Faction Warfare (FW) was introduced to EVE Online back in June of 2008 with the Empyrean Age expansion.  It was, and this is me trying to describe it, a way to let capsuleers fight for the four major NPC empires in wars of conquest across several low sec regions.

If you have to find an analog for FW in other MMORPGs, it is probably most akin to Realm v Realm PvP.  Unlike the wild west of null sec, there are rules and guard rails and you can earn prizes for participating beyond kill mails and stories to tell at FanFest.

FW has always been a bit less than a complete success, and occasionally a victim of the dreaded “collateral damage” when CCP fixes something for one aspect of the game, breaking things for another.  (Upwell structures were very much a bad thing for FW for a while.) And, of course, like any content it has been mastered in many ways and even exploited a few times.  At one point some Goons figured out a way to farm the Loyalty Point rewards to such an extent that CCP had to go in and change how they worked.

But, in my opinion, the biggest problem for FW over the last 15 years has been the need to commit to yourself fully to it as a play style in a way that other aspects of EVE Online do not require.  You can go 3rd party on null sec battles or day trip to wormhole space or run missions or abyssals in your free time, but if you want to get into FW you had to belong to a corporation that had committed to one of the factions.

So back in November, when we got the Uprising expansion which finally gave FW players the revamp they had been waiting years to get… seriously, they were way overdue for some attention… it was more than a bit disappointing to find out that the corp restriction on joining in on FW was still in place.

In the Imperium there was a call for people who wanted to try out the new FW changes to join in… but only with an alt because you had to join a special, out of alliance corp that had been created.

But now, with lat week’s update called the Shipcaster Shadow War, non-aligned players can join in on FW events without the commitment… sort of.

You can now go find FW events in The Agency.

Right there on the front page

There you can find the first such event, the Shipcaster Shadow War, laid out for you.  All you have to do is click through and pick which of the four main empires you want to support and you can join in.

The event description

There is still some relationship to your corp or alliance.  They can block members from joining specific factions.  But your corp doesn’t have to commit fully to FW and you don’t have to quit your corp and find another one if your won’t commit.

The thing is, are you really a part of FW when you do this?

I mean yes, you are in fact supporting one of the empires and working out in the low sec FW regions doing FW adjacent activities.  But my read… and I haven’t gone out in person… is that you are not actually taking or defending objectives of your chosen empire like those who have fully committed.

I saw something the other day… I think it was in the latest Pulse video from CCP… that made it clear that there is this version of FW and there is the traditional full commitment version.

Which, I guess, is neither here not there so long as one understands that FW hasn’t really changed, it just has some parallel activities for outsiders.  Also, that this current event replaces The Hunt, the Guristas focused event that they introduced five years back.

Still, there are some other changes around this that are interesting.

As part of the game lore around all of this, there has been something of a falling out between the traditionally allied empires.  FW has been focused on two parallel conflicts.  There is the Armarr vs Minmatar war, which stems from the Minmatar uprising to free themselves from Amarr slavery, and there is the Caldari vs Gallente war, which saw the Caldari also rise up to… um… given the Caldari avarice driven empire, to own the Gallente libs I guess.

As part of that the Caldari and the Amarr were allies and the Minmatar and Gallente were allies.  But the Caldari caught the Amarr spying on them and the Gallente… I don’t know, decided they didn’t like rust… and now the empires have been decoupled.

I’m not sure what the long term implications of that are, but I know that back in the day I was able to move from Caldari to Amarr space and pick up mission running because you got a boost with Amarr when you were helping the Caldari.

And, finally, there is the whole shipcaster thing, and the race to build them, which is the point of this event.  These will apparently be jump bridges that will let pilots of a faction jump straight to contested systems.

I always sort of thought of FW as being something of a low stakes version of null sec conflicts, so I guess giving the factions their own Ansiblexes makes some sense.  I will be interested to see how this breaks FW, because it is very hard for CCP to not break FW most days of the week.

Anyway, I wanted to mention all of this as it is a significant change to the game and could bring more people, if not directly into FW, then at least into the systems where it happens and provide more targets for those involved and the third parties that just like to hunt there.

Related:

• TNG – The Shadow War Event
• CCP – The Paths to War
• CCP – Patch Notes for FW Update

We’re back to blockchain at CCP.  Something, something, crypto, blockchain, Project Awakening.

I don’t even know what to say, aside from the fact that this will fail like every blockchain scheme has failed so far.  CCP can’t even make a second successful video game, so saddling any idea with blockchain nonsense seems like a double guarantee for failure.

It was just a year ago when we saw CCP’s CEO bragging about hanging out with a bunch of crypto grifters at GDC.

Hilmar in the middle of the crypto suite

The backlash was such that they had to swear that NFT meant Not For Tranquility.

You might think that sort of experience with your installed and paying player base might cause the company pause.  But no.  Pearl Abyss has invested heavily in blockchain and dammit, they’re going to get something out of it… and Hilmar is apparently just the sucker to believe he can do it.

So the announcement today is that Andreesen Horowitz… as in Marc Andreesen, whose one claim to fame was to be in the right place at the right time to make Netscape happen, and then sell it to AOL before its failure became manifest… is investing $40 million with CCP to fund them creating and “innovative new AAA game set in the EVE Online universe.”

To start with, as some devs I know are probably saying, it is charming to think that $40 million gets you the league of AAA games.

Then there is the fact that blockchain is pretty much a landscape of failure, an idea that has no practical application, a technology that is simply a tax on transactions promoted by rent seeking venture capitalists, and any benefit from it can be done… has been done… cheaper, faster, and easier with existing technology.  It is a garbage idea promoted by scammers.  It belongs in a museum alongside ideas for perpetual motion and those tablets that would turn water into gasoline.

But even with the spectacular failures and the myriad of stolen apes, people keep pushing on this like it just hasn’t found the right home.  I wonder how many of last year’s crypto startups are even still around, or are still investing in this?

The Blockchain Game Alliance – GDC 2022

Oh Ubisoft, there you are, right at the top, right where you belong when it comes to bad ideas.

Anyway, this is me posting angry in the morning.  I’ll probably have something coherent to say at some future date, possibly when they have something beyond overblown expectations and empty quotes about the project, should that ever come to pass.

But it will no doubt have an impact on CCP and what they work on.  Software development isn’t 100% a zero sum game, but it can be close to it.  You can only work on so many things at once.  If we’re lucky maybe this fiasco will just pull resources off of their first person shooter project.

Related:

• CCP – Announcement page for Project Awakening
• Twitter – CCP’s announcement
• Twitter – Hilmar playing the fool
• Reddit – What does r/eve thing about this?
• Massively OP – A better summary than I can manage right now

We had the Monthly Economic Report for February 2023 land the week before last… I’m only just now getting to it due to a several day power outage… and it was tempting to once again declare it to be something of a benchmark to consider before events.  In this case, the Imperium moving north to war in Pure Blind.

EVE Online nerds harder

Except, of course, that the Imperium is joining a war already in progress.  Fraternity and its WinterCo allies have been going after B3 in the north and things have advanced to the point where even CCP has taken a moment out of their usual blinkered focus on their marketing plan to note that null sec was up to something again.

So we should go straight into destruction.

Destruction

And, after all of that, destruction overall was down in February.  You can see the blue line representing destruction trending down in the back half of the month.

Feb 2023 – Production vs Destruction vs Mined

The data for that chart shows the total value of destruction at 34.97 trillion ISK in value, down from 41.09 trillion ISK in January.

Likewise, the region stats also show about a 6 trillion drop in destruction, with the total there being 34.54 trillion ISK.  The top ten regions for destruction were:

1. The Forge – 1.67 trillion 4.82% (Caldari High Sec)
2. Pure Blind – 1.61 trillion 4.68% (B2 Coalition)
3. The Citadel – 1.52 trillion 4.40% (Caldari High Sec)
4. Vale of the Silent – 1.45 trillion 4.19% (Fraternity)
5. Fade – 1.43 trillion 4.15% (B2 Coalition)
6. Sinq Laison – 1.40 trillion 4.05% (Gallente High Sec)
7. Lonetrek – 1.38 trillion 3.99% (Caldari High Sec)
8. Delve – 1.32 trillion 3.83% (B2 Coalition)
9. Perrigen Falls – 1.23 trillion 3.56% (PanFam)
10. Metropolis – 1.08 trillion 3.12% (Minmata High Sec)

While The Forge remains on top, Pure Blind is in the second spot.  All told those ten regions made up 40.79% of the destruction in February.

So it feels like Pure Blind was indeed warming up when it came to the war, really there appeared to be less destruction elsewhere.  PB was in fifth position last month, with 1.57 trillion ISK destroyed, very close to the February value.  FI.RE and their move op disasters last month were no doubt part of what built up those numbers.

The security band chart shows null sec was still the place for destruction, though it was down by a bit.

Feb 2023 – Destruction over time by Security Band

CCP has also included a new graphic this month in an attempt to illustrate the largest battles every month.  Unfortunately, the version I can post here, the PNG graphic, is pretty useless.  It does not impart any information of value beyond something akin to a heat map.

Feb 2023 – Battles in New Eden by Participants

The HTML version has data embedded in it that gives more information and context.

A battle example from Pure Blind

But I cannot embed that in the blog because it would be too large to fit in my format and WordPress.com doesn’t allow that sort of thing in any case. (Too easy to embed trojans and such.)

However, they do provide the data for the charts.  If I get to another look at just kills in another post this month, I will draw some data from it.  I have already pulled the data into Power BI.  The main pain is that they don’t map the system IDs to their names in that table, so I have to go elsewhere to find the mapping.

Production

Meanwhile, production numbers were also off a bit, though not by as much as destruction.  The regional stats recorded 152.90 trillion ISK in production in February, off by a little less that 3 trillion, with the top ten regions being:

1. The Forge – 22.49 trillion 14.71% (Caldari High Sec)
2. Delve – 20.74 trillion 13.56% (Imperium)
3. Vale of the Silent – 16.34 trillion 10.68% (Fraternity)
4. The Citadel – 10.00 trillion 6.54% (Caldari High Sec)
5. Lonetrek – 7.99 trillion 5.23% (Caldari High Sec)
6. Heimatar – 7.72 trillion 5.05% (Minmatar High Sec)
7. Perrigen Falls – 5.13 trillion 3.35% (PanFam)
8. Fade – 5.12 trillion 3.35% (B2)
9. Fountain – 4.86 trillion 3.18% (Imperium)
10. Deklein – 4.12 trillion 2.70% (Fraternity)

As usual, the regions feeding Jita remain at the top of the list, while those ten regions made up 68.35% of the production in New Eden.

Trade

February saw 736.23 trillion ISK in trade value, down 61.35 trillion from January.  That feels like a lot, but the total averaged out over 28 days is about 26 trillion ISK, so that drop could very much just be the fact that February is three days shorter than January.

1. The Forge – 494.07 trillion 73.21% (Jita)
2. Domain – 40.52 trillion 6.00% (Amarr)
3. Delve – 22.04 trillion 3.27% (Imperium)
4. Lonetrek – 19.68 trillion 2.92% (Caldari High Sec)
5. Perrigen Falls – 14.45 trillion 2.14% (PanFam)
6. Sinq Laison – 13.30 trillion 1.97% (Dodixie)
7. Metropolis – 12.09 trillion 1.79% (Hek)
8. Heimatar – 7.74 trillion 1.15% (Rens)
9. Vale of the Silent – 7.06 trillion 1.05% (Fraternity)
10. Fade – 5.28 trillion 0.78% (B3)

As always, The Forge, home to Jita, tops the list representing almost 3 out of every 4 ISK spent on trade.

And, furthering my statement about the lower value being more a matter of fewer days in the month, the velocity of ISK continued to rise.

Feb 2023 – Velocity of ISK

That points to a healthier economy, especially after the doldrums of the economic strangulation era that CCP went through a while back.  We still haven’t full recovered… you can see grim moments in CCP decision making in the big dips in the line… but we are at least back on the rise.

Still, the bottom line on that chart, the one absent PLEX or contracts, isn’t rising all that much, so the activity of the top line, which includes PLEX, is something CCP can manipulate with in-game sales on game time for PLEX.

ISK Faucets

Here is where we talk about the money and where all that ISK comes from.  The top faucets for February 2023 were the usual suspects.

Feb 2023 – ISK Faucet Totals

Commodities remained above the combo of NPC bounty prizes and ESS payouts, but only just.  Commodities were actually down by about 8 trillion ISK in value when compared to January, while bounties were up a bit.  Commodities are always a bit odd though, because they only get counted when people cash them in to an NPC, while bounties are collected and counted immediately.

Feb 2023 – Top Faucets Over Time

You can see that, after the big climb for commodities in December and January due to the holiday event, there was a fairly big dip in both commodities and bounty prizes, followed by a resurgence for both, with commodities leading the way again.

Drilling in to commodities over time we see the holiday event spike and then the rise in Sleeper drops.

Feb 2022 – Top Commodity Items Over Time

Breaking that out to the total values for the month shows us this.

Feb 2023 – Commodity Value by Type

Then, on the NPC bounty and ESS payout side of things, the top regions on that front were:

1. Vale of the Silent – 4.29 trillion 10.26% (Fraternity)
2. Delve – 3.73 trillion 8.93% (Imperium)
3. Perrigen Falls – 2.94 trillion 7.04% (PanFam)
4. Fountain – 2.66 trillion 6.36% (Imperium)
5. Querious – 2.59 trillion 6.20% (Imperium)
6. The Kalevala Expanse – 2.27 trillion 5.43% (PanFam)
7. Deklein – 1.73 trillion 4.15% (B2)
8. Branch – 1.69 trillion 4.05% (Fraternity)
9. Tribute – 1.39 trillion 3.33% (Fraternity)
10. Malpais – 1.36 trillion 3.26% (PanFam)

Overall the regional stats showed the combined bounties and ESS payouts added up to 41.77 trillion ISK in value, about a trillion less than January.  Those ten regions added up to 59.00% of the total payouts.

All of that drove the money supply up in February.

Feb 2023 – Money Supply

The big jump was still in November, when we got the Uprising expansion and CCP loosened up on the dynamic bounty system.  In December we saw a flat month due to money being taken out of the economy due to players who came back for the 7 days of free omega leaving again.  But since then the money supply has continued to grow.

Feb 2023 ISK Balance

This is not a bad thing.  Players with ISK in their pockets feel better about putting assets at risk.  The whole CCP scarcity theory, that making us poor and resource starved would drive conflict, proved to be false.  I have said this before, and will no doubt say it again, but applying real world economic theory to a game like this comes with risks.  The players don’t live in New Eden.  If life gets expensive and miserable for them in game, if they feel poor and are afraid to lose the assets they have, that doesn’t drive them to conflict, that drives them to log off and play something more fun.

Mining

Mining remains as boring to write about as it is to do for me, but still I have some numbers.  From the regional stats, the top ten regions for mining value were:

1. Delve – 1.49 trillion 6.79% (Imperium)
2. The Forge – 1.14 trillion 5.19% (Caldari High Sec)
3. Vale of the Silent – 1.07 trillion 4.86% (Fraternity)
4. Lonetrek – .99 trillion 4.49% (Caldari High Sec)
5. Metropolis – .93 trillion 4.22% (Minmatar High Sec)
6. Domain – .87 trillion 3.97% (Amarr High Sec)
7. Aridia – .75 trillion 3.40% (Amarr Low Sec)
8. The Kalevala Expanse – .73 trillion 3.31% (PanFam)
9. Sinq Laison – .71 trillion 3.25% (Gallente High Sec)
10. Perrigen Falls – .68 trillion 3.09% (PanFam)

Those totaled up to 21.95 trillion ISK in value and 42.58% of the mining value done in New Eden.

Overall, mining was broken out in February in the following security bands.

Feb 2023 – Mining volume by security band

That might be a little hard to read, but you can click on it to see it full size.

Loyalty Points

And then there are loyalty points, which I started listing on a whim, but which don’t really change enough from month to month to really be worth writing about.  So, for one final list from the regional stats, here are the top ten regions.

1. Lonetrek – 1556.97 million 16.15% (Caldari High Sec)
2. Venal – 1491.29 million 15.47% (Guristas)
3. Metropolis – 1274.95 million 13.22% (FW low Sec)
4. Placid – 851.11 million 8.83% (FW low Sec)
5. Delve – 427.98 million 4.44% (Blood Raiders)
6. Curse – 344.73 million 3.58% (Angel Cartel)
7. Stain – 343.42 million 3.56% (Sansha)
8. Aridia – 332.41 million 3.45% (Low Sec Paragon Agent)
9. Essence – 322.24 million 3.34% (FW low Sec)
10. Pure Blind – 286.73 million 2.97% (Mordu/SOE)

There was a total of 9,641.26 million loyalty points earned, with the ten regions above accounting for 75.01% of those earned.

And so it goes, another month in the books.  All of the sources and other places I could find where this was being discussed are linked below.

Related

• CCP – February 2023 Monthly Economic Report
• CCP – February 2023 MER Forum Thread
• Reddit – February 2023 MER thread
• TNG – Looking at EVE Online in February
• TAGN – Last month’s MER Post

As I noted previously, I can wait for June and the real launch of the game.  But some people are keen to get in there early and see what the new version of Diablo is all about, so I have been keeping an eye on public comments about how things have been going.

It is here, this weekend and next

On the bright side, the opening game play sounds like it was compelling enough that people wanted to play and keep playing.

But the technical issues that cropped up… well… they were a problem.  There were apparently issues all along the path depending on when you logged in.  At peak hours there were queues… did Blizzard not know how many keys they had given out, and have they not been making live service games for 20 years… and once you got in there was a fair chance of being disconnected or having the game client simply crash.

Now, of course, finding these sorts of issues is why you have these events.  The company needs to get the live and chaotic sort of load that only actual end users can provide in order to test their game from end to end.  This was part of the reason I had little interest in this early access event.  I have my own software to test.  And they certainly want to get that all worked out before the actual launch.  Many of us remember the Diablo III launch.

Oh, I remember that

However, Blizzard reputation has been built on design and polish one of my early posts in the first week of the blog was in reference to Rob Pardo speaking at the Austin GDC about the design principles of Blizzard, and there is a whole section in there about polish.  And while there were some free keys given out for this weekend, a lot of people bought a copy of the game early to get in on it.  Paying customers have different expectations.

The price to get in

I know that polish doesn’t mean perfection.  But I do still wonder if this early access in Q1 was as much a stunt, rushed out early to assure Microsoft that the company is on track to its financial goals and commitments as agreed to in the acquisition fine print.

I will say, however, that the opinion of some I have seen is that, when they did get to play, that the game was very good, with references to the way Diablo II felt being brought up a few times.  And, of course, the game is available on PC and consoles, so sometimes it helps to know which platform the person is using.  My general take is that PC gamers are a bit happier with it than console gamers.

Anyway, we’re here at the last day and I hope those who jumped in are having a better time now than they were on opening night.  And I want to thank all of you… um… game individuals so eager to jump into those untested waters that those of us who might play in June will have a better experience.

Related:

• Massively OP – Diablo IV’s first open beta night was slammed with long queues, disconnects, and performance issues
• Forbes – The Diablo 4 Beta Is Basically Unplayable Thanks To Endless Login Queues
• The Escapist – How to Get a Refund for Diablo 4 Early Access on PC
• WCCFTech – The King Is Back and Runs Well on PC
• WCCFTech – Diablo IV Comparisons From the Open Beta on PC and Consoles

I want to note this event both because it is kind of a big deal and because I referenced the Fortizar in a post last week and we attacked another such structure in Skarkon back in late January.  Otherwise, this is another second hand report, meaning I wasn’t there.

The Fortizar in the dark red space of Pochven back in January

Fraternity’s Fortizar was in the Nalvula system in Pochven.  They deployed this Fortizar before the systems being battled over during the Triglavian invasion event were absorbed into the new Triglavian region of Pochven.

Once Pochven was formed, players have not been able to deploy structures in that region, so any legacy structures from the before times are extremely valuable as bases from which to farm the profitable Triglavian sites in the region.

As I mentioned, we took a run at it in cooperation with B2 and some low sec people, which was something of the nascent coalition that formed later for the current war.  So while we were messing with Fraternity Keepstars, Snuffed Out and the Freemen of the North, a group who Fraternity blobbed out of Tribute a couple of years back and who have been fighting a low level conflict against them ever since, went after that Fortizar.

That led both sides in the war against Fraternity to pile into Pochven once more to lay siege to the irreplaceable Fortizar.  And this time it was destroyed.

But, the battle report looks a little crazy.  I was tempted to go with a headline about 7,000 ships being destroyed.

Battle Report Header

That header, divided into Fraternity and its allies, the loose association that is the Freemen of the North, and then the B2 Coalition and the Imperium, appears to show that the latter two won a victory against astounding odds.

The thing is, Pochven is like wormhole space, and when you kill a structure all the stuff in it drops into space rather than being sent nicely packaged to asset safety.  So, shortly after the Fortizar was blown up, the field looked like this.

The Pochven loot pinata pays off

Those are all the hangar containers and ships and whatnot that were kicked out into space, and anything that wasn’t valuable enough to be scooped up and hauled off was blown up.  So if you run down that battle report you start seeing a lot of shuttles, corvettes, and other small ships as part of the destruction.  And whoever those ships belonged to get counted as being part of the battle, even if they were not logged on.

So, it sorting out the battle report losses for Fraternity and allies, aside from the Fortizar itself, there were 7,051 ships and capsules lost, broken out by the following groups.

Type                  Involved      Lost      Value
Shuttle               3,598         3,597      843m
Frigate                 845           843     5.35b
Corvette                616           616      202m
Destroyer               373           363     9.03b
Cruiser                 263           254     6.35b
Capsule                 229           228      327m
Interdictor             223           216     12.0b
Heavy Assault Cruiser   144           142     29.3b
Stealth Bomber          127           113     4.99b
Interceptor              95            92     2.71b
Logistics                64            64     13.4b
Hauler                   64            63     1.91b
Command Destroyer        61            61     3.61b
Tactical Destroyer       60            53     4.82b
Assault Frigate          45            41     1.48b
Battleship               41            40     24.6b
Covert Ops               39            39     1.84b
Combat Battlecruiser     39            38     3.84b
Expedition Frigate       35            35     1.08b
Command Ship             34            34     10.8b
Mining Barge             29            29     1.26b
Logistics Frigate        23            22      819m
Mobile Tractor Unit      18            18     2.85b
Electronic Attack Ship   13            13      497m
Blockade Runner           9             9     1.47b
Combat Recon Ship         6             6     2.61b
Attack Battlecruiser      7             6      724m
Industrial Command Ship   5             5      455m
Strategic Cruiser         4             4     2.15b
Marauder                 11             3     5.49b
Flag Cruiser              1             1      211m
Force Recon Ship          2             1      199m
Deep Space Transport      1             1      119m

That is quite a list.  The capsules is probably much closer to the count of those involved on the side of the defenders, since you can only lose a capsule if you are logged in.

Still, reports were that the fight was pretty spectacular, with Rote Kapelle even bringing in a titan to pile on… a titan that managed to get the final blow on the structure.  CCP was on the scene and grabbed a screen shot of the Erebus unleashing its lance doomsday weapon on the Fortizar.

A hit on the Fortizar

So their Pochven Fortizar is gone.  As I noted before, it is now a question of where the war goes next.  Fraternity has lost three Keepstars and more Fortizars in Pure Blind, which has been a blow, but which also reduces their distractions.  The Keepstart in X47 is now the core of their line.  Will they continue to defend it, or will they be worn down and evacuate it to its fate?

Related:

• Reddit – Frat vs The Freemen of the North – Week 115 (tale of the fight)
• Reddit – Navula Fort Final Moments (screen shot)
• Reddit – Pochven Fraternity Fortizar Falls (where I found the loot pinata screen shot)
• Reddit – Fraternity leader Noraus issues a statement (Google translate at its finest)

The anniversary has rolled around again and EverQuest is celebrating its 24th birthday… um… yesterday.  Did I miss the date this year?  I blame travel and power outages.  But still, here we are, an MMO that has been around longer than I have been married. (By about six months.)  I mean, the game has been on Steam for 15 years at this point.

Once more Firiona Vie is on another bit of celebratory artwork.

Getting drunk with dragons

I think I ran out of things to say about the game back at the 20th anniversary, but time never stops and apparently neither does Norrath.

EverQuest, not just the cornerstone of the history of SOE and Daybreak games (I keep thinking about extending that post to the EG7 era), it remains an ongoing and expanding product.  Not only is it one of the best earners in the Daybreak stable (DC Universe Online bring in more total dollars, but EverQuest is so inexpensive that its net revenue is something to envy) but it is carrying on.  Last year we got a 64-bit version of the game.  This year we have a host of roadmap items, including the 30th expansion and a rework of the now decrepit UI.

The 2023 road map for EverQuest

There are, of course, celebrations going on in the game as well.  There is bonus xp and special events and some free goodies.  You can read all about that here.

And so I mark the passing of another year of Norrath.  I wasn’t all that young when it launched, and it has now been around for half of my lifetime.

Related:

• Daybreak – EverQuest anniversary page
• Daybreak – Anniversary news post
• Massively OP – Classic EverQuest celebrates 24th birthday
• Inventory Full – The 24 Year News Cycle
• The EverQuest Show – Interview with Jenn Chan (transcript)

The fallout from the weekend clash, where more than 6K capsuleers clashed carried on into the week.  Fraternity chose to defend only their Keepstar in X47, which meant that the other three Keepstars advanced to the hull timer, the final step before destruction.  Meanwhile, B2 and the Imperium went back and set the armor timer for the X47 Keepstar again.

So, come the morning of the 15th, there were more timers to fight over.

Fraternity and its allies in PanFam were clearly split over what to do.  Previously, with four equal choices, X47 was their answer, it being their primary staging base, the location with the most member stuff to, if not lose, at least get sent awkwardly to asset safety.

This time, there were three final timers that would end up with structures being destroyed, which is never a good look, and their most valued structure at risk of being put into its final timer.  Fraternity was not helped by the fact that two of the timers, the X47 timer and the final timer for the 5ZXX-K Keepstar coincided.

The Imperium and B2 chose to exploit the issue by pushing some fleets into X47 to keep that timer in play while throwing the hard hitting Leshaks at the 5ZXX target, making the defenders choose between the two.  This let the Leshaks tear through a good chunk of the hull hit points.

A Leshak on the 5ZXX Keepstar

That image is from CCP who is, surprisingly, sitting up and taking notice of the war.

The defenders managed to win the timer in X47 and started to pile into 5ZXX in order to try and save that Keepstar, leading to another savage tidi slugfest.

Frat and PanFam even dropped capitals into the morass, and it was said to be touch and go because the server performance was so bad that the Entropic Disintegrators weapons that the Leshaks use would fail to cycle and have to be constantly restarted.  The real damage from a Leshak builds up over time, but that build up is cancelled if the weapon does not cycle, forcing it to start over again.

However, the Imperium had other choice on the field and were able to keep the timer from counting down long enough that the defenders, fearing they would end up losing the structure and be stuck in the middle of angry hostiles, began to extract.  This led to the Imperium and B2 tearing apart the defenders and they tried to get away.

The battle report shows that across the four systems in play the defenders lost more than a trillion ISK in ships and structures.

Battle Report Header

That battle report is broken out into four groups, with Team B representing Faternity, PanFam, and allies, and Team C representing the combined forces of the Imperium and the B2 Coalition.

More than 600 billion in losses were in the form of structures, as three Keepstars total were destroyed, the later pair with minimal defense.

Keepstars destroyed

The kill reports:

• 5ZXX-K
• ROIR-Y
• F-NMX6

Meanwhile, another two Fortizars were also destroyed, all with considerably less in losses for the attackers this time around. (Plus, Snuffed Out used this distraction to put PanFam’s Pochven Fortizar, the one we took a shot at back in January, into hull timer again.)

Unfortunately, I missed the whole thing, so this is a second hand report.  It wasn’t just that, once again, a timer was coming when I have no business being anything but asleep, and doubly so on a work night.  The weather was against me as well.  Tuesday saw a strong storm hit Nothrern California, dropping lots of much needed rain, but the high winds knocked down a tree that took out an electrical transmission tower that was key to my end of Silicon Valley.

So the power was out and isn’t expected to be restored until Saturday.  That explains the rather bland post I put up yesterday… I had a lot more I wanted to get into it… but the power was down and I ended up wrapping it up on my iPad tethered to my phone.  (Of course, that post got nine comments, which is a lot more than usual lately, proving once again what I want to write and what people like are clearly different things.)  Now I’m on a short trip for work, so in a motel room with power and Wi-Fi.

However, it wasn’t difficult to find sources.  There was a nice post by Kunmi on the Imperium internal news site. (Why it doesn’t get posted to INN I do not know, but there is some rumor that INN is still controlled by The Mittani and that limits it to a few Twitch shows.  I don’t know, it is just a rumor.)

And, of course, there was r/eve.  After the weekend battles partisans of Fraternity and PanFam were working hard to spin a narrative of a fatal loss by B2 and the Imperium.  Like we haven’t thrown away way more than 300 billion ISK on risky experiments before.  So the B2 and Imperium posters were ready to remind them of their smugness of just a few days ago and how they were promising their line members another big Goon feed.

All of which puts the focus back on X47.  That is the linchpin  of Fraternity’s position in Pure Blind.  Again, this isn’t the first time we’ve been in the north battling over a critical Keepstar in that system.  The question is if there is a way around it that can force Fraternity to fall back, or will they evacuate on their own if we keep putting pressure on it?

This will be one of those posts where I am asking a question that I do not… and probably will never… know the answer, it both being murky, situational, and possibly unknowable because there is no way to go back in time and test the alternatives.  But such barriers have never stopped me from asking a question before, so why let it stop me now?

In my memory, when it came to MMORPGs, free to play had two objectives.

The first was to remove a barrier to getting players into your game.  I will use WoW as the example, as it stands as something of the pillar against which success might have been measured.  Back in the day you needed to commit to a $15 a month subscription in order to play WoW.

You might have gotten a free trial period from an offer or through a referral, but in not too many days you were going to be asked to commit to a monthly fee to access the game.  In addition, you might have to buy a box up front.  Or a virtual box.

I remember being annoyed way back in the day when I first started playing EVE Online because once I got the end of the free trial I not only had to subscribe, but I had to buy the game… but there was no physical game to buy.  I had to give them money up front for the privilege of being able to subscribe to their service.  I already had the game downloaded, so this felt more like an initiation fee than buying something tangible, and it irked me.

I think free to play has wiped most of that away.  At a minimum I think most MMORPGs have some sort of infinite trial period.  Even World of Warcraft doesn’t require you to buy the base game anymore, and you can hang around and play to level 20 taking as long as you want.  There are restrictions, and companies will promote the benefits of subscribing… every time you log off a Daybreak title it opens a window in your default browser to encourage you to subscribe… but the barrier to some sort of basic level of entry is pretty low.

I am sure there are still a few titles out there that are old school on this front.  I think Final Fantasy XIV still requires you to buy the game.  But, on the flip side, there are titles like Guild Wars 2 that have a whole game available pretty much for free.

So I think on that front free to play succeeded. Some f the friction, the barrier to entry, was erased. Granted, there is still the whole multi-gigabyte client down that stands in the way, but at least most places don’t make you pay for the privilege.

The other aspect was competitive advantage. Against titles that charge to play, free is a pretty good opening bid.

And, certainly, the early titles to jump on board did, in fact, find the conversion to that model drove their numbers and revenue up. There were more than a few press releases about the total and complete success of the change in the first month or two.

But as Brian Green once pointed out to me, nobody puts out a press release when the numbers fall off down the road. And, since almost all entrants in the MMORPG market have some free option, has free become a requirement rather than a differentiator?

Some titles still have subscriptions to back up their free model. John Smedley was very up front when he said that the free option was there to get you to subscribe. Others sell expansions. And there is always a cash shop and an RMT currency.

I do think that free to play has let some titles survive. The $15 a month model can be a high bar for many. So success in that way seems to have occurred.

But, just to throw out another measure at the end of this post, did we end up with better games because of the free model. That is harder to measure. Sure, a game that is still up and running is better than one that shut down because of the subscription model. However, it also feels like the cash shop and the weekly specials become the focus of some titles because of that model.

So no good or definitive answer here I suppose. But, as I said, that never stopped me from asking a question.

Phase 2 of Wrath of the Lich King Classic brought us the opening of the Argent Tournament up in Ice Crown.  And, as I noted previously, I was all in on that, and somewhat surprisingly so since it was something I ran to its extremes back in the day.  I keep running those dailies.

Don’t forget to put on the lip balm first!

Or, rather, I kept running those dailies.

I went out there almost every day and did the whole load of dailies

The list of all the solo ones

The thing is, there is an end goal for some of the dailies.  Once you do your tournament initiation, then you go fight for each of the races of your faction to become a champion of each.  It takes five days to become the champion, and there are five factions, so at the end of 25 days of dailies you get to the end of the last city and get a new achievement.

Champion of the Alliance

And then, that is it for the faction dailies, which are four of the eight daily quests you can get in the phase 2 version of the Argent Tournament.

That leaves me with four daily quests, three of which are solo and which I run through pretty quickly.  There is a fourth quest, which involves slaying Chillmaw, and elite dragon that floats around in a corner of Icecrown.

Watching Chillmaw circle

I have some vague memories of being able to solo Chillmaw and his three helper NPCs back in the day.  But I must have been much better geared or more talented back then, because right now he eats me up pretty quick if I try to challenge him.

So when I am doing the dailies I grab that quest and hang around where he spawns to see if I can find a group to work with.  That can be pretty hit or miss.  Sometimes I find somebody eager to help, sometimes I am hanging around alone.

I did try using the group finder interface that Blizz put into Wrath Classic.  A good idea in concept I suppose, but not very effective in practice.  I have yet to have anybody take me up on a group I have formed, and the ONE time I found somebody else who had setup a group, I couldn’t join because they were full.

I suppose that the group filled up proves that there is somebody out there willing to join… and who knows about the group finder.  But it has yet to work out for me.  I think our server might be a bit low on the population scale.

Now, if we were in phase 3 of Wrath Classic, with the rest of the Argent Tournament available, I would have an additional series of dailies to work on, the set that unlocks once you are champion of your faction.  But phase 3 is somewhere in the distance.  People are still doing Ulduar regularly if the LFG channel is any indication.

Also, I did find it odd that you cannot post in the LFG channel unless you have created an advert in the group finder.  I guess that is a feature, but it does complicate what was once a fairly straightforward operation.  Hey, come help kill a thing, it will be quick.

So I continue to pile up the currency from the dailies.  I have bought a couple of the gear upgrades, but it is the Argent Hippogryph I am saving up for.

Battles in EVE Online are not like WoW battlegrounds or things like that.  There is no mechanism to teleport you into the event and certainly nothing to extract you once you’re done.  In New Eden everybody has to walk uphill in the snow both ways and events don’t just happen.  Every big battle and every event, including things like Burn Jita or the Frigate Free for All, involve a lot of up front work by a dedicated crew invested in making something happen.

A battle where 6K people show is the result of considerable effort, both setting up the supply lines and resources as well as simply getting people into and out of the battle.  There are often whole side battles going on to interdict reinforcement or catch stragglers trying to leave the field.  I’ve spent my time off the periphery as often as I have been in the main scrum, stopping people from joining or leaving the fight.

For example, back at B-R5RB, I was able to join the battle late in the evening as part of a subcap fleet sent in to drain titan capacitors, but only after hours of fights between reinforcement ops clashing around the constellation.  And that opportunity started in so late on a work night that I couldn’t stay up until downtime at 4am local, so I left myself logged in and, the next day when I had some time, got back in game and docked up at the station in system.  I then jump cloned back to our staging and picked up another ship.

I left my Dominix and a jump clone in that station for over a year and was never able to extract that ship.  Eventually I put it up on contract at an attractive price and somebody bought it, but it was deep in hostile space and while I might have YOLO’d it out on some quiet week night, it was easier to just sell it at some point down the road.

And this is hardly the only example of things I have left behind in battles or deployments where extraction hasn’t been viable.  I have stuff littered about New Eden in NPC stations… some where we stayed, others where asset safety sent things… so make an effort to try and not leave things behind.

As I mentioned, with last nights battle in X47 I ended up docking in a friendly Fortizar in system and heading to bed.  I was somewhat resigned to leaving my Strombringer there to linger until the time was right to try and get it back out.

The X47 Keepstar where stuff happened

X47 isn’t far from our staging.  It is just eight gates between there and or current home in DO6.

The straight route home

But that route was guaranteed to be camped for days.  The gate out from X47 to J-CJIV was sure to be bubbled and watched by those eager for a few more easy kills.

Alternate routes were possible, and not even that many more gates in distance.

Avoiding the straight route

But anything I can think of somebody else no doubt has marked down and camped for now.

The camps do die down.  Eventually those in a hurry to get home stop taking the chance, the people on the gate camps get bored, and opportunities arise.  But it can take a while and, in a war where we’ll be back and forth to X47 again soon, the risk will remain higher than one would like.

If I had gone out in a Scythe logi cruiser, which I felt like doing because they are so cheap and insure so well that the loss would be negligible, I might have just tried to blast out right away.  But I was in my Stormbringer, kind of a pricey cruiser for me.  So I was set to let thing lie, jump clone back to staging, and worry about it later.

But that morning, as I was writing up yesterday’s post about the battle, a ping went up for a fleet set to go rescue people who were trapped.  It didn’t specify where, but there were not a whole lot of options besides X47.  So I logged myself back into the game and got on voice coms to listen to their progress.

They did indeed come to X47 and began clearing away bubbles and shooting the cyno jammers and generally making a path for egress.  I had to hold tight because I was tempted to just warp to them and follow them around while they did their stuff.  But that isn’t always helpful.

Other people had the same idea and we were soon told to just hang on, a plan was under way.

Once that fleet had cleared a path from the Keepstar to the Fortizar where I was now undocked and sitting on tether, more pings went out telling people to log back in and warp to the Fortizar.

Meanwhile it was clear that other groups were part of the same plan.  I saw The Initiative undock their Navy Apoc fleet from the Fortizar, where they must have safed up earlier, and head off to the Keepstar to help clear.

INIT Apocs undocking

We had to sit around for quite a while while things got sorted, and it is possible that at least one group went off to shoot the Keepstar again to set a new timer, though I cannot confirm that on my own.

Eventually though there were last calls to get everybody who wanted to go home on the Fortizar.  Then titans started to drop in, one for each fleet, in order to bridge us home.  Another aspect of this war is that our front line staging Keepstar and theirs are a single jump apart for capital ships.

We all got on our titans and when the bridges went up, we were sent back to our staging system.

Fleets bridging back to staging

I am sure there are still people stuck in X47.  We never get everybody out in one op, so there will be more ops later.  But a bunch of us got back and are ready to undock again.

Meanwhile, I am a bit surprised at the lack of response this whole extraction operation got from Fraternity and PanFam.  There are a few of their partisans on r/eve posting about a “hell camp” and Imperium ships being trapped in X47, but the actual action in the system was fairly low effort.  A couple of small groups put up some bubbles and grabbed a couple of stragglers, but when one fleet can drop in, clear the undock of your Keepstar so that people can log in and warp out, a “hell camp” it is not.

And the lack of effort in trying to extract more losses from trapped ships makes me wonder how committed Fraternity and PanFam are to the war.

Yesterday’s post recounted how the Imperium and B3 coalitions had spent the afternoon setting timers on multiple structures, including four of Fraternity’s Keepstars in Pure Blind.

Fraternity Keepstar Locations in the region

The Keepstars were all set to enter their armor timer events, the second of the three shoots required to kill these structures today.  The first event, shooting the shields, can happen at any time.  But subsequent events are set to occur in the time zone the defender has chosen.

Fraternity, the defender, is a largely Chinese based alliance, so their choices were well off of normal business hours here in the US.  The times were:

• ROIR-Y – 08:34 UTC – 04:34 Eastern / 00:34 Pacific
• X47L-Q – 10:08 UTC – 06:08 Eastern / 03:308 Pacific
• F-NMX6 – 12:39 UTC – 08:39 Eastern / 05:39 Pacific
• 5ZXX-K – 13:48 UTC – 09:48 Eastern / 06:48 Pacific

This was further complicated by the fact that at 2am local time in most locations in the US  Daylight Savings Time began, so the clocks did their annual “Spring Forward.”

Imperium leader Asher Elias asked us to “alarm clock” these ops… get up early, stay up late, whatever… in order to push these structures into their next timers.  I opted to take a nap on Saturday afternoon and then stayed up past midnight to try and go on at least the first op.

When I got on we had more than 2,000 people in our staging system, a number that grew past 3,500 as the first timer approached.

It looked like Fraternity and its allies were not going to contest the first Keepstar in ROIR-Y.  Leshaks were sent in to shoot it for the armor timer.

Leshaks at work on the first Keepstar

I was in Asher’s fleet of Stormbringers, and we jumped in when a small fleet of Tengus from Siege Green, and Frat ally, showed up and picked off a couple of Leshaks on the edge of the formation.

When that was done, we moved on towards X47L-Q, taking up station at one of the gate leading into the system.

Waiting on the X47 gate as bombers took runs at us

X47 is a location where we have fought over Keepstars before.  Back in 2018 we fought many of the same people over a Keepstar in this very system.

This looked to be the system where Frat was going to contest the timer.  As we lingered outside waiting for the timer to get close, Frat and PanFam had collected a good 3K players of their own on the Keepstar.

The X47 Keepstar Awaiting our arrival

Then the word to jump into the system came and the game’s troubles began as more than 6,000 players attempted to have a battle in X47L-Q.  CCP had reinforced the node for us, and was clearly keeping an eye on things.  But past history indicated that we were likely in for a mess.

CCP unironically using the word “Breaking” as we tried to set fire to the server.

Things were moving very slowly as we tried to load into the system, and once people got into the system, commands were taking up to ten minutes to get a response.  The savvy in the crowd had hit shift-control-alt-M to bring up the Outstanding Commands window to keep an eye on if the server was processing inputs.

past 6 minutes trying to lock two targets

Our structure shooting fleet, the Leshaks, got into the system and got with range of the Keepstar, but ran into one of our old known issues.  While everybody else was moving at 10% speed due to Time Dilation, which CCP uses to slow things down so the server can try to keep up, structure timers do not slow down.

So we had 15 real time minutes to start shooting while 6 seconds of game time was taking 6 minutes to execute… if your commands made it into the queue to be processed… so by the time they could start locking up the structure it was too late.

6K people in space around a structure though, a fight was going to happen and the Leshaks started brawling with a Paladin fleet.  We were going to get something out of all of this.

However, we were heading for another timer.  at 11:00 UTC every day is downtime, when CCP restarts the cluster.  Everybody gets kicked off the servers when that happens, and that time was rapidly approaching.

I was within range of some stuff on the Keepstar and trying to lock up some of the Paladins when downtime hit.

As close as I got

And the big log off came.

Downtime arrives

Pings went out to log back in as soon as possible to continue the fight.  We had invested the time, we were going to blow things up or go out in a blaze of glory.  The server, however, had other ideas.  While the cluster was up again soon enough, X47 itself was having problems.

At first the server was still loading.

Character selection failed

Then it was reporting as stuck.

The server is not happy

The EVE Status Twitter account was reporting that they were working on the issues, but that they were present.

I was able to get in fairly soon, maybe 20 minutes after downtime ended, when a lot of other people were piling in as well.  The server number climbed well past 3K again and I was on the Keepstar watching people who had been safety warped off returning to their locations, landing on grid.

And I decided it was time to call it a night.  Or a morning, it being nearly 04:30 local time.  I set myself to dock in the Fortizar we had in the system and was able to warp off and get tethered, but I declined to wait to get docked and went to bed, leaving the game up.

I came back this morning to find I had been disconnected.  But I was safely docked up.  I can leave my ship there and jump clone back to our staging.

You can see that there were a lot more people online than usual before downtime on the server graph from EVE Offline.  There were 26K people online then, and more than 6K were in X47, with even more in surrounding systems.  Pure Blind was a popular location.

EVE Offline player graph

You can see people trying to get online, then some trouble as we all got kicked out of the system again later on.

At its peak I saw numbers in local well past 6.1K.  The highest I screen shotted was 6,115.

Character in the system – 6,115

In the end Fraternity and its allies saved their Keepstar and without a doubt won the ISK war, as a lot of us were blown up on the Keepstar or trying to escape.

But the evening was not a total loss for the Imperium and B2 Coalition.  We managed to set the timers on the other three Keepstars, so the final hull timer fights will be coming this week at some early morning hour.  We shall see.

There is more to this story, including some word of a roll-back for the X47 system that did not restore ships that were destroyed but which pulled back people who had escaped from the system.  I do not know any details, but I suspect there will be more news about this as the day unfolds.  This, however, is all I have in me for the story this morning.  I may need a nap today.

Addendum:

Early battle reports for the active systems in Pure Blind show close to 370 billion ISK destroyed.

Battle Report Header

The Imperium and B2 Coalition make up almost 300 billion of that amount, most of it no doubt on the Keepstar grid in X47.

In Reavers Asher used to always talk about “putting money in the bank” for our preparatory operations.  We would spend evenings flying around, shooting structures, setting timers, and laying the groundwork for potential battles.

And, of course, having deployed to Fade to bring war to Fraternity and its WinterCo allies, we were clearly going to be out putting money in the bank on a lot of structures in Pure Blind and Tribute.  So I was right there and ready to go when Asher wanted to take out some fleets for that purpose.

There were a couple of fleets going out, but I went with the Leshak fleet that Asher was leading.  It is a sign of Asher’s reign that we’re getting some interesting and expensive doctrines in the mainstream of the Imperium.  Leshak’s were once something that were tolerated in a couple of fleet comps, then became a SIG specific fleet comp for structure bashes, and now it is open to everybody who has the ISK.

Leshak fleet on the way

I do not have that much ISK to spend, so I joined up on the logi side of things.  A tech II logistics cruiser is more in my price range.

The Leshak is fun to watch.  Triglavian ships have a single beam weapon that spools up damage over time.  Asher warped us in a wall formation to our first target, a Fraternity Keepstar, and I tried to capture what it looked like with a host of red beams reaching out to hit the structure.

Red beams reaching out

Unlike lasers, the beams are on all the time, so there is a convergence of them on the target all the time.  Because of the way EVE Online targeting works, you quickly get a sense of the points on a hull or structure that weapons are allowed to hit.

Or everybody is just aiming for that one spot

And the damage output from a wall of Leshaks is pretty fierce.  We burned through the shield timer on two Keepstars in record time.

We also spent a little bit of time reinforcing a Fortizar or two.

Brackets on, walls of battleships hitting a Fortizar

We spent some time traveling around to our targets, setting up timers that will come up deep in alarm clock time for those of us in the US.

Leshaks moving again

The locals did a little to respond to our efforts.  They were waylaying some stragglers who fell behind at one point and Vily was out with some bombers trying to catch us on gates with a bomb run.

Bombs landing as a fleet gates away

We made our rounds, did our shoots, then got a ride back towards home on a titan.

Sending us home

We happened to arrive back at the same time that some titans from The Initiative were landing back on our staging Keepstar as well.

Everybody landing between the uprights

They had been out doing their own reinforcement ops.  All told, we set armor timers on four Keepstars in Pure Blind along with a series of smaller structures.

But the big newsworth item that got pinged out for our op was that we somehow managed to ALL be aligned for a warp.

Asher lets everybody know about our achievement

This seems like trivia, and it certainly isn’t the FIRST perfect fleet warp I have been a part of, but when you have a full 255 member fleet with a battleship doctrine in time dilation… because pushing a few full fleets around Pure Blind was dragging the servers down… and having everybody actually paying attention and doing the right thing at the right time, that is a rare event.  There is almost always somebody who didn’t hear or had to step away or for whom the UI failed to register the align command.

Of course there was the ping and now a Reddit thread, which includes an image from the internal new post about the miracle warp.  It was an event.

Somebody also happened to catch a screen shot of our fleet ball in the Cloud Ring nebula looking like a menacing eye.

The Leshaks are watching

Now we just have to get back online for the next timers which will be around 10:00 UTC on the day most of the US leaps forward into Daylight Savings Time.  That means… it will be either a really early morning or a really late night for those of us in the US.

We will see who shows up to fight over the timers soon enough though.

Addendum:

Somebody put together a quick video of some of the structure shoot ops.

You can, if you look carefully and the quick camera moves haven’t made you ill, spot Asher leading the Leshaks, and a couple of the battleship walls including the one I have a screen shot of above around the Fortizar.

One of the aspects of deploying off to the other side of null sec for a war is that a bulk of the combat oriented players are now sitting up in Pure Blind while all of our accumulated stuff, infrastructure, and a the people who didn’t get the memo (or didn’t care) about the deployment remain back down in Delve.

This is always an issue, leaving your homeland undefended while you go off to fight elsewhere.  In fact, the Reavers SIG was formed in part to exploit just that situation.  Part of our mission back in the day was to go live out of ships in safes in enemy territory and attack their assets in order to divert attention away from the main front.

It is a problem for every group leaving their space in null sec to attack elsewhere, and the methods for dealing with it can vary.  We forced PAPI to do some clone jumping between regions while keeping up a modest second front in Feythabolis and Esoteria during World War Bee.

Now, however, it is our turn.  We’re deploying north and in the past, trouble at home has blunted operations… though the most effective foe was CCP when they sent Sleepers to attack our structures in Delve during a war. (They attacked other places in null sec, but they seemed to be especially present in Delve.  The Chaos Era was a hell of a time.)

Anyway, past experience has informed our planning, and the Imperium has been setting up an alternate homeland defense group for the last six months or more.

In that time we have been asked in pings and firesides to prepare an alpha character on its own account for homeland defense.  There were instructions and skill plans on how to roll a fresh account, get some bonus skill points, and assign them to the right skills.

There was also a specific corp within the alliance your alpha had to join, one with high taxes to ensure that nobody was slipping in to dodge obligations elsewhere.

I happened to have a character on another account that was unsubscribed and had all the skills, so I didn’t bother creating a new character.  I got him into the corp and stationed him in 1DQ1-A months ago, waiting for the moment when he would at last be called up.

And finally, this week, he got his chance.  The call went out for alphas to log in to defend our space and I got to see how the whole thing was supposed to work.

Ships were up on corp contract for 1 ISK each.  That is effectively a free ship, so nobody should be worried about losing one. (Hell, I insured mine just to make a little more ISK for the effort if it got blown up.)  That also removes the need to deal with SRP… though, as I understand it, that didn’t stop people from applying for it all the same.  People were scolded for that.

I found my ship.  The doctrine is our Ferox fleet, toned down to be alpha friendly and cheap to replace.  I even had a SKIN for the hull on my alpha.  So once we got everybody together, a full fleet of alphas with Sonrier as FC, it was time to undock and try out alphas.

Ferox on the way

We did not have far to go.  The hostiles were in the ESS in 1DQ… being in an ESS is the way to bait people into coming in and getting blown up… with a Demios fleet, because HACs are everywhere, with logi and boosters looking for somebody to come and fight them.  And so we rolled in with a 170 Feroxes to counter their 80 Demioses and it was on.

As one might expect, we shed a lot of ships.  But they were cheap ships.

ZKill puts the price of an alpha Ferox at 25 million ISK, while a Demios rings in close to 150 million ISK, so we could lose ships at a four to one rate and still win the ISK war.  Yes, we did have some more expensive ships on grid, but we were able to absorb losses and reship and return to the fight.

A Demios on grid with us, Feroxes in the background

And their command ships, a trio of Eoses, those were worth about a half a billion ISK.

So when we got to the end of the fight, having ground them down and blown up most of their fleet, the battle report put the ISK war pretty well in our favor.

Battle Report Header

Capsules count as “ships” in the loss total, so you can lop off 66 from our side and 93 from their side to get the actual ship losses; we lost 128 while they lost 127.  A pretty even count, until you get to the ISK.

That is our current go-to plan for defending Delve while our mains are all away in the north.  It was interesting to see it in action.  My alpha ended up on 34 kill mails, with two kill marks on his Ferox hull.  We’ll see how long that hull lasts.

Blizzard has announced that from today, March 9th, through Sunday, March 12th, if you are a lapsed WoW subscriber you can log in and play the Dragonflight expansion for free.

WoW Dragonflight

The specific statement is:

Grab your favorite character and we’ll grab you a Dragon! This is your chance to soar through the magnificent Dragon Isles and experience Warcraft at its nostalgic best. All players with an inactive WoW account will receive trial access to Dragonflight*. And if you don’t have a level 60, check the battle.net launcher app – there may just be a gift for you!

If the gift isn’t a level boost, then they have done something very wrong.

Actually, it looks like you get to create a level 60 Dracthyr, the new race that launched with the expansion, if you want to try that out.

Create an evoker

Blizzard would, of course, very much like you to buy a copy of Dragonflight, pretty please, because they don’t have much else going on in Q1 and it is March already and it would be great if their numbers didn’t completely tank for this quarter.

In order entice you further, all versions of the Dragonflight expansion have been discounted 20% through March 15th, in the hopes that the free trial will convince you to buy.

The catch, such that it is, is that you will not be able to level up past level 60 until you purchase the expansion.  Any experience you earn will be “banked” and held for you, to be awarded once you make the purchase.

I was curious to see who actually would be given free access to the expansion.  The emphasis in the announcement felt aimed at those not currently subscribed.  But the odd cases… people who own the expansion but who are not subscribed as well as people like me, who are subscribed but not playing Dragonflight… appear to be covered.  I can go play the new expansion this weekend if I want.

However, they do make clear that this free period gets you access to retail WoW only.  You cannot use this grace period to slip into WoW Classic and see what is going on there.

Related:

• Blizzard – Official announcement
• Blizzard – blue post in the forums
• MMO Champion – Blue post and links

We are at a point in Wrath where I am reminded that it was really the last hurrah for the idea of leveling dungeons along the way of your adventure.  Wrath opened up with a dozen five player dungeons in the tradition of vanilla and TBC, and we get another four as the phases unlock.

Once we get to Cataclysm we get fewer dungeons along the way, more at level cap, and we start getting special ones, like the old Zul’Aman and Zul’Gurub raids re-cast as five person heroics.

There was certainly a reason for this change.  Our own travel through Northrend has required very little overland adventuring, even with us all starting at level 68 rather than 70, and we have leveled up into and sometimes beyond the levels of the dungeons.  The realities of managing an 80 level xp curve where Blizz wants people to get into the latest stuff and the plan to go to five level expansions for a couple of runs made the situation untenable.

Because, unless you’re going to do heroics at level cap, the instances can become a blur of one and done events.

I have strong memories of several dungeons in Wrath… Utgarde Keep and the Nexus for various reasons, and the Oculus for very specific reasons… but many of the other were things we did once back in 2009 and now, 14 years later, we’re doing once more.

Which brings us to the Halls of Lightning, which I actually bit more vague memories of from back in the day.

Riding up to the Halls of Lightning

Going back in the history of the blog… I am so glad I tagged every dungeon run with the name of the dungeon… so Halls of Lightning will bring up this run and the past two… I was able to see that we had to take two runs at this one.  We failed on the final boss and it was late and we had to call it a night on our first run.  So we spent a second week there on a return visit to finish it off.  By the second round we were all level 80 and managed to finish it off.

Which doesn’t mean I have any strong memories of the instance.  It was more a series of vague “we had trouble here” sensations now and then that came up.  But that was often guide enough for us, at least until the last boss.  We also came in at about the same level as we did in our first run at it back in the day.

The group

The first thing we noticed on arriving was that the first boss was there, wandering around the paths between us and the rest of the instance.

General Bjarngrim doing his rounds

He wanders around between a set of groups, seeming to get charged up with power as he visited each group.

The first floor map

That seemed like a hint that maybe we should take out those groups while the general was elsewhere before engaging with him.  We acted on that plan, taking out the nearest two groups while the general was on the far side of his patrol.  But after clearing the group in the lower right of the pentagon on the map, we ended up a little too close to the general on his walk back and suddenly it was on.

But we managed to power through it… mostly.  Ula got dropped, but on being revived she did win the roll for a new pair of shoulders.

Mantle of the Electric Charges

We went around and cleared out the last group, then turned to the Iron Cruicible room, which I remembered as some sort of event.  It ends up being a room with non-elites in it that respawn quickly, so if you sit there and try to clear them, which we did for a bit, you’ll never get to the far side of the room.  In the end we made a dash for it, cross the room, then made our way up to the second floor, where the remainder of the bosses reside.

Up to the second floor

The first boss waiting for us was Volkhan, whose name was changed for copyright reasons I am sure, whose location again triggered some deep past memory of trouble.

Volkhan works at his forge

Still, we took a run at him… and it did not go well.  We were not ready for his mechanics and barely disturbed his work.

Volkhan back to his forge after our brief interruption

His gimmick is summoning some golems who, when you burn them down to one hit point, he has explode for lots of damage.  Avoid the golems.  We read up on a couple of suggested ways to deal with it, but in the end I just pulled him across the room then kited him around in a corner while people steered clear of his helpers and we managed to bring him down.

Then it was around through the Hall of Watchers which, again, I somehow knew was going to be trouble… well, that wasn’t even memory, it was just the certain knowledge that in a room with a bunch of hostile looking guys frozen in place somebody had to become animated and attack us.  We made our way past there as quickly as we could and over to Ionar, who was clearly going to be dealing some electric damage.

He looks like a thunder storm wearing armor, what do you expect?

Bjorid was able to put up a nature resist group effect and, when it came down to it, we were able to get through him on the first run.  There is a point where he lets loose with some electrical creepy crawlies that wander around, but they were easy enough to avoid.

With Ionar out of the way, we went through the passage behind him and into the last big area which leads to the final boss, Loken.

Loken is kind of bored with the whole thing

Yes, there was some trash to clear along the way, but we managed that and were standing before Loken before too long.  Proving I pay some attention to what goes on now and then, I did recall Brann Bronzebeard mentioning Loken the previous week when we were in the Halls of Stone.  I don’t remember what he said, but the name definitely came up.

Loken has a couple of tricks up his sleeve.  He has an ongoing AOE attack that gets stronger the further away you are from him, and then a sudden AOE attack that you really want to run away from him before it hits.  So stay close, until you need to run away, then stay close again.

Also, he attempts to monologue you to death with how tedious it is to have to get up out of his big chair to deal with mortals.

The latter was survivable, but we managed to mis-time the former and ended up with just me standing there, embarrassed, with Loken down to 12% and little chance that I was going to finish him off.

We didn’t even have a soul stone, so we had to release and run back.  While we got ready again, I looked Loken up to see if there were any suggestions for the fight.  The clearest on I found just said fight him on the glowing line, so everybody knows where to be, then just back up when the big attack is coming, then let him come to you again once that has passed.  Rinse, repeat, and finish him off.

And it worked like a champ.  The first fight was chaos with us running all over, the second fight was all backing up every time I called out that the big hit was coming, standing just out of range, and picking up the fight again from there.  He went down, dungeon complete.

Halls of Lightning achievement

He dropped a nice wand upgrade that went to Beanpole.

After we rolled on that we went to take a final picture in the instance.

Loken’s end

We made it through, though we did wipe twice and, somehow, Ula and Bjorid managed to die an additional pair of times.

After this we will likely make our return to Utgarde Pinnacle to finish that off.  If nothing else, that will put off us having to face The Oculus.  That will be an adventure in and of itself.

Move ops continue to run from Delve.  It takes a while to get everybody online and moved to the front lines.  A full week of daily move ops is pretty normal for a coalition sized move, and some people will still miss their ride and have to find their way northward.

Those still hanging out in Delve thinking that they can perhaps rat and mine in peace while war rages elsewhere have been in for a bit of the usual surprise.  I may not know how wed Pandemic Horde is to defending its allies in Fraternity and WinterCo, but they have been much more active out of NPC Delve, hunting for those who think running CRAB beacons during war time is a good idea.

At the front, things have been developing slowly.  Fleets have been going out and the stage is being set, but there have not be any titanic, tidi inducing clashes since we have arrived.  There haven’t been any critical, red pen ops yet.

But there was one op I had to go on the other night because of who was going to lead it.  I mentioned back in November that Progodlegend, former CSM member, the person who declared the “million dollar battle” back in the day, one time member of TEST leadership, and a key figure in the PAPI’s 59 week war against the Imperium in 2020 and 2021, had joined Goonswarm.  He was going to take out his first fleet for the Imperium.

That seemed like it might be an event, so I made sure I was around when it was time for the fleet.  (Asher pinged this op out in advance to Reavers; we’re still special.)

So when the fleet was pinged out I was already logged in and ready to join.  But the game wanted to know if I was really ready.

I keep the log window open by default…

I was, in fact sure, and once I was in I could see that Asher was going to be in the back seat for this, PGL’s first Imperium op.

The fleet command structure

That was pretty soon after the ping.  The fleet expanded beyond 200 characters before too long and, with that, the required jokes were made.  Would we be fitting rigs and how many interdictors would we need to avoid being yelled at, both related to moments in the last war that were repeated often.

PGL, as expected, took this all in stride and, once we were set, led us off into Deklein… which is always an odd experience, that having been our home from until mid-2016, so I have a ton of out dated bookmarks for staging POSes and jump bridge arrays… and into Venal where we caught titan bridge.

I only include this pic because we don’t see a Levi all that often

Our destination was Tribute and the system of UMI-KK… once again, a system of memories.  Once the capitol of TNT’s holdings in the region, I remember taking it from N3 Coalition back in 2012.

Destination in sight

This time around it is at the edge of Fraternity’s holdings and we were there to blow up an Ansiblex jump gate that had been reinforced previously and hopefully get a fight.

We went in along with a fleet from B2 and another from The Initiative and setup around the Ansiblex.

The Ansiblex in sight

We spread out and put drones on the structure while a Fraternity HAC fleet sat on the Keepstar watching us.  There was also a report of bombers lurking, looking for a run on us, which was why we were spread out and had bubbles around.

However, we brought too many ships for Fraternity to untether and try to stop us.  Their fleet stayed on the Keepstar and we whittled down the Ansiblex.

Watching them watching us

Once it was destroyed we lingered a bit, then started a careful extraction from the system.

Another legendary moment from the last was was PAPI attempting to extract a HAC fleet from 3-DMQT and getting caught with MWDs on burning for the gate by a pack of bombers whose runs managed to destroy most of their ships before they were able to jump.  It was an ignominious feat and one that PGL was clearly seeking to not repeat as we left UMI-KK by small groups.

We managed to extract safely.  There was no massacre… well, unless you count the cost of going through B2 Coalition Ansiblexes.  The prices seemed to be outrageous compared to what we pay back in Fountain and Delve.

Using a SCUM Ansiblex

Asher assured us that the prices had not been cranked up by B2 in order to soak their new allies from the south, but were just the normal prices.  It turns out that ice products are more expensive in the north.

Otherwise it was a low intensity op with a kill mail, which everybody enjoys.  PGL as an FC was clear in communication and got us there an back.  That is about all I ask of an FC.  Would fly with him again.

This is something of a counter-point to last week’s post where I noted that we were in an “Age of Diablo.”   Almost a golden age, really, what with being able to play various incarnations of the Diablo series while waiting for Diablo IV to come out later this year.  How much more Diablo do you want?

Enter The Butcher!

You would think, having put up such a post… and having been effusive about the series on multiple occasions, that I might have spent some time over the weekend… you know… actually playing some Diablo.

I was, after all, getting over a cold this past weekend, which was a perfect excuse to do nothing but sit around and play video games.  But did I play any Diablo?

Well, I did play a little bit of Diablo III on Friday evening, getting myself along to the end of Act I with my Season 28 character, yet another barbarian.  But I was not particularly enthused and I spent most of the rest of the weekend’s video game time playing WoW Classic and EVE Online.

Now, of course, MMORPGs have that whole sunk cost fallacy going for them, so it is hard to compete… but I am literally replaying old content in WoW Classic and was doing so during the EVE Online move op I wrote about yesterday… my time played in EVE is always under counted because I spend so much of it tabbed out and doing something else… so clearly I could have found time for Diablo, but just didn’t.

All of which got me to question whether or not I even like Diablo anymore?  Is it going the way of TorilMUD or EverQuest for me, a game that had a long past happy state that I am never going to relive, so it just exists as a reference point for posts about video game nostalgia and the good old days and whatever it is I have gotten up to here for the last sixteen or so years.

I mean, some of my early posts here were about EverQuest nostalgia, for a game that was all of seven years old at the time.  It is going to be 24 years old in about two weeks.

Some part of me longs to go play it, but some part of me longs to go play those other two titles as well, and that just isn’t going to happen.

It wasn’t as though playing through the story in Diablo III was bad.  The problem is that I have done it before, multiple times.  Many times.

Which led me around to thinking more about what it is I do like about the Diablo series.  Certainly the mood it conveys, and the simplicity of the game play.  Diablo III loses a bit on those fronts, being a little too well lit, a little too neon glowy at points, a little too much in the indirect lighting to get the mood thing on that the first two titles did so well.

Still, it kept me playing through back at launch, with the expansion, and through a few seasons, though not very many seasons.  Maybe that was too much.  There are a lot of games in my history that I have only played once or twice, where the story was good enough, but I didn’t really need to see if through again.

Or maybe I am just not in the mood.  I suppose the real test will be when Diablo IV comes out.  But I felt like I had to ask myself the question, even if I couldn’t really test it right now.  Some things just wear out by the residue of the old enthusiasm remains behind.

We’re going to go live in interesting times.

-Asher Elias, State of the Goonion

If you are one of those people who hate it when r/eve gets taken over by null sec bloc propaganda wars, I have some bad news for you; war were declared.

This is no surprise to those who were paying attention, and even some who were not.  As I noted last week, the Imperium had not been coy about what Saturday’s State of the Goonion was generally about, telling members to be ready for move ops immediately following the address, listing out doctrines that will be used, and generally ramping everybody up to be ready for war.

Asher, sounding somewhat subdued to getting over a cold, gave the traditional short address that has become the format of choice over the years.  His words were broadcast both on Mumble and over the Imperium News Twitch channel.

Waiting for Asher to speak

We are headed north to link up with B2 Coalition, which has been defending itself from Fraternity for many months now, to push back on WinterCo and PanFam.  Pretty much what I guessed last week, it being the obvious choice.  The war is being framed, once again, as a battle against the landlord alliances represented by WinterCo and PanFam.  Not a new spin, but a solid one.  The Imperium and B2 Coalition both stand against rental empires… we’ll ignore the former FI.RE alliances now in B2 that were landlords up until fairly recently… so that is the dividing line between the two factions.

The only detail left was where we would be staging.  For the answer to that it was time for a move op.

Move op fleets were put up shortly after the SotG ended, with three capital move fleets being announced.  Those quickly filled up… I managed to get in one… and two more were announced in order to find space for those headed north.

Unlike a lot of past move ops, where I have just gone out in a single sub cap, the advance notice of doctrines and such allowed me to get ready.  I had my Ninazu packed and fueled up, the fleet bay packed with sub cap hulls… this was so much easier due to changes that allow refit modules to be in the cargo of ships being carried… and I was in a move fleet and ready to go.

But these things take time.  We were pushing close to 1,500 ships through the pipe that leads from Delve up to Fade.  While that is only 18 jumps with Ansiblex connections… something you could do in about 20 minutes in an interceptor… getting all of us through in ships from shuttles and frigates all the way up to titans was going to take more time.

We waited for our fleets to be called so we could move by groups, making each hop and gate jump along the way in our turn.  As it so happened, the fleet I chose was the last of the group to be told to undock, but we were all ready when the word finally came.

Capitals undocking from the Keepstar

Then it was on to the well trod route between Delve and Fade, one I have taken many times in the last dozen years, such that I know the system names and can remember events that occurred in most of them.  The first jump was to the boarder between Delve and Fountain, and the through the regional gate.

Pushing through the regional gate to Fountain while sub caps cover

Then there are the traditional four systems in Fountain, Y-2ANO, KVN-36, C-N4OD, and J5A-IX.  In a sub cap that is quick set of systems.  With capital fleets it can been fairly rapid, because they can take the Ansiblex jump gates, so don’t have to worry about jump timers and such.  But when you have supers and titans, too large for the Ansiblex system, there is a jump and then a wait, and then another jump.

But the waits were not too long, the timers ran down quickly enough, and we were soon at the far end of Fountain, pushing through into Cloud Ring, the nebula for which it was named being obvious in the sky around us.

Last exit from Fountain

In Cloud Ring things get a little more difficult.  While the region is now held by an Imperium Alliance, Shadow Ultimatum, it is also an easy region to slip into and there are a couple of groups who love to camp the Ansiblex route, looking for easy prey.

My Ninazu making a warp seemingly alone

And, of course, the jump timers started getting longer and longer with every jump.  We had enough fleet mass to push through.

So many caps to draw that the Fortizar took a minute to appear

By then we were pretty close, though the last jump timer was about 30 minutes for many of us.  It wasn’t much longer until we were in Fade and landing at our destination, the last system in Face, on the boarder with both Pure Blind and Deklein, where an Imperium Keepstar was ready for us.  That puts us within easy reach of those two regions and Tribute as well.

The operational tempo has yet to really kick off, though I did jump into a fleet that reinforced a Fraternity Fortizar that was close by.  First shots fired and all of that.

Structure Shoots are our bread and butter

I did go along with a later move op to get an alt on a second account up north.  I activated a second account for the war and have my main combat alt up there now who can fly most of ships I brought up.  I just brought him up in a bomber in the sub cap fleet that was covering the next surge of capitals northward.

Once again at the sun

This became important because our staging system is within jump range of where Reavers had staged a few months back.  Not much came of that deployment, but I had moved ships up to that in an Apostle, so I wanted to get it and all of my ships there jumped to the new location and then have my alt to hand because I now had two capitals deployed and will eventually need him to fly one of them home.

So now I have two faxes and 20 sub caps deployed, and I don’t want to have to bring them all home.

So we are off and running.  We are settling in at the front and now two pairs of blocs, the major powers in null sec, are squared off in a somewhat more even match up when compared to World War Bee, where it was the Imperium versus just about everybody.

I am not sure what the war is going to be called, but we all seem to be ready for it.

There is a video of some of the first move op, with music and some of Asher’s address overlayed, that gives a sense of what a move op can be like.

Now to see how this plays out.  EVE had 31,329 on at prime time during the move op, the highest point since the launch of Uprising.  A good war could bring more life to the game… and destruction always stimulates the economy.

Related:

• Reddit – The top comment of this post is a good summary of the situation
• Reddit – Brave video about the war

There was an item in the news this past week that declared that Meta had sold just about 20 million Quest headsets so far.

That kind of seems like a win.

I mean, you sell 20 million of any expensive electronic gizmo without a killer app to drive demand and you’ve done pretty well.  Right, because there remain no killer app for VR, no title that people would throw down for the hardware just to play.

I mean, Beat Sabre is cool, but not that cool.

Time Magazine on VR 7 years ago

It also at least implies that there is a market out there, an installed base ready to jump on board should somebody finally find the sweet spot for VR titles.

Granted, there are some holes you can poke in that vision.  How many people are still using those early generation units, if they are still viable?  How many of the subsequent generation units have been purchased by die hard VR lovers who replaced early units?  And how many were purchased, used for a few hours, then stuffed in the back of a closet only to be forgotten.

Still, a lot of companies would love to have sold 20 million of any of their products.  So the Oculus team deserves some credit.

Of course, if the division that made the 20 million things ended up losing $1,200 for every one they sold, that might take a bit of the edge off of any envy you might feel for Meta.

In just 2021 and 2022 the Reality Labs division within Meta operated at a $24 billion loss.  And, sure they did a lot more than just the VR headsets, but VR is the cornerstone of the whole metaverse VR reality that Zuck has been championing.  You can blame Horizon Worlds and whatever hare brained schemes that never saw the light of day over in Menlo Park for the losses as well, but it was all predicated on the idea of VR being the enabling tech.

Now, however, Zuck is out telling people how he is putting together a team to work on AI, that being the latest and greatest of buzzwords, which has seen Microsoft and Google pouring cash into, so Meta is going to follow suit.

But the unstated side effect seems to be that his ardor for the metaverse has cooled.

Zuckerberg goes to VR France and Spain

There hasn’t been any big announcement to that effect.  But John Carmack, maybe the only person on the Reality Labs team with the vision and sense to know where VR ought to go, has been in the wind, gone from Meta for about a year now.

The layoffs that have hit the tech giants, each shedding at least 10K staff in a show of something, have reportedly hit the Reality Labs staff particularly hard.  So now the group is a shell of its former self being run by the VP who worked on the Juicero (and no, I am never going to let that go) to carry on with whatever the plan is now that AI is the shiny new paste gem in the dime store tiara that is most of Meta.

Will Horizon Worlds users ever get legs at this rate?  That was all promised before the great cuts and the chase after AI.

Not that the Reality Labs group is dead.  They still have a roadmap with hardware objectives including new VR headset models and some AR gear.  But it seems possible that Zuck’s obsession with the metaverse might be well and truly over.  Still, something came of all that cash.  It isn’t like he did something really dumb, like buying Twitter for $44 billion.

Earlier this week a studio named Mainframe, staffed by some former CCP, Blizzard, and UbiSoft developers, revealed their first game.  Called Pax Dei it, as the headline says, it will attempt to bring the player interactions of EVE Online into a medieval setting.

Pax Dei with farms and fields

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before… because that has been the premise of a few titles up to now, including Crowfall and Albion Online.

Okay, that is unfair, but it was the first place my thoughts went when I first saw this announcement… that and do we need another PvP gank box, which is what trying to turn New Eden into a fantasy setting tends to yield? (I am working on a theory about how being able to escape more easily in EVE Online makes it feel less oppressive that avatar PvP where you tend to be stuck… but I’ll get to that on another day.)

However, their announcement is surprisingly unhyped about the whole PvP aspect of the game. PvP is planned to be opt-in, as opposed to the usual game killing full loot PvP that such titles often pursue.  Instead it will focus on things that make it some more like an open world survival title, perhaps more along the lines of what New World started out looking to be or what Valheim does, but on a larger scale.

Not having the place kick off as a murder simulator from the moment you log in actually makes it sound somewhat interesting.  This grabs me in a way that some of the other “let’s make fantasy EVE” projects have completely failed at.

But I also have a reasonably reliable track record for liking these sorts of sims.

Of course, I still have questions.  The terms “sandbox” and “player driven economy” get tossed around a lot and there are many open questions in my mind.  The whole player drive economy makes me go “hrmmm…” due to how the lack of destruction often impedes MMO economies leading to massive wealth accumulation and the price inflation that goes along with it.

But the game has just been announced, so there is time to get to all of that.  There is even a trailer which, honestly, doesn’t say much either.

It does look pretty however.

Anyway, I have put this on my list to watch and pipped the announcement channel from their Discord server into the MMO News channel of the TAGN Discord.  I think three people show up there.

Related:

• Mainframe – Pax Dei web site
• Mainframe – Pax Dei Discord server
• Mainframe – Studio web site
• Steam – Pax Dei store page
• PC Gamer – Former EVE Online developers announce fantasy sandbox MMO Pax Dei
• MMO Games – Pax Dei – An Exciting New Fantasy MMO From CCP and Blizzard Devs