Twenty Weeks of World War Bee

The plan was always we were going to move into Delve and Period Basis at some point.

-Vily, TEST Alliance SOTA

This past week on the CCP front, the company released the Monthly Economic Report for October which showed the extent of the destruction that occurred in Delve over the course of the five consecutive big fights early last month.

NPC Delve stands out on the map

Of the 45 trillion ISK destroyed that CCP recorded, 10.89 trillion ISK of that happened in Delve.  That is 24% of the destruction in the game, most of which occurred over a one week period.

The MER also showed how mineral prices have spiked to an all time high due to CCP’s starvation plan.

Oct 2020 – Economic Indices – Look at that mineral price spike at the end

CCP nerfing mining hard last month and nerfing ratting this month will have some impact, but with the World of Warcraft Shadowlands expansion landing later today, if CCP sees a dip in players it will likely be the call of Azeroth that did it.

Then there were two alliance announcements from the invaders, one from TEST and one from Pandemic Horde, which paint different pictures of their respective war goals.

Vily got up in front of TEST and trotted out the same vilification message that Goons are dumb and bad and their leaders needs to be driven from the game and the line members must repent of their bad choices.  Also, he wants to sit on our face, which I guess means he’s trying neg us or something?  Look, he said it, not me.  I just think of that as an incentive to keep fighting for as long as possible.

Also, as I pointed out in the quote at the top, TEST plans to come live in Delve and Period Basis which, again, is awkward given we’re still there.

TEST holdings in Orange

They do have all of Period Basis now, so I suppose they can start there.

Currently TEST lives primarily in Esoteria, Paragon Soul, and part of Feythabolis.

Current TEST home areas in Orange – Also, orange poop emoji?

Those areas will be up for grabs if they are really all in on Delve and not just making an excuse for their backfield home systems being attacked.  But the plans about avoiding our Keepstars and just smoking us out over time do not seem to have changed.

Then Gobbins posted an update for PanFam in their Discord on Saturday, after the Keepstar was anchored in T5ZI-S, announcing that “The Great Siege of 1DQ” had begun.  Also, they’re going to invade Fountain again, but this time from the south.  But primarily they want to burn “Rome” (1DQ), though they primarily interested in the faction Fortizars there, which were part of the treaty with GotG back in 2018, not the Keepstars.  They also want to blow up anything not secure behind the Helms Deep citadel in E3OI-U, after which they might be done.

Delve Front

In Delve there was much of the same going on as before.  As I mentioned earlier in the week, while ihubs continued to change hands, PAPI pushed hard to get the ihub T5ZI-S down, which opened the way for them to drop a Keepstar there.

PAPI Keepstar in T5ZI-S

The Imperium opted not to engage in another bloodbath to kill a Keepstar the way we did in early October, there being another one in the region already.  Without an opposition it went online successfully and put their new staging just one gate from 1DQ1-A.

Delve – Nov. 22, 2020 – Now with more annotations

What that they are… closer to us.  Maybe that means they will start attacking 1DQ1-A or that fights will be more likely.  The idea being floated that it cuts us off from Fountain though, I am not sure what that buys anybody.  But the war will get more real… or it won’t.

Other Theaters

Fountain.  I guess, given the above statements, PandaFam is invading there.  Reliving past glory?  Given that The Initiative retook a bunch of the ihubs and has since moved to join the Imperium foothold in Esoteria, there isn’t a lot stopping them.  Some theoretical capital ships are “trapped” there in Gobbins’ vision of things, but I’ve heard tales of trapped capitals before.  For a long time the same people were telling us the Imperium super and titan fleet was trapped in 93PI-4.  And then suddenly it wasn’t.

Querious remains an ongoing low intensity war over ihubs.  The invaders finally broke into “fake” Querious and took some of those ihubs after weeks of trying.  Now they have to hold them.

Querious – Nov. 22, 2020

And down in Esoteria the Imperium campaign has carried on.  The Bastion, Ferrata Victrix, and The Initiative have held on to their gains and even added another ihub to their record.

NW Esoteria – Nov. 22, 2020

If Vily’s SOTA speech is true, that group over there should be able to gain more ground if TEST is really moving to Delve.

My Participation

I went on a number of ops over the past week, but few ended up in a fight.  If the enemy shows up with double or more our numbers, we don’t feed them an easy victory.  The best skirmish was yesterday when a TEST Ragnarok warped off on its own and got dropped and killed by a dread bomb.  That drew a big response.

Behold their titan rage form

I bridged in with a Cerb fleet for support and, while too late for the titan kill, we managed to pick off a few hostiles, including an enemy FC, before heading home.  Screwing around in Delve just two jumps from our capital… well, there is a saying for that.

In the end, no losses for me, so my total remains as follows:

• Ares interceptor – 11
• Crusader interceptor – 5
• Rokh battleship – 5
• Atron entosis frigate – 5
• Ferox battle cruiser – 3
• Drake entosis battle cruiser – 3
• Purifier stealth bomber – 2
• Guardian logi – 2
• Malediction interceptor – 2
• Scalpel logi frigate – 2
• Raven battleship – 1
• Crucifier ECM frigate – 1
• Gnosis ratting battlecruiser – 1
• Scimitar logi – 1
• Bifrost entosis command destroyer – 1
• Cormorant destroyer – 1
• Hurricane battle cruiser – 1
• Sigil entosis industrial – 1
• Mobile Small Warp Disruptor I – 1

Other Items

The EVE NT Alliance Tournament wrapped up on Sunday, with the final match up being Templis CALSF versus Warlords of the Deep.  That ended up with Templis CALSF winning the final best of five matches with three straight victories.  They lost no matches and came out on top.

And then there was the weekly peak concurrent user count, which again happened on Saturday rather than Sunday, likely due to the Keepstar in T5ZI-S anchoring right at prime time, which had about 6,000 of us sitting around waiting for the other side to jump into us.  No fight occurred, but lots of us logged on.

• 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)

Related

• INN – World War Bee: Week 20
• INN – TEST Alliance SOTA
• Image – Gobbins PandaFam plans
• New Eden Post – World War Bee 2 Rages On
• INN – Fueling the War Machine – Logistics

No. I’d Rather Kill Rats.

In keeping with the anniversary theme of this year, and dipping once again into the Computer Gaming World archive.  I give you the ad that ran in the December 2004 issue, which hit news stands and mail boxes in November.

Computer Gaming World Issue 245 – December 2004

A two-page spread isn’t so bad.  Since I am working from a scan, ads spread across two pages don’t line up unless I leave an appropriate gap.  That is a decent screen shot to capture a bit of the game.  It feels like it is in Stranglethorn Vale maybe?  I’m sure somebody will know where it is set.  I’m not sure there is such a dragon there abouts, but maybe there was at one time.

The only fly in the ointment was that the ad was way back on pages 78-79.  That’s the back half of the magazine, the cheap seats.  Diablo II didn’t have to put up with anything that far back in the magazine.  That position placed it lower in precedence than the horrible Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude ad, another Vivendi title, which got the opening pages, and the IGE.com gold seller ad, which holds the back cover.

I suppose at least it was a few pages ahead of the Saga of Ryzom ad.

You might get a sense of how tentative the launch date for WoW actually was from this ad.  Placement of ad copy has to happen a couple months in advance.  So when this ad suggests that you sign up for the beta, it means that likely back in August or so they were really not feeling firm about November.

Again, as I have said in the past, CGW isn’t any sort of definitive measure.  It wasn’t the biggest video game magazine out there.  But it was scrappy and it jumped on big titles to sell copies.  And on the cover of that issue was EverQuest II.  You can see that cover, and download a .pdf of the whole thing, here.

Anyway, happy fifteenth anniversary to World of Warcraft!  I didn’t get around to playing until early March 2005.  When WoW launched I was with Jeff Green, wading into post-cataclysm Norrath wondering if the lighting that was EverQuest might strike twice.

Also, you can totally kill rats in Azeroth if you want.  Sure, that quest in the tram station just has you charm them, but with the implication that they were to be turned into kebabs, which I find to be something of a distinction without a difference.  And the fact that they went hard on the bear, boar, wolf quest kill quests doesn’t exactly represent a leap in the genre.

Where they really innovated was in the realm of poop and outhouse related quests.  Why don’t we have a trailer about that?  Where is my poop parade?

Oh, and today also marks the 25th anniversary since the launch of the Warcraft franchise.

Warcraft has been a thing for almost half my lifetime.

Wandering Castle Drulak

Back to TorilMUD and maybe the final chapter of my Leuthilspar Tales series.

Out on Evermeet, the island of the elves in TorilMUD, at the end of the long path that leads from Leuthilspar, maybe three score rooms away, one comes to a dead end, a clearing with a well.  The room description, like so many in the game, gives little away.

A Clearing
The path opens into a beautiful clearing. A well with blue, sparkling water, reflecting the sun’s light, is surrounded by a ring of young silverleaf trees. Mats of lush moss and grass grow around the well. Flowers, orchids and small bushes full with red berries add to this pleasant and peaceful scenery. A gentle wind breezes across the well and makes the trees whisper a silent song. The path ends at the well and it might be a good idea to fill your drinking containers at it. The only way back is the path leading south to the forest.

The well has water in it.  You can drink from it or, as the description suggests, fill you flagon or water skin from it.  Otherwise there isn’t much more to see.

But long trails that end may rooms in are suspicious by their very existence in a MUD.  So of course you search the room, and if your intelligence is high enough, or you persist long enough, eventually you will find something.

You find a secret exit north!

A secret exit.  Some bushes you can… um… open… MUD syntax, sorry… allowing you to pass north into the zone we called Castle Drulak.

On the list of zones in the credits it is just called “Drulak.”

Drulak ————————— levels 25-50

That is an odd level range for a zone on Evermeet.  As with the Sylvan Glades, it wasn’t a zone to solve the most immediate problems facing a young elf or half-elf.  It wasn’t a place to level up so you could get the hell off of Evermeet.  By level 25 most elves were long gone from island.  With a group of level 17 to 19 elves you might venture into the zone to hunt for experience, but you were better off in the Elder Forest or at Anna’s.

Leuthilspar and Vicinity

And despite its name, the zone isn’t just a castle like, say, the zone Ice Crag Castle is.  There is a castle in the zone, with the right name.

Outside of Castle Drulak
A large and dark looking castle towers before you. Its walls look very grim
and uncomfortable and sometimes dark figures walk on top of the castle’s walls.
What is truly amazing of the whole buidling is that it floats in the air. The
only way you see leads inside the castle through a large double stone door, of
course there is another way too, but then you had to fly through the clouds.
From where you stand you can look downwards and all you see are little houses
and a lake far below you. The wind is very cold outside the castle and seems
to blow from each direction. Surely it is much warmer inside the castle. One
or the other way.

And you can go in and explore it.  It has guards and towers and a cook and a librarian, but isn’t otherwise all that spectacular.  It seems like a side show in the zone.

Well, that isn’t really fair.  The castle is about as big a deal as most things in the zone.  But that is the issue, there are a lot of disparate things in the Drulak zone.  Let’s look at the zone.

Drulak Zone Map

You might need to click on the map to blow it up to full size in order to read everything on it.  The chaos of font sizes was going to have some meaning, but then I forgot about it half way through and now there is no meaning.  If I had done the text as its own layer, I could have fixed that easily, but I am old, from a time before layers, so I often forget to do that.

You can see Castle Drulak there in the upper left, with the distinctive castle shape, towers out at the corners.

Just south of it there is the gypsy camp.  There is a vendor there, but they carry no stock, so I imagine the camp is there to let you clear inventory.

To the east of the castle is Turtle Lake, infested with dragon turtles.  But they are not aggro, so you can move about on the lake freely if you have a boat or a spell of levitation or fly on you.  Boats are just something you carry in your inventory in TorilMUD and not a vessel you might actually sail about with.

On the lake there are two points that go down.  One leads to an old sorcerer whose purpose I have forgotten.  The other needs water breathing, which I lacked when I went to explore.  Something is down there.

Then there is the cave of Ferentybylynxaferix the dragon.  He was needed for a quest and I was occasionally asked to go scout to see if he had spawned.

In the middle of the zone there is the farm.  Out front there is the depressed elven farmer.

The way this elf is dressed and handles his weapons convinces you that
he has not been a farmer forever. An aura of strength seems to surround
him and as his eyes rest on you, you can feel it. But there is also some
kind of sadness in his eyes. His whole face is grimacing as if a great
pain would rest inside him. He is dressed with some soft leather cloths
and wears two longswords at his belt.
A farmer is a medium-sized level 41 Moon Elf.
He is in excellent condition.

<worn on body> a soft leather armor
<primary weapon> a silver longsword

He is down because his children are ill.  They are in the house behind him.  Though the fact that his description says he wears two longswords, yet hold only one might be getting him down as well.  His leather armor was worth some platinum, so I used to make a point of putting him out of his misery back in the day.

South of the farm is a hollow tree that contains a bee hive.  The guardian bees are aggro, defending their queen who wears a golden tiara.

South of that, and actually before the clearing that hides the entrance to the zone proper, is the bugbear caves.  Grumtar the bugbear chief and Markor the bugbear shaman are the bosses in the caves.

Then there is the chasm that leads down to a camp.  However, to get into the camp you need to have detect invisible cast on you as the key to get in is not only hidden, but invisible.  I had to pass on that during my tour.

But the key location I recall in the zone is the Temple of Labelas Enoreth.

It has been abandoned and is overrun by ghosts of the former caretakers and priests, cursed to haunt the grounds of the temple.  At the east end of the temple is a locked door.  To get through you must obtain the marble stone head from the hag who lives below the temple.  As in most thing, this means killing her.  You then hand the head to the headless statue who gives you the crimson key that unlocks the door.

Behind the door is a lifesized statue of Labelas Enoreth.  It lives, and when you speak to it, the statue gives you a quest.

The statue slowly turns to you and says “Have you come to redeem them?”

ask statue redeem

The statue says, “To redeem the people of this area in my eyes three things
must be done. A quest must be completed to banish the evil that this temple
has become.”

ask statue quest

The statue says, “Three items must be gained and brought to me. In return
an object of great value shall be given showing that you have redeemed
yourself and your people in my eyes.”

ask statue items

The statue says, “The three items shall come from varying parts of the world.
The first is that of a queen whose followers only duty is to her. The second
is the striped hide of a foul beast from far away. The third is an item worn
on the hands that has one of my beloved creatures worked into their make-up.”

And that is all you get.  Again, questing in the age of MUDs was a bit more cryptic.

The first item, as I recall, comes from the queen bee in the zone, while I think the second is a drop from the displacer beast, which is found in the lands east of Waterdeep, near the Lava Tubes.  I cannot think of what the third one might be, though I know our group did this quest more than a few times.

The reward was an elven blade which I had to query Katumi bot about several times until I got the right one:

Katumi tells you ‘a slender elven Moonblade (Wield) Dam:2 Hit:2 * (Weapon) Dice:2D6 * Procs: ‘labelas’ Protection of the Forest 1/week – Power Of The Stars * Magic !Dwarf !Evil !Halfling !Human !Neut * Wt:5 Val:0p * Zone: Drulak (Q) * Last ID: 2011-01-01′

Not a bad sword, though something I think we all went and collected for low level elven alts as opposed to using it on out mains.

And so it goes.  I think I have covered all the major zones on Evermeet.  I started this series back in 2009, so it has only taken me nine years to get there.

The whole series:

• Getting to Kobold Village – Sep 2009
• Exciting Ways to Die in Kobold Village – Oct 2009
• The Kobold Temple of the Unholy – Oct 2009
• Lost in the Faerie Forest – Oct 2009
• A Visit with the Tako Demon – Oct 2011
• The Age of the Discriminating Vendor – Jan 2013
• Fox Tails, Goblins, and Bandor’s Flagon – Mar 2014
• Elves Unchained in TorilMUD – May 2016
• Up All Night in Leuthilspar – Sep 2016
• The Elemental Glades – Nov 2017
• Disappointment in the Sylvan Glades – Jul 2018
• Solonor Saves the Elves with the Elder Forest – Sep 2018

Thirteen Years of This in Azeroth

I stood there in the rain amongst the looted corpses and burning huts.

The scene, repeated over and over…

As I surveyed the grisly scene, the reasoning behind the task seemed less and less plausible.  Did I really have to kill them all and burn down their huts?  Was there some other way where both sides could have gotten what they wanted?

Well, at least that guy promised me some gold for this… and guys like that always pay… always about the same amount too… like there was some sort of industry standard price for this sort of thing.  Hrmm…

Maybe the next task will be different.

Happy Birthday World of Warcraft.

A Secluded Mansion in Minecraft

With the Ascension expansion in EVE Online and Pokemon Sun & Moon having landed last week, I was perhaps a bit surprised when I ended up playing more Minecraft than anything else over the weekend and since.

Of course, there was a Minecraft update and Aaron’ mansion adventure to inspire.  After that I decided I wanted to go find one as well.  That meant getting one of the new cartographer villagers to spawn, since each one only sells a map to a single woodland mansion.  I headed to one of the villages I had walled in, lit, and tended to, added a bunch of additional doors (as the number of doors dictates the maximum population of a village) and started feeding the current villagers their favorite things to get them to produce new villagers.  I managed to get a cartographer on the second try and, after he grew up and I stuffed him full of paper to encourage his trading, he offered me a new woodland mansion map.

The maps are somewhat generic looking, giving you a general sketch of the area where the mansion is placed.  It also puts a little marker representing the hold, which shows your position relative to the destination.  The marker gets bigger when you get close, and once you get on the actual map grid, it begins to fill in like a regular in-game map.  I forgot to take a screen shot of my initial map, so here are a couple of samples from the wiki.

A cartographer with woodland mansion and ocean monument maps

Map in hand, I put together some supplies… a full stack of food, a set of tools, four stacks of torches because I like to light things, flint and tinder for when I really want to light thing up, a boat, 10 obsidian blocks, and a stack of wood.  I didn’t have any wool handy from where I set out, so I took a pair of clippers along as well, hoping to shear some sheep as I went.  That actually worked out well, as sheep were plentiful at various points.

My map showed the mansion I was seeking was northeast of where I was (Aaron’s mansion was to the west) so I set out to find it.  I left our explored area north of the prismarine bridge on the rail line.  North of there is ocean, so I was hoping to travel as far as I could by boat, which is both fast and doesn’t require you to stop at night.

And, as it happened, I did manage to make much of the trip by boat, though I did have to cross stretches of land at times, including the last stretch.  I moved northeast when I could, trying to get my little marker to move.  Eventually I found myself lined up on the east-west axis, and just had to travel north.  After a couple hours of travel I eventually found myself on the map grid and closing in on the mansion.  My path was a little more wandering than Aaron’s, as a render of the world after I arrived shows.

Aaron, straight west, me, northish…

I was up past the -26,000 line on the x axis, though still lined up with our core area on the z axis.  But I had found the mansion.

The mansion in the woods

Following Aaron’s example, I built a small house outside the front step of the mansion.  There was plenty of wood to hand, being in the middle of a canopy forest, so I was able to build all the amenities.  I also setup a furnace, fueled by wood, in order to turn wood into charcoal to resupply my torch supply, which had run short.  And even still there was so much forest about that I started setting fire to it just to get a some sky above me.  Slash and burn exploration.

Burn baby burn… also my wood hut

I did managed to not burn down the mansion by removing trees that were up against it before I started setting things alight.

The mansion amid the burned woods… the remaining wood is easy to harvest

With more light shining everywhere, I was feeling better about diving into the mansion.  Aside from the usual monsters that spawn in the dark, there were some vindicators and evokers, the new “illagers,” to take care of.  Both seemed susceptible to ranged fire, so I stood back with my bow and killed them.  The vexes, summoned by the evokers, were the most difficult to deal with.

The mansion cleared, I explored its various rooms and stowed away my loot… including five totems of the undying.

That done, I was there, more than 20km from the nearest outpost, with a big mansion and dwindling supplies.  The mansion was a great place but, when it comes to the usual real estate litmus test, it failed on the top three items, “location, location, location.”  I was sort of stuck.

I did manage to pick up some additional supplies.  Along the way I found a desert temple, which I setup as a living station.  On clearing that out, I obtained some watermelon seeds and a saddle.  I also picked up a potato somewhere, probably from a zombie.

The saddle came in handy, as there were a lot of horses in the fields not too far from the mansion.  A lot of horses.  I think they must have really upped the spawn rate for horses.

A few of the horses within sight of the mansion

I took the seeds and my one potato and started a farm to build up my food supply.  One potato became three, three became seven, and so on until I had a couple of rows growing.

The horse hanging about the farm

I also had to dig the usual mine, so I began to tunnel down to level 12 in order to start collecting iron, diamonds, and cobblestone for the next project.  The next project was, of course, setting up some sort of link to home.

I had dragged along 10 blocks of obsidian in order to make a nether portal.  My idea was to do what we did with Aaron in reverse.  I would portal into the nether, get up into the roof, and start a transit tunnel headed south for the main hub.  That seemed easy enough.  I just needed a bunch of cobblestone for a tower up into the roof.

So I built the portal in the foyer of the mansion, lit it, and stepped through carefully.  It came out on a flat outcropping of netherrack, high up, but not too high, over the usual lake of lava.  I build a building of cobblestone around it, leaving a hole in the roof to start my climbing tower.

The tower went along easily enough, my main problem being cobblestone supplies.  I had to go back and mine more in the world.  And then I got to the roof of the nether and began to feel a bit of anxiety.  I didn’t want to bore straight up through the netherrack, lest I hit a lava patch and have it pour straight down on me.  So I expanded my current platform a bit and tried digging at an angle, just to poke up into things.  I was at about level 95 and I only needed to get up to around 119 to be level with our transit hub.

And, of course, I hit a lava bubble.  It wasn’t bad.  It was pouring down the side of my tower, all I had to do was plug it up.

And I missed.  And missed again, and then panicked as the lava flowed towards me, then dropped into the tower and plugged the top to keep any lava from pouring straight down into my portal room.

So now I was in a bit of a fix, with lava pouring all over my work.  So I got myself up on the roof of the portal building and started building a repair tower to get myself high enough to re-route and plug the lava leak.

Lava pouring down

After a couple of false starts, I was doing well getting up the side when I heard the cry of a ghast, followed quickly by the sound of it launching a missile at me.  I had fought off a couple of them already, but I was standing in a precarious spot at that moment and its shot knocked me right into the lava flow.

I quickly jumped out and off the side tower, heading down into the portal room and through into the world, hoping to be able to jump into the little pond by my farm before I died.  I did not make it, and my gear was strewn about the foyer as I died.

On the plus side, my gear was safe and close to hand.  On the downside, all my levels had disappeared, and with them my ability to repair my diamond pick, which was already showing yellow on its wear bar.  Levels are used to repair things, and without them my having the iron for an anvil and diamonds to the repair job were not much good.

Still, I was at least together.  I got back up on the repair tower and eventually plugged the lava flow at its source, then finished more drive up into the roof of the nether.  I hollowed out a room and moved the portal up there, by which point my diamond pick was into the red for wear.

I took some time to ride around and see if I could scout a good overland horse path to the ocean, from which I could sail back to our explored area.  That still might be viable, but it will take some time.  It will still likely be quicker to tunnel through the nether to our transit hub and then lay rail.  It just looks like I might end up doing it with iron picks, which mine slower and wear out much more quickly.

So there I am, stuck far from home, building a new one and a road in between the two.