6. Void’s Awesomeplex – $364,730,70
7. Braxwolf’s Waffleplex – $358,166,372
8. Bel’s House of Horrors – $342,072,780
9. Murf’s Matinee Mania – $325,309,184
10. Syl’s Fantasy Galore Panopticum – $284,246,625
11. Clockwork’s Cinesplosion – $270,152,909

I am holding on to second place, but am $26 million behind Liore.  That means I need to beat her total by at least $3 million each week for the next nine weeks of the summer season.  Or I need a really big score one week… or she needs to go on vacation and forget to do her picks.

And those in the mid-pack need to beat her by double that every week to overtake.

One of the interesting side notes is how well Moderate Peril is doing, holding on to fourth place, all the while doing his picks like he is running an actual theater, showing each movie only once most weeks (he doubled up on a film once) and not min/max optimizing.

Anyway, we are on to week five and the options are:

Despicable Me 3           $840
Transformers              $175
The House                 $198
Cars 3                    $102
Wonder Woman              $131
Baby Driver               $110
47 Meters Down            $36
The Mummy                 $26
Pirates of the Caribbean  $26
All Eyez on Me            $19
Rough Night               $23
Captain Underpants        $19
Guardians of the Galaxy 2 $15
Beguiled                  $32
Beatriz At Dinner         $12

Despicable Me 3 is tracking for a safe $90 million this coming weekend.  However, if you pick that, your other seven screens end up pretty weak.  Meanwhile, Baby Driver is getting some buzz and the the FML site stats show it is being picked heavily.  That might be the sign that those in the know feel it is going to be the optimum pick of the week.  So it might be a better plan to pick a lessor anchor film and pile on that.  But which title would you pick as an anchor?  And how deep do you go with Baby Driver?  Six screens?  Seven?  All eight?

We shall see how the week goes.

WoW and the Nostalrius Survey Summary

As noted previously, the team running the Nostalrius private/pirate vanilla WoW server, which was effectively shut down by Blizzard back in April, an event which caused a good deal of attention to be focused on the whole nostalgia server question.

Ever mindful of the mob… see flying in Draenor… said they would at least consider the whole alternate server idea, inviting Nostalrius to come speak to the Blizz team in Irvine. (I keep putting Blizz in Anaheim in my head, because that is where BlizzCon happens, rather than in Irvine, which is on the other side of Santa Ana, where their offices actually are.  It’s not that far away… it is all in the OC… but is incorrect.)

Give the opportunity to meed with Blizzard, the Nostalrius wanted to have some data to hand beyond their server stats, so put together a survey to get a sense of their community.

Surveys are misused constantly, so I am always dubious about generalizing too much from results.  But Nostalrius did get 50,000 respondents to their survey.  20,000 responses had to be culled from that batch as they gave what were called “incoherent” responses, where the respondent gave conflicting information.  Examples were indicating that they had played a given expansion on a Blizz server but indicating elsewhere that they had never played on a Blizz server.

That still left 30,000 responses.  And while that is largely from an admittedly self-selecting group, so long as you treat it as such… don’t, for example generalize out to “all WoW players” from the results… you can gain some insight, or at least food for thought.

Of the respondents , the majority of whom are in their 20s, have played retail WoW at some point, and were not playing retail WoW at the time of the survey, money was not a listed as a major factor for most.

Figure 8. Left Retail Because…

Additionally, when asked which expansions they had played on retail, over 60% of respondents indicated that they had played any given expansion.

Figure 6. Players per expansion played on retail

So this is not necessarily a batch of freeloaders seeking a cheap time, something players on private/pirate servers have been painted as previously.

One of the side details noted in the survey results was that the age range of respondents indicated that many of them were likely too young to have actually played vanilla WoW back in the day.  For them, seeing vanilla is only an option through such server.

The ranking of the expansions (0 to 10, with 10 being the best) was interesting, but unsurprising for this group.  Basically, Cataclysm is viewed as the breaking point.  Before Cataclysm, vanilla and the two expansions, The Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King, are rated very favorably.  But Cataclysm and beyond are rated much less favorably, with Warlords of Draenor at the bottom of the list.

Figure 9. Four expansion ratings compared

Wrath of the Lich King, the worst ranked of the first three phases of the game seems pretty well liked when compared to the Warlords of Draenor.

Figure 10. WotLK ranking vs. WoD

I would imagine that WoD gets an extra helping of negative due to it being the current state of the game, but that is still a pretty negative view from this particular group.

Of course, one of the things that this highlights is that there are differing views as to where nostalgia really lies, as I note previously.

And then there is the question as to what, if anything, Blizzard will with any of this.  My bet still rests on, “little to nothing.”

Anyway, the charts I used above are all part of a nine page summary of the survey, available as a PDF file here.  There is more in the summary, I just cherry picked a few items that interested me.  The full report is said to range out to 80 pages and will be made available at some future date.

Hat Tip to Massively OP

Foothold in Pure Blind, Path to the Future

Summer has arrived! Following the closing of World War Bee, the north continues to be quite active…

Updates Blog, June 20-26 Summary Post Opening

I am still not convinced that one side in a war, much less those calling things safely from the sidelines, can declare a war is done and pretend that ongoing fighting is something else entirely.

Perhaps one might say that the operation, styled as “World War Bee” by one side, is over?  Some of us in the north have been fighting since before that name was even a thing, and we carry on fighting now that the operation has been unilaterally declared done.  Certainly plenty of individuals have said they are done with the war, but some of the same old names have carried on since January.

The again, we haven’t been doing ourselves any favors when it comes to reminding people that the war is still ongoing and that we form up every night.  The Mittani dot Com, or however you’re supposed to write that out (I usually just refer to them as TMC), has barely made a passing reference to the war in the last few weeks, with the last actual post about the war being Matterall’s article way back on the third of June.  Some organ of the state we have there.

TMC seems far more focused on its streaming channel.  Even there, the Meta Show this past weekend was more focused on TMC’s ArcheAge promotion than anything in New Eden.

Of course the flip side of that is, if some of our foes wish to declare the war over and move off to other places, that certainly seems to be to our benefit.  Maybe letting the war be “over,” for whatever definition of over one might care to choose, is a better plan.

And on the “over” front, Pandemic Legion has been reported to be pulling out of Saranen in what one wag over the weekend referred to as the “PLExit.”

The most common response to this pull out that I have seen is that PL always holes up some place to prepare for the Alliance Tournament.  Of course the dates for that were just announced, putting the whole thing out in November.  Does PL really go dormant for a third of the year over an event that requires maybe 50 people tops out of an alliance of more than 2,000 characters?

Anyway, war or not, tournament or not, the pressure on Saranen has relaxed noticeably, leading to GSF taking a system in Pure Blind over the weekend.

93PI-4 is on the other side of Saranen’s gate to null sec, and was once PL’s base of operations.  Now it is in Imperium hands, the station, ihub, and TCU having been taken and held.

Close to Saranen

A small start.  We shall see if it develops further.  NCDot is still in the neighborhood and we continue to fight them on a nightly basis.

Meanwhile, in another corner of Pure Blind, Imperium alliance LAWN, whose numbers were cut in half recently when the corporation The Graduates moved over to The Initiative, taking 368 characters with them, still managed to find the wherewithal to take not just one system, but a whole constellation in the region.

LAWN’s 300 hold this currently

Dare we draw hope from these minor gains?

I doubt we will have the forces to reconquer even half of the space we lost over the last few months, and all the more so if we plan to do it the hard way.  I have said in the past that I am not a fan of The Mittani’s book of grudges, where he has declared we will seek revenge on every last group who fought against us.  That isn’t practical, and even the new occupants of our space, who complain loudly and at length when called the CFC 2.0, are still blue-ish to each other.  They are okay fighting each other, but territory is inviolate, indicating that the age of coalitions and agreements is far from gone.  Different, but not so different.

There will have to be some coming to terms with the new state of affairs in the north, and we will have to have the flexibility to make new agreements if we can.  We are going to want some territory back, one way or another.  The only group that is completely beyond the pale is Circle of Two.  I would personally endorse any agreement or alliance that allowed us to send them packing after their betrayal.  I would ally with TEST or anybody else and forswear any claim on Deklein to take Tribute.  But that might just be me.

And any of that is all out in the future.  Nobody is going to deal with us because we captured a system or a constellation.  So we form up every night to press forward.  The war still goes on for us.