Arriving at Level 41 in Pokemon Go

Back in December of last year Niantic unlocked the next ten levels in Pokemon Go.  The game, having been capped at level 40 for over four years, was finally going to give people some new advancement goals.

The catch for the next ten level was that, in addition to the usual exp grind, players were going to have to complete some specific tasks along the way.  For some, those who had been at level 40 for a long time and who had continued to accumulate exp, the tasks were the real gates to the next levels.

For people like my wife and I, who hit level 40 less than a month before the new levels were unlocked, the exp hill was going to be the main limiting factor.  I finished the four tasks, which included catching 200 pokemon in a single day, long before I was even close to level.  We both managed to tip over into level 41 this month, with the exp being the final gate as expected.

A level up at last

With the level you get some prizes.

Some gifts for your level

But then you are quickly back to looking at the exp curve to get to level 42.

The tasks to get to level 42 are not too tough.  They are:

• Evolve Eevee into each of its forms
• Use items to evolve Pokémon 15 times
• Make 3 excellent throws
• Use 200 berries to help catch Pokémon

Only the Eevee evolution task is going to take some effort really.  And part of that is because the basic evolves are random chance. (The naming trick only works on your first evolve, which I did years ago.)  I had been saving up some Eevees for this, and then got seven Jolteons in a row.  Time to catch some more Eevees.

In the end though, the exp will be the final gate for most levels.  The level gradient looks like this:

• levels 1-39 – 15 million exp
• level 40 – 5 million exp
• level 41 – 6 million exp
• level 42 – 7.5 million exp
• level 43 – 9 million exp
• level 44 – 11 million exp
• level 45 – 13 million exp
• level 46 – 15 million exp
• level 47 – 18 million exp
• level 48 – 21 million exp
• level 49 – 25 million exp
• level 50 – 30 million exp

There are ways to speed up gaining exp.  My biggest score was when I used a lucky egg, which doubles all exp earned, then had somebody transition to a best friend, finished my weekly pokestop spin and pokemon catch, and did two five star raids with our group.  That was worth about 350K right there, though that was the stars aligning just right as the best friend was somebody in our raid group, so we were able to coordinate.  Otherwise, a good day gets us a raid and the usual catch and stuff, so often rings up less that 20K exp.

As for the tasks, looking at the list posted over at Polygon, only the tasks for levels 49 and 50 seem like they are big enough to be a significant barrier to level.  And, even then, the exp curve for those are so big that you will likely have plenty of time to work them out.

But we’re still just working on level 42, which for the most part means working on exp and catching every Eevee that shows up.

The EVE Aether Wars Tech Demo

If I had been a good blogger I might have mentioned this before it happened, but as I have been pretty much injecting nostalgia straight into my veins with EverQuest, Diablo, and Lord of the Rings Online for most of the month, this sort of slipped by.

Earlier this month CCP put out a dev blog about EVE Aether Wars, a tech demo they were going to hold during the Game Developers Conference, which is also running this week.

Tech Demos get Splash Screens

The basic idea was that CCP would be working with a company called Hadean to use their Aether Engine for a huge space battle tech demo to help demonstrate the possible usefulness of the engine for supporting such mass battle content… and maybe pick up a Guinness Book record along the way.  The target was to get 10,000 players together to drive this tech demo.

CCP and EVE Online are, of course, no strangers to mass battles.  Huge player battles and people behaving badly are the two things that have traditionally gotten EVE Online their press coverage, though the latter has tapered off somewhat in recent years.  I think Judgement Day was the last big newsworthy bit of betrayal.

But big battles, those are more common and yet still manage to get coverage in the gaming press, coverage which often leaks out into the mainstream press.  And CCP has received recognition from Guinness for last year’s Million Dollar Battle which peaked at 6,142 players.

That number, however, was about all the game could handle… and I use the word “handle” in the most liberal fashion.  Being in that battle, like any such huge battle, means playing in molasses with time dilation slowing things down to 10% speed and controls becoming unresponsive and people being disconnected regularly.

So CCP is clearly an ideal customer for anything than would make this better.

On Hadean side, their Aether Engine is a cloud based system to rope together servers to support the processing power needed to keep a huge battle going.  The details are scant, as one might expect, but some of the information about their operating system is covered by, or linked to, in the FAQ about the event.

People could sign up for the test, which was set to go yesterday at 17:30 UTC.  I signed up, grabbed the 700MB download for the client, and awaited the promised login key.

There were plenty of warnings about this not being a full fledged game.  The controls were very simple, being pretty much “press W to accelerate” and “click the mouse button to shoot” with mouse input to steer your way.  But I still wasn’t sure what to expect.

After a bit of delay I was able to get into the demo at 18:00 UTC and found myself in space.

In with ~1,500 other players

The feel was very much that of EVE Valyrie.  You were dropped into a single player ship and used the mouse to point where you wanted to go.  There were shield and armor indicators to right and left that showed your ship’s health.  The backdrops in space were from EVE Online, but the action itself was nothing akin to that.

You had to find other players… that blob in the upper right was some sort of mini-map/proximity guide but wasn’t much help… get them in your targeting reticle until they were locked, at which point you could launch a missile at them.  Then rinse and repeat.

Locked On!

Not exactly exciting.  It was a mass of people shooting at each other.  To aim it was much better to slow down to get things in your sights, and if you started taking hits it was time to accelerate and turn to avoid the incoming.  I managed to get a few kills.  You had to pound somebody with quite a few missiles in order to kill them outright, so I am sure some of my targets had been softened up by others.  Likewise, I am sure I served up some ready kills to others as it seemed to be the usual routine of the killing blow getting the credit.

However, after about 15 minutes it became clear that we were not going to get 10,000 people in the demo.  The numbers stopped climbing past the 3,500 mark.  So Hadean dumped in some AI pilots to make up the balance.

At that point the sky was alive with missiles, oddly seeming to flow in the same direction like a school of fish.

So many missiles

I suspect the uniform missile behavior was related to the AI players.  They seemed to have guided missiles, judging by how they would all turn together mid-flight.  When the AIs decided you were a target it seemed likely you were going to die.

They moved as one

Not that being blown up was all that painful.  You just respawned back into the match in a fresh ship.

When the AI players became active, that was when the client actually began to get bogged down.  At least that was like an EVE Online fight.  The FPS meter, which had been into three digits for much of the time, fell way down, running between 15 and 45 FPS depending on where I was pointed.  The client also crashed a few times, though launching and getting back in the game was quick enough.

In the end it wasn’t much of a game… perhaps too simple for my jaded tastes in this day and age… but it wasn’t meant to be.  As a tech demo it was interesting.  The game itself seemed to be able to keep up with the mass of players without having to resort to slowing people down in order to keep up.  I have no idea how much hardware was required behind the scenes to make that possible, but I imagine that it was not trivial.

Hadean put up an op success post about the test.  They only ended up with a total of 3,852 live players in the demo. (It would have been more if there had been a Keepstar at risk.)

CCP also posted a follow up Dev Blog with some further details including:

• 3,852 human pilots engage in glorious internet spaceship combat.
• A total of 14,274 pilots engaged in combat including AI pilots.
• A peak concurrent battlefield population of 10,412 pilots, including AI pilots.
• A peak concurrent population of 2,379 human pilots on the field.
• A total of 88,988 ships destroyed.
• A colossal 14,710,908 torpedoes fired.

There is a promise of more play tests to come in order to help test out the technology.   We will see if maybe, some day, this tech will trickle down into EVE Online in order to make fleet fight there less of a slog.

Other views of the event:

• Imperium News
• Massively OP

Spring Movie League – Some Could Not Imagine

The third week of our spring Fantasy Movie League has come and gone and it was definitely one of those weeks.

The lineup for the week looked like it had a few potential anchors with the usual lot of filler.

Tomb Raider         $407
Black Panther       $391
A Wrinkle in Time   $241
Love Simon          $217
Game Night          $82
The Strangers       $78
Red Sparrow         $67
Deathwish           $54
I Can Only Imagine  $41
7 Days in Entebbe   $29
Annihilation        $29
Jumanji             $23
Gringo              $21
The Hurricane Heist $19
Peter Rabbit        $15

With that I spent most of my time thinking about what to anchor my lineup on.

I was not convinced Tomb Raider was going to pass Black Panther and, as I noted, Liore endorsing Love Simon in chat made me set that aside.  Then there was A Wrinkle in Time.  The safe choice seemed to be to anchor on Black Panther, with either two screens of that or one screen and something else, before working on filler.

I, however, got hooked up in a side theory from chatter that was convinced that, as a kids film, A Wrinkle in Time would have a smaller week over week drop than one might expect.  A 50% drop is pretty normal but some kids films, like Peter Rabbit, dropped off much more gradually over time.  Wrinkle dropping 50% didn’t interest me, but if it only dropped 40-45% it would not only been in play as an anchor, but as priced might contend for the best performer slot.  And I could get three screens of Wrinkle with plenty of room to back fill.

So as I fiddled with variations around Wrinkle, a monster was forming in the filler column.

Down in the filler was I Can Only Imagine, a sleeper priced with maybe a $3 million weekend box office performance in mind.  That was the Monday thinking for FML when they unlocked the lineup for our picks.

But by Wednesday the forecasts for Imagine were starting to come in way over that number.  I saw a forecast for $6.5 million first.  But one outlier forecast does not a groundswell make.  But then there were more, and the number was rising, with predictions going to $8 million then $10 million on one site I generally don’t trust.

One site going overboard you can dismiss, but when everybody is predicting high you have to figure something is going on.  It was becoming clear that Imagine was going to be the best performer, so those paying attention began to optimize for it as their filler.  But anchors still seemed to matter.  Even at $10 million plus the $2 million bonus wouldn’t replace your anchor screens.

I decided to bet on Wrinkle doing better than expected, mostly because I can convince myself of anything if I say it to myself enough times… and a couple of forecasts had it above $18 million, which just reinforced the story I was telling myself.   So I went with 3x Wrinkle and 5x Imagine.

Spring Week Three – My Picks

When the screens finally locked there wasn’t much variety in MCats.  We all had Imagine as our filler.  But in the TAGN league clearly some people had not gotten the word.  They were not alone.  According to the research tab only 33% of players had Imagine in play.  But I was feeling okay about Wrinkle as an anchor as it had some play in the top 100 players list:

• 12 — 2x Black Panther, 5x I Can Only Imagine, 1x Blank Screen
• 9 — 1x Black Panther, 1x A Wrinkle in Time, 6x I Can Only Imagine
• 6 — 3x A Wrinkle in Time, 5x I Can Only Imagine
• 4 — 1x Tomb Raider, 7x Game Night
• 3 — 1x Game Night, 7x The Strangers
• 3 — 1x Black Panther, 7x I Can Only Imagine
• 2 — 4x Love Simon, 4x Annihilation

But 2x Black Panther, 5x Imagine, and one blank screen was the most popular pick overall.  And come the Saturday morning results, that seemed to be the winning play.  But Imagine was doing even better than the most optimistic forecast.

The Sunday update had 1x Black Panther and 7x Imagine in the perfect pick slot, with Imagine looking to take third spot in the weekend box office, passing Wrinkle which was headed for a 50% drop over the previous week.    That perfect pick held when the final numbers were released.

Spring Week Three – Perfect Pick

No joy for me, but Liore, who placed last in the first two weeks of the season, had the perfect pick along with 164 other FML player, making her the overall winner for week three.  I guess I can’t troll her this week.

1. Dr Liore’s Evil House of Pancakes (M) – $165,384,269
2. Corr’s Carefully Curated Cineplex (M) – $157,536,351
3. Ben’s X-Wing Express (M) – $153,035,716
4. Po Huit’s Sweet Movie Suite (T) – $146,825,365
5. Aure’s Astonishingly Amateur Amphitheatre (M) – $146,825,365
6. Paks’ Pancakes & Pics (T) – $146,825,365
7. Biyondios! Kabuki & Cinema (T) – $146,825,365
8. Dan’s Decadent Decaplex (M) – $144,294,622
9. Wilhelm’s Broken Isles Bijou (T/M) – $144,294,622
10. Goat Water Picture Palace (T) – $133,076,678
11. Logan’s Luxurious Thaumatrope (M) – $132,965,578
12. Joanie’s Joint (T) – $130,792,717
13. Vigo Grimborne’s Medieval Screening Complex (T) – $115,499,771
14. Bean Movie Burrito (T) – $67,113,951
15. I HAS BAD TASTE (T) – $66,871,277
16. SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights (T) – $66,643,027
17. DumCheese’s Cineplex (T) – $60,456,300
18. Darren’s Unwatched Cineplex (T) – $58,901,732
19. Skar’s Movies and Meat Pies (T) – $58,351,058
20. Kraut Screens (T) – $58,341,937
21. Miniature Giant Space Hamsterplex (T) – $56,540,940
22. JHW’s Cineplex (T) – $39,024,976

The Meta League Legend:

• TAGN Movie Obsession – players from it marked with a (T)
• MCats Multiplex – players from it marked with an (M)

Those of us who loaded up on as much Imagine as our anchor screens would allow did not fall too far behind, though my choice of Wrinkle set me back a ways.  But anybody who didn’t check the forecasts from the sites I listed out in the opening post of the season were in for a rude surprise if they didn’t pick Imagine.  This wasn’t one where the Thursday night preview numbers on Friday morning helped. The forecasts were trending by Wednesday. (And, in the TAGN League, mentioned in the FML Chatter forum for the league.)

The week shook up the overall standings, lifting up those who went with Imagine in their lineup.

1. Po Huit’s Sweet Movie Suite (T) – $343,521,112
2. Corr’s Carefully Curated Cineplex (M) – $326,056,604
3. Ben’s X-Wing Express (M) – $321,512,791
4. Biyondios! Kabuki & Cinema (T) – $320,953,929
5. Wilhelm’s Broken Isles Bijou (T/M) – $317,863,111
6. Paks’ Pancakes & Pics (T) – $312,716,024
7. Dan’s Decadent Decaplex (M) – $301,730,279
8. Aure’s Astonishingly Amateur Amphitheatre (M) – $301,695,127
9. Goat Water Picture Palace (T) – $298,967,337
10. Dr Liore’s Evil House of Pancakes (M) – $297,591,982
11. Joanie’s Joint (T) – $285,876,086
12. Logan’s Luxurious Thaumatrope (M) – $280,443,980
13. Vigo Grimborne’s Medieval Screening Complex (T) – $270,168,439
14. I HAS BAD TASTE (T) – $239,361,430
15. Kraut Screens (T) – $234,181,483
16. SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights (T) – $226,087,490
17. Darren’s Unwatched Cineplex (T) – $222,776,183
18. Miniature Giant Space Hamsterplex (T) – $211,286,068
19. Skar’s Movies and Meat Pies (T) – $208,306,170
20. DumCheese’s Cineplex (T) – $206,764,632
21. JHW’s Cineplex (T) – $190,581,986
22. Bean Movie Burrito (T) – $135,890,663

Liore was the biggest winner of the week, rising from 21st place into 10th position.  Po held on to overall lead in the Meta League and still has a buffer, but Corr and Ben, who fought it out for first last season, closed the gap considerably.

And now week four looms with the following choices:

Pacific Rim             $340
Black Panther           $251 
Sherlock Gnomes         $223
I Can Only Imagine      $176
Tomb Raider             $157 
Paul, Apostle of Christ $155
A Wrinkle in Time       $126
Love Simon              $98
Midnight Sun            $66
Unsane                  $58
Game Night              $56
Peter Rabbit            $50
The Strangers           $34
Red Sparrow             $34
Deathwish               $24

Gone from the choices are 7 Days in Entebbe, Annihilation, Gringo, The Hurricane Heist, and finally after so many weeks Jumanji.

Replacing them are Pacific Rim, Sherlock Gnomes, Unsane, Midnight Sun, and Paul, Apostle of Christ.

At the top of the list is the Pacific Rim sequel, priced as though it plans to dethrone Black Panther from the top of the weekend box office this time around.  The last to weeks failed to knock Black Panther from the top of the list.

Meanwhile, seeing other movies appearing on the list, do you suppose it was an accident that Tomb Raider came out close to Easter?

CCP Revises PLEX Plan to Reconsider Aurum

To cut straight to the chase, CCP announced in a dev blog that they are not going to gyp you out of your Aurum if you have a balance less than 1,000.  Last week they were going to draw a line at 999 Aurum or less in the name of the economy and I was dubious as to whether they would hold the line on that statement.  They’ve given out lots of penny packets of Aurum since it showed up and are worried that converting it all to the new PLEX would flood the market.

Honestly, I am never going to replace this PLEX graphic

While the design of the game may have started with the line “Death is a serious matter,” death is mostly trivial in New Eden, it is the economy that keeps the game going.  They can fix death, but if they screw up the market the game is done.  But the hew and cry about lost Aurum was loud enough that they had to listen.

So instead of doing the PLEX conversions all at once, those with Aurum balances under 1,000 will get their conversion three months after the fact in an effort to buffer the impact on the economy.  There is still no word on when the initial PLEX conversion will happen, so that will be three months from whenever.

Also, as part of that dev blog I learned, as no doubt many others did, that there are actually Aurum tokens in the game.  I’ve never seen one, nor bothered to look.

Look quick before they’re gone

Those will be coming out of the game when the change hits.

CCP has also said that they will be doing sales/promotions in the New Eden Store so that if you want to spend your Aurum before the change, there will be something to buy with what you have.  They also announced a new ship SKIN for Cormorants, Caracals, and Drakes, but that comes in at 800 Aurum per SKIN and you probably only have a balance of 300, so you’ll have to wait for another offer.

Not really sure who the IGC is, but they have a nice SKIN

Meanwhile, there is always a “somebody is going to get screwed” aspect to changes like this, and while people with low Aurum balances seem to be off the hook, those who have paid Broker’s fees in order to list PLEX on the market are now the ones who will be losing out.  In the first dev blog CCP promised to refund Broker’s fees when the conversion went in and all current listings were removed.   The new dev blog though says that isn’t going to happen:

…our team discovered that we don’t actually have the ability to refund fees at all. In EVE, fees are paid as a transaction when an order is placed and not tied to the order itself.

Oops.  The back up plan here is just to give you lots of advance notice that if you list a PLEX on the market and it is there when the change comes into effect, you can kiss that ISK good-bye.  Of course, as noted above, we still don’t know when this PLEX change is going to come into effect, so we don’t know how far in advance this advance warning will be.  And, of course, CCP doesn’t have a great track record getting the word out to people, though that doesn’t distinguish them from other MMOs.  As an audience, MMO players likely aren’t as engaged as you thing they ought to be.  If you’re reading this you are a special snowflake when it comes to actually paying attention.

Furthermore, I have to wonder if getting the word out is a good plan.  What happens when people stop listing PLEX on the market to avoid the possibility of losing their Broker’s fee?  Supply will shrink and prices will go up… and if they go up enough people will start listing again because the Broker’s fee loss will be covered by the price increase if only the person listing can sell some of their stock.  Because there is likely to be a price drop once the change has been made and a lot (but not all) Aurum is converted to the new PLEX.  Maybe?

What do you think?  Is CCP going to screw up the market here, or is there enough ISK going through Jita to buffer this change?

For those interesting in hearing more on this, Talking in Stations did a show that included a discussion of the topic with CCP Rise to help sort things out.