Twenty Years

Unlike a lot of things that happened years or decades ago, September 11th 2001 doesn’t feel like just yesterday.  It feels like a long time ago.  It feels distant, a piece of history.  As an event it is closer to to the end of the Cold War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the break up of the Soviet Union, things that loomed large for a much younger me.

Twenty years is a long time and so much has happened since that date.  We’ve had five presidential elections, invaded Afghanistan, invaded Iraq, had hurricane Katrina, endured the great recession, saw the Arab Spring, the Occupy movement, the Tea Party, ISIS in Iraq, a festering civil war in Syria, gay marriage becoming legal, the election of an unhinged reality TV star as president, an open and proud racist movement, a thermonuclear armed North Korea, the end of civil liberties in Hong Kong, Brexit, an armed attack on the US capitol, a political party going all-in on voter suppression and racism, and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

2020 alone felt like it lasted five years.  No wonder 2001 feels like distant history.

And that is just what spills into my mind on a first pass.  So many other things happened since 9/11 that have pushed it deeper back in memory.

But I still remember the day.  It fell on a Tuesday at a time when I had early morning conference calls, the joys of dealing with teams a few time zones away.  I had stayed home to take those and the news popped up about the first building being hit as I was getting ready for the first call.  I had just turned on the TV when the second tower was hit.  It was surreal, watching that run on the news over and over again.  The conference call was cancelled.  Work was cancelled.  Everything was cancelled.  All flights in the US were cancelled, and those in flight landed as soon as they could.

By the time the towers collapsed it felt like everybody was watching CNN helplessly, not knowing what to do or what this all meant.  It was a unifying national trauma and we were going to do something about it.  We sent troops off around the world, my brother included, stirred shit up, killed hundreds of thousands, saw thousands of US service men and women killed, wounded, or traumatized in an effort that, in hindsight, didn’t make us all that much safer and didn’t help the average person in the countries on which we visited destruction.  In the end the main beneficiaries seemed to be US defense contractors and a layer of high ranking corrupt individuals who skimmed the cream for themselves.

Despair with US foreign policy runs in our family I suppose.  I had a great uncle on my mother’s side of the family who went to work at the State Department after the war, learned Arabic at the army language school in Monterey, and went off to the Middle-east to help make the world a better place.  In furtherance of that he he was seconded to the CIA and ended up using his diplomatic cover to carry suitcases full of cash to bribe politicians and finance coups and otherwise help make everything worse for no real long term gain.

He was moved to write a book about his time in the Middle-east due to the harm we had caused over there.  He described leaving Beirut in 1975, a city he had loved in the 50s and early 60s, which had become a byword for violence and destruction when he saw it for the final time.

And now there is my daughter, who will turn 20 in December.  My wife was six months pregnant when the 9/11 attacks happened.  My daughter has never known anything but the War on Terror and security theater at airports and a seemingly endless war in Afghanistan.

I suppose that last is… not over, because history never ends… entering a new era.

I don’t miss the Cold War.  Living under the threat of nuclear war was not a happy time, and those who long for the bilateral symmetry of NATO against the Warsaw Pact are glossing over the reality of the time.

But I remember a stretch of time that ran from the late 80s to the mid-90s where there was hope that things would get better, that world would hash out just a few more problems, that we might actually be able to settled things and get, if not peace, then at least something close to it.  Gorbachev, German reunification, the fall of the Soviet Union, the expansion of the European Union, the unity of the Gulf War against an aggressor, we seemed to be headed in the right direction.  And then, as usual, we fucked it up somehow.

Remember the dead.  Comfort the survivors.  Hope for something better.

Diablo II Act Three

My 20th anniversary replay of Diablo II has reached Act III, which is beyond where I expected to get.

It has been a long time

I have picked up Diablo II again a number of times over the years.  I always play through Act I, which I said is very much the Diablo memory act.  And I always get well into Act II, though the the Duriel fight is probably the first real check in the game to see whether you are geared and spec’d usefully.  I save that one respec that you get until that fight at least, because that is usually the point where I have to get serious.  You can get that far in the game with a strategy of “I’ll just carry more health potions!”  Duriel is the first place that tends to fall apart for me.

But Act III… that doesn’t have any strong memories for me.  Sure, I recognized it when I got there.

On the dock in Kurast

But in the first two acts I know what the quest are by heart.  In Kurast I am just the new guy in town.  Fortunately, Deckard Cain is there to keep me on track.

Stay on target!

Part of the reason I forget Act III no doubt relates to its design, which isn’t all that exciting.  It is very gray in tone, which is odd for a jungle I suppose, and lacks much in the way of interesting visuals.

A village in the jungle

It is also a very linear.  Not the way that the Diablo III story zones are tightly linear, but there is basically one path forward.  Kurast is at one end, Mephisto is at the other, and you just walk straight towards him, stopping occasionally for a dungeon along the way.

In the Flayer Dungeon

No portals, no change of scenery, no doubling back, just walk the jungle, clear the dungeons, find the waypoints, check in with Cain whenever the quest log says.  It makes you wish for a bit of the Arcane Sanctuary again, just for a change up.

In that Diablo II way, you have to go collect some bits and pieces again, delving into one dungeon for a brain, another for a heart.  They are always in the big shiny chests.

A likely place

And all the while Cain and his pals back in Kurast are pushing you on with a false sense of urgency.  You have to get moving, danger is at hand.

Look, the game will wait for me, there is no need to hurry. I’ve seen the script.

At the far end of the jungle is Travincal, a town clearly in a red district as everybody there is open carrying and the city council is very much anti immigrant… or at least anti me.

And they are not just all talk either

The council is kind of a tough fight.  They are all mini bosses so I had to run in and out of the fight a few time.  You can see I have a portal up in the fight for a quick exit.  Also, my mercenary is down again.

The council defeated, you end up with the last drop you need, Khalim’s Flail, which you combine with his hear, brain, and eye in the Horodric Cube.

The cube works some magic

That assembled, it is back to Travincal to break the magic orb that opens up access to the final dungeon area, Mephisto’s lair, the Durance of Hate.

Time for Mephisto

The Durance of Hate has a few mini bosses in the way, some of the alternate members of the council I think.  This was the first time I ran into a mini boss with a serious defense buff, being immune to physical damage.

Steel Grumble indeed

Fortunately my weapon does other types of damage as well, so he took a while, but we eventually knocked him down.  Then there was some more clearing to do, but it wasn’t long before we were facing Mephisto.

Mephisto speaks!

He has some more of the council with him, and he delivers his big line, which is that we are too late, his brothers Diablo and Baal have already been and gone.  The fight was tough, though not too bad.  My merc died, as usual, but I was able to take him down without having to jump out of the fight more than a couple of times.

When he dies, you get his soul stone and return to town.  From there you get the wrap up narrative and passage to the Pandemonium Fortress and the start of Act IV.

Tyreal is there to greet you

Act III did not feel as long as the previous two acts, though that may be more due to the lack of distinctive areas of dungeons.  But when we talk about short, Act IV brings it.  More on that in another post.

Everybody Comes to Westfall

We are now past the two week mark for WoW Classic and I feel like I haven’t gotten very far along.  People are moving along, I see people past level 30 in Stormwind regularly and “that guy on the horse” has become a regular feature. (Was it Ethic who named that concept, the person on their mount in town sitting there to show it off?)  Beside that I feel like I am poking along so slowly.

This is somewhat self-imposed as the instance group hasn’t been ready to ride yet, with moves, business trips, and end of summer vacations keeping people away.

And moving slowly isn’t all that bad.  I am not in any crazy race, nor was I ever likely to be in contention for any “world first” in the game.  There is lots to explore and see and do while keeping characters down in the level range for the first dungeon, Ragefire Chasm.

Plus, there are always alts.  I’m prone to making too many alts to start with, so keeping in the right level range has gotten me to four characters now in the level 14-16 range.  I have all four alliance races covered as well, as I now have:

• Level 14 gnome warrior
• Level 14 human paladin
• Level 16 night elf druid
• Level 16 dwarf hunter

That warrior might be my first gnome character in WoW.

So I have not been idle.  And they have all stepped into the zone where we’ll be headed, the zone where most people end up in at some point or another; Westfall.

Westfall – This Way

Westfall is one of the quintessential zones of Azeroth.  For the Alliance it is where a lot of players converge as the quest lines there lead to the Deadmines instance.  If you want to have Gryan Stoutmantle shout your name out to the zone you have to get on board the quest train.

He’s just hanging out waiting for you to show up

And, of course, Horde players have to find their way there as well if they want to do the instance.

While some of the starter zones have calmed down quite a bit… they are not dead, but I got my gnome warrior through the Coldridge Valley part of the dwarf/gnome starter zone in about 20 minutes because there were no more lines… Westfall feels like it is still full tilt crowded a lot of the time and very much alive with players.  And NPCs of memory.  Running into the zone you are greeted with the first quests right away from familiar faces.

Welcome to Westfall! How about a few quests?

Those are the Furlbrows, with Old Blanchy, who features in a couple other places in the game, including an appearance in the Old Hillsbrad dungeon in the Caverns of Time.  It was a bit of a shock when Blizz killed the lot of them for Cataclysm.

But there is no time to hang about there.  There are so many semi-overlapping quests in the zone that you might as well get them all.  One of the quests sends you to the next location anyway, Saldean’s Farm, where you pick up a few more. (And maybe stand around clucking in hopes of getting a chicken pet.)  Then it is off to Sentinal Hill to turn in the quest from Goldshire sending you to check in with Gryan Stoutmantle, who also has a quest for you, as does a couple of other NPCs.  Don’t miss the one down the hill by the inn… and don’t forget to grab the flight point.  Running is all fine and dandy, but sometimes you just want to get places.

The list of quests alone brings up a small wave of nostalgia.

Some of the early Westfall quests

Here the game starts to stress your inventory management.  Half of those quests need you to collect things.  You need four stacks of ingredients for Westfall Stew, another stack for Goretusk Liver Pie, gnoll paws for another, Defias bandanas for yet another, bags of oats for Old Blanchy, and a pocket watch for Ted Furlbrow.  It isn’t quite Green Hills of Stranglethorn level of inventory management, but when you are likely rocking six slot bags, things start to fill up fast.   And that doesn’t even start to count the random drops you’ll get.

Then you have to find the mobs for the drops.  That isn’t too hard.  They are often in handy camps.  The problem is that the camps are often well camped by players.  But the pick up group cooperation spirit of WoW Classic, or at least the Bloodsail Buccaneer server, continues on.  With a couple of characters I was able to find groups to hunt with.

Slaughtering the Defias at one of their camps

Grouping up is a great way to knock out the quests where you have to kill 15 of this or 20 of that, since everybody in the group gets credit.  And a group can hold and wipe out a camp that might be a bit much to take on solo.  Mobs, especially the gnolls, spawn close together so you often cannot pull just one.  With a group you can do the whole village.

Waiting for gnolls to pop again

The problem is the quests that require drops dole them out one at a time.  A good group will swap to free-for-all looting and people will stick around until everybody is covered.  Or mostly covered.  Sometimes somebody leaves and another joins and they’re just starting and there is a cycle through the group that could last all night if you stuck around.

And some of the drop rates kind of suck.

Welcome to the gnoll hunt

I get that maybe every Defias isn’t following dress code or maybe left their bandana on the dresser at home in the rush to get out to Westfall, but Gnolls would seem to have four paws, and boars at least one liver per.  Yet we ran across many a pawless gnoll or heavy drinking goretusk whose liver had decayed to the point of being useless for cooking.

I remember a late 2004 Lore Sjöberg article over at Wired from back in the day that spoke of the “kinder, gentler” ways of World of Warcraft (which is a bit of a time capsule point of view you can find here), that included a reference to how, if you slew a named mob for a quest that required you bring back their head, the corpse would nicely provide a head for everybody in the party.

And that is the case certainly, for a specific named quest mob.  But for a run of the mill Defias or gnoll, it is a maximum of one per corpse, not guaranteed.

Not that it is a huge burden.  I have always toyed with the idea in the back of my mind that this was on purpose back in the day, that in order to off-set the reduced experience you get for grouping Blizz makes you slay more mobs.  And, in the end, when you need eight or fifteen drops and you have none it feels like it will take forever, but it never takes too long until you’ve just got one left.

Anyway, I am through that first wave of quests in Westfall on a couple of characters, and into it with the others.  The hope is that we’ll be able to get a group together to try Ragefire Chasm this weekend.  That it is located in the back end of Orgrimmar will make this comedy gold I am sure.  But if we need to stall some more I am going to have to start another alt, and I am well down the list of options.  I only have rogues and cloth wearing casters left.  Or I could go Horde I suppose.  We’ll see.

Addendum: I noticed that I used the title of this post before.  I cannot resist an obscure allusion I guess.

Fall Movie League – Nun the Less

The first week of our fall Fantasy Movie League is now done.  The post is a day early this week as I have a bloated mega-post planned for tomorrow already.

It looks like we have 16 people ready to go for the season based on the first week’s picks including at least one new player.  This first week saw a new film back at the top of the box office after a couple of weeks of carry overs dominating.  The lineup for the week looked like this:

The Nun                     $615
Crazy Rich Asians           $218
Peppermint                  $205
The Meg                     $88
Mission: Impossible         $62
Searching                   $62
Operation Finale            $52
God Bless the Broken Road   $48
Christopher Robin           $42
BlacKkKlansman              $37
Alpha                       $32
Happytime Murders           $30
Mile 22                     $26
Incredibles 2               $26
Hotel Transylvania 3        $16

On Monday I was still thinking Crazy Rich Asians might continue to be the right pick for anchor.  But then I read up on The Nun and found out that it was part of a whole series of very successful horror movies, including last year’s Annabelle Creation.  That, the growing projections over the week, and the Thursday night preview take got me to swap to The Nun as my anchor.  However, I did next to no research on filler titles which was my downfall for the week.  Right anchor, wrong filler.  I ended up with 1x The Nun and 7x The Incredibles 2.

Not the worst pick, but The Incredibles 2 dropped a lot with the passing of Labor Day and the start of school in the US.

The Nun was the best performer for the week, exceeding expectations by a fair margin, so was the anchor you had to go with to be a contender.  The perfect pick for the week was 1x The Nun, 1x The Meg, 2x Searching, and 4x Christopher Robin.  Nobody in the TAGN league managed to get the perfect pick.

The top ten scores for the week were:

1. Corr’s Carefully Curated Cineplex – $84,581,253
2. Po Huit’s Sweet Movie Suite – $84,581,253
3. Goat Water Picture Palace – $84,581,253
4. Too Orangey For Crows – $81,825,073
5. Darren’s Unwatched Cineplex – $81,551,873
6. Cyanbane’s Neuticles Viewing Party – $80,242,277
7. Wilhelm’s Kul Tiras Kino – $77,068,947
8. Miniature Giant Space Hamsterplex – $76,451,282
9. Ben’s X-Wing Express – $75,063,100
10. SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights – $63,428,493

As I said, this season will be top ten lists only.  Also, since this is the first week I don’t have to do a season score as well.

Corr, Po, and Goat all picked the same lineup.  For the box office scoring the ranking doesn’t make any difference unless you want to brag about having won the week.  But for the new scoring system order matters, so getting the tie breaker correct suddenly matters.

With the new scoring system the stack is the same but the scores are different.

1. Corr’s Carefully Curated Cineplex – 10
2. Po Huit’s Sweet Movie Suite – 9
3. Goat Water Picture Palace – 8
4. Too Orangey For Crows – 7
5. Darren’s Unwatched Cineplex – 6
6. Cyanbane’s Neuticles Viewing Party – 5
7. Wilhelm’s Kul Tiras Kino – 4
8. Miniature Giant Space Hamsterplex – 3
9. Ben’s X-Wing Express – 2
10. SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights – 1

I decided to go with just awarding points to the top ten, as in the example I posted last week.  With 16 players in the season I considered more points, 12 or 15, but decided against that for now.  I can change it later, but more points seemed likely to stretch the gap between first place and last.  Right now first place can only ever gain 10 points on somebody in a week, rather than 12 or 15.

The two scoring systems on week one do look very different.  The box office score doesn’t show a huge gap between first and ninth place, while the new scoring has first place gaining 10x the points of 10th spot.  I suspect that as we get towards the end of the season the the box office scoring system will effectively have a much wider gap while the new scoring system will lead to a tighter race at the end.  We shall see.

Coming up for week two we have:

The Predator         $408
The Nun              $338
A Simple Favor       $257
White Boy Rick       $137
Crazy Rich Asians    $131
Peppermint           $86
The Meg              $43
Unbroken 2           $40
Searching            $40
Christopher Robin    $31
Mission: Impossible  $28
BlacKkKlansman       $22
Operation Finale 2   $21
Alpha                $18
The Wife             $18

Going away this week are Happytime Murders, God Bless the Broken Road, Mile 22, Hotel Transylvania 3, and the long lasting The Incredibles 2

New this week are The Predator, A Simple Favor, White Boy Rick, Unbroken 2, and The Wife.

The Predator.  Is there precedent for remaking a movie that featured two actors who later went on to be state governors?  The original Predator was in the sweet spot of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s acting career (defined as between Scavenger Hunt and Last Action Hero) and had a bunch of spin offs, including a branch that somehow managed to pit the predator against the alien from the Aliens series, the best part of which was, in my opinion, the Alien Loves Predator web comic.

So there is a lot of history and The Predator is actually a continuation of the series rather than a reboot or remake.  It might as well be though since, aside from the web comic, the only bit I can recall was the original movie, and that mostly involves former Navy Seal, pro-wrestler-cum-actor, and future governor of Minnesota Jessie “The Body” Ventura wielding a backpack mini-gun that was probably the inspiration for including such weapons in every shooter from Doom forward.

Enough baggage.  How will it do?  It is a toss up between its history, being the shiny new action film, and it playing in ~3,800 theaters versus crappy reviews and it being a bit more nerd trivia than mainstream at this point.  Also, the 107 minute run time likely means they are padding out a minimal story.  Estimates put it between $25 and $35 million.  At the low point you don’t want it, while at the high end it has to be your anchor.

A Simple Favor is a murder mystery about a blogger and it stars Anna Kendrick which is all I need to know as I am now all-in on this.  Yes, it has a bit of the same tech-mystery vibe as Searching, but it gives bloggers their time in the sun.  Might be good for $14 million, if you need to get into numbers to pick this.

I recall the trailer for White Boy Rick coming up in the 25 minutes of trailers… including a red card trailer… that ran before BlackKklansman when we saw that.  There were apparently a lot of films who felt the Spike Lee demographic was vital to the success.

Anyway, it is about a kid who gets involved in the drug trade then becomes an FBI informer, all before he becomes of legal age.  Neither the story (based on true events, as they say) nor the kid has much draw for me, but the adults around him feature some big names including Matthew McConaughey, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Bruce Dern, and Piper Laurie.  Maybe good for $9 million if the long range forecast is accurate.

Unbroken 2, which is the sequel to the 2014 film Unbroken, and which has a longer name, but I am going to call it Unbroken 2 because it is easier.  This film follows former Olympian and freed prisoner of war Louis Zamperini through his post-war struggle and his becoming an evangelical Christian.  Short, made by a team that does faith focused films, and none of the original cast returns.  Memory of the first film might trick enough people into seeing it for it to get to $3 million.

And then there is The Wife, which actually premiered in the US a year ago, but which is out for a return run because… reasons.  I don’t know.  An art house film with a strong cast, it probably tries to make people think or something, which is never a box office draw unless you throw in enough explosions or gun shots to drown that out a bit.  But they are traveling to Stockholm to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, so gunshots, explosions, or a kidnapping are probably out.

Still, there it is, priced down with Alpha, which made $2.5 million last week, so somebody thinks it is worth about a million I guess.

With all of that my Monday Hot Takes pick ended up being 3x A Simple Favor and 5x Searching.  See, I wasn’t kidding about being all-in.  Tech thrillers for the win I hope.  Whether I will stick with that lineup through the Friday lock is another question.

The EVE September Update Strikes Another Blow for Symmetry

The September update for EVE Online doesn’t have much in the way of cornerstone features.  The changes were largely drawn from the “little things” thread, which are small improvements to our daily life in New Eden.

A few changes in the patch notes worth noting.  For example:

It is no longer possible to add items to a mobile depot, while it is reinforced. It is still possible to remove items from a reinforced mobile depot or scoop the mobile depot itself.

This will likely lead to more dead excavator drones as it is the general practice of Rorqual pilots, when caught by attackers, to drop a mobile depot and dump their expensive excavator drones in it.  That saves them for another day as killing a mobile depot requires you to reinforce it, then come back later to kill it.  Now however the Rorqual pilot needs to be quick as the attackers will likely reinforce any depot they drop right away.

Then there is another key item:

Upwell Cargo Deposit is now available at all Upwell Structures. This feature allows players flying outside an Upwell Structure to place items from their ship cargo directly into their personal hangar in the structure.

This should close off the courier scam where pilots get sent to a citadel only to find that they have no access.  They can’t deliver so lose the usually inflated collateral.  There was a thread about this change in the forums.

And there were also a series of changes to how ship fittings are managed.  One big item is that you can save cargo items as part of the fit.  This will be a boon for Reavers, as Asher does like us to haul around a pile of refits.

If we could strap things to our ships, we would

There is a long list of minor updates, enough that there is likely something there to make you happy.

But the big change in the September releases is the graphical update to the line of ships based on the Caldari Osprey.  It was one of the few remaining asymmetrical designs.

The Osprey in its final form

Once the Caldari cruiser with mining bonuses, it eventually got fully focused on the logistics (space healer) role once CCP was done revamping the mining ship lineup.

Space was different back in 2007

There was a joke about Caldari ships back when I started playing EVE Online.  It was said that when it came to Caldari ship design, there was a designer for the left half of ships and a designer for the right half of ships, and that these two people had never met.

Over the years since CCP has been regularly changing the sometimes wildly asymmetrical designs with ships that have bilateral symmetry.  Some of these have been good.  I think the Scorpion and Moa ship lines look better for the change.  Others I have been less enthusiastic about.  The Cormorant got an odd treatment, while the Griffin went from a sleek lined frigate to a space pig.  All a matter of opinion I suppose.

This time the came from the Osprey, which now has matching appendages on either side.

The new Osprey

These side bits also now fold back while the ship is in warp.

Side thingies down!

The central body remains similar to the old model, with a frilled snout and the long, tapering engine housing in the back.

The Osprey Navy Issue got its own new set of wings with the change.

Osprey Navy Issue

And the tech II variation, the Basilisk, got wings that are somewhat reminiscent of Dumbo.

Flying with both doors open?

Those doors fold down a bit when the Basi is in warp.

Folded down a bit

I am not particularly enamored with the change.  As with the Oneiros, I think they managed to remove all the grace from the design with this change.  But I have been told that symmetry makes SKIN development easier, and SKINs sell.

Anyway, that is what we are getting for September.  The patch notes are available to read through, if you want to see all the little changes, while the updates page only mentions the Osprey changes.  The update has been declared live, so everything mentioned is now a thing.

Coincident with this update CCP also announced a special SKIN release as a fundraising effort for the family of a member of the team, CCP Mankiller, who passed away in July at the age of 44.

Cordite Blossom Sabre

These SKINs, called Cordite Blossom, will be available from the New Eden store for a limited time and, once removed, will be retired and never sold again.  Proceeds from the sales will go to help the family of the late CCP Mankiller.

The SKINs are available for the following hulls:

• 60 PLEX – Punisher
• 60 PLEX – Slasher
• 60 PLEX – Sabre
• 60 PLEX – Zealot
• 60 PLEX – Eagle
• 60 PLEX – Ferox
• 60 PLEX – Brutix
• 60 PLEX – Hurricane

Buy a SKIN or two if you can.

Quests, Missions, and Return on Investment

One of the great compelling aspects of MMORPGs is progression, progression being defined as doing something… gain a skill, earn some gold, gain some experience, advance a story, open up new zones or dungeons… that advances you towards a larger goal.  I was all over that, along with what was meaningful and what might not be, last week.  Or, at least I strung together a bunch of words alleging to be all over that.  The rather subdued response could mean I sent everybody away to think… or that I just sent everybody away.

I am back for more.

Part and parcel of whatever variation of progression you choose, at least in PvE, is knowing that the time you spend gives you an expected return in the coin of the realm is, gold, progression, faction, or whatever.  Knowing you can log in and do something in a given amount of time for a set reward can be a powerful thing.  But it can also be a limiting thing.

In a discussion in a comment thread a while back about PvE in EVE Online there was the usual gripe about the dull and repetitive nature, accompanied by the call for CCP to make PvE more challenging, dynamic, exciting, or whatever.  Those words always play well, in part because they are just vague enough without an solid context to mean just about anything.

However one person called bullshit on all of that in a comment.  His assertion was that what mission runners valued above all was the consistency of both knowing what they were going to get for their efforts and understanding what it was going to take to complete the task at hand.  It was the surety of the return on the time invested that kept people going after they learned enough of the game to move forward.

Great moments in PvE, two explosions at once… I clearly split my guns

And while I wasn’t on board with everything he had to say, I had to agree strongly that the almost guaranteed return on the time invested was likely the bedrock on which many a mission runner career ended up being based.  In the absence of broad scale progression like levels, the reward in ISK and LPs was about all one can hang their hat on when it comes to New Eden PvE.

There is a reason that bounties in null sec are the biggest ISK faucet in the game.  Anomalies are repetitive in the extreme, don’t really have much of a fig leaf of a story to cover your reasoning to warp there and shoot everything in sight, and the big excitement is that maybe you get an escalation at the end.  And even escalations, not all that common back in the day, have gotten much more rare as CCP attempts to put the reigns on the faction battleship supply.

Furthermore, as I noted on Talking in Stations a week or so back, the escalation option for many players is to sell the bookmarks to a group that will run them and split the rewards with you so you don’t have to step out of your comfort zone and have your payout expectations set in advance.

There was a skit with Bill Murray on Saturday Night Live way back in the day where he was on stage with another performer ( I forget who at this point) who would give him a treat every time he did something on stage.  Then, after one action, he didn’t get a treat, at which point he stopped to point out that he was expecting a treat.  He’d been given a treat for every action in rehearsal and during the warm up before the show and for every action up to that point, but now suddenly he didn’t get a treat when he clearly expected one and had to find out, mid skit, what happened.

This is sort of the dark side of MMORPGs, the conditioned behavior, in that we expect to get a treat… experience or gold or achievement or whatever… for every action.  We expect that our time invested ought to be rewarded and can get upset or demoralized when it does not.

I am reminded of spending a whole evening grinding mobs with a group back in early EverQuest and then having a bad spawn or a mob wander up or get trained onto us, getting killed, and essentially losing all of the progress I had made.  That was always a disheartening moment.  For all the arguments about having enjoyed yourself up until that moment, the loss of what you had played/worked for tends to cancel that out and then some.

MMORPGs have tended to mitigate that since the early days of EverQuest.  In World of Warcraft death’s sting is pretty light, no progress is lost, and you can run back and try your hand at things fairly quickly.

In New Eden however the destruction of one’s ship can still represent a setback in the only progress a lot of people use, ISK accumulation.  One of the hardest things to get used to in EVE Online is that losing a ship is something to be expected, a normal part of the game.  It took me a long time to get past that.  I have seen people argue that they would never play EVE because they equate a ship in New Eden with gear in WoW, and the idea that you could somehow lose all of your hard earned purple raid gear is anathema to some people.  The whole “only fly what you can afford to lose” is nonsense talk to people who come from worlds where you never lose anything.  That there is a whole complex economy happy to sell them replacement ships doesn’t matter, loss is bad.

And even when you have accepted that ships are temporary, there is still that ISK setback and the inconvenience of getting a replacement.  So PvE in New Eden tends to be the pursuit of the optimized ISK gathering experience, and null sec anomalies win on that front.  Missions are arguably at least mildly more interesting, but a boring anomaly is very consistent in reward and difficulty and you don’t have to travel to find one.  With no real progression outside of ISK accumulation, people tend towards the easiest path.

But that is setting up for failure if your primary focus in PvE.  Anomalies are deadly dull.  I will never be really space rich or own a super capital ship because I cannot bring myself to run more than one or two on any given day.  Instead I use them to fill in the gap between alliance ship replacement payouts (you never quite get what you paid, or for peacetime ops you only get a small payout), to buy new ships when doctrines change, and to cover my own losses when I am off doing dumb things just to see if I can. (I was told I was very dumb for flying my Typhoon back from the deployment, fun and/or challenge not being a mitigating factor in the minds of some.)

In a sandbox game like EVE Online which lacks what I would consider long term, meaningful progression, how do you build “better” PvE for players?  What does “better” even look like given that, for many people, additional complexity or difficulty is often viewed as a negative and the accumulation of ISK or LPs are the only real long-term incentives?

Even people who choose more difficult content like burner missions optimize for them, so that when CCP changes something without mentioning it in the patch notes it can cause some heartburn?

And where does that leave CCP’s ambition to convert new players from PvE to PvP?  Because the return on investment… measured in fun, excitement, or kill mails… for PvP in New Eden can be even worse than PvE.  Much worse.

Sitting in a bubble during a gate camp and waiting…

The problem with sandbox PvP is that it depends on other people, and we’re all notoriously unreliable.  And all the more so in New Eden where you can’t just pop up again at the nearest respawn point fully equipped and ready to have another go.

Yet another on the list of reasons I fly in null sec is that not only do I see some of the more large scale PvP battles, but for the most part somebody else does the work of figuring out where to be and when, then just calls on people like myself to come and help make it happen.  People like Asher Elias and Jay Amazingness and a host of other people put in a lot of effort to find fights that will keep us all happy to hang around and respond to pings.

Even then I would say that maybe, possibly, very optimistically one in four operations end us up with us shooting at hostiles, leaving aside structures and the occasional passing target of opportunity… which usually gets scooped up by the guy not running the doctrine fit because he has two scripted sebos in his mids for just such an occasion.

And even then, actually getting the much worshiped “gud fight” is a rare bird indeed.  Most roams or gate camps or whatever tend to end up as ganks of singletons who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and can’t quite get away.  It is no wonder that final timer structure shoots tend to get a good turnout.  At least we all get to fire our guns and a kill mail is almost guaranteed.

So I ask, in the context of the progression the game offers, the tendency for players to optimize for the desired outcome, and CCP’s fantasy about turning PvE players into PvP players, what does better PvE look like in New Eden?