35 Years of Connected Computers

I realized the other day that at some point 35 years ago, during the latter half of the summer of 1986, Potshot… or Skronk or Fergorin or whatever names I’ve used to identify him on the blog over the years… sold me a modem.

I think it was in August, but honestly it could have been July or September.  It was a cash deal and no receipts were kept.  It was an Apple 1200 bps modem and I took it home, then went over to the used computer store that was close by… because used computers were a business then… and bought a Super Serial Card for my Apple //e so I could hook the modem up to it.

Apple and Zoom modem pictures gleaned from the internet, the latter being me second modem

At that point I had to do something with it.  I dialed up a BBS or two with some primitive terminal emulation software, then I started looking at online services, landing on GEnie.

There I ended up playing Stellar Emperor almost right away.  Somebody there told me to go buy the Apple ][ terminal emulator that CompuServe sold which was light, emulated well, and had ten macro keys, which would become all important in playing Stellar Emperor and Stellar Warrior. (I did a recap of my 80s online gaming a while back.)

I also never had to go sit in the computer lab in college anymore.  They had a dial up number I could log in through.  I still had to walk across campus to pick up my printouts for projects, usually from SPSS, a software package I am continually surprised to find still exists.  It is almost as old as I am.

I’ve told those tales before here.  I’ve even charted out timelines for various things, including platforms and connectivity.  I’ve written a lot down on the blog over the last 15 years.

Game Platforms

I should probably update that one a bit.  I can add iPhone to it, and a Nintendo Switch.  But mostly it has been Windows PC gaming since Y2K.

Connectivity

That one I really need to update.  I think it was about 2015 that we swapped over to Comcast for a cable modem connection.  That runs at 100 MBits.

100 megabits per second.  One hundred million bits per second.  That is a long way from 1,200 bits per second back in 1986.  I would need more than 80,000 little Apple modems humming along in parallel to even come close to my throughput today.  1986 me would be impressed.

Hell, 2006 me would be impressed.  We’ve come a long way.

Back in 1986 I was kind of an oddball, demographically speaking.  I mean, just having a personal computer was still kind of odd, though growing increasingly common.  But having one that connected to other computers, that was really not a thing for many people.

For a long time the idea of a computer being connected to other computers was kind of niche.  One of the jobs I had there were several Apple ][s hooked up to a central Corvus drive that would share accounting data and output reports.  And the stuff in the lab at school was all wired up, but for most people a computer was a stand alone unit.  If you wanted to send somebody data you printed it out or saved it to a floppy disk.

In 1991, when I was working for a company that specialized in hard drives I got a call from a guy who had moved from there to a data recovery firm asking me about modems.  I was the recognized “modem expert” largely because I ran a BBS at the time, which made me the one-eyed man in the land of the blind.  He had a client down in LA who really needed the data from a drive they had recovered and wanted to know how long it would take to send to him via modem.  They had a 2,400 bps modem handy to transfer the 40mb of data.

I told him it would be quicker to drive down to LA and hand him the drive in person.  I didn’t even get into the complexity of queuing up however many files and sending the one by one and then sorting through them at the far end.  He was discouraged, but understood when I did the math.  It was kind of a surprise that the client at the far end had a modem, even in 1991.

Modems didn’t really become a thing to have until 1994 or so when the World Wide Web suddenly hove into view for many people.  I moved from the hard drive company to a modem manufacturer… again based on the fact that I ran a BBS so knew something about modems… where our big selling point was that you could send a fax from your Apple PowerBook.  Hard copies were still a thing.  Remember faxing lunch orders into a restaurant or getting fax spam ads?  No?  You’re kind of young, aren’t you?

But with the web, the internet became a thing for everybody.  The rush to get online began and here in Silicon Valley there was a good year to 18 months when on a typical weeknight you could lift up the handset on your home phone and not be sure you would get a dial tone.  The phone company, built on the idea that most people make a few five minute calls, was suddenly faced with a bunch of people who would dial up to their ISP when they got home from work and leave their connection pinned up until they went to bed.   Checking your email was kind of a big deal.

There was an transition point from where a computer went from being a stand alone device, to being something that could connect to an online service, to a device whose whole existence revolves around connectivity.

Back in the 80s and 90s having a computer online meant you could be some sort of cyber ninja computer hacker.  Now having a computer not connected has a special mystic.  We have a special term for it even, an “air gapped” computer.

I mean think about how much you do every day that required connectivity.  My job, which has been work from home for 18 months now, pretty much required online connectivity all the time for the last 20 years.  The network being down meant no work was getting done.  And now I am at home and that connection is work, commerce, and entertainment.  I have a 10 channel package from Comcast for my cable TV service because they want so badly to demonstrate that people are not cord cutting.

So far this year we have watched live TV on January 6th and during the Olympics.

Meanwhile, “always on” internet is essential.  All my many screens, and screens have proliferated in the last decade, seem to now demand some sort of internet access.  I remember back in the day when my daughter and I got our Nintendo DS Lites.  Internet connectivity was kind of a rare thing.  Setting up Nintendo WiFi for Pokemon was a pain.  I think only Mario Kart really worked well with it.

Now if I pick up the Switch Lite somewhere out of WiFi range is starts acting like a junkie in withdraw.

And I suspect the trend will continue in that direction.  I’ve resisted wifi enabled appliances and stuff, given their legendary security vulnerabilities, but I am sure some day they will become mandatory.

Nine Weeks of World War Bee

War never changes, or something like that.  This war is now past the two month mark and a few things have changed.

In Delve, the Imperium anchored two more Keepstars in 1DQ1-A.

Keepstars anchoring behind our staging Keepstar

The number of Upwell structures in our staging system was already to a point where they flooded the overview, but now there are two more Keepstars on grid with our main staging Keepstar.  The grid around that area is… crowded.

1DQ1-A staging Keepstar grid

The red circles are the four Keepstars on grid, while the two yellow circles are Sotiyos.  The blue circles are the array of faction Fortizars taken as part of the peace deal from the war two years back.  I don’t think I circled them all as they are hard to pick out in that screen shot, which is also slightly angled off the up-down axis, so doesn’t line up quite right.  But there are a lot of them.  You can see some of them lined up in this screen shot from above the home Keepstar.

Fortizars to the left, right, and below

This grid will end up being a hell of a fight should it come down to it.

Northern Front

After marshaling their titan and super force and driving it all the way around from Catch into Fountain, the invaders destroyed the final Keepstar in the region, the one in Y-2ANO.

Attacking the Keepstar

A few ops were run to help people get things out of the Keepstar before the final timer.  I managed to get a Ferox and a Megathron safely back to 1DQ1-A.  However, an Ibis I left in there is now in asset safety and will be redeemable in Hophib in a couple weeks.  Hah.

That brought the attacker Keepstar kill count up to six.

Keepstar tally so far

After that, the invaders appeared to be done in Fountain.  A few more smaller structures were destroyed, but they didn’t bother to form up for the final timer they had set on a faction Fortizar in Y-2ANO.

Faction Fortizar glows as the timer runs down

Instead they started move ops to move their forces elsewhere, perhaps to threaten Querious or Period Basis… or who knows, maybe they’ll actually come to Delve?

Not getting a fight on that faction Fortizar, Elo Knight dropped out Ferox covering fleet into their staging at I-CUVX where we mauled a move op and reinforced their staging Fortizar while the hostiles sat and watched, not bothering to form up anything to fight us.

Battle Report Header

Not a war winning fight, but a send off from us.  I did not come back for the armor timer, but it did not go well for us.

Southern Front

Querious saw clashes over structures, including the faction Fortizar in ED-L9T, a location well remembered by many in Reavers as the sight of one of our most epic fights a little over five years back.

Sovereignty in the eastern end of the region remains mostly uncontested as a swathe of systems sit with nobody bothering to drop an ihub.  It just isn’t worth the effort to either side.

Querious ihub map – Sep 6, 2020

Meanwhile, the invaders have made no progress on the western reach of the region, when GSF and The Initiative still hold ihubs and TCUs.

The big action in the south took place in the Paragon Soul region, in G-M4GK, when the Imperium spotted some titans in there and threw down to try and take them out.  Subcaps and capitals were through the gate and into a brawl, with supers and titans formed up and ready to follow them in, all late on a week night in USTZ.

In the brawl in G-M4GK

Things did not go our way, the supers and titans did not gate into the fight.  The dreads and faxes that got on grid ended up taking heavy losses, including a Vehement faction dread.

Doomsdays hitting home

The battle report showed losses at a 3:1 ratio against us.

Battle Report header for the G-M4GK brawl

But it was a moment of very high excitement, on both sides I am sure, as it looked like something might break out and become one of those legendary battles.  Once everybody who could be extracted was out, we escorted the titans home and called it a night.

Seeing our titans and supers safely back

My Participation

I managed to get into the G-M4GK fight, where I lost my Guardian as part of Elo Knight’s Ferox fleet, then joined Dictorian Pilot’s fleet in a Sabre to help camp the G-M4GK in TCAG-3, where we caught quite a few hostiles trying to slip in to catch our caps as they pulled out.

I also went out with an interceptor fleet to witness the death of the Y-2ANO Keepstar… and to whore on the kill mail.  I was a bit bummed that I could not stay on grid to see it explode, but the hostiles were looking for anything to shoot.

My damaged comic fit Ares

I had a snowball launcher and a fireworks launcher, along with a civilian weapon off an Ibis, so you know I was serious.

I managed to get off grid to repair on one of our Fortizars when a hostile Tengu warped in on us at zero.  He was quickly tackled by the the others interceptors sitting with us, who were actual fit with useful things, like webs, scrams, and points.  The Tengu was taken down by the dozen interceptors.

Get the Tengu!

My efforts are visible in that screen shot.  Both fireworks and snowball launcher were in actions… and the gun as well.  I got on the kill mail.  To be fair to the poor Tengu pilot, tidi was pretty bad with over 2,000 people in the system, and he might not have known what hit him until it was too late.  But it was a nice little addition to our day.

So my loss count for the war incremented by one, with the loss of the Guardian.  My total:

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

I have two Guardians on the list as I went down my losses and realized I forgot to add one from early August.

Overall

With the invaders moving their forces elsewhere, it seems like the northern front my be done.  The rumor is that PandaFam is going to install some smaller alliances in the region in order to hold it, which I am sure will end well.  But we will have to wait and see if that comes to pass.

The big question is where will the invaders strike next?  Will they focus their forces and attempt to do to Querious what they just finished doing in Fountain?  Will the stage back in Catch in FAT-6P or use one of their 13 Keepstars deployed for their move op to try to approach from the Khanid region?  Or will they force a move into NPC Delve to hurry things along?

I suppose it depends on who is running the show.  TEST and Legacy have seemed lackadaisical in their approach to the war relative to their PandaFam allies, who have really been putting in most of the work.  But, as was pointed out, Legacy is still at home and can rat and mine and do much of their peacetime stuff, while PandaFam is deployed far from home and no doubt feels some pressure from line members to get stuff done.

The Sunday peak concurrent users has dipped back down a bit, reflecting the reduction in action. (Numbers courtesy of EVE Offline)

• Day 1, Jul 5 – 38,838
• Week 1, Jul 12 – 37,034
• Week 2, Jul 19 – 34,799
• Week 3, Jul 26 – 34,692
• Week 4, Aug 2 – 35,583
• Week 5, Aug 9 – 35,479
• Week 6, Aug 16 – 34,974
• Week 7, Aug 23 – 38,299
• Week 8, Aug 30 – 35,650
• Week 9, Sep 6  – 35,075

And then there is the Quantum Cores patch, the subject of my post tomorrow, which will change some of the way Upwell structures are handled.  That may have some impact on the war come October.  But we’ll get to that and we see what week ten has for us.

Addendum:

• INN — World War Bee: Week Nine

WoW Classic gets a DDoS Attack

All I wanted to do was play a little WoW Classic while I ate my lunch on a Saturday afternoon.  But this was what I got.

Should I try again?

A group calling themselves UKDrillas on Twitter decided to go after WoW Classic today.  They had started against against Wikipedia yesterday, but moved on to WoW Classic, seemingly to go after streamers on the US PvP servers.

Asmongold always seems to be on that list

As of my writing this I seem able to get into the game on Bloodsail Buccaneers, however I end up getting dropped fairly frequently, no doubt a side effect of the attack on the PvP servers.  Overwatch, which shares the same data center, is also down.

There hasn’t been much word about this outside of the Classic WoW subreddit.  No doubt Blizzard is working on the issue, while the WoW news sites seems a bit behind the curve.  But for a bit we were able to see WoW Classic servers showing up with low population counts.

A rare site these days

Not that things were getting better as time went along.

Now the servers are gone!

As for the attackers, they are free to disrupt things for now.  Groups like this have popped up before.  I remember LulzSec hitting EVE Online and other sites back in the day.  I also recall a bunch of them ending up arrested eventually.  It happens.  We’ll see how this plays out.

Other reports:

• WoWHead has a report up

The Labors of Blaugust 2019

Blaugust has come and gone.  Whether or not is was a success, or what impact it had, is pretty much an individual perspective.  My goal of posting every single day in August was achieved, so I guess it was good.

Belghast has a summary post about the achievements of Blaugust.  The basic stats are:

• 1305 posts were made by Blagust 2019 Participants
• 66 Individuals Participated
• 11 Newbie Bloggers Participated
• 55 out of 66 made at least 5 posts qualifying for Bronze
• 36 made at least 15 posts qualifying for Silver
• 31 made at least 25 posts qualifying for Gold
• 27 made 31 or more posts during the month of August qualifying for Rainbow

We were down in participants, having seen 90 last year, but the post per participant ratio went up, closing in on 20 per, and more people made it to 31 posts this year.

Being in the 31 post club, I get to display the rainbow Blaugust badge.

2019 Rainbow Badge for 31 or more posts

Bel has a Blaugust media page up where you can grab this year’s, or any previous year’s, badge.

As is often the case, I got to the end of the event and then wondered what had really happened.  Sure, I wrote a lot of posts, but did I do anything for the Blaugust community to earn my self-appointed “mentor” title?  I am not sure.  I did make some Blaugust posts that contained some advice, if you could manage to distill it down enough I suppose.

• Blaugust 2019 is Coming
• Blaugust Arrives and You Call This Prep?
• Blaugust and What the Hell to Write About
• Blaugust and Burning Things Down
• Blaugust and Keeping the Words Flowing to the Site

I was feeling a little manic this year, just judging by those titles.  I think I was more on point with last year’s advice posts:

• A Blaugust to Revive Blogging
• It Is Blaugust and What Should I Even Write About?
• Blaugust and Consolidating Your Blog Reading
• Blaugust and Making Comments on Comments
• Blaugust and Editorial Policy
• The Labors of Blaugust

I should probably go back and lump together all the posts about blogging I have made over the years for the various NBI or Blaugust events.

Traffic-wise, I saw an uptick in page views and visitors and likes and comments.  That seems to be the norm here for Blaugust.  Stats show that has happened for the last five years, an uptick from July to August.  Whether that is the impact of Blaugust or other items… last year, for example, Battle for Azeroth hit in August, this year WoW Classic hit, and posts about both attracted search engine traffic… I could not say.

Oddly, the uptick tends to continue into September, with that month being slightly higher in page views than August, though likes and comments tend to fall off.  Just looking at the average views per day, this September seems to be following the trend, though I also do tend to keep rolling on the daily post thing for a few weeks after Blaugust.  Once I get rolling I guess.

I’m not sure what else to say.  I made it.  I read a lot of other people’s posts.  I tried to comment on some, link out to others, but managed to do neither to the extent that I would have liked.  I suppose I should take a moment to get in what has become my baseline advice over the various blogger events, which is:

• Be the blog you want to read

If you’re not making that blog, then what are you doing?

And, of course, I want to link out to everybody who participated.  Please click on the links and visit these people!

• ..in the mind..
• A Hobbits Journey
• A Missioneer in Eve
• A Technical Rejoinder
• Aeternus Gaming
• All the Ampersands
• Ammos Rambles
• Ashs Adventures
• Aywren Sojourner
• Azerothian Life
• Backlog Crusader
• Beyond Tannhauser Gate
• Bio Break
• Blog of the Idle
• Book of Jen
• Can I Play Too
• Contains Moderate Peril
• Cooler on the internet
• Daily Creative Thing
• Dating Sims on the Holodeck
• Dextraneous
• Endgame Viable
• Enjoying Overload
• Everwakes Internet Journey
• Galumphing
• Gamer Girl Confessions
• Gaming Conversations
• Gaming SF
• Glittering Girly Gwent Gaming
• Glittering Girly Gwent Gaming
• Going Commando – A SWTOR Fan Blog
• Home of Beau Hindman
• I Care a Lot
• Im Not Squishy
• Indiecator
• Inventory Full
• Kabalyero
• Kaylriene
• Knifesedge Blogs
• Later Levels
• Leaflocker
• LeeksEverywhere
• Leeterati
• Mailvaltar – MMOs and other stuff
• Me vs. Myself and I
• MMOJuggler
• Nerd Girl Thoughts
• Nerdy Bookahs
• Neri Approves
• Neverwinter Thoughts
• NomadicGamersEh
• Play Casually
• Priest with a Cause
• Psychochilds Blog
• RandomX
• Shadowz Abstract Gaming
• Shards of Imagination
• Synthetic Dulips
• Tales of the Aggronaut
• TechJoy2Day
• The Ancient Gaming Noob
• The Friendly Necromancer
• The MMOist
• The Parent Trope
• Time to Loot
• Unidentified Signal Source
• Watching Snow Fall
• Whats Occurin?
• Where The Monsters Are
• Wordy Introvert

Solonor Saves the Elves with the Elder Forest

After all the news yesterday it might be time for a quiet Friday.  So I have finished up one of my TorilMUD drafts to continue on with the tale of the elves.

My Leuthilspar Tales series so far has been mostly about the hardships and disappointments faced by the elves and half-elves of Evermeet in TorilMUD. Isolated on the island, unable to take the elf gate to the mainland until level 20, the elves were left with the three zones I’ve written about before, Kobold Village, the Faerie Forest, and the Elemental Glades. The latter was more of a hazard to young elves than anything, the su-monsters killing many an unwary elf in their day.

Later we got the Sylvan Glades, a zone with much to recommend it… unless you were an ill-equiped elf under level 20. Then it wasn’t of very much use at all.

What a young elf needed was a place to accrue experience, get some gear, and maybe indulge in a bit of questing along the way.

Experience was they key of course. In the old school world of DikuMUD and its derivatives, of which TorilMUD was one, gaining experience and leveling up was a primary task, and slaying things was the main way to do this. Quests in TorilMUD were almost exclusively about equipment, and quest givers were rare, unmarked, and sometimes exasperating to deal with. And getting to level 20 was a prime goal. Not only could you get through the elf gate to Waterdeep, with its open air market selling gear you could only dream of back in Leuthilspar, but you also got to see your stats as numbers for the first time (Up until that point your stats were words like “good,” “excellent,” or “poor” that represented a range of values, “perfect” being the only one to map to a single number, and many a character was abandoned upon hitting 20 only to learn that the you were at the low end of the range for some key stat, so were screwed.) and you could petition a GM for a last name. (Something else EverQuest borrowed.)

But getting to level 20, something that probably takes an evening in World or Warcraft these days, could take a a couple of days of play time. I think my first TorilMUD character had five days of play time… that would be 120 hours logged in… before he hit level 20. (And his stats were bad. Also, he was a ranger. A ranger with bad stats is like a double curse.) That was in part because I was learning the game and the lay of the land. But it was also because I had crap equipment and the competition for mobs was pretty fierce. And when I say “fierce” I mean there might be a dozen other people sharing the whole island with me also trying to level up.

Eventually I found people to team up with. People other than Xyd. He was a freaking magic user when what we really needed was a healer. But if somebody was doing the mob rotation for groups… there was set of mobs you could run between in Kobold Village and the Faerie Forest and slay in a single spawn cycle for maximum experience… and wouldn’t let you in, it was hard times. Solo mobs were slow times. If they were worth any decent experience they beat the crap out of you and you had to rest between fights… oh, the Kobold miners… and if you could kill them without resting up they were probably not worth much experience at all. Not that you could tell. Back then you had to go back to your class guild leader to get a vague statement about how far along you were in your level. They key was if the message included a grin. That meant you were within 10% of leveling.

So much complaining, I know. The upside was that shared adversity builds bonds. I played video games with people I met on Evermeet for years after the fact. A few still show up here and leave comments now and then. Our WoW guild was originally founded in 2006 by a group of TorilMUD players after we moved from EverQuest II.

Anyway, the problems of Evermeet could have been born had they not been isolated to our island. But if you started anywhere else in the game, you could walk to Waterdeep and partake of its bounty. Tiny Silver rings were as common as water, a few spawning on every reboot at the south end of town, coming with 5AC and +2 hit stats, a huge item for a low level player. That was the first thing an elf would buy in Waterdeep, to replace that +4hp pearl ring and probably that piece of string that boosted your save versus paralysis… and there was nothing paralyzing on Evermeet. So we felt justified in our resentment against the rest of the Faerun. Why couldn’t we have nice things?

One of the players I met back in the early days was a elf ranger named Rylandir. I think he was a ranger. He might have been a warrior. I just recall his attempt to get a full set of gear all in ANSI green, which makes me think ranger. Anyway, I caught up with Xyd down in the Kobold mines on day and he was grouped up with Rylandir. Xyd introduced him as “speaking in the ways of our ancestors” or something like that, a sign which I immediately picked up. We had ourselves a role player.

Which was fine. I try to be role play compatible, even if I cannot carry it off myself. I fear I am much more a “roll player” at my core, a reformed munchkin who can’t quite let go of the mechanics side of thing.

So I joined the group and we slew kobolds together for quite a stretch and he became part of the league of shared adversity.

What made him different that Xyd or Meclin or myself is that he didn’t just bitch about the problem and then move on once he hit level 20. He actually did something about it. After playing for a while he started looking into what it took to design a zone. He was going to be part of the solution for the elves.

Meanwhile the TorilMUD staff tried to throw us, and the leveling population in general, a bone by planting some special XP Grid zones in the game. These were square zones populated by a semi-random set of mobs of various levels, the idea being that there would always be some mobs to grind if your favorite areas were being camped. The zones were generic, tacked onto various zones around the world, identical, forgettable, and, worst of all, not very good experience.

We got one of those zones on Evermeet. I remember when they made their appearance all over. And after some experimentation they were declared to be not very useful.

XP Grid next to the Elemental Glades on Evermeet

The xp was poor, there was no loot, the coin drops were minimal, and there was nothing compelling or even midly interesting about the locations once you had wandered through. One explanation I heard was that the mobs were all generic, not having been assigned a class, so they could be randomly generated or some such, at that classless mobs did not give much experience. And that might have been true. But in hindsight I suspect that the whole thing was set up that way on purpose so as not to pull people away from the real zones in the game. Because if the XP grids had been a worthwhile alternative, people whole have flocked there, and these grids were not what the game was about. So it was a deliberate “better than nothing” solution that didn’t even rise to that level of quality.

Rylandir’s efforts paid off however. He was now the immortal Solonor, the Forest Hunter. I seem to recall that he did a couple of small zones initially, but his first masterpiece was the Elder Forest on Evermeet.

It was, and remains, a magnificent zone, just the sort of area that the wee elves of Evermeet needed. The text of the zone was all done very nicely in ANSI colors. There were plenty of mobs in levels that rose the deeper into the zone you went.  There were only a few key aggressive mobs.  There were quests and the zone itself told a story in its room descriptions and through the behavior of its mobs.

It is also a multi-level zone with lots of hidden doors, mobs, and items that you have to search to find.  Without searching you would barely get into the zone.

Entry Level of Elder Forest

The theme is that of a musty, abandoned place, where the dead were laid to rest only to rise again.

First Level of Elder Forest

But it isn’t all undead.  There is an open area at the back and a hill around which a few different types of mobs reside.

The bottom level of the Elder Forest

And the levels interconnect, as you can see by the levels of the map (which go from top to bottom both in the post and in the game) and there is even a path over a hill that connects back to the same area, something that became part of the leveling loop later on.

It is hard to describe what a nice, well put together, tight zone is like in a MUD.  Things just work and flow nicely and you get a good sense of place.  There were also random atmospheric messages that varied with your location.  They might announce a blood curdling scream or a sense of being watched in the underground sections, or the sound of fighting or the ring or swords in the distance up on the hill.

It is also a bit difficult to describe the zone with the same emotion that I have done with others, like Kobold Village.  This is because the Elder Forest came along much later in my time in TorilMUD it doesn’t have quite the same attachment for me that the older zones do.  We ran through it many times during the current iteration of TorilMUD, which went live in early 2003, but I ran dozens of elves and half-elves through Kobold Village and the Faerie Forest during the 90s.

And the rework of the forest road outside of Leuthilspar did not help.  Once it was just eight rooms down the road and turn south.  After the change it was off in the distance.

Leuthilspar and Vicinity

And then, of course, there was the emancipation of the elves back in 2016.  The requirement to stay on Evermeet until level 20 was lifted and the elf gate at the east end of Leuthilspar was open to all elves.  They could leave the island and head to Waterdeep, which is where most of the population of the game tends to congregate.

Now the Elder Forest sits mostly silent.  Most low level zones are pretty quiet these days as the online population sits between 20 and 30 players and most of them are level 50.  But the Elder Forest is especially quiet.  It isn’t on the way to anywhere, unlike some of the mainland low level zones, and it is on Evermeet, where only those born there may freely tread.

The Elder Forest has become what it was designed to look like; a hidden tomb from a time past.  But for a short time it was a happy, active, and interesting zone to play in and explore.

Delve – Deploying Means Less Ratting and Mining

The New Eden Monthly Economic Report for August 2017 is out, and while there are some surprises, the economic performance of Delve isn’t one of them.

The Imperium spent most of the middle of the month of August deployed in the north, staging out of the low sec system of Hakonen.  This meant less people ratting and mining, but probably more important, less people defending the home region of Delve.  That led to a sharp uptick in carrier and Rorqual losses.  So, as one might expect, NPC bounties were way down for Delve.

August 2017 – NPC Bounties by Region

Hitting close to 3.6 trillion ISK in bounty payouts, that put the region down almost 5 trillion ISK from July, when the payouts totaled 8.4 trillion ISK.  The August take was just 42% of the July number.

Still, that left Delve ahead of other heavily ratted regions such as Branch, Cobalt Edge, Outer Passage, and Period Basis, all of which remained fairly steady month over month.  The overall effect of the deployment can be seen in the ISK sinks and faucets chart.

August 2017 – Top 8 ISK Sinks and Faucets

The bounty payouts dip and recover on the chart as the Imperium deployed then returned home.  That dip represents a little over half of Delve’s contribution to that chart, so you can see that it is significant, but also that bounties are being paid out elsewhere too.  With Delve gone bounties would still the largest ISK faucet in the game by far.  And, of course, 92% of bounties are still paid out in null sec.

It is also interesting to note the bump in insurance payouts and transaction tax and broker’s fee deductions during the deployment north as the Imperium bought out supplies in Jita and then lost piles of Typhoons.  The interconnectivity of the economy is one of the powerful aspects of EVE Online.

On the mining front Delve was likewise down during the deployment.

August 2017 – Mining Value by Region

The dip in mining is even more dramatic that bounties, with the value assessed at 2 trillion ISK, down from over 10 trillion ISK in July.  That is an 80% cut, though it is not surprising.  Rorquals, the mining ship of choice in null sec space, were heavily targeted during the deployment.  Many were blown up… the value of ships destroyed went from 1.4 trillion to 2.2 trillion ISK… while smarter miners chose not to expose their fancy ships to the danger.

Likewise, production in Delve was down as well, dipping by 50% as people threw themselves into the deployment.

August 2017 – Production Values by Region

The key economic figures summary chart also shows Delve dropping by half when it comes to trade value as well when compared to the July numbers.

August 2017 – Regional Stats

So that is the economic impact of the Imperium taking its show on the road for a few weeks.

However, we’re back in Delve again now, the defenses are back in place, and ratting and mining are relatively safe occupations for the wary again.  I expect the numbers to bounce back to July levels this month, perhaps even exceeding them as people put in a bit of effort to make up for losses and lost time.