38 Weeks of World War Bee

Another week of skirmishes and undefended structure kills in Delve.  I was inspired to revive a bit of propaganda from a past campaign in the region.  Back in 2012 the Walltreipers Alliance held out for an extended period against overwhelming odds, earning the respect of all in the campaign.  Somebody repurposed an Asterix map for that back then, which I revised to reflect the current situation.

The Siege of 1DQ1-A

In a bit of a replay, the main corporations from the 2012 Walltreipers Alliance ended up in The Initiative and are currently involved, once again, in a fight against heavy odds.

Over on the PAPI focused Trash Talk Tuesday show this past week Vily made another attempt to reel back in the comments he made to Polygon when interviewed about the goal of Legacy Coalition in the war back around week 11.  For those in need of a reminder:

When we started this war, we knew that we were fighting this to the end,” Vily told Polygon. “For us, this is a war of extermination. This is a war to the death. We are aiming for the removal of Mittani and The Imperium from Eve Online. […] We are here to purge them.

-Vily, in an interview with Polygon about the war

He has tried to walk that statement back a few times, saying he didn’t really mean it.  But the original statement wasn’t him on yet another Twitch stream speaking off the cuff.  This was an interview with an online publication, a situation where one would generally be ready with some prepared statements.  Meanwhile, his attempts to “prove” he didn’t mean it have all been hand waving, leaving one to suspect that he did mean it and that now he merely regrets its.

Vily did say that PAPI would be attacking 1DQ1-A, that they have a plan to destroy the Imperium capital.  Details were absent, as one would expect, so we will just have to wait and see if he really meant that as well.

Of course, then on Friday afternoon CCP announced their “significant update to industry” plan which seems designed to make capital ships cost 3-5x what they do today, something that will discourage any sort of bloody assault on the Imperium capital.  In addition to the usual effect of locking in the “haves” versus the “have nots” in terms of power, it is likely to make the capital “haves” much more conservative in how they use them.

This led to a cross-coalition Meta Show on Saturday, with representatives from both sides of the war discussing the possible impact of these proposed changes.  There seemed to be agreement that the rich will get richer… Malcanis wins again… but when the question of whether or not expensive capitals would mean an end to the war, neither side backed down.  Kenneth Feld of Pandemic Legion said he had titans ready to go and wasn’t leaving until 1DQ1-A had been burned to the ground, even if it took another year to get there.

So the war remains “on.”

Delve Front

PAPI had a banner week when it came to Keepstar destruction, knocking down five more in systems where they were able to put up cyno jammers in order to operate without the threat of Imperium capitals showing up to defend.

Week 73 losses

The Keepstar in 39P-1J was the KarmaFleet home base citadel, so I am going to guess a lot of stuff is on its way to asset safety.  My PI Epithal is headed that way now.

Off it goes

The coalition instructions for the last few weeks has been that if you want to keep something safe, move it to 1DQ1-A.

Otherwise the map of Delve remains the same as it was last week.  At least I can just run last week’s map, which will save me a bit of time.

Delve – Mar 28, 2021

There has been no push into the final Imperium constellation and no ihubs flipped outside of it.

Other Theaters

In Querious Brave and Severance have managed to claim all the remaining ihubs, so none are left in Imperium control.

Querious – Mar 28, 2021

That is their new home.

We are getting down to the end of the fight over Catch, as Brave has lost their final ihub in the region.  There is only a single Legacy ihub left in the region belonging to Warped Intentions, circled in red.

Catch – Mar 28, 2021

Once that is down and structure clean up has finished, Catch will cease to be a front to cover, the fighting being all but done now.

Likewise, Immensea is down to the last bits and pieces.

Immensea – Mar 28, 2021

Impass, which I haven’t bothered to post maps of, is also pretty much done, so the Legacy Coalition alliances that lived in those regions are now committed to Delve, Querious, and Fountain.

Further along in Esoteria, that region remains in play with Army of Mango and Evictus trying to backfill TEST’s space to keep it out of the hands of The Bastion and its allies.

Esoteria – Mar 28, 2021

And then down in Fountain, the most recent of the secondary theaters of operation, Federation Uprising continues to push into the region.

Fountain – Mar 28, 2021

My Participation

Another week of me going on a few ops.  I seemed to favor Mister Vee this week as I ended up on a few of his fleets, though not much came of them until a Muninn fleet yesterday that ran out to defend an armor timer on a Fortizar in 39P-1J.  We successfully did that, then went to shoot their jump bridge that connects T5ZI-S to HZAQ-W, which drew a response from them, which got us to ping for another fleet, which got more of them revved up and we soon have 1,600+ of us zipping around in HACs and dragging the server down to the point that things were not responding.  I had locked and was shooting PAPI ships at one point and getting no responses… no hits and no misses, just ammo being expended.

After that started to get really bad we decided to extract and I got stuck on the gate out because my guns wouldn’t finish cycling down so my aggression timer was stuck at 1:00 and wouldn’t start counting.  Somebody suggested spamming F1 until they responded, which eventually worked, after which I had to wait out the very slow due to tidi timer.

Waiting on the gate as ships explode around me

At 20 seconds left I became the primary and overheated my hardener and lit off my assault damage control.  With three seconds left on my timer I was at 25% shields, which gave me just enough buffer to jump though.

On the far side of the gate I arrived just in time to help kill a TEST Minokawa, which was a nice way to end the fight.

So I ended up with no losses this week, though I was very close to one, so my overall losses for the war remain:

• Ares interceptor – 17
• Malediction interceptor – 7
• Crusader interceptor – 5
• Atron entosis frigate – 6
• Rokh battleship – 5
• Scimitar logi – 4
• Ferox battle cruiser – 4
• Drake battle cruiser – 4
• Purifier stealth bomber – 3
• Guardian logi – 2
• Scalpel logi frigate – 2
• Raven battleship – 1
• Crucifier ECM frigate – 1
• Gnosis battlecruiser – 1
• Bifrost command destroyer – 1
• Cormorant destroyer – 1
• Hurricane battle cruiser – 1
• Sigil entosis industrial – 1
• Mobile Small Warp Disruptor I – 1

Other Items

As I mentioned at the top, there was CCP’s Friday afternoon announcement about the coming industry changes.

We also got the Monthly Economic Report for February, which included some new data.  I wrote a post about that.

Over at War on the Rocks, a site that explores defense policy, there is a piece up about EVE Online and the current ongoing war and how it may be relevant (and not) to current ideas on war.

And on the peak concurrent user front, the high point on Sunday was up over previous weeks, reversing the downward trend we had been seeing.  I will say, however, that peak largely seemed to be driven by the escalating fight I mentioned above, which kicked off just before the usual daily peak tends to land.  Still, it got us over 36K.

• Day 1 – 38,838
• Week 1 – 37,034
• Week 2 – 34,799
• Week 3 – 34,692
• Week 4 – 35,583
• Week 5 – 35,479
• Week 6 – 34,974
• Week 7 – 38,299
• Week 8 – 35,650
• Week 9 – 35,075
• Week 10 – 35,812
• Week 11 – 35,165
• Week 12 – 36,671
• Week 13 – 35,618
• Week 14 – 39,681
• Week 15 – 40,359
• Week 16 – 36,642
• Week 17 – 37,695
• Week 18 – 36,632
• Week 19 – 35,816 (Saturday)
• Week 20 – 37,628 (Saturday)
• Week 21 – 34,888
• Week 22 – 33,264
• Week 23 – 33,149
• Week 24 – 32,807 (Saturday)
• Week 25 – 31,611
• Week 26 – 39,667 (Saturday)
• Week 27 – 34,989 (Saturday)
• Week 28 – 34,713
• Week 29 – 35,996
• Week 30 – 38,323
• Week 31 – 38,167
• Week 32 – 37,259
• Week 33 – 35,886 (Saturday)
• Week 34 – 35,626
• Week 35 – 35,379
• Week 36 – 35,085
• Week 37 – 34,394
• Week 38 – 36,319

Related

• INN – World War Bee: Week 38
• INN – Folly and Hypocrisy in PAPI’s Extinction Campaign
• INN – To Legacy, with love, from INIT
• INN – Goons Are More Like BoB Than They Want to Admit
• INN – How Wars End
• The Meta Show – Industry Changes Discussion and the War
• War on the Rocks – All About EVE

The End of Liberty Squad

I first posted about Liberty Squad back at the start of last year.  The group was formed as a USTZ effort to deploy out of Delve and find fights in other null sec regions.  When I joined up we were off to Geminate to pick fights with Pandemic Horde.

The Liberty Squad forum bee

There was always a bit of a problem with Liberty Squad in that the membership had a large overlap with Reavers, such that either one or the other could deploy, but both could not… unless they went somewhere together… as they mostly the same people.  But that wasn’t a huge issue as Asher, the head of Reavers, is a lot more involved in coalition-wide operations these days, being one of the rare sky marshals to run a campaign and not quit the game in exhaustion once it was done.

Anyway, we got word earlier this month from Cainun that the leadership of Liberty Squad was going to take their corp out of GSF and go try something new.

By now, I expect many of you have either heard some rumors, or noticed some movements. Come this time tomorrow, the Terrifying League of Dog Fort will have left the alliance. With them go Thomas, Zed, Mapache, and myself, on a new misadventure of our own making. Liberty Squad will be without leadership, and I expect will be closed as a result. Some have expressed an interest in trying to step up to take over the reins, but those possibilities are not mine to decide, or attempt to influence.

It has been a fantastic 18 months building, and running this squad regardless of its ups, and downs. Our Uemon deployment in particular, will always be one of the more fun periods I’ve spent playing this game. It has been a pleasure running this squad, even with all you meme-riddled bastards making every drake related remark imaginable every 15 seconds on fleets. I wish all of you the best in your search for fun, and enjoyment in this terrible little game we all play.

FC grants you eternal permission to always bring your Drake from now on, fly well.

And so it goes.  I actually met most of that group at EVE Vegas last year.  They all got Liberty Squad buttons from me, including a special Canadian Drake one for Zed.

My EVE Vegas buttons

It is a bit sad to see that group go.  I flew with them many times and their fleets were a lot of fun.  But when your friends want to run off and try new things you wish them well and hope they find what they are looking for.

With this announcement there was an attempt in the forums to drum up support for a new group to be called Freedom Squad.  This made me chuckle a bit both because USTZ groups seem to always have to play on faux patriotism as a gimmick and because we had a Freedom Squad back in the day, the remnants of which became the core of Reavers.  However, this attempt was shut down pretty quickly by a director.

The thing is, creating a group to cater to those of us who just want to deploy to foreign parts was nationalized by the coalition with the formation of the Goon Expeditionary Force earlier this year.

I’m not sure which one is our forum bee yet

I think that came about because there is always some of us who want to know when the next war or whatever is going to happen and the coalition finally decided to harness that drive officially rather than leaving it to the sometimes random attention of smaller, self-formed groups that tend to depend on a small leadership group.

Which doesn’t mean those groups are going away.  Reavers and Space Violence and Black Ops are all still around.  But none of them are open to all comers these days.  They are selective.  So the GEF scratches the deployment itch for all and sundry who just want to go on the road and shoot structures… or get fights, which also happens some times.

Things change.  People move on.  Spaceships remain.

Maybe 50 for the First Time in EverQuest

I did it.  I made my low key EverQuest 20th anniversary goal, I got a character to level 50.  On a live server, naturally, and during the anniversary experience boost for the most part.  But I still did it.

Dolenz at 50… should have rolled a druid

After my first round of adventures getting to the Scarlet Desert things settled down a bit.  I found the poison vendor in the Plane of Knowledge and bought a stack of cloudy potions so I could slip through Grieg’s End by going invisible.

This guy, he has the cloudy potions

There in the Scarlet Desert I did the quest again, got the piece of gear, and then hung around to fight some more until I was closing in on level 48.

The next day I opted for the level 50 hot zone quest, leaving the Scarlet Desert behind.  For that I was pointed towards the Ruins of Sebilis, which is Kunark.  Kunark I sort of remember.

The place with the lizard people… and ruins…

The route was simple enough this time.

• Fields of Bone
• Swamp of No Hope
• Trakanon’s Teeth
• Ruins of Sebilis

Kunark has such charming place names.

The travel wasn’t up to the previous challenge.  The main points of friction were that the route pathing on the map was a bit wonky and I had to remember that you can swim up waterfalls.  Oh, and once I got to Trakanon’s Teeth I had to work with the welcome wagon waiting there to greet me.

Everybody came by to say hello

I will say, while there are some minor graphical improvements over launch day EverQuest in Kunark… for example the trees actually move a bit like there is wind… some of the textures are just bad.  I mean, I get that this is supposed to be a swampy area, but that ground texture just looks bad.

Once in the Ruins of Sebilis I was tasked to slay 5 “bok.”  I have to admit, I had no idea what that meant when set out.  But it turns out the frogloks in the area all have an association that is part of their NPC name.

In the Sebilis Ruins fighting a “dar” knight… need a “bok” for the quest

Unlike the Scarlet Desert, where I am pretty sure I was the only player in the zone, Sebilis seemed to have some traffic.  There were people coming and going, some my level, some higher level.  I was just interested in tracking down my five “bok,” but I worked through enough frogloks that I made it into level 48 on the first run.

On the second run I got my five “bok” and then hung around pulling mobs until I hit level 50.

The output, in an odd order

That was that.  I was level 50 with three full days to spare.  I am not sure I will carry on much further.  I still have Moria to attend to.  But it was nice to get there.

Then I started thinking about when I may have hit 50 previously in EverQuest and I couldn’t really come up with an answer.  In the early days, with my first… and now lost… account, I had at least one character in the 40s.  But I was very much into alts, so I had a pile of characters on the E’ci server that were in their 20s and early 30s.

That seems to have been a recurring theme.  I get close to 40 and I make an alt rather than carrying on.

So no level 50s then.

During the early days of EverQuest II, when the Station Access plan came out, some of us went and played EverQuest as well.  I might have gotten there then.

I am pretty sure I didn’t get there when The Serpent’s Spine came out and I went to play.  And Potshot and I didn’t get out of our 20s when we had our run on the Fippy Darkpaw progression server.  Our momentum having been undercut by the great Sony/SOE hacking outage.

There were a couple of other times when I have gone back to play, but in sifting through the various servers I could remember, I wasn’t able to come up with a single character at level 50 or beyond, save for the paladin on whom I used the free level 85 boost about five years back. (They don’t hand those out as often as they do for EQII, where I have a had a few such free boosts.)  And I never really played him, having gotten hung up finding my way via the zone guide back then as well.

So Dolenz might be it.  My youngest character, who started out in the tutorial less than a month and a half ago, made it.  He might be, after 20 years of on and off tinkering with the game, the first character I have that has made it to the original level cap.

Rift Prime Data Points

The dev update notes from Trion this week indicate that Rift Prime is pretty popular.

With Tiger mount his time is spent, lagging in that zone event

The update itself was to address concerns about lag people have been experiencing on the Rift Prime server during zone events.  In explaining the plan they dropped a few interesting facts that speak to the popularity of Rift Prime:

• This may come as a surprise: Some of the zone events on Prime are bigger than even the biggest, record setting events RIFT had during its beta and original launch.
• Since then, souls and abilities have gotten more numerous, more complicated, and more resource intensive, primarily in their use of server CPU.
• Even with the newer hardware that the Prime cluster is running on (it’s a beast – the newest in the company), we’ve all experienced that at times it is not always able to keep up with the mass of data.
• The reason this may affect you even when you’re personally not in a big zone event is because large numbers of people sharing your “player service” are.

So Rift Prime has seen the largest zone events ever during the life of the game.  I think this pretty much sells the idea that such servers are popular.  You can argue about whether the nostalgia factor is the draw or if it is just the idea of starting again on a fresh server where everybody is level one is what brings people to them, but this reaffirms the popularity of such servers overall.

This also corrects my own pet theory, that Trion wasn’t really sold on the idea of Rift Prime and so used whatever hardware they had to hand to stand it up.  Instead we’re apparently playing on the biggest, baddest hardware that Trion has.  Nice to know.

Finally, it is interesting to me at least that abilities that were added or updated after Rift’s early peak have come back to haunt the game with the boost in popularity it has achieved with Rift Prime.   A quote on that:

However, nothing on Live compares to the crazy things that a couple of abilities were doing on Prime. (We’re looking at YOU, Elemental Barrage and Wrathful Exuberance!)

And so it goes.

SuperData says Fortnite Continuing to Climb

The February digital revenue numbers from SuperData Research are out and they show what SuperData has already been going on about; the rise of Fortnite.

SuperData Research Top 10 – February 2018

On the PC side of things Fortnite is still behind PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, but that is PUBG’s strong spot.  On the console side of thing Fortnite is alone in third position with PUBG nowhere to be seen.  And when it comes to live stream viewership, the metric of the hour, Fortnite owns.

On the PC side of things both games kept ahead of World of Warcraft on the revenue front.  World of Tanks, which just saw a big update, tucked in behind WoW, displacing CS:GO, which fell to tenth, while ninth position saw Hearthstone pop up onto the list.  We’ll see next month if World of Tanks benefits from the update.

On the console side list Call of Duty: WWII continued to hold the top spot, while FIFA 18 and Fortnite both pushed ahead of Monster Hunter World.  The long on the list GTA V held on in fifth position.

And on the mobile list Candy Crush Saga stayed in fourth place while Lineage M dropped one position to eighth and Pokemon Go moved up to ninth.  Both PUBG and Fortnite have their own mobile versions on the way so the battle between these titles may eventually expand to all three lists on the chart.

The Ongoing Tension Between Solo and Grouping

In which we are reminded that the “group-solo” dynamic in MMORPGs is not settled and likely never will be.

I have been thinking about the solo/grouping dynamic a bit after a couple of previous posts regarding World of Warcraft and EVE Online.

Yesterday the 7.2 patch went live for WoW, and one of the key items in it for a lot of people was the ability to finally finish up the achievements to unlock flying in the expansion.

Now available

The grind to get there seems, to me, to indicate how much the devs would like you not to be able to fly until you’ve walked the whole expansion. (WoWHead has a nice little tool to track your progress towards unlocking flying.)

However, participating in a raid… which at one point was never going to be available via LFR, then was going to be available via LFR at some much later date… is no longer on the list.  The achievements for unlocking flying are available to the dedicated soloist.

Given the situation, where we learned back during Warlords of Draenor that a very vocal subset of the WoW population believes that flying is part of the social contract between them and Blizzard, and where Blizzard seems to have agreed after its own protestations, making it a soloable venture is the right decision.  “You must raid” as a prerequisite for flying is a non-starter, even with something like LFR available.

Then over in New Eden, CCP announced their plans for refineries in EVE Online.  One key aspect of the change involved moon mining.  Rather than being the passive activity it is now where, once the POS is setup and configured all you do is flying out to it once in a while and collect the resulting moon goo, moon mining is going to become an active process where chunks of the moon will be ripped from its surface to float in space where people will need to undock and harvest it.

Moon chunks in spaaaaaaace!

My own reaction to this was to wonder if this new method would be fun for people as an ongoing mechanic or initially fun before turning into yet another aspect of EVE Online that is grindy boring.  But I do not mine moons… or asteroids or anything really any more… so my thoughts on the topic were fairly brief.

Kirith Kodachi though, he saw this as a blow against the null sec empires.  Rather than being able to simply put up towers and collect the proceeds, people were going to have to work to get those essential… essential to tech II production… moon resources.  And that certainly seems to be the case.  Harvesting moon goo is going to be more work.

Enter Neville Smit, whose own follow up post to the CCP announcement takes this thought a step further.  He sees this as yet another squeeze on the solo New Eden entrepreneur.  Who besides the null sec alliances is organized enough to adapt to these new mechanics both effectively and efficiently?  It is the CSM elections all over again, where a large group that had to organize by necessity is thus already poised to take advantage of something where organization is a critical element.

Basically, the rich get richer and Malcanis wins again.  What is a solo capsuleer to do?

Azeroth and New Eden are drastically different places, but they both still end up walking that same path between what can be done solo and what should require a group, organized or otherwise.

World of Warcraft owes a healthy chunk of its success to enabling solo play.  It is one thing to pine for the good old days of EverQuest, but the fact that solo wasn’t a thing put a cap on its popularity.  So WoW has to keep on the path of allowing solo play to be viable to keep subscribers.  They have to play it safe and not do anything crazy like… say… making mobs in WoW Legion scale to your item level rather than just your level so your daily faction grind becomes a chore… and give solo players crutches in the form of dungeon finder to let them dip their toes into grouping without commitment.

EVE Online, on the other hand, does pride itself on being… difficult.  That alone has put a cap on how many subscribers it can ever hope to have.  But it has been reasonably good at not explicitly killing the viability of solo play, at least for specific definitions of “solo.”  Are you still “solo” if you are multi-boxing multiple accounts?  You don’t need half a dozen people to sign your corp charter or need to form a fleet of a given size to attempt content… you’ll likely get blown up if you do, but if you want to try you’re welcome.

And, in that spirit, there is nothing that specifically prohibits a solo player from trying to set up a refinery to moon mine, just like there isn’t anything specifically prohibiting a solo player from trying to take null sec space.  They can have at it all they want, it is just likely to end badly.  And I think it is okay to have content that requires group play.  But I wonder if CCP should be trying harder for solo and smaller group play, especially when it comes to making changes to things that were once viable for those groups.