Immersion in the Blocks of Minecraft

This one should be fun.  I am back on the immersion hobby horse and I am going to dive into Minecraft next… survival mode… which I am sure is going to be a breaking point for somebody because… well… the game looks like this:

Villagers congregate at the town center in a world made up of one meter cubes

That was kind of a random screen shot I had to hand, but there are plenty more on this site and the web in general, that will illustrate that nobody in their right mind is going to be fooled into thinking that is the real world or anything like it.

And yet… and yet… I have experience various physiological reactions to the game that indicates that my brain can indeed be fooled into reacting to a world made up of unconvincing one meter cubes.  That, for me, is the purest form of immersion.  My body taking the input from my eyes and reacting cannot be faked.

So when I feel a tinge of acrophobia when I unwittingly walk up to the edge of a high cliff and realize how far up I am or when I am digging around in the roof of the nether and find myself in a thin portion and break through to find myself many meters above a lake of lava and just shy of stepping into this air, that means my brain is somehow convinced at a base level that this might be real, even if at higher level my brain knows this is all just images rendered on a screen and isn’t a threat at all.

But what gets my brain there?

I am going to skip ahead a bit on this one and, rather than meandering through a half a dozen tales… most of which I have probably written about here already in any case if you’re interested… and jump straight on what has become the through line for this series, which is a sense of place.  I think that is what helps convince my brain that it should flutter up my guts a bit when I loom over a cliff.

Now, “sense of place” is its own can of worms.  I’m in my fourth post and I am going to spin that in a fourth way.  With LOTRO is was the familiarity of Middle-earth.  With EverQuest it was the sense of worldliness and danger.  With EVE Online it was the overlay of player events on locations in the game that gave then meaning and history… and danger.

So what is it with Minecraft?

Well, it certainly has worldliness going for it.  There is all the world you could care to find and more over the next hill or across the next ocean.  Procedural generation for the win.

And, naturally, there is a sense of danger at night, where the world presses back against you.  You don’t get it all your own way and eventually some creeper is going to slip in and you’ll just hear that dreaded “hissssss” sound before it blows up and wrecks something you’re been working on… or kills you.

But I think more than either of those, there is the mutability of the world, the fact that you can make it your own, shape it as you will… if you have the time and patience… to be what you want.  You can build a house, a castle, or an Italian city.

The work of Skronk and Enaldi

The fact that you have changed the world, created something within it, transforms it and gives it a sense of place that the bare wilderness lacked.  And the effort of gathering the resources and building something grand or complex only ads to that.

In that was Minecraft is different from LOTRO or EQ.  Those worlds are essentially immutable.  You must take them as they are and find the place that they offer.

And EVE Online, where you can own space, build structures, influence resources, and fight wars over territory, even that only lets you build essentially temporary little sand castles in the vastness of space.  I live in Delve now, and the system of 1DQ1-A, the capital of the Imperium, shows the influence and power of that coalition, with Keepstars and Fortizars strewn about a grid as a show of power.

But we haven’t always lived there and we won’t always live there.  The tides of diplomacy and war have washed over Delve many times, scouring clean any sign of past residents.  And someday we too will no doubt decline and be washed away.  So goes the history of New Eden.

So Minecraft has a more permanent state of change.  I mean sure, somebody can come by and undo what you have done.  Creepers can blow up your stuff.  But it takes a lot of time and even in destruction the land remains changed.  Your impact remains even in ruins or a hole in the ground.

But Minecraft has its downside as well.  Having built castles, fortified towns, thrown up towers, build water spanning bridges, and laid down many kilometers of minecart track to create a transportation network both in the nether and on the main world, in the end I always end up feeling a bit empty at the end of a project.  The joy and the purpose is in the creation, but when you build a huge structure you quickly find yourself with not much left to do when it is done.

You have changed the face of the world, but then what?  There just isn’t a lot to “do” in Minecraft once you’ve built all your structures, explored as far as you care to, made your way through the nether and the end.

I have often felt pride in what I have built and, at the same time, a sense of emptiness in being done.  You only need one room and a bed and a bit of storage, so I’ll have a multi-story castle and all my stuff in one room off the main door.  It feels like there should be more.  Mojang has tried to address that a bit.  We have the ravagers now wandering the world.  But that becomes more of a maintenance routine after a while.

And then there is the world itself.  While there is a variety of biomes and no two places are exactly the same, there remains a tiring sameness in the world all the same.  There are only so many types of trees and hills and mountains all have similar essential elements.

Finally, there is the day/night cycle, which gives you the sense of danger in the world, but also becomes quite oppressive over time.  When you’re working on a big project, especially a rail project where you are moving along the world, leveling terrain, digging tunnels, laying track, and carrying supplies forward from your most recent base, the daytime starts to feel very short.

You get up and start working and soon that big square sun is past its zenith and you have to start planning what you’re going to do when night comes.  Do you roll on back down to your last camp?  Do you start working on a new camp?  Do you dig a quick hole in the side of a hill and set up a bed and carry on?

It really cuts both ways.  I wouldn’t want to do away with the night cycle.  It is part of the game pushing back on you which makes your accomplishments fulfilling.  But even with the night quickly over when you hit your bed, I still find the day too short to the point that it hinders getting things done.

Pro immersion:

• Feeling of place within the world
• A wide world to explore with many biomes
• New things being added regularly
• Ability to change the world, to leave your mark
• Able to share your creation with friends in a shared world
• A sense of danger, or the world pushing back against your efforts
• The fulfillment of effort in creation

Immersion breaking:

• A world of sameness until you’ve made your mark
• New things usually don’t apply to areas already generated
• Few real “game like” things to do
• Having created feels less fulfilling than it should
• Resource management can become a grind
• The world pushes back in a very “samey” way
• The oppression of the day/night cycle

And some of those latter are not unique to Minecraft.  There isn’t a lot you can “do” with towns or towers or encampments in LOTRO or EQ.  But there is also a game with a story and advancement and other activity built into the mix.  I can admire the Bree or the run down Forsaken Inn out in the Lone Lands or Hobbiton, but I also have a series of tasks to take care of, levels to gain, monsters to slay who drop loot and coin and which earn me status and what not.

If I went and created Bree in Minecraft I’d just have a town where not much was happening.  It would be neat to look at, but once I was done it wouldn’t be useful for much and I’d go on to work on something else.

Anyway, those are my thoughts on Minecraft, which reflect the way I have chosen to play it.  I prefer survival mode and haven’t done anything with mods.  I just explore and build and farm and mine in the randomly generated world and look for meaning.

So four posts and four variations on a feeling or sense of place.  I suppose, ideally, this series would end with me finding the ideal mix of ingredients when it comes to that.  I think that will be a long journey though as no such destination is anywhere on my map so far.

The immersion series so far:

• Down the Rabbit Hole of Immersion
• Immersion in Middle-Earth
• Immersion on the Bad Linoleum of Norrath

• Immersion in the Nebulae of New Eden

Thirteen Weeks of World War Bee

Here we are again.  Today marks the third month of World War Bee, as it started back on July 5, 2020.  A lot has happened since then, though not so much with the war itself.

This past week saw CCP actually take some official notice of the war, mentioning the battle at 49-U6U in their latest EVE Pulse video.  The mention happens in the first 40 seconds of the video:

CCP Mirage calls out the Imperium losses (true enough) and then declares that the Fortizar was saved (not true at all).  The former is likely due to them using TEST streamer RonUSMC as their source, while the latter reflects the recent state of disdain the company has for null sec, viewing the region as a problem to be solved rather than a play style of value. (But they still love us more than faction warfare.)

PAPI, or “the snake people” as they are now called, also finally decided to step up and do something in Delve.  They didn’t actually invade the region yet, but they were alleged to be offering a bounty for killing ratters and miners in Delve.  PAPI players can earn 100 million for blowing up a ratting Myrmidon.  If anybody is interested, I’ll undock an insured Myrmidon and let you blow it up if you front me 30 ISK million in advance.  I won’t even file for SRP.

Of course, the deal as posted didn’t say the 100 million would be in paid in ISK.  It might be simply delivered in “value” like the Tranquility Trading Consortium profits.

The author of the post later deleted the details and now only the title of the post remains, so it could be that there was no bounty offer at all, making the whole thing yet another example of failure to take action in Delve.

We did, however, get the news that CCP had deployed a “UI only mode” for the game client to the test server.  That should make big battles better for many players. especially those running multiple game clients on their system.

In the end, if that is all I have for an opening, then it wasn’t much of a week.

Querious Front

This is pretty much where things seem set to happen.  The invaders have staged here, so this is where the action should be taking place.

I mentioned in last week’s post that the invaders had managed to drop a Fortizar in SVM-3K, which is actually in Delve.  The timer for that came out on Tuesday in the early AM my time and was promptly blown up by Imperium forces, with PAPI only fielding a token effort to try and pick off some kills.  I was hoping it might brew up into a long fight, but by the time I logged on in the morning the field had been looted and everybody had gone home.

The best bet for potential action last week seemed to be around the Keepstar that the hostiles dropped in 8QT-H4.  That is in Querious still, but on the boarder with Delve, just one gate over from the Fortizar they lost above.

Keepstar deploying

Again, it would begin anchoring very early in my time zone… like 4am… so I wasn’t going to make it to the start of whatever came to pass, but my hope was that a big fight would ensue and I might get in with some reinforcements later on in the day.

However, once I was up and online (6am my time) the fight was over and the Keepstar had anchored successfully.

Apparently Asher had a new tactic to try out involving a host of stealth  bombers and a series of strategic bookmarks  However, he shared the bookmarks alliance wide with full add/edit/delete capabilities and somebody deleted them.  It isn’t clear if this was the work of a spy or just commonplace stupidity on our part, but Asher’s plan failed and now the invaders have dropped their ~20th Keepstar in pursuits of their “Maginot Line offensive” where they place a structure then hope we’ll come and fight on it.

Otherwise the Querious front was remarkably quiet.  The invaders blew up some Fortizars we left behind in the region and we poked around some, but not much changed.

Other Theaters

The destruction of our Fortizars left behind in Querious was balanced out somewhat by The Initiative destroying Fortizars the invaders left behind in Foutain and Aridia.  The big kill though was in Aridia where LowSechnaya Sholupen, a member of the invaders that has actually stuck around in Fountain and contested a bit of space, got caught trying to deploy a Keepstar in Hier only to have it blown up by Siege Green.  Both sides in the war rushed out to whore on the kill.

Other than that, there were the usual range of skirmishes in roams into hostile space and attempts to hack ihubs all over.  Period Basis saw a bunch of hacking activity on our side, and we returned the favor in Esoteria, keep the low order conflict around the TCAG-3/G-M4GK gate simmering.

Edit: Of course, I wrote this Sunday morning when nothing seems likely to happen (though I guess the week should go Saturday to Sunday, but whatever) then, when I was out, a fight broke out in SNM-3K as PAPI made its first capital push into Delve to try and take the ihub in the system.  120 billion ISK total lost according to the battle report doesn’t make it a big fight, not after 49-U6U, but John Hartley got his titan on grid and got the kill on a TEST Rorqual because he likes to live dangerously.  The ihub was defended but PAPI won the ISK war and I missed the whole thing.

My Participation

I went on exactly one fleet last week.  Not much was going on during the USTZ time frame when I am able to dedicate time to fleet operations.  I went out on a fleet that chased around some TEST hackers down in Period Basis.  We blew up a few of them, they blew up a few of us, but we stopped their enotsis attacks and everybody went home.  I was not among the exploded, so my loss count for the war remains:

• Ares interceptor – 9
• Atron entosis frigate – 5
• Ferox battle cruiser – 3
• Drake entosis battle cruiser – 3
• Guardian logi – 2
• Malediction interceptor – 2
• Scalpel logi frigate – 2
• Scimitar logi – 1
• Bifrost entosis command destroyer – 1
• Cormorant destroyer – 1
• Purifier stealth bomber – 1
• Hurricane battle cruiser – 1
• Sigil entosis industrial – 1

Other Items

Despite some early examples, this is becoming the war where nobody shoots Keepstars.  PAPI has not touched the Keepstar we have in 49-U6U and we’re not doing anything with the Keepstar the dropped in 8QT-H4.

The word is that the enemy hasn’t even moved into the 8QT-H4 Keepstar yet, that it is just bait to try and get us to commit titans.

On the Meta Show this past Saturday The Mittani speculated that the invaders may still try and drop a Keepstar in NPC Delve, though the fact that he seemed to salivate at the prospect may mean that is more wishful thinking than anything.

Delve remains relatively unmolested three month into the war.  Given that is where we live, Vily’s war aims of extermination and removal of the Imperium, articulated in the Polygon article I quoted two weeks back, remain essentially unfulfilled.  I am sure his recent attempts to walk those goals back are completely unrelated.

There was some mention of other groups taking advantage of the Drone lands residents being away for the war to mess with their space, with some ihubs getting taken in Geminate and some ratters and miners finding themselves hunted, but it is not clear if this is any sort of concerted effort of just a moment of opportunism.

The PCU count for each week of the war looks like this:

• 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

Down a bit from last week, though still holding in the same range.  The fight late on Sunday came well after the peak.

Other coverage:

• INN – World War Bee: Week 13

Friday Bullet Points about Minecraft

It has been just over four years since Microsoft paid Markus “Notch” Persson 2.5 billion dollars for Mojang, the company he founded.  Of course, what Microsoft was really buying was Minecraft.  Notch had been forecasting doom when it came to Microsoft’s plans for Windows 8, but it turns out that a couple of billion dollars can change your mind when it comes to monopolistic practices.

Notch said at the time that the deal wasn’t about the money.  And I am sure he was right.  It is never about the money, it is about what the money can buy.

Anyway, four years down the road and it seems like Microsoft hasn’t managed to screw up Mojang and Minecraft.  I was concerned at the time as there is a long history of big companies buying small studios and then destroying them by not understanding what they really bought.  But Microsoft has managed to avoid that fate, in large part I imagine because they have mostly left Mojang to focus on what it does best, while pushing a few smart ideas of their own that their size and muscle allowed to be a success.

There has been some news out about Minecraft this week, which I am going to mix in with a couple of items of my own for a list of bullet points about Minecraft.

• A Lot of People Play Minecraft

In a recent interview the head of the Minecraft business group at Microsoft, Helen Chiang, said that more than 90 million people play Minecraft every month, up from 74 million at the start of the year, and more than 150 million copies of the game have been sold, up from the 100 million mark back in mid 2016.

This is no doubt related to the fact that Minecraft is available in some form on a lot of platforms.  I was going to compare to The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim for most platforms supported, then I saw Minecraft was available on things like Apple TV and the Nintendo 3DS and started wondering if we were getting into Tetris levels of platform support.

• No Minecraft 2

Also in that interview the question of a sequel came up and the idea of a direct sequel for the core Minecraft product was dismissed.  Microsoft gets it.  If you have a popular product with 90 million people playing it every month, you don’t yank the rug out and force them to decide between what they currently enjoy and some new item.

While Club Penguin didn’t have that level of popularity, things would have likely ended better had Disney not tried to force its player base onto the now discontinued Club Penguin Island.

So while Microsoft will use the Minecraft IP for other games, it won’t try to replace the core game.

• Minecraft Dungeons

And speaking of using the Minecraft IP, at MineCon this past weekend a new spin-off was announced in the form of Minecraft Dungeons.

Described as something of a cross between Minecraft and Diablo, this will be a multiplayer dungeon crawl experience.  I have actually wondered about a Minecraft dungeon crawl experience in the past, though I would like it to be in the world where I can also build stuff.

Here is the trailer:

This could be interesting if done right.

• Minecraft Realms

Not in the news, but something I want to mention as an item Microsoft got very right.  Part of what Minecraft does well is a shared experience.  You can play with your friends.  Minecraft is a power in online gaming that people often don’t even consider.

For a long time there was a plethora of third party hosting services for Minecraft and then Minecraft Realms.  Realms didn’t offer any of the customization options that the third party hosts did and was much more expensive to boot, at least if you just wanted to play with a few friends.  It was pretty much a non-option when I first went looking for a place to host our Minecraft world.

Somebody at Microsoft figured out that if they couldn’t do quality when it came to features, they could easily do quantity based on a much lower price.  So they dropped the price and added in support for the various editions of the game, and kept it all easy to manage.  The UI for Realms is built into the Minecraft client.

You still can’t run mods and such, but for $7.99 a month it is an easy, no hassle way to put up an invite-only world that you and your friends can use.

It sure as hell was a better plan than that whole Mineserver fiasco.

• Cuteness Overload

Also announced at MineCon was some of the plan for the next Minecraft update, which will be version 1.14.  Core to this will be Pandas.  There is a video.

There are also new NPCs planned, called pillagers, but this will be known as the panda update.

This is the sort of thing that will keep people coming back to Minecraft.

The MineCon announcement summary has been posted.

Attribute Remap in New Eden

Every once in a while a discussion arises about attributes in MMORPGs and whether they are really relevant any more.  Derived from the same Dungeons & Dragons to computer RPGs to DikuMUD to MMORPGs, attributes were once the cornerstone of a character’s ability, the rolls you made to generate them determining the future and fate of your character.

TorilMUD – they wouldn’t even give you a straight up number

Your fighter really, really wanted a STR of 18 99/100 or whatever the peak was for AD&D back in the day, a roll many fighters seemed to have been able to obtain somehow.  The dice favored them.  And well the dice might, because you probably couldn’t carry your sword, shield, armor, iron rations, torches, and whatever loot you might run across if you didn’t get that roll.

But with the coming of MMORPGs and, more critically, MMORPG expansions, base stats were quickly overshadowed by stat boosts from gear.  I remember when SOE decided to discard weight as an impediment in EverQuest II.  At launch if you were carrying too much stuff you would be slowed down.  I remember being able to tell if somebody was carrying bank boxes through town as they would creep at a snail’s pace.  But after a few expansions everybody’s gear had so many stat bonuses that you could use those boxes in place of bags and carry all your coin and still move about unencumbered.  At that point measuring weight was of little value unless you simply wanted to inflict it on new players.

Anyway, whenever that discussion comes up I always enjoy injecting EVE Online into it because, like so much else in the game, attributes in New Eden are a different beast.

You might be surprised to find that characters in EVE Online even have attributes.  But they do.  Each character has five, the list and descriptions for which I am going to borrow from Neville Smit:

• Intelligence – the speed at which you process information
• Memory – how well you remember information
• Charisma – the degree to which you influence others
• Perception – your ability to understand the situation around you
• Willpower – the amount of stamina you have to reach a goal

EVE Online is a more cerebral game I guess, lacking the usual strength, dexterity, constitution, etc of the traditional medieval themed MMORPG.

Furthermore, these attributes do not impact your game play directly.  Perception won’t make your overview easier to read, willpower won’t make your shields stronger, intelligence won’t make POS mechanics comprehensible, and charisma won’t make NPCs like you or do what you ask.

Nope.  The only thing attributes influence is how quickly you train skills.  Each skill in the game is linked to a primary and secondary attribute, and the higher the numbers for those attributes are the faster skill will train.  There is a whole article over at the EVE University Wiki about skills and learning.  Meanwhile, the usefulness/uselessness of attributes has been argued back and forth for ages, even making an appearance in Blog Banter #65, where we all went on about what should be done with them.

Their validity as a game mechanic aside, there are two approaches to dealing with attributes.  The first is to spread them out evenly so all skills pretty much train at the same speed… except skills involving charisma because you’ll be one point shy and somebody has to take the hit.

I’ve been that route off and on in the past.  As of that Blog Banter I linked I was in the level attributes camp.

Wilhelm Arcturus attributes in mid-2015

But you get the opportunity to remap your attributes once a year. (Though if you’re a salty old vet like me you probably have/had a couple of bonus remaps in your back pocket.)

So you can swap around your attributes if you know you’re going to be focused on a particular set of skills for a long stretch.  Back in the day getting all the skills to be a fleet booster, which required Fleet Commander V, was a year long investment, so you would remap and queue them up and be committed to that for quite a stretch.

Currently my attributes are optimized for training skills related to Spaceship Command and weaponry.  Perception and Willpower rule the roost in those categories.  At this point however, I am running out of practical skills to train.  I am not interested in getting into a super capital as I barely fly the two capital ships I own, and all of the sub cap skills I have are at least to level IV.  Do I really need Marauders or Black Ops or a couple others trained up to level V?

My attributes pre-remap… not sure why the point in Int now… with +4 implants

On the other hand, there are a whole bunch of skills that benefit primarily from Memory and Intelligence that I have had in my queue for a while.  I want to get all the Scanning and Fighter skills up to level V, boost up some of the Planetary Management skills, and so on.

So I loaded up my in-game skill queue with all of those skills, dropping any of the remaining Perception/Willpower skills, let that sit for a bit, the loaded them up in EVE Mon.

EVE Mon, while it hasn’t seen an update in almost a year… a worrying amount of time that makes me suspect the end might be nigh at some point… has some useful features for dealing with your skills and attributes.

First I created a new skill plan from my skill queue, an option under the Plans menu, opened up the plan, and then used the Attributes Optimizer option.  That told me I ought to max out Memory and throw any remaining points into Intelligence.

My attributes optimized

If I do that I chop more than 95 days off of my skill training time.  Of course, if CCP introduces a new ship with a new skill that I absolutely have to have, it is going to be a slow train because of this change.  And I am committed to it for a full year.  I have no bonus remaps left.  (My alt has two, which doesn’t help.  Also, sell remaps for PLEX maybe?)

Of course, I can’t leave well enough alone, so I tinkered a bit with what EVE Mon told me and found out that it isn’t quite the min/max champion.

Now really optimized

I’m not sure that 15 hours is a significant difference.  I’m just more surprised that EVE Mon didn’t choose the most optimized path.  I suspect that dropping two points off Memory and giving it to Intelligence boosts a bit because Intelligence is the primary attribute.

Anyway, I pulled the trigger on the change.  CCP warned me it would be a year.

Are you really sure?

So I expect that the next two skill point milestones I hit, 190 and 200 million skill points, will feature a lot of skills outside of Spaceship Command for once.

We’ll see where I stand in a year I suppose.  Maybe attributes won’t even be a thing by then.

The Further Diminution of Station Cash and Additional Intrigue

Daybreak Games announced yesterday that they would cease selling physical game cards for Daybreak Cash (which I am going to call Station Cash from here forward out of habit/tradition) or All Access membership effective last week.  The cards should have been pulled from stores as of September 26.

Soon to be gone

Naturally, in the grand SOE tradition, ads for these cards are still all over the various Daybreak game web sites despite the order to pull them from shelves.

Probably not coming to Target now…

Should you find such a card still on the rack at your local WalMart, because there is always somebody who doesn’t get the word, their ability to be activated will cease on November 8, 2016.  After that date they will just be colorful bits of plastic.

If you have an activated card, you can still redeem it for the foreseeable future, likely in part because California state law does not allow companies to expire or invalidate gift cards that customers have paid for.

The timing of this is… if not interesting, at least worth a moment of thought.

Daybreak sending out the word to pull Station Cash cards off the rack a full week before they announced to customers that the cards would be going away was not accidental.  They clearly wanted to get at least some of the cards off the rack before they told people.

But why?

There are downsides to such cards.

The cards have a bit of a checkered history, being one of the sources of Station Cash that helped devalue the currency back in the day with “Triple Cash” deals for redeeming cards and the inevitable bonus cash that WalMart demanded its customers get.

Triple your take!

As a revenue source, Daybreak has to share a cut with the retailer and the card processor so, as Blizzard would rather you buy digital direct so they don’t have to share the loot, so Daybreak no doubt wishes you would just buy straight for them and leave them with the cut the middleman would otherwise take.

Then there is the accounting annoyance of such cards.  When a customer buys the card you cannot claim it as revenue until it is actually redeemed.  You have to carry that money on the books as an obligation.  In one of those way that accounting goes from measuring reality to becoming reality, you get the money and can spend the money, you just can’t claim the money towards revenue or profit.  But that likely doesn’t apply if Daybreak straight up sells you the Station Cash, because that transaction is done and you have your virtual good and/or service right away.

On the upside, those cards were low effort sales.  Somebody else has to ship them, put them on the shelves, ring them up and so on.  Daybreak just has to redeem codes and keep the accounts at their end.

And, of course, these cards are how players who do not have credit cards can buy Station Cash and All Access for their accounts.

So why kill them off?  If they were not selling enough, removing them from the shelves THEN announcing they were going away doesn’t make a lot of sense.  Doing it the other way around might have gotten them an injection of cash as people who wanted/needed to use them rushed out to pick up a few before they were gone.

And killing them off doesn’t end the accounting hassle.  That goes on for a while because you already have  this ecosystem of cards and some percentage always go missing and never get redeemed.

For this, I think we have to go back to a bit of news almost two weeks in the past, the announcement that one of Daybreak’s games, H1Z1: King of the Kill, was no longer going to use Station Cash and would be getting its own virtual currency with the generic name “Crowns.”  Not “Daybreak Crowns,” just “Crowns.”

So while Connor over at MMO Fallout attributes this to possibly more Daybreak financial woes, I wonder if this portends further changes at the company.  They have cut one of their games out of their Station Cash herd and now they are shutting down a somewhat passive revenue stream without trying to give it a final, farewell milking.

Are we looking at the start of some sort of splitting up of Daybreak into smaller, perhaps more saleable parts?  The Crowns announcement started people wondering that.  Does the retail card cut further that?  Is this another preparatory move, or just Daybreak trying to simplify their business?

Anyway, the announcement and brief FAQ is available here.