WordAds Unleashed

As mentioned/promised/threatened previously, I turned on ad for the blog on October 1st.

For those just catching up, WP.com announced that they were going to start injecting “sponsored” posts into blogs that were on the free plan, and while I was technically on a grandfathered “No Ads” plan, my plan was still listed as “free,” so I opted to upgrade to the Premium plan.

Premium features

Among the features of the Premium plan is to be able to earn ad revenue.  So, in a swap of no small irony, I went from paying to have no ads on the blog to paying more to allow ads on the blog.  The hope is to offset the price of the premium plan.

The WordAds feature in WP.com… not to be confused with Google’s AdWords I guess, though I think Google changed that name a while ago… is easy enough to turn on when you have Premium.  You flick a switch, fill out a form, get processed for eligibility, and then you’re in.   Or I was in, anyway, the bar being low enough to allow that.

Having turned it on I went to my work laptop where I have browsers setup without Ad Block to see what happened.

For a while, there was nothing.  It takes some time to get going.  And then, suddenly, there were ads.  Ads in the side bar, ads anchored to the scroll bar, ads around posts, ads in posts every three paragraphs… the place was quickly swimming in ads.  Too many ads.

So I went back to the settings and dialed that back some.  The meanings of the settings are a bit… vague.  I mean, I know what “Display ads below posts…” means in my head, but what toggling that setting on and off did was not lining up with my expectations.

The ads, as most places, are served up based on what you, the reader, have been snooped on doing on the internet.  I thought it was pretty funny that one of the first ads I was served was about blocking ads.

Know your audience I guess

I also found it amusing that it injected an ad for hearing aids below the group picture in yesterday’s post about the group playing Diablo II where I identified us as an aging rock act.

Now it is showing me ads for Macy’s because my wife was looking at their online ad, which just shows they’re lumping us together in the same IP address.

Apparently I even earned some money my first day out, netting 8 cents towards my eventual payout, which comes at the $100 mark.  I also get a new stats tab on my admin page that tells me about revenue and number of ads served.  Something new for the annual blog review post I guess.  Another horrible metric to report on.

Anyway, if you see ads, this is why.  But if you have an ad blocker setup, which I do recommend, you won’t see any.   You also, so far as I can tell, won’t see any ads if you view my posts in a reader like Feedly.

As always, your feedback on this change is welcome.

Wide Screen

A very astute reader of the blog might have noticed that, recently, some of my screen shots included in posts were a bit… wider… than normal.  That last screen shot on my post about WoW Classic alts was different that the rest.

And some screen shots in the post about the battle at 46-U6U in EVE Online featured some screen shots like that as well.

This is because I recently was able to borrow a Dell U3415W monitor.  The “34” refers to it being 34″ diagonal in size.  It is a big monitor.  Perhaps the biggest one I have ever worked on, at least when it comes to screen resolution.

It displays at 3440 x 1440 resolution.  That is a lot of pixels to push.  My main monitor, a 24″ Dell U2412M was just 1920 x 1200 for comparison.

But the first thing was to find room for it on my desk.  The monitor is big enough that it is curved slightly, so that the whole screen stays in your peripheral vision.  I was able to squeeze it in there and still keep my little (1600 x 900) secondary monitor on the side, so I can play full screen and still be able to see IMs or pull up maps or quest info or whatever.

It fits there

The main problem is what to do with my Snowball microphone.  It used to sit off to the side of the old monitor, but cable reach and space constraints now mean it has to it somewhere in front of one of the monitors.  Unfortunately, it is just tall enough that it blocks something no matter where I put it.  So it moves around at need for the moment.

And once I had the monitor hooked up… well… let me tell you, your perceptions about desktop space and what windows need to be opened up full screen change.  It was kind of crazy, having that much room for stuff on the screen.  I wondered how I would get used to it… and then about an hour later I was.

You certainly don’t need to expand most things to take up the full screen.  Web sites, text documents, chat windows, they can all live in much smaller spaces.  Spreadsheets though!  Now there is some full screen magic.

But first I was on to games.

I wanted to know what games would actually support a 3440 x 1440 resolution.  What could I play full screen?

Perhaps unsurprisingly, World of Warcraft was totally fine with the big screen.  In perhaps a bit of a surprise though, WoW Classic is also good with that much real estate.

A Plaguelands panorama

The UI scales fine, nothing is awkwardly out of place, no bits are stretched, everything is anchored in what feels like just the right spot, and playing in a world that extends to the edge of your vision is actually pretty cool.  I got used to that very quickly.

EVE Online, my other much have, likewise seemed fine with a big screen, though the client has been somewhat resolution agnostic for a while.  It will size to whatever screen you want.  The UI does get pretty small and things you need to click on… and you need to click on many things in EVE Online… can seem pretty far apart until you move around some of the UI, but it works.  And the view can be breathtaking.

In the slow motion scrum of battle

Games that are screen size agnostic, games like RimWorld, had not problem with the bigger monitor.  You just get to see more real estate.  I was a bit surprised to find that Age of Empires II HD was good with the resolution.

An RTS panorama

The awkward bit is that the game anchors the mini-map and the build controls at the lower corners, which are way far apart and distant from whatever you are likely doing on the main screen at any given moment.  Not so bad if you have memorized the key controls.  But if you’re like me and need to click, the sheer distance will slow you down.

Other games worked with varying degrees of success.  EverQuest II seemed good with the screen size overall, save for the experience and control bar at the bottom of the screen, which only scales to about half that width.

I guess it anchors on the left size of the screen

However, the view of the landscape, in the newer zones at least, was very nice.

It’s older sibling, EverQuest, gamely tried to follow suit.  Launching the game, the windows seemed disinclined to stretch and just stayed their usual defaults.  Once in the game, things opened up as it tried to accommodate the wideness of the new reality.

Let’s get wide in Norrath

The UI ended up getting stretched across the screen as things tried to remain relatively spaced. The UI settings acknowledged the screen size, but the view into the world felt a bit stretched across the horizontal plane.

Likewise, Lord of the Rings Online started up fairly awkwardly. As it started up windows were stretched, controls were stretched, and the signs looks bad. But once in the game, things settled down. The UI had a few quirks… when you open up your bags they all have unnecessarily space between them… but otherwise looked good.

From middle to wide earth

I was at least covered on some of the older games I play. I haven’t dug through them all yet, and some are up front about not supporting anything wider that 2560 x 1440. Diablo III falls in that category, not that I have played it recently.

Probably the only downside I’ve seen so far is Minecraft. It runs just fine and scales up to the right size without issue. And when looking out on the world it is quite a sight. But the moment I turn left or right, the way it handles motion blur at the edges of the screen starts to give me a bit of motion sickness. (I get the head ache sort, not the nausea sort.) That might be something I could get used to, but it was unpleasant so I stopped playing around with it pretty quickly.

And then, of course, there is my video card. When I built my current system about two years back, I went with an EVGA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB video card. That was a decent choice as it appears to be just about able to handle the big screen when running some of these games. When I used the GeForce Experience to optimize my graphic settings for the new monitor, it did turn down the detail on some titles. Even with WoW Classic, which I had been running max settings on, needed a couple of settings dialed back a bit.

Of course, I immediately started looking into new video cards, but the timing is bad. Not only is there the whole “kid in college” level of expenses to deal with at the moment, but nVidia just announced a new lineup, but the older cards haven’t seen a price break yet. Maybe by Christmas time there will be a decent upgrade at a good price.

That assumes I’ll get to hang on to the monitor for a while, though it might be one of those things where once you have had this much screen space you can never go back.

[This post was written in WordPress.com’s new “block editor,” about which I will complain at a later date. It is not only awkward to use, but makes the post look different from other posts if you look closely. WP.com deployed the block editor while I was writing this, and I thought I was trapped with it, but I have since figured out how to continue to use the “classic” editor going forward.]

The Ogres of Loch Modan

Loch Modan occupies the same spot in the level curve as Westfall, being good for players up to about level 20.  It has long been my practice… since my first serious ventures into WoW… to run both the human and dwarf/gnome starter zones.  The pacing is about right if you bypass a quest here and there, and you never start running up against quests in the orange or red range.

That and I enjoy both zones.  They are similar in being smallish zones that feel bigger than they are, yet very different in layout.  Westfall has you ranging out from Sentinal Hill near its middle while Loch Modan is almost the inverse, with the loch in the middle forcing players to travel in a circle around it.

Loch Modan – Classic Map

Unlike Westfall however, Loch Modan does not have a dungeon at the end of its main quest line.  Even with the vanilla experience curve there is probably a limit to the number of low level dungeons you need.

There are, however, come elite ogres to battle with if you want a group challenge, congregated in the Mo’Grosh Stronghold in the northeast part of the zone.  I mentioned them in a previous post as we passed through Loch Modan in a series of quests that ended up with us in The Barrens on the way to Ratchet.  There are three “elite” quests that send you into ogre valley, and we had only knocked out one.  So this past Saturday we decided to take on the other two.

Well, some of us did all three since we ended up with some alts in rotation.  The main group has still not formed up.  Earl is still mid-move and Bung was away for the weekend, so it once again fell on alts to keep us busy.  I’ll have a whole post on alts later.

Actually, one main was with us.  Ula was on as her level 20 mage, a key part of the planned main group.  But Skronk was on with a level 19 dwarf paladin and I had my level 20 restoration druid, rounding on what would have been a decent group in EverQuest.  We had a tank, a healer, and a mage for crowd control and DPS.

The first two quests come from Thelsamar, while the third is part of the quest line around Stonewrought Damn.  After running into The Wetlands you come back and need to get a drop the ogres, which is kind of a pain because the rest of the quest line is soloable, with a group quest popping up in the middle of the chain.  Later WoW would never do that except to lead you into an instance.  Classic has no qualms on that front.

So off we went to take on the ogres.  And it went pretty well.

Fighting an elite ogre

As I said the last time we were out here, a dedicated healer changes the equation.  We were able to take single ogres without issue and pairs with some effort, though Ula was quick on the polymorph to sheep them if we needed.

We were again sitting at a cave to fish out some of the specific ogres we needed.

Orge cave screen shot from the previous trip

It was also said that the drop needed for the Stonewrought Dam quest would only drop from the ogres in the caves, so we kept on them.  But once you’ve cleared the easy cave… easy because your group is up to it… then you start eyeing the more difficult cave.  The cave where Chok’sul lives.

Chok’sul is the named ogre in the area, and one of the quests is to slay him and bring back his head.  Slaying him was the stretch goal for the evening, but we started off so well that we decided to head over and see about him.

His cave, the main cave in the valley, is deep.  Oddly, for me it was quite recognizable as the same cave used for some of the ogres in Nagrand in The Burning Crusade.  Never remake an asset when you have a good one to hand.

The cave itself wasn’t so bad.  We had to knock over a couple of ogres to get way into the back where Chok’sul was.  We found him there with two attendants.  We hoped that we could get one or both of them on their own, but when the pull happened we got all three.  Ula sheeped one and we tried to burn down the other two as quickly as possible.

We killed one attendant but in keeping Skronk alive I had pulls aggro with healing and Chok’sul was on my druid, pounding him to paste before I could adjust.  In hindsight there were a few things I could have done… going into bear form, for example, might have kept me alive longer since I had aggro… but I went down.  And without heals we were all soon running back to the cave.

When we got back we found we had made the classic WoW Classic blunder.  We had wandered into the cave after another group had cleared a bunch of it.  We saw them headed across the valley.  But rather than suspecting anything we wandered straight to the back of the cave.  But as we were running back to our corpses most of the cave respawned and we were in an ugly location with a couple of ogres wandering close to our corpses.

The plan was to resurrect and take, use a health potion quickly, then take whatever came at us.  We knocked down the closest one, but ended up wiping as we caught a couple more.

Back to the cave again.

The second time our position was better.  The ogre we had slain had been alone to one side of us, so we had a safer spot in which to resurrect.  There was still an ogre on us, but we were able to take him down right after we resurrected.

Ogre in the cave – note all the skeletons

Or space cleared out, we turned our attention to see how the Chok’sul situation had developed.  It looked like the respawn popped another ogre in between us and Chok’sul, but it looked to be far enough out to be able to pull on its own.

That ogre mystic up and off to the right

We got lucky on that.  Skronk was able to proximity pull only it and we had cleared enough space for ourselves to be able to break line of sight so it would come to us.

The bigger bit of luck was that Chok’sul attendant, the one we killed, did not respawn.  So we only have Chok’sul and another ogre.  It was time to sheep the ogre and let Chok’sul come and get us.

We were able to knock him down, though his ogre helper had to be re-sheeped before we were done with him.  Then we all looted Chok’sul to get his head right away lets something else go wrong and leave us in another situation.

We then went after the other ogre, dispatching him.  We were done with that quest, we just had to fight our way back out of the cave.  Fortunately getting out wasn’t so bad and we were able to clear our way to the cave entrance without further mishap.

There we took stock.  Chok’sul’s head had been obtained and we had knocked out the various ogre flavors that needed to be slain.  However, despite all that work in Chok’sul’s cave, we still had not come up with the crystal drop needed for the Stonewrought Dam quest.  It was back to the smaller cave, where an ogre at the entry waited for us.  We slew it and got the drop at last.  It was time to get out of Mo’Grosh Stronghold.  As with Chok’sul’s head, the corpse nicely yielded up a crystal for each of us.

We still needed a drop each from spiders and crockalisks, so spent some time hunting them.  Unlike elite ogres, they were only dropping one each.  But we were able to burn through them as fast as we could find them… finding them being the only real issue.  Eventually though we all ended up with the quest items we needed and headed back to the dam to turn in the quest.

After that there was a small matter of jumping in the water to defuse a Dark Iron blasting charge set to blow up the dam.  Then it was the final quest turn in.

As with the end of the Deadmines quest after you slay Van Cleef, Chief Engineer Hinderweir VII shouts out your name for the whole zone to hear when you wrap up the quest line.

A shout out for the help

After that it was back to Thelsamar for the other quest rewards.  Probably the best item received was the ring for slaying Chok’sul.

A ringing endorsement

It is not the best ring in the game, but for me it was the first ring I had received.  And any ring with some stats is better than no ring at all.

There is a post brewing in the back of my head about comparing how gear gets doled out in WoW Classic, where certain slots are not filled for many levels… shoulders just started to drop for us while rings, trinkets, and headgear are still mostly to come… to how a game like EverQuest II does it.  I cannot recall a slot you can’t fill by level 10 there, though one would need to loop in crafting, and there is another comparison to be explored I suppose.

Anyway, post ideas for the future.  But our Saturday night adventure in Loch Modan came to a successful conclusion.  Hopefully it won’t be too long before we get everybody together and into the Deadmines.

The Burning Lands set to be the 25th EverQuest Expansion this December

The expected second shoe dropped as Daybreak announced late on Friday the next EverQuest expansion, The Burning Lands.

Beware: Hot Snail

I am not sure why a snail was the monster they chose tease the expansion with, but maybe they are fans of the Pokemon Magcargo.

And what is it with Daybreak and Friday afternoon announcements?  That is when you put out press releases you want people to miss.  I know I did.

The short producer’s letter mentioned the expansion and some general details about the setting.  As I predicted back in January, EverQuest will be following its younger sibling back into the elemental planes.  A lucky guess if ever there was one.

As with EverQuest II, the older game will see gear up and catch up events before the expansion arrives.  In addition the previous expansion, Ring of Scale, will be half price until pre-orders for the new expansion goes live.  After pre-orders for The Burning Lands are available you will no longer be able to get the collector’s or premium editions of the older expansion, so if you want all the bennies that come with either of those now is the time to act.

And so it goes, with the turning of the leaves and a new autumn we get another new EverQuest expansion.

Norrath Nostalgia Tour turns into Literal Nostalgia Tour

One of the early themes on this blog was nostalgia for Norrath and the annual autumnal return to EverQuest or EverQuest II.  If you go way back to September 2006 you’ll find that to be the topic of the third post on the site.  So there is a lot of history/tradition here, and I have referred to it as a “nostalgia tour” off and on since that time.

As has probably happened more often than not here over the years, autumn showed up and I started thinking about Norrath. And, as also tends to be the case, I feel a bit lost as to where to go these days. It is hard to believe that EverQuest II and World of Warcraft were not even two years old when I started the blog.

Fortunately Bhagpuss had a suggestion for me and, as I noted last week, I started down that path by visiting Yun Zi and picking up the Days of Summer quests.

I’m here for the event please

Before getting to the current version of the event I had to go through and run the 2017 quest line.

Getting started

The event is, as the title notes, literally a tour of Norrath, with the 2017 version running players through various expansions with each quest.  This started well in my range of knowledge, kicking off in the Desert of Flames, where you had to head off to various points in the expansion to get updates.

Peeking in on the Silent City

I could not do the quest without some help.  I am not sure how I was supposed to divine the destination for the little icons presented (except perhaps the coin with the Maj’Dul faction on it) and I honestly did not have the patience to fly hither and yon about the expansion trying to guess.  But even with the locations from the wiki to hand I did have to fly around a bit to figure out where to go.

The next quest, which feature the Kingdom of Sky expansion, was a little bit more tricky.  I played EQII from launch until KoS, took a break then, and then came back with Echoes of Faydwer, so I avoided a lot of KoS.  I did end up running through it at one point, so it wasn’t totally alien to me, but I did need to use the waypoints provided by the wiki now and again to figure out where to go.

I do actually remember coming here at one point

After that it was off to Echoes of Faydwer, which was the great revival expansion for EverQuest II, where they decided maybe they should just ignore the lore from EverQuest.  With this they chose to embrace it.

In the Butcherblock harbor

That return to the lore proved popular and revitalized the game somewhat.  With that expansion, which came out in November of 2006, we’re into the era of the blog.

Welcome to the nut house

Having played through much of Faydwer repeatedly, I was again able to just travel based on the locations the wiki fed me.

The next quest brought me to Rise of Kunark, which might be the last expansion I played, or at least purchased, at launch. (I have the little pewter bear mount on my bookshelf still.)  I wrote a bit about my getting stuck in the waterfall, but otherwise was able to get around the expansion pretty well.

After that, however, I was in unknown territory.  The expansion list for the game goes on… and gets a bit strange… but they are mostly areas where I either haven’t been, or if I have been there, I did so without really knowing which expansion I was wandering around.  Still, some of it looked nice and I got a feel for the generally increasing level caps of the zones.

Somewhere pretty… not sure which expansion

But with my heroic boosted Shadow Knight (chosen because he can one-shot just about anything I’ve ever run into) and copious help from the wiki (I not only had to use waypoints but also look up how to simply get to certain areas) I was able to complete the 2017 series of quests.

That done I was able to start in on the 2018 set of quests.  For those I got out my level 96 berserker, Sigwerd, who I consider my “main,” even though I have four level 100s.  He is the one character I have leveled up the furthest in the old fashioned way.  He at least made it through Kunark before I used a free boost on him a couple years back.  I forget if it was level 90 or 95, but he made it to 96 and has been lingering ever since.

I chose him because the 2018 quests go back to the original zones of EverQuest II, so I clearly wasn’t going to need a character that could one-shot level 100 heroics.

While I wasn’t going to need directions on how to get the various zones, I still used the list of destinations from the wiki.  With that I was pretty sure I could find the landmarks, starting in Antonica.

Heading to Coldwind Point

I rolled through that, seeing the sights from so long ago, then it was off to the Commonlands.

Looks like a golf course

Nek Forest, on the other hand, was a bit more challenging.  As often as I ran through there, I was at a bit of a loss for some of the landmarks and had to wander for a bit before finding a couple of them.  This was as much because of the claustrophobic feel of the zone as anything.

The Thundering Steppes though, there I raced ahead to each landmark.

At the Shrine of Decay

I rushed so fast that I missed a checkpoint and only realized I wasn’t getting updates when I was way over in the Ruins of Karana, so had to backtrack and run through again.

After that the Enchanted Lands were a breeze, it being a smallish zone with landmarks I well remember.  And then Zek, a run which ended predictably at Deathfist Citadel.

I’ve been here before

And then I was drawn up short.  Apparently, in Norrath, summer runs with the baseball season, and the last three weeks of the event, with a zone each, had yet to unlock.

So I was all caught up.  Now I have to wait like everybody else for the event to finish as well as finding something else to do in Norrath.

Warzoned Out

The Warzone Extraction event has a bit more time to run but I am done running the sites.  I have “finished” the event in that I have collected all of the guaranteed rewards.

Warzone Point Count – Also, drones engaging Eosian Safeguard

The boosters obtained at 20, 70, and 170 points were not of much value.  The cerebral accelerators though were at least useful to speed up the training of an alt or two and could be sold on the market.

The big reward at the end

There is a summary of the event over at The Nosy Gamer that reflects my own thoughts to a certain degree.

I also went in with something of a sub-optimal fit for the event, a Heavy Assault Missile armed Drake with a passive tank.  While it was able to handle the task, for the scale of the sites it was big, slow, and awkward.  I could have built up a much more efficient ship for the event, but I would have likely spent more on that than I earned on the event.

Still, it could handle things, I just had to be patient.  The only real tactical problem that came up was when a Sleeper force including two Wardens showed up.  The Wardens are the armor repping Sleepers and they will rep any ship you attack.  I had to kill them first because they could out rep my attempts to kill the frigate because the damage application issues hitting such small ships with HAMs plus their resists let a single Warden out-rep my damage, while launching drones with frigates active was mostly an easy way to lose drones.

The Wardens were big enough however that I could kill one while the other was repping it.  However, their tactical behavior consistently led me to a difficult spot.  Unlike the other ships webbing and scramming, the Wardens felt no need to hang around within my missile envelope, limited to 25km with the short range HAMs, even with my max missile skills.  So I would kill one and then damage the other just before it wandered out of range.

Then I was a bit stuck.  Being webbed I couldn’t catch it and it could keep the frigates around me alive with its reps.  So the only option was to risk drones.  The remaining Warden was well within drone range, 60km for me with skills alone, so I launched them and sent them after my repping nemesis.  Then it was a race.  As soon as the drones set on the Warden all the frigate Sleepers would drop me and go after the drones.  The drones had to kill the Warden quickly.  Fortunately the Sleepers would concentrate on a single drone which, when it started taking armor damage, I would recall.  The frigates would chase it back to me, then return to assist the Warden, and which point I could re-launch the damaged drone to rejoin the fight.

Once the Warden was down it was time to recall drones again and finish off the frigates with missiles, the go after the bigger ships, generally culminating in chasing down that one Sleeper battleship that liked to get out past 60km while I was blowing up his friends.  Even from that range he would keep neuts on me, so I never had and cap handy to use my prop mod.  On the other hand, he didn’t web me either so I could eventually catch up even going only 196 m/s. (I inevitably used all the speed boosters that dropped just to catch up a little faster.)

Again, as with any PvE event you can repeat, the first couple of times you learn the ropes, after which it becomes a matter of applying what you learned, quickly devolving to simple repetition.

The event itself had a couple of problems to my mind.

First and foremost, it was a bit of a death trap.  After running several events under the banner of The Agency that were easily soloable with any combat ship… I did Lucky Strikes in a stealth bomber a few times… putting up an event where you’re going to get scrammed, webbed, neuted, and killed in short order unless you have just the right sort of fit seems like a good way to make people mad.  If you didn’t have a passive tank or had weapons that needed capacitor, you were in trouble.

And, yes, New Eden has always been a harsh place.  But when you set a pattern of events by The Agency being fairly easy, litter sites around high sec, and encourage players to go get them with only a vague warning, then you’re going to kill a lot of player ships.

Be warned though; you might encounter some resistance while searching the wrecks! We advise you to bring some firepower.

Searching on “Eosian” over at zKillboard tells the tale, even leaving out the low and null sec players who got zapped by other players while they were neuted, webbed, and scammed.

CCP will be CCP I guess.

Speaking of which, the second issue that will be familiar to any long term player because it happens every time; the event NPCs were not visible on the overview.  Even the default “All” overview had to be fixed.  I expected this and reacted in the usual way, manually adding NPC types as they showed up.  But I am sure more than a few newer players were surprised/alarmed/blown up because of this.  It would be really cool if CCP could do something about this some day.

Finally, there is the big issue for me, which is SKINs, and the fact that I didn’t get any.

I blew up well over 200 Sleepers during the event and never got a single SKIN drop.  I knew there were some to be had.  Not only did CCP mention them in the event announcement, but the SKIN list in-game showed four Valkyrie SKINs not available in the PLEX Store; SKINs for the Merlin, Moa, Naga, and Scorpion.

Valkyrie SKINs listed

As an economic venture I could have spent my time elsewhere for better return.  As a fun activity the event wore out and became repetitive after a couple of days.  So, for the most part, I kept going to see if I could get a SKIN drop, and I never saw a one.

Fortunately others did get SKINs, as they were all up for sale in Jita.  The Merlin SKIN seemed to be the most common drop.  There were many listed on the market and I was able to grab one for under 6 million ISK.

Merlin SKIN for me

The Moa SKIN was a bit more rare, and thus more expensive, but I grabbed one of those as well.  The Naga and Scorpion SKINs however seemed very rare indeed, with only a couple on the market last I checked.  That put them beyond my SKIN splurge price.  I might have grabbed them anyway if I flew either hull regularly, but since that was not the case I let those two slide.

Anyway, so goes another in-game event.  With the coming of the Life Blood expansion, part of which is a change to The Agency event structure in an attempt to make it into something where people group up to complete them, I do wonder if CCP is going to make the error of excluding solo players from events.  We shall see with the first post-expansion event I suppose.

 

Honest Trailers – The Warcraft Movie

About sums it up for me… but I wasn’t too impressed with the movie.