It is always night in space I guess.

But I meant the middle of the night my local time.

At the EVE Fanfest 2023 Keynote we got to see the ancient Jovian stargates, which had previously gone live, connected to the stargate network, and aligned themselves to the system of Zarzakh, go green and start allowing traffic through.

Zarzakh was now a place players could visit.

But it was also a place where the high sec empire rules did not apply, a place where people would clearly be shooting each other.  And also, as a new location, a place that would attract a lot of tourists, which would in turn attract people who like to shoot tourists and the cycle continues.

And, of course, I am pretty much a tourist in New Eden at this point… and I wanted to go see the new shiny thing.  But I also didn’t want to get blown up immediately, before I could take some screenshots.  So I wanted until late in the evening US Pacific time, when the Euros were all safely in bed, the US east coast was about done for the evening, and when the Chinese were probably still having breakfast, to fly off to take a look.

There are four stargates that lead to Zarzakh located in Alsavoinon, Turnur, G-0Q86, and H-PA29.

As it turns out, Alsavoinon, which is connected by a gate to the Cloud Ring region, is just 12 gates from the Imperium’s capitol in 1DQ1-A thanks to the anisblex network that makes to the current Eye of Terror Mk IV transit system.  Granted, the Cloud Ring end of that route, F7C-H0, is often camped, I figured I could take a chance.  So I grabbed an expendable ship, a Hound, the Minmatar stealth bomber, the fit of which was so old I would no doubt get denied SRP if I lost it, and headed north.

Hound on the way north

As it turned out, our Shadow Ultimatum allies up in Cloud Ring had been keeping the route clear, so I was able to slip into Alsavoinon without any issue.  Then I had to figure out where to go next.  I did not occur to me that the Jovian gate would be there in my overiew like any other gate.  I don’t know why.  But I saw that The Initiative had parked a Fortizar in the system, so I warped to that so I could tether up and work out what to do next.  And on landing there, the solution presented itself.

Oh, there it is

The Fortizar turned out to be a perch for the gate to Zarzakh which, as I sat there, I noticed was in my overview like any other gate.

It didn’t look like much from that angle, just a big green cloud blob.

Hiding in plain sight?

In fact, it was so obvious that it felt like part of the “how not to be seen” bit from Monty Python.  How did nobody not notice this before?  Oh wait, because it wasn’t there before.

Warping to the gate got me more of what I was looking for.

The Jovian gate up close

Once I was there, it was time to jump on through.  I expected that I might get blown up rather quickly, but I was hoping for a few screen shots along the way.

First though, I had to pay the fee to use the gate.  10K ISK please.  It was like The Initiative was already running the gate.

There is a gate toll

On the other side I found myself alone at the gate.

The Zarzakh side of the gate

There were some wrecks and corpses there.  Clearly there had been some fighting.  But it was clear at the moment.  I was also safe from the Zarzakh gravity hazard at the moment.

Warning, there is a hazard out there

The overview showed me the following items.

Where to go in Zarzakh

From the gate I warped to the station, the Ancient Jovian Observatory, which was huge.  In fact, it was so huge that I could barely get any of it on screen to take a screen shot.

It is big… and misty

The station had been the obvious scene of some additional fighting, and it was there that I saw my first hostile ships.  Some of the Tuskers were flying around.  But it appeared that Imperium pilots were holding the area around the structure currently, so I was able to go about my business undisturbed while they chased the Tuskers pilots around.

I tried pulling away from the structure to get a better look at it, but that made no difference to its scale.  It was still too big to fully see, and shrouded in mists, which obscured its features. (Though some say it has Caldari markings.)

I flew far enough away to get outside of the protective bubble around the structure… which still showed as 0 meters from me even as I started to get warnings that the gravity hazard was going to be set on me.

Better get back to safety

I turned around and got back within the sphere, my Hound now smoking apparently, even though it was as yet undamaged.

My Hound flying back into the protected zone

I knew there was more to the system.  The keynote had showed some structures under construction.  Then I realized that my current overview tab did not have beacons displayed.  Getting those on the overview showed me the Deathless Construction Site, which I warped off to.

Off to the construction site

That got me to the area where there were structures and the obvious soon to be available once the expansion drops shipcaster, partially done.

Also, the black hole is very visible

It was there that I discovered that the camera controls were locked.  I could not disconnect the camera from its view to move it around and explore the area.  This is likely because this is just a facade for now, an interim state that the camera might be able to pan through and past if left to the control of capsuleers.  They don’t want us seeing the skybox on the other side or whatever.

This is probably also the reason for the gravity hazard, to keep us from roaming around the system trying to find things or create deep safes or whatever.

Speaking of deep safes, bookmarks also seemed to be disabled in the system.

Sorry, no bookmark for you

That didn’t leave much to do.

I was moving around cloaked when a couple of the Tuskers warped in.  I was able to put my camera on their ships for a few more screen shots, but there honestly wasn’t much else to do or see.

The system is clearly configured to keep us from getting too nosy before CCP is ready.  I wonder to what degree it will remain that way come the launch of the expansion.

I did jump through the other three gates, just to see the other side.  But there was nothing particularly special.  The system can me used as a travel point but that doesn’t seem to be its sole purpose.  It is not just about being yet another Thera as Jester suggested on Reddit, though it will no doubt be used that way.

Then I wandered on back to 1DQ1-A and docked back up, unmolested on my return trip.

So I have been to see the shiny new thing.  Now to wait for updates and it become more than just a transit point and tourist attraction.

EVE Fanfest came and went this past weekend.  Lots of people flew to Iceland to attend and likely had a very special experience.

My own experience of the event was through some early morning Twitch streams and reviewing the VODs of things that happened while I was still asleep.  The pain of being 7 hours behind UTC and Icelandic time.

So my reactions are very much information focused.  Did I learn something new?  Did I get enough details?  How was the presentation?  There is little camaraderie or feeling of being part of the crowd at the event when you’re sitting at home alone and watching a replay of an event on your monitor.

I wrote about what my expectations were in the days leading up to EVE Fanfest, so I will use that as my structure for my Monday morning feelings about the event. (Or Sunday afternoon feelings, but this post will go live on Monday morning.)

Keynote

A much better keynote than last Fanfest.  It was a lot less self-congratulatory and a lot more focused on new things coming, things to be excited about, and things that would be talked about later.  It probably also helped that they didn’t just raise the subscription price like last time.  Also, they didn’t totally over promise the content aspect.  Last year was just awkward.

On the video it seemed a little embarrassing that Hilmar and Ratatti and a couple of others had to ask people to cheer to get the responses they expected at times.  That looked like a bit of a rebuke on video, but you can’t really tell what the audience is up to.  And, at events like this, the audience sometimes has trouble settling down to focus on the presenter rather than chit chatting among themselves because it is cool to be hanging out with friends and fellow players.

There was a decent amount of info in the keynote.  Others have gone through it in detail, so I will be lazy and link out to those at the bottom of the post with other related items.

And, of course, you can watch the keynote yourself.

I suppose the highest compliment I can give is to recommend you watch it to get a sense of what was announced at FanFest.  Or read the coverage of the keynote at the bottom of the post.

Expansion Announcement

We did get this, and it is a big deal.  We will get the expansion on November 14th.

EVE Online Havoc

The primary new content aspect of it is, as with Viridian, focused on Faction Warfare.  This time around they are letting players ally with the Guiristas or Angel Cartel to jump in and disrupt the battle zones.  The Jovian stargates in Alsavoinon, Turnur, G-0Q86, and H-PA29 now take you to Zarzakh and there is a shipcaster under construction there that will send you to the front lines in Faction Warfare when the expansion launches.

Two expansions focused on Faction Warfare, good for them.  But if it becomes three, people will be upset.  All other groups get jealous when one group gets too much attention, be it deserved or not.

There are also a bunch of low key, quality of life changes under way, some in response to player feedback on things introduced in Viridian.  I am waiting for the dev blogs and patch notes before I get too invested, but it looks like a lot of good stuff.

Again, CCP Ratatti said “automated SRP” and I think expected to be showered with adoration during the presentation.  Instead he had to stop and say it again to try and elicit the response he was expecting.  It is hard to tell if this just isn’t a feature in huge demand… quite possible, since SRP is kind of a big null sec alliance thing, and not even all of them do it… or if he just doesn’t get cut any slack anymore because he is now and forever the DUST 514 guy who came in, told players he knew better than them what the game needed, then proceeded to screw up the economy for 18 months in pursuit of an impossible goal leading to a precipitous drop in player activity during what I called “the year of disappointment.”

The CSM18 Election Results

We did get the results.  I wrote a post about that, which you can read here.  As I noted in the post, doing the results in the midst of Fanfest means they didn’t get a lot of focus, but we know who made the cut.

The 18th Council of Stellar Management

And we know who CCP hand picked from the 11-20 positions to fill out the two extra spots.  I still have to go back through the VOD to see if they explained their choices.  But it doesn’t matter as much as that these are the choices they made I suppose.

EVE Online Board Game

This got some mention, but I came away feeling like the whole thing was much further out than I expected.  Somebody has been trying to build up a lot of hype for this on social media and it feels like that was mistakenly premature now.

EVE Strategy Board Game – War For New Eden

The game was available to try at Fanfest, which doesn’t really do much for those of us not there.  I also didn’t hear even a tentative date for when the Kickstarter campaign would kick off.

Whatever The First Person is being Called These Days

It is being called EVE Online Vanguard, because that is a name with a glorious history I guess.

EVE Vanguard – Coming Soon

It is a first person shooter, it will somehow be integrated with EVE Online, it has been built with Unreal Engine 5 and Carbon for engine and UI, it is in alpha right now, and current EVE Online Omega subscribers will be able to sign up for a special test even in December which will be called First Strike.  There was the idea of “founder” status or whatever mentioned, something special for the early adopters.

This does not excite me at all.  I was previously promised orbital bombardment and never got to drop things on FPS players, so I am salty.

I know there are a couple dozen die hard and very vocal DUST 514 veterans out there who really want this, but every game or feature, no matter how bad, is somebody’s favorite thing.  There were a lot of problems DUST 514 had to overcome, not the least of which was being on the PlayStation 3.  But had it seen a strong enough response, it would have been moved to PlayStation 4 the way DC Universe Online was.

Maybe after 15 years of trying to make a successful FPS, CCP will hit the mark.  But I am dubious.

Project Awakening

My desire was to hear nothing about this at all, but with Hilmar speaking I knew that was folly.

Just wake up already

That said, Hilmar was mercifully brief.  He reminded us that CCP has been given $40 million to make this title and reiterated the “Not For Tranquility” promise when it came to blockchain technology.

I remain nervous on that front all the same.  Despite the absolute collapse of the blockchain, crypto, and NFT market over the last year, most of that being expected due to the whole thing being mostly an outright scam, that somebody thinks this is worth $40 million means that that they will want some return on that, and may demand EVE Online integration at some point.  And we know promises from CCP have about a 12 month shelf life after which they are deemed null and void by the company.

The EVE Online Monument

It was unveiled.  I saw pictures online from people.  It was mentioned a few times during presentations.  There are now 765K names inscribed on it and an offhand promise to revisit it for the 30 year anniversary.  But there wasn’t a lot about otherwise.

That said, they did update the monument name finder page so you can find where your name is on the monument.

There I am

Clicking on that brings up an image of the panel with all the names.  You can find your own name in the mix.  They are all sorted alphabetically.

In with the Wilhelms

Honestly, that exceeded my expectations, so I salute the effort.

Random Space Statistics

There were many.  I need to go back and review the VODs to dig some out.  But if seemed about sufficient.

Else?

What else was there?

There was Project M5, the mobile 4x conquest title, which is now called EVE Galaxy Conquest.

EVE Galaxy Conquest

That will be coming soon on iOS and Android, with a PC client promised for a future date.  As somebody put it, we now have “EVE Clash of Corps” to look forward to.

There was some look into the underlying technologies for EVE Online going into its third decade.

Carbon and Quasar

Carbon is the front end technology which anybody playing the game now know because it powers the revamped UI, while Quasar is the backend technology.  Also, Hilmar was able to make a joke about moving to Python 3 for the third decade.

Project Discovery, the in-game citizen science mini-game, will be moving in the future to help with cancer research.

Project Discovery

If science can harness our need for ISK and ship SKINS to help cure cancer, so much the better.

It was also announced that PLEX For Good would become a continuous effort that people could donate to at any given time and that players would help guide where the funds would go.

I am a little less excited about this, if only because my experience with human nature is that we tend to respond better to an urgent, current, specific need than enhancing the general good of the world in some general, unspecified way.  I am not saying that is healthy, just that it is the way people tend to respond.

Finally, we got the word that ticket sales for the next EVE Fanfest were already on sale… and that it will be in May of 2025.  So there will be no EVE Fanfest in 2024.

Tickets on sale now!

Overall, for myself as a remote viewer, I did learn a bunch of new things, so am not disappointed.  Expectations were met and occasionally exceeded.  But I am waiting for some dev blogs to nail down a lot of details.  CCP is usually pretty good with that.

Related:

• CCP – General Fanfest Summary Post
• CCP – EVE Online Monument Page
• NEP – Fanfest 2023 Keynote Recap
• INN – EVE Fanfest Keynote
• TNG – The EVE Fanfest 2023 Keynote Address

I have mocked and chided EG7 and Daybreak since the acquisition because they have consistently and repeatedly highlighted H1Z1 as one of their most valuable first party properties, something they own the rights to.  Not as valuable as EverQuest, which Ji Ham declared as their most valuable, but still always on the list.

And the reason I have been rather dismissive of this is because, for all of that talk, they haven’t done thing one with H1Z1.  It was, after all, a big announcement a couple years back that they were working on getting the build system for the app working again.

In fact, I have long harbored a suspicion that the EG7 plan for H1Z1 was to close their eyes tight and wish as hard as they could that H1Z1 would simply miracle itself back to it brief position of market dominance and popularity, which was back in 2015 and 2016, and become the Queen of the Battle Royale genre once more.

I mean, Daybreak tried everything… if you define “everything” as renaming the game every so often and to handing it off to NanWorks for some rando to run, only to have it handed back to them.  I mean, there is a whole hour long Death of a Game video about this amazing series of half hearted moves.

The efforts have been underwhelming to say the least.

This shirt is missing at least two additional names…

So imagine my surprise when Ji Ham was up there talking to investors about plans for a new H1Z1 title.  We’re they going to finally take a shot and try to regain so very much ground lost to Fortnite and PUBG?

First party game plans

No!  They want to bring back the survival part of the game that was split off and renamed Just Survive way back when, then shut down in 2018, making its name especially ironic, it being the only part of the game that did not, in fact, just survive.

But I am totally fine with this.  I am certainly more likely to go play Just Survive than the battle royale version of the game, which is technically still available both on PC and PlayStation 4.

The funny bit is that the people watching that video presentation were pretty jazzed about the H1Z1 announcement, but were clearly not aware of the difference between the battle royale and survival halves of the game.  The battle royale part was the popular bit and that is, once again, NOT  what they’re going after.

It even says at the top of the chart “sandbox suvival” and not “battle royale.”

Is that a good thing or a bad thing that EG7 has decided to return to the sandbox survival, the part of the game that Daybreak, under the very same senior management team, shut down?

One must assume, if they are bringing this up at all, that they have spotted some aspect of the survival game that might be adopted, adapted, or improved in order to make this a title worth investing $25 million into.

It is kind of a strange spot, because elsewhere in the video Ji Ham said they wouldn’t be remastering Lord of the Rings Online after all because it could cost as much as $30 million to do it right, and for that they believe they can get a brand new game… like a new EverQuest title.

That attitude argues that they are not simply going to revive and spiff up Just Survive, that they want a new game with a new angle and new game play out of this.  If you won’t bring a current title up to date for that price, you certainly wouldn’t revive a game you shut down for just a few million less.

So maybe it is a good thing.  The survival sandbox genre has a lot of players in it, but it always feels like it has a lot of room for growth and experimentation. And, personally, I am much happier with this plan.

I am perhaps not as thrilled with the idea of this being a shared public server concept, the way the original Just Survive ran.  That wasn’t bad, but it does get tiresome to have somebody just ganking you on site.  I mean, I played it for a bit.

The hunter… in his underwear… and his prey

But I would be a lot more interested in a co-op, PvE, server rental, larger explorable world model.  I know, everything can’t be like Valheim in that regard, but some things can be like Valheim in format.

Anyway, it is potentially on the horizon, though I suspect that the launch date of 2026 is optimistic.  In fact, given the history of Daybreak, the most likely outcome is that this gets cancelled long before it sees the light of day and we never hear about it again.  We shall see.

The problem with the CSM election results being announced at EVE Fanfest is that they tend to get drowned out in the additional news and excitement.  They also, apparently, get announced at 3am my local time.  I might alarm clock for a Keepstar fight, but I am not getting up early for the CSM.

So I awoke yesterday morning to find that CSM18 has already been proclaimed.  Here is CSM18:

The 18th Council of Stellar Management

The ten elected members won their seats in this order, with incumbents marked with a ** and previously serving members marked with a *.

1. Kazanir** – Goonswarm Federation – GoonWaffe – 1st round
2. Alcoholic Satan – Pandemic Horde – A Blessed Bean – 1st round
3. Luke Anninan** – Fraternity. – Into Oblivion. – 30th round
4. Angry Mustache** – Goonswarm Federation – KarmaFleet – 32nd round
5. Storm Delay** – Pandemic Horde – Horde Vanguard. – 33nd round
6. Mike Azariah* – None – The Scope – 38th round
7. The Oz – None – Pecunia Infinita – 38th round
8. Dark Shines – The Initiative. – Void of Eden. – 39th round
9. Mark Resurrectus** – TURBOFEED OR GLORY – Holey Roamin’ Empire – 39th round
10. Amelia Duskspace – TRUTH. HONOUR. LIGHT. – DEMONS OF THE HIDDEN MIST – 39th round
11. Kshal Aideron – The Ancients. – F.U.N. Inc. – CCP Pick
12. Stitch Kaneland – The Tuskers Co. – The Tuskers. – CCP Pick

In addition, for CSM18 CCP opted to pick two additional members of the council from the 11th to 20th place finalists, which accounts for the last to positions on that list.

Overall, there was quite a boost in voting, with the CSM18 election seeing 47,155 ballots cast.  We can compare that to the last few years which were showing downward trend in voter participation.

• CSM17 – 30,814 total votes
• CSM16 – 38,086 total votes
• CSM15 – 36,120 total votes
• CSM14 – 32,994 total votes
  

As for who ended up on the council, only 6 of the 10 elected seats, and 6 of the 12 total seats, when to null sec candidates, down two from CSM17.

And we also saw a null sec incumbent, Pandoralica, fail to make the cut.  Though it was perhaps asking too much of even the enlarged and independent alliance that is The Initiative now to get two members elected to the council.  Pando and Brisc managed it last time, but Brisc had managed to build his own coalition of supporters independent of his former alliance.

Then there is the order of elimination.  The STV voting method goes through a series of rounds and, at the end of each round, the candidate with the lowest vote count is eliminated.  With 49 candidates in the election and a target of electing 10 members, there are 39 rounds.  This is the round by round elimination record.

1. “William Chen” with 110.066856 votes
2. “Melicien Tetro” with 139.937642 votes
3. “SeriesPro ” with 164.118262 votes
4. “Dhuras” with 182.707135 votes
5. “Grima The Mad” with 190.223741 votes
6. “Sol Weintroub ” with 235.496787 votes
7. “Styxx ” with 254.256176 votes
8. “Dario Kaelenter” with 266.851594 votes
9. “Corporal Fillip” with 284.205175 votes
10. “Kilyavi Alaailaa” with 291.161414 votes
11. “Kontan Rekor” with 300.294067 votes
12. “Cael Caderu” with 300.878212 votes
13. “Lady Death Strike” with 311.708281 votes
14. “Rico Shikkoken” with 325.814735 votes
15. “Yondu Quill” with 334.080011 votes
16. “Nala Queen” with 341.840275 votes
17. “Gornilo STrubanov” with 347.596265 votes
18. “Gabriell Bemenacth” with 360.810012 votes
19. “Twan Molenaar” with 389.999255 votes
20. “Gideon Zendikar” with 437.100101 votes
21. “MILINT ARC Trooper” with 457.408813 votes
22. “Gustav Mannfred” with 475.992133 votes
23. “Rots Mijnwerker” with 537.858648 votes
24. “Drake Iddon” with 550.028593 votes
25. “RGC Godfather ” with 569.963184 votes
26. “Lee Adoulin” with 620.430003 votes
27. “Nuke Michael” with 659.860478 votes
28. “Larkness” with 691.945369 votes
29. “Velonad Tyldamere” with 802.444659 votes
30. “DutchGunner” with 913.547616 votes
31. “Kshal Aideron” with 1022.668744 votes (picked by CCP)
32. “Kelmac” with 1052.432071 votes
33. “Stitch Kaneland” with 1080.453270 votes (picked by CCP)
34. “White 0rchid” with 1311.775777 votes
35. “Pandoralica ” with 1705.981681 votes
36. “Phantomite ” with 1821.824324 votes
37. “Arhont Sibirskii” with 1941.553601 votes
38. “Torvald Uruz” with 2220.811269 votes
39. “Dujek Oneye” with 2916.299582 votes

CCP chose the additional pair of CSM18 members from those eliminated in rounds 30 to 39.

Finally, should sombody leave or be removed from the CSM… this used to happen pretty regularly back in the day… it looks like Dujek Oneye will be the first alternate candidate.

So there we go.  CSM18 has been elected.  Congratulations to those who made it in.

Related:

• CCP – Forum post with election results
• Reddit – Election Results Thread with ballot totals
• Reddit – Candidate’s initial first round vote totals
• NEP – Meet Your New Council of Stellar Management

I am having one of those days where I have too many items I want to write about.  I still have a few half finished post related to that EG7 video from earlier this week, and then there is EVE Fanfest, where despite my low expectations, CCP actually delivered some things of interest with some hard dates behind them.  You can watch the keynote here.

So, when in doubt, I am going to just take things in bite sized chunks and write probably a few more posts than I need to rather than trying to lump things into a couple of mega-posts.  This will probably carry me through the end of the month.  We’ll see.

And the first thing on my ranked priority list is the announcement of the next expansion for EVE Online, which is called Havoc.

EVE Online Havoc

I got to watch a bit of the keynote, including the intro to the Havoc expansion.  Just before the keynote a message went out in game that the Jovian gates were activating and we got to see the gates go live and jump through to see the new system of Zarzakh.

An active Jovian gate

There was some flying around and we got to see the new station and the damaging effect that hits your ship, applying continuous hull damage, when you fly outside of certain safe bubbles in Zarzakh.

Shield and armor still intact while hull is almost gone

I am sure CCP will explain why they have added this mechanic to the system.  We got the lore reason, which has to do with a black hole being nearby, but why they want to hold us to areas around structures was left unstated.

The main thrust of the expansion, however, is to add another faction to the Faction Warfare conflicts.  We were shown shipcasters being constructed in Zarzakh.  You will be able to join the Guristas/Angel Cartel faction in Zarzakh and drop in on Faction Warfare front line systems to fight against the empires and disrupt the formerly two sided struggle.

Also, there will be an Angel Cartel titan at last.

A glimpse of the new titan

So there will be a race to be the first to get a blueprint, then to build one, then to destroy one.

There is an expansion trailer as well.  It doesn’t show much in the way of details.  I suspect that we’ll have to wait for panels tomorrow, or more likely dev blogs next month, to get anything concrete.

The one thing that is shown at the end of the trailer is a glimpse of the first person shooter they have been working on since DUST 514 shut down a decade back.

It is called EVE Vanguard and it is supposed to make its appearance sometime on December.  I will say, at least it is on PC this time.  We’ll see if this gets another niche fan base too small to support it financially… like literally every title besides EVE Online that CCP has produced.  But I’ll get to that later.

Related:

• CCP – Havoc hits EVE Online 14 Nov
• Massively OP – The EVE Online FPS is back as EVE Vanguard this December

Our group carries on with our hardcore experiment, though not without some setbacks.

Hardcore for all your… something… needs

Some tidbits from the experience so far to catch myself up.

Blue Bar and Catching Up

I have been the least diligent of the three of us in playing Hardcore as I have a mild desire to get another character to level 80 in Wrath Classic.  Being away for a week seemed like it was going to set me way back with the group.

This was mitigated somewhat by rested experience.  A week away gave me a full level of blue bar.  I left having just hit level 11 and was able to very quickly jump to level 13 in an evening of focused effort.

I was a little worried about the whole rested xp thing at first because I noticed early on that I wasn’t accumulating any.  I had forgotten that you don’t start to accumulate it until you hit level 8 or so.  But at level 11 I built up enough to burst ahead two levels pretty quickly.

Some Deaths

However, I really shouldn’t have worried too much about being behind as Ula’s level 14 hunter Moolaloo ended up taking the terminal swim in an oasis pool in The Barrens while I was away.

This led to a re-order and restart of the rest of the group so that when I arrived back from Hawaii and hit level 13 I was actually ahead of the curve rather than being behind.

Alternative Plans

The shock and realization that every death was going to lead not just to a feeling of loss, but also, and more importantly, a need to replay the same content yet again, led Potshot to formulate a possible alternative plan.

When you die in Hardcore you get a free… if somewhat convoluted… way to transfer your character to a normal vanilla WoW Classic server if you’re invested and want to carry on with that character. (Or if you don’t want to do the starter area yet again.)

Potshot’s plan is a set of rules for post Hardcore play to give a scoring system that puts a little of the edge into dying, but which would not require an ongoing need to start from scratch.  There will be a blog post about this plan later should we end up deciding we have had enough of starting over from scratch.

Done with Mulgore

Meanwhile, Hurmoo, my tauren druid, was about wrapping things up in the starting zone that is Mulgore.  I had done most of the quests and had met at least one of the local named celebrities.

Everybody loves The Rake

That set me up with a quest to head out to The Barrens which, has its own set of famous NPCs.

What was that about your wife?

Diversion into Durotar

If you watch the Deathlog addon, you quickly get a sense that The Barrens is a dangerous place.  People die there all the time.  After going after a couple of quests out there and having to flee a couple of times due to things like a level 16 hyena wandering in among the level 12 stuff I was stalking, I decided that I might like another level or two, just to be safe.

So I did what I used to do back in the old days and ran over to another starter zone, in this case Durotar, in order to run some still green quests to build up a little more easy xp.  Razor Hill had some options for me.  There were a couple of quests to run which involved getting deep into areas where respawns behind you could be an issue, even a couple of levels ahead of the curve.  I ended up grouping with somebody else with the same plan, an undead warlock named Capers.

But even paired up, we were not safe.  We went off to get our quota of quillboar kills and along the way ran into Captain Flat Tusk in the middle of a fight.  He is a level 11 elite, maybe not dungeon boss quality, but at least a serious dungeon trash mob, and we had some trouble with him… though that trouble was largely due to the belief that we might be able to handle him.

We committed, got in over our heads, tried to run after I ran out of mana to heal, and… sorry Capers.

Alas, poor Capers

Capers didn’t seem too mad about it.  He laughed and said it wasn’t my fault.  But there was somebody else going back to start from scratch again.

Meanwhile, between Durotar and a bit more at the Crossroads, I was able to hit level 14.

Class Quest Time

Level 14 is time for the next druid class quest.  Not for anything cool, like cat or cheetah form.  No, this is for the cure poison spell.

Seems a bit obnoxious to require a class quest for a spell like that, but welcome to vanilla rules.  The bitter part is that it isn’t a bit of a haul to get it done.  I did the first step with some fellow druids, which involved climbing up a hill.

Class quest stage up there somewhere

The next stage sends me off to some place dangerous looking, so I am waiting for the group to get back together again before I set off on that trek.  Fortunately, they’re more diligent than I at hardcore, so were into The Barrens…

The stampede

Then through into Durotar as well to pick up a few extra quests before committing to the land of Chuck Norris jokes.

I also used the opportunity to hit Orgrimar and get the flight point.

The big Horde city on Kalimdor

I was struck by how much it resembled Qeynos back in old EQ… at least the flat, walled front of it.

Being Poor

Really an aside, but I somehow always manage to forget how poor you are when you start off in WoW Classic.  I know, there is a whole post here from just four years ago about us scraping our coppers together to get the 5 silver to form a guild, but I have been playing in Northrend at level cap where daily quests had out 20 gold like it was nothing and I don’t have a single character in the expansion that has less than 2K gold in their pocket.  I’ve been spoilt, this being the true evil of the Lich King or some such, corrupting us with gold.

Anyway, I have twice not been able to buy all my spells on an even number level up because I’ve been out of cash, and I haven’t even been buying any luxuries, like food or water.

The Ongoing Deathlog

And then there is the server vibe and the insight the Deathlog addon brings.  And the comedy.  I am still far too amused by some last words.

Oh, there he is now…

I will say that there are a lot more people hitting level 60 now.  You get that cheer sound a few times in an evening.  But you also see the real tragedy more often as well.

You can always transfer to a non-hardcore server

I did also see the first real persistent case of somebody trying to gain attention by dying repeatedly.  I mean sure, there is always somebody dying in a specific place just for a laugh.

Oh yeah, that’s a good one man!

But the other night we had somebody who just kept making orcs with attention getting names and dying over and over and over, likely just because they knew they would show up on the Deathlog display.

Ended up with a few dozen dead level 1 orcs

He seemed to vacillate between semi-suggestive and variations on the name of the president.  Not the worst thing in the world, but it did clog up my enjoyment of Deathlog with what seems like a bunch of try hard attempts and 13 year old boy humor.

But that is the way things go with some people.  I feel self conscious when everybody can see me, but some people feel the exhilaration of exhibitionism I guess.

Put down 2028 as the next date for a possible new EverQuest MMORPG title.

EverQuest – Since 1999

Though maybe don’t write that in indelible ink, as even in yesterday’s Capital Markets Day presentation in Stockholm, EG7 Acting CEO Ji Ham said that he probably should have made that date blurry on the slide because it is way out in the future… there were several “ifs” in his statements… but they think they can manage it.

But let’s dial back to where this even came from.

There was a three hour presentation… breaks included… by Ji Ham yesterday to talk about EG7’s long term plans.  It was live streamed and is now up on YouTube if you want to get into all the gory details about how past plans came to fruition, high level goals, and a lot of financial related talk, not all of which I am sure I buy into.  But every such pitch is tainted by over optimism.

There is, however, a lot to unpack in that video and I have only skimmed through it once and pulled out the following tidbits.  I still need to go back and give a couple sections a closer listen, especially the Q&A session at the end.  I certainly didn’t hear anything about a console version of LOTRO, for example.  But I always figured that was never more than a tease in any case.

There are some build ups during the presentation, looks into what their plans are in general for both first and third party IP titles.

The future milestone for EG7 releases

You can see Cold Iron on that chart, a one time possible acquisition for Daybreak, a deal which then never got mentioned again with the acquisition Daybreak by EG7.  But that never really got any news until Cold Iron shipped Alien’s Fireteam Elite with a different publisher, which led to a whole what is going on here investigation.

Well, Cold Iron is back working with EG7.  Daybreak will publish their next title and Toadman will do some development for hire in support of the new title, a deal that gets covered in the first 20 minutes of the video.  And the whole story about around Cold Iron is even stranger than we thought.

The Cold Iron data sheet

Along with the history part we got a glimpse of the monthly gross revenue trend lines for all of Daybreak’s titles. (You can find this at the 30 minute mark of the video.)

Monthly Gross Revenue

The bars in the back are the total consolidated gross revenue for all titles combined, and should be compared against the scale on the right, while the lines are for each game and are aligned to the scale on the left of the chart.

There was also quite a bit of talk about planned revenue and the need to support that with how the company plans to get there, along with some history about how the company ended up with their current line up, including a side tale about the SOE acquisition and how their success with that has made him confident with his feel for the games market.

Broad strategy for EG7

But when it gets down to it, they have a nice chart for what they consider first party titles.

First party game plans

For H1Z1 he said specifically that they are not reviving the battle royale concept, that they are looking to do a sandbox survival style of game, with a box price less than AAA titles, cosmetic in-game purchases, and DLC to round out the revenue model.  I don’t know if they remember that they shut down the sandbox survival side of the franchise back in 2018.  But now they’re buying into it again, with development to start next year.

I’m going to skip over Mechwarrior because that doesn’t do anything for me and get straight to what I started out wanting to write about, the next possible EverQuest title.

Ji Ham says that they consider EverQuest to be their most important IP, that it helped usher in the MMORPG era, and that even WoW was based on EQ (which Blizz did acknowledge directly at BlizzCon one year).  But what are they going to make with a $30 million budget?

Sure, it says massively multiplayer… so maybe box plus a premium subscription option plus cosmetics plus expansions/DLC is the path, just like the original.

But then Ji Ham goes into a comparison with Elden Ring around the 2 hour 18 minute mark. (Ji Ham said he has 200 hours in on Elden Ring at this point, which surprised me.  But I was surprised when I found out Smed played EVE Online, so my cynicism about gaming company leadership is pretty deep.)

I mean, I get part of the comparison.  Elden Ring’s financial success while still being a super difficult title has given Daybreak the green light to embrace hardcore over accessibility, to get back to the early essence of the franchise, which I am sure will make some people cheer.

But they still have to make something that offers a compelling game play experience.  Being difficult is not enough… and picking a $30 million budget for the next EQ because that is how much Elden Ring costs… what can I say? [Edit: And, as noted in the comments, I am not even sure how Ji Ham came up with that number for Elden Ring.]

However, the whole thing is still in the ideation phase and given that we’ve been through a couple of rounds of ideas for a new entry in the EverQuest franchise, it is tough to get too invested in something where a few people are currently trying to develop a concept with an eye towards maybe starting development in 2025 and maybe shipping sometime around 2028… though probably later than that, given past experiences in the genre.

So we’ll have to wait and see, but at least it is on the agenda.

But before we start getting too optimistic, elsewhere EG7 was announcing plans to appease shareholders.  We saw demands back in May from investor Alta Fox for more money in the form of dividends and stock buy backs.  So this got slipped into the mix on the press page:

Together with new financial targets the Board of Directors are proposing a shareholder capital return program. That includes dividend and a stock buyback program, aiming to start the program in the beginning of 2024. The shareholder capital return program is subject to approval from Extra General Meeting of the shareholders to be scheduled for Q4.

The details elsewhere indicate that half of company net revenue will be used to appease shareholders through dividends and stock buy backs.  That doesn’t sound bad on its surface maybe, but profits are what a company uses to invest back into making things like new titles.

Does that plan leave them enough space to get to a new EverQuest title?  They haven’t managed it as Daybreak or EG7 so far without this sort of earmark on profits, so it makes me a little dubious on the whole thing.

Still, I am interested to see the reaction.  Even hinting that they might be making a Marvel based MMORPG got them no end of press.  How much attention with the suggestion of a new EverQuest title garner?

Related:

• EG7 – Mid-term financial Targets
• Market Screener – Enad Global 7 presents new financial targets and strategic direction
• Massively OP – EG7 tells investors it wants to develop a new EverQuest MMORPG
• Inventory Full – EverQuest 3 – What, This Again?!

The August hunt for the Jovian stargates initiated by The Deathless saw speculation as to where the gates my lead.  Called “Operation Epiphany,” it led to the discovery of four gates located in the systems of Alsavoinon, Turnur, G-0Q86, and H-PA29.

Jovian gate from The Scope

The gates received an update yesterday mentioned in the patch notes and announced in a new video from The Scope.

The patch notes included the following information:

• The four ancient Jovian stargates located in the Alsavoinon, G-0Q86, H-PA29, and Turnur systems appear to have connected with their stargate pairs at their destination location. This system has been assigned a system name that was discovered by capsuleers during the investigation: Zarzakh. The system is now viewable on the map.

• Although the stargates have registered their navigation data with the New Eden fluid router network, and additional information about the system has become available, the stargates remain in a locked state, preventing access to capsuleer traffic.

And, true to the patch notes, the new system does appear on both in-game maps, showing connections to the four systems with the ancient Jovian stargates.

Putting Zarzakh on the map

The location in greater New Eden puts the system somewhat between the regions of Molden Heath and the Great Wildlands.

The maps indicate a system, a station there, and a region designation as well, which makes one wonder what else may lay beyond Zarzakh.

The Scope video gives a more dramatic impression of events.

The items from the chyron at the bottom of the video, which I transcribed myself this time, read as follows:

• Society of Conscious Thought Calls for Urgent Meeting of CONCORD Assembly as Fears Grow over Stargates
• Ancient Jovian Stargates Registering Connections to Zarzakh from Alsavoinon, G-0Q86, H-PA29, and Turnur Systems
• Proposal from Gallente Sentators to open Joint Talks on Alsavoinon with Caldari State Rebuffed by President Aguard
• Presence of Possible Jovian Station under Pirate Control Alarms Interstellar Governments and Corporations
• DED and EDENCOM Monitoring Increased Angel Cartel and Guristas Activity as Stargates Change Status
• Deathless Circle Organization’s Reach Compared to Major Pirate and Criminal Cartels by Federal Intelligence Office
• Caldari Navy High Command Brief Chairman Akimaka Saraki on Conflict in Amevync and Ishaga Constellations
• Interstellar Shipping and Navigation Bodies Reviewing Possible New Trade as Stargate Connections Revealed
• Tribal Council Meets over Turnur Stargate as Angel Cartel and Deathless Circle Links to Thukker Renegades Raised
• EDENCOM Reports Signs of Increased Intensity in Fighting between Triglavian Collective and Drifters in Abyssal Deadspace
• Special Investigation into Rogue Caldari Research Corporation Opened by Caldari Business Tribunal
• Imperial Forces Continue to Press on Several Fronts in Amarr-Minmatar Warzone as Sword Marshals Monitor Turnur Situation
• Caldari State Chief Executive Panel Authorizes New Colonia Charters in Syndiate Region Territories
• Capsuleers Mull Potential Changes to Strategic Geography in Nullsec in Light of Registered Stargate Connections

Many of those are just for lore color, but that last one, that hits at a serious point.

One of the long requested changes for the Dronelands, the eastern and northeastern null sec regions, is the addition of NPC held space with stations, similar to what is seen in the northwest, west, and southwest of null sec.   Regions like Delve, Fountain, and Pure Blind have NPC systems included in the regions where groups can collect up resources to attack ratters and miners in order to keep null sec from being safe simply due to the depth of systems any roaming fleet has to traverse in order to find targets.

So the implication that there might be another region in store for us, one that might put some of the much safer regions like Malpais or The Kalevala Expanse within range of, say, a Black Ops drop… that is bound to peak some interest.  Will Yasna Zakh give hunters a base of operation against PanFam’s homeland?

Putting Yasna Zakh on the map

That would certainly spice things up, and I say that as somebody with some bombers parked in FDZ4-A in Geminate.

Anyway, I’ll certainly be looking for an update on that with the info coming out of Fanfest. The idea of new space is always exciting… and space that might allow us to drop on PanFam more readily?  Well, a capsuleer can dream, can’t he?  Will this just be a lone system or a whole region to be unveiled?  And what else will it hold for us?

The patch notes also mention two new ships are visible in the ship viewer in game, and no doubt we’ll have access to them some time soon.

• Mekubal class Destroyer from the Angel Cartel and the Mamba class Destroyer from the Guristas have been added to the ship tree and can be viewed in game.

So that is the big lead in before Fanfest.  We’ll see what else they have to add to this soon.

Related:

• CCP – Patch Notes
• NEP – New Ships, New Gates, New Adventures
• TAGN – Previous Post about Jovian Gates with Links

EVE Online Fanfest is coming up quickly, with the official opening on Friday. That is a little later in the year than usual, but happening all the same.  CCP has the Fanfest Mega Blog posted with all sorts of information about the happenings of the event.

Once again I will be skipping EVE Fanfest.  I opted to spend my vacation time on a volcanic island in the Pacific rather than a volcanic island in the Atlantic.

But, for those of us staying home, there will be the option to watch some of the events and panels via the CCP Twitch stream.  A schedule for that has been posted.

EVE Fanfest 2023 Streaming Schedule

The times mean I probably won’t be seeing very much of the event live, given that 15:00 UTC is 8am local time for me.  I love EVE Online, but not enough to get up at 3am on a weekday to watch the Welcome Ceremony.  I might make the Keynote live, since I’ll be up and technically working during that time

There is a list of things I will want, or expect, to hear about at EVE Fanfest in some form or another.  I’ll start with the first and most obvious.

The Keynote Speech in General

CCP has a spotty record historically with the event keynote.  I know it is different if you are there in person with your corp mates and having a good time and able to ignore the dull bits, but those of us watching the live stream tend to be more into the details of what is being said.

The keynote sets the tone for the event.  It is a chance to build excitement, announce things that will be discussed in detail later, and to get your most dedicated fans engaged with the company.  If more than 25% of the keynote is regurgitating once more things you did in the past, you’re doing it wrong.  We had a whole self-congratulatory Game Director’s Letter back in July, so I hope we don’t get a rehash of that.

I mean, we will, but I hope they can limit themselves to just half of the keynote patting themselves on the back.

What I want: Something to get me excited about the game and the rest of Fanfest 2023, some interesting stats, and a minimum of old news

What I expect: Mostly stuff I already knew and a very brief nod to anything interesting

Expansion Announcement

This should be the meat of Fanfest for most of us.  We have had the Jovian stargate reveals and the Angel Cartel artifacts.  Now CCP needs to pull this all together in at least a high level vision for what is coming in November/December with the expected expansion.

What I want: Details that make me eager to play and a launch date

What I expect: A name, a splash screen, a vague target range, and some hints

The CSM18 Election Results

CCP made a big fuss about timing the CSM18 elections, extending the terms of CSM17 even, so they could announce the results at Fanfest.   And now, looking at the streaming schedule, I don’t see a live stream slot for that, nor even an in-person time slot set aside for this.

What I want: A cool, dynamic live stream about the vote like they have done the last couple of years

What I expect: Two minutes of “here’s you’re new CSM” in the keynote and a dev blog

EVE Online Board Game

CCP has announced an EVE Online based board game, complete with a Kickstarter to fund and/or pre-sell it, back in what… late July?  Details were incredibly sparse to the point that I couldn’t be bothered to put together a full post about it because there was literally nothing to write about.  So it ended up as part of a Friday bullet point post.

This is another item that doesn’t appear on the schedule, so it will probably be somewhere in the keynote.

What I want: Concrete details about the game with an accompanying dev blog and a specific launch date for the Kickstarter campaign

What I expect: Two minutes of “Hey, a board game” in the keynote and a vague date range

Whatever The First Person is being Called These Days

CCP is still indulging in the fantasy that spending time and money on an FPS set in the EVE Online universe is a smart decision.  That said, they have been pretty quiet about the whole thing after multiple announcements and false starts.  I rather expect it to stay that way.

What I want: Nothing

What I expect: A brief mention that they are still spending time and money on this

Project Awakening

Remember this?  I’d prefer to forget it, but there it is, CCP’s plan for an EVE Online based blockchain title.  My hope would be that CCP would have read the room and the market by now, realized that this is a bad idea that will fail spectacularly when compared to their past failures.  But there is Hilmar who always wants to be with the cool kids on the latest trend

What I want: As much as I would enjoy writing another scathing blog post about Project Awakening, no mention of this at all would be sufficient for my needs

What I expect: Gushing praise of this new future path for CCP and at best ambivalent player reaction

What I fear: Wasting one of redacted panels with this hot garbage

The EVE Online Monument

The physical, real world EVE Online monument was being refurbished and having its name plaques remade which, among other things, offered a way for new players to get their character names on them.  There will have to be some mention of this.

What I want: A mention in the keynote and a dev blog with a link out to an updated name locator app

What I expect: A mention in the keynote and a dev blog with promise to a future link out to an updated name locator app

Random Space Statistics

It has been 20 years of internet spaceships, there is a streaming session with the title of “20 years of capsuleer data,” I expect I will not be disappointed when it comes to me need for random space statistics.

What I want: Many random statistics

What I expect: Many random statistics

Else?

I suspect that there will be other things of note.  Maybe even a genuine surprise or two.  But this is what I am looking out for when it comes to EVE Fanfest 2023.

I wrote previously about how we are on track to get the Ice Crown Citadel update for Wrath Classic soon.  There were some interesting items in the patch notes, but one thing absent at the time of my writing was a solid confirmation that we would be getting the Dungeon Finder as part of the update.

The PTR patch notes have since been updated and the Dungeon Finder is now live on the test server.  I logged in to check and, sure enough, there it was, expanded even to include the new difficulty levels included

The Dungeon Finder

When the Ice Crown Citadel hits the live Wrath Classic servers, you will be able to queue up for dungeons, just like you were able to back in 2009 when the Ice Crown Citadel update landed back then.  This is exactly the right moment for it to be introduced.

I remain dumbfounded that it was ever any sort of controversy that the Dungeon Finder wasn’t available on day one of Wrath Classic, and doubly so that some self-appointed expert voices in the community, who knew better, made this a foundational argument in their ongoing “Blizzard is bad” routine.  Well, I suppose I stopped believing they were arguing with any sort of good faith ages ago, so perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised.

But the point is that Dungeon Finder wasn’t there at launch of Wrath of the Lich King back in 2008 and it should never have been considered for the launch of Wrath Classic.  If you were confused on that, get over it.

That the Dungeon Finder itself started another argument… well, that is no surprise.  Same as it ever was.

Dungeon Finder has always been a divisive feature.  It managed to open up content to a much wider range of players… and all the more so when it was expanded to raids… and, if players use is any measure of success, then it is one of the most successful features ever implemented in World of Warcraft.

But it has its downside.  There is, as always, the player behavior aspect of the feature.  It drives a “just keep queuing” play style and a “go go go!” behavior within instances.  If you want to actually stop and SEE what is in an instance, to read the quests, listen to the dialog, and understand how it all fits into the story of the current expansion, your Dungeon Finder group is probably going to vote to kick you for slowing them down.

And Dungeon Finder had its own impact on the design of the game.  It became immediately clear that nobody wanted to queue for large, sprawling dungeons like Wailing Caverns, Sunken Temple, or Blackrock Depths.  Too many players wanted the quick hit, the simple objective, the “kill three bosses and collect your reward” style of play.

Blizzard had already been paring down the scope of dungeons with Burning Crusade and Wrath, but the Dungeon Finder made them go back with Cataclysm and break down the more complicated old world dungeons into bite sized chunks.  Anything that took a semi-competent group more than 20 minutes to run was out.

Part of the allure of WoW Classic when it landed was not just being able to play in the old world, but also being able to play the old instances as they were back in the day.  Our guild, running the old world instances as a four player group, made 12 runs into Blackrock Depths because it was a crazy multi-visit dungeon with a complicated story.  It was epic, frustrating, and hilarious by turns.

I wouldn’t want EVERY dungeon to be like Blackrock Depths of old, but the Dungeon Finder means no dungeon can every be like that.  And maybe the accessibility that the Dungeon Finder brings is worth the price.

Anyway, I understand why Dungeon Finder brings up strong reactions.  It does so in me as well.  But I did get irked with the sudden revisionist idea that it should have been there at the launch of Wrath Classic.

There are a lot of things that are different about how classic runs today versus how things were back in 2004, 2007, and 2008.  It is simply the nature of this sort of server that you end up with something that is a compromise because the company has to pick a release and a feature set to represent what was, especially in vanilla, very much a changing environment.

But Dungeon Finder at the launch of Wrath of the Lich King?  That was never a thing.

After our time at Kilauea on the big island, I wanted to check out one more spot on our way back to our hotel.  As you drive from the volcano towards Kona along Route 11 there is a sign that says South Point Road that will lead you down a 12 mile stretch of occasionally single lane black top to Ka Lae, which is the southernmost point within the 50 states that make up the core of the United States.

This is the sign when you’re leaving Ka Lae

There are US possessions and territories further south, such as American Samoa, but there is no destination within the actual 50 US states that is further south.

The location is also generically referred to as South Point, and it is a windy and desolate location.  There are some cattle ranches along the road there and a satellite tracking station run by the US arm of the Swedish Space Corporation, but it feels pretty empty.

I am in serious danger of over using the word “desolate” here.  The feeling of isolation, at being at the end of land, with the wind and the crashing waves and the volcanic coastline, it is quite palpable.  On the flip side, there were about a dozen groups with pickups or RVs who had set up camps and were hanging out or fishing or just doing whatever one does at the end of South Point Road.  So it wasn’t like we were alone out there, though the vibe with the nature made it feel a bit like we were intruding, that other people out there had gone there to get away from everything and here we were, showing up in our rental car to gawk.  But we were hardly the only gawkers either.

The location is thought to be the first place where Polynesians from Tahiti landed in the islands, it being, as noted, the southernmost location and closest to their point of departure.  It also has some of the oldest signs of settlement, including holes bored through the volcanic rock which were used to moor their boats so they could fish without getting swept away by the wind and strong currents.

As you walk along the western side of the shore it is a cliff where you can see how the layers of lava from eruptions over years flowed to the ocean, cooled, solidified, then were covered by the next flow, building up the land over thousands of years.

The layers exposed

Further along, as you reach the southernmost tip of the island, the cliffs dip down until the waves are crashing upon a lava rock shore.  I took a bit of video of the waves hitting the shore, though what you hear on the video is mostly the sound of the constant wind.

That video is close to, but not exactly at the southern most point, which Google maps has marked as a bit of rock out in the water.

The Google maps satellite view of South Point

You might be able to see a line in the middle of the tan patch up from the lava rocks.  That is the wall to the left of the video.

You can see some dirt in the foreground, that tan patch, which had a very fine powdery texture which left our shoes covered in the same tone.  Beyond the dirt and some of the lava rocks it looks like there might be sand, or perhaps a pebbled beach.  There is very little sand on the coasts of the big island, and what you see there is actually bits of coral that have washed up and accumulated over the centuries.

The coral made more visible

The coral has been bleached by the sun and there is so much of it that it reminded me a bit of the bone textures used on early WoW.

close up of the coral bits

Of course, with black lava rock and white coral bits to hand, people spend time writing things out on the black rock.  There was some of that along the highways in Kona when we were last on the big island in 2001, but they seemed to have all been removed.  When my wife wondered aloud about that, I opined that it might have gotten obscene, leading the highway department to clean things up, which led to a side discussion where my she learned about the idea of “time to penis,” a video game concept she thought was pretty funny, if somewhat telling.

But nobody is cleaning up at South Point… or the wind and waves eventually clean up everything… so there were a few recent creations and the remains of some older ones that had been scattered.  There was, however, a nice one declaring the location.

Welcome to South Point

We put together one with our daughter’s initials, an echo of our 2001 trip when my wife was just pregnant with her and we were coming up with a name, which we also wrote in coral on black rock somewhere along the island.  Probably at the black sand beach.

Behind us at the shore was the South Point navigational marker, a light beacon and visible sign.

The South Point Navigational Marker

It is on a concrete pillar with a solar panel on the back to charge up the battery for its flashing beacon, back in the hard packed dirt area.  Also, visible in the background, are some little white pillars that are the windmills of the Pali o Kulani wind farm, which takes advantage of the nearly constant wind to provide power to the island’s electrical grid.

Naturally, to take these pictures I had my phone out and, in having it out I noticed that I was getting 2-3 bars of LTE signal way out at the lonely end of the island.  I suspect line of sight to towers helped, but it is a sign of progress that there was almost nowhere on the island that I was without a cellular signal.

And, seeing I had signal I naturally had to bring up Pokemon Go to see if there was a Pokestop of a gym down at the end of the big island.  I was not disappointed.  The navigational marker was the location of a gym.

Spinning the photo disks for a gift

The gym was in the hands of Team Valor, so we had to take it for Team Instinct… because of course we did.

There was also a Pokestop close by, which was at the sign marking the mooring holes I mentioned previously.

Mooring holes Pokestop

Somebody will, of course, decry this creep of technology into the most remote areas of our world, but occasionally the Pokestops directed us to some minor item of note or clarified something we couldn’t see, like this USCGS marker that was beyond the barrier back at Kilauea.

USCGS Reference Marker – Set in place in 1940

And, of course, these Pokemon Go locations don’t actually blight the landscape in reality, just in the augmented version on our phones.

Anyway, as the title of this posts indicates, I believe I have now visited the southernmost Pokemon Go gym within the 50 US states.  And, as of this writing, my wife and I are still in the gym, along with three other people who showed up to join in.

Still holding the gym as of Saturday afternoon

We’ll see how long we last in that southernmost of gyms.

[Addendum: We got kicked out at 3 Days, 22 hours, 4 minutes.]

I also have one Pokemon gift/postcard in my bag from that gym still to send to one of my in-game friends.  That is one I will save to my postcard book and favorite so I don’t delete it by mistake.

My wife and I were off on a holiday this past week celebrating our wedding anniversary, so the last seven posts were all written in advance, and they probably show it.  I am still catching up on news and comments, but I have a couple of posts in me related to the trip AND video games.

Our destination was the big island of Hawaii, which is called Hawaii, because people just name things and worry about confusion later.

This was a bit of a repeat trip because way back in May of 2001 we made a similar trip where we also stayed in Kona and saw the various sites.  Back then, in the before times, when air travel hadn’t been turned upside down by 9/11 and my wife had just found out she was pregnant, we rented a bright red bitchin’ convertible Camaro and drove around the island in a single day, hitting the north end, where you can see Maui across the water, then to Hilo on the wet side of the island, down around the south end of the island, stopping at the volcano and he black sand beach, before turning north again and speeding through the macadamia nut plantations and coffee farms just fast enough to leave the top down as it rained on us.

The bitchin’ Camaro at the black sand beach parking lot

Driving around islands is kind of our thing, though it was much easier to do on Oahu and Hawaii than on Maui.

This time we decided to go the other way around in our red Kia Sorento, stopping at the black sand beach… which now has a special area for sea turtles.

Green sea turtles

Then it was off to Kilauea to see the big crater.

Not fooling around, it just says “Volcano” on every road sign

Volcanoes are pretty much the big thing on Hawaii.  It is the newest of the islands and is still mostly black lava rock.  There are huge stretches of land where it looks like somebody took a giant roto-tiller to

Things at Kilauea had changed quite a bit.  First, if you go read the history, there had been a few major eruptions since we were there last.  But there had also been significant upgrades to the facilities around the volcano.  When we were there back in 2001 there was pretty much just the Thomas A. Jaggar Museum and observation station.  There were barriers to keep people from getting too close to the crater, but it was pretty rough and unimproved out there.

Looking into the crater in 2001

I was able to wander right up to the edge of the crater back in the day… where you can see an offering to Pele, though I think if you consume the pint of Popov vodka before you offer it, it might carry less weight with the Goddess.

Now however, there have been a bunch of improvements.  There is a sprawling visitors center with maps and guides and a theater to show films and a restaurant and several gift shops along with a lot of information about the place.  There is also now a $30 fee to drive into the place.

One of the maps showing the crater and the visitor’s center

We went through the visitor’s center, then drove along the Western Crater Road and stopped at the overlook by the now closed Thomas A. Jaggar Museum and observation station.  It was damaged in the 2018 eruptions and earthquakes.  We go to look out over the crater, which honestly wasn’t doing much.

The crater from near the T. A. Jagger museum

It, honestly, wasn’t as impressive as I remembered.  The crater had filled in quite a bit in 2008, then changed with the 2018 eruptions, but was now just kind of a steaming black hole that looks a bit like a strip mining coal pit.

My wife, who had to stay in the car back in 2001 because she was pregnant, was not hugely impressed.

The 2001 warning sign

It was cool, but perhaps not as cool as you might imagine a volcano.  Also, you were not able to get nearly as close to the crater as I was able to back in 2001.  You’re kept much further back these days.

One other change from 2001 is that there is now very good cell phone coverage at the crater, and any place you can get a signal there is a Pokemon Go gym.  So we made sure to get into some of those gyms as we toured the area.

Some gyms in the area

Those are some telling names.  Explosive Eruptions was the one near the main crater.

(Also, if you’re a friend of ours in Pokemon Go, you were getting gifts from an Ocean region this past week, if you’re trying to get that particular Vivillon.)

We drove around, stopped at a few of the other sites, including the 1959 eruption crater, which you can get into and walk across these days. (That is the Devastation Trail noted by the gym above.)  Nancy was wearing flip flops, so wasn’t up for the hike down into that crater, so after some more sites, we got back on the road and headed north towards Hilo.

As we were getting into Hilo and had gotten back into range of some radio stations… the south end of the island is pretty desolate in stretches, there being a couple of active volcanoes there and all… we heard an news bulletin come in that Kilauea had just erupted.

We had been gone from the crater for about an hour when it happened.

Captured from the USGS video

It is hard to tell, because that USGS image is zoomed in, but that was taken from almost exactly where we were standing when I took my own crater image above.  (The USGS has a whole page of information about the eruption along with some nice images.)

At that point we had been out and about for hours and were in Hilo for a late lunch/early dinner.  We considered turning around, but were not sure if they were letting people back in.  So we took Route 200 over the middle of the island, past the road up to the Mauna Kea observatory, and down into Kona where we ended up back where we started.

We spent the next day at the pool to relax, but we read that people were being allowed into Kilauea area.  Some trails were closed, but you could get back in.  Also, the $30 per car entry fee was good for 7 days, so we wouldn’t have to pay again.  So the next day off we went.

It is about a two hour drive around from Kona to the Volcano, though that is mostly because the road is narrow and allows 55 MPH at peak points, but is often restricted to 35-45 MPH.

Getting close at last

There we found the park a bit more crowded.  We couldn’t get into the same location we had been at on the previous visit, so had to drive up past the old museum, where we could see the lava flowing.

Lava fountains down in the crater

That is about as zoomed in as the phone camera would allow and it doesn’t seem all that impressive as an image.  Certainly the USGS and some professional photographers have come up with better images.  We were pretty far back at that site.

Here is a picture my wife lined up which, if nothing else, gives some scale relative to our location.

My goofy visage with the lava in the background

But standing there, when it was quiet, you could hear the lava’s dull roar and could see it just spurting up from the crater, the plumes rising and falling, peaking close to 50 feet in height.  It was distant yet completely compelling.  I took a lot of bad pictures and crappy video in my failed attempt to capture some essence of what was happening down below us in the crater.

Quiet was a bit difficult.  As noted, there was very good cell coverage, so there were people up there loudly narrating what they could see to distant friends and relatives on their phones.  I have a video where the audio is entirely one guy yelling in Portuguese to his family back in Brazil at the top of his lungs.  He was quite excited by what he was seeing, holding his phone up to stream video as he shouted his narration.

We managed to get into the parking area for the location we had been at on the first trip and there got a much better view of the lava.

Lava plums continue to spout

That is pretty close to where we were standing for my first crater picture.  You can see multiple spouts of lava.  I also managed to capture a bit of video not spoiled by somebody trying to communicate to another continent.

I wish I had a better iPhone, but there are other, much better, video clips of the eruption out there if you are interested.  Also, the video drops a bit at the end and was cut short because a freaking yellow jacket was suddenly buzzing me.  It isn’t enough to have an active volcano, but they also throw in aggressive stinging insects.

When lava isn’t enough

My wife ended up getting stung in the side of her head when one got caught in her hair.  It was a light sting, so far as they go… she got stung six times one summer… but still, not a high point of our outing.

Meanwhile, in the video in addition to the lava spouts you can, if you look closely, see the cooled lava flowing down into the crater.  It was very impressive yet distant as we stood there and watched.

That was probably the highlight of our trip to the big island.  And, of course, in the face of nature’s majesty, we also played some Pokemon Go.  On the second trip we did a raid with some remote invites sent out to friends.  The bummer is that, while Pokemon Go marks the Pokemon you catch with the location, it sometimes ties things to the nearest large location.  So instead of having a Pokemon that said “Kilauea” as its catch point, we ended up with some that said Captain Cook, which is a town about an hour away.

From there we went off to… find that we could play Pokemon Go at another remote location.  But that is for the next post.

I must need something to complain about today, because I have clearly picked an easy target.

As always, when I get on the horse about character attributes in EVE Online I feel I need to explain, for those who have not played the game, that said attributes have no direct impact on how well your character does in game.

My current attribute settings… remap available!

At this point I am starting to think it might be cool if they did.  What if you boosted up your perception score and it improved your probe scan precision?  There would be some hilarious min-maxing if they actually did something for your game play.

Alas, they do not.

I could be pretty easily convinced, 20 years into the life of the game and 17 years into my own journey in New Eden, that CCP included attributes as part of characters simply because that is what all role play games do.  Let’s face it, they still call mission rooms “dungeons” in the patch notes now and again… space dungeons… so it isn’t a stretch to think that other tropes of Dungeons & Dragons influenced their design as well.

Hell, I have seen the EVE Online character attributes described as follows, which feels like it was taken directly from some TTRPG:

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

What attributes in fact do is alter the amount of time it takes to train skills.

Do I have to get into how skill training works in EVE Online?  I don’t have the stamina… erm, willpower… to go that deep.  But I will say that skills are trained in real time, even when logged out, and the amount of time they take to train is influenced by your attributes.

Each skill has a primary and secondary attribute associated with it, and they tend to map over whole classes of skills.  For example, Spaceship Command skills are primary perception, secondary willpower when it comes to attributes.  So if you want to train up those skills you will max out perception and then throw any excess into willpower.

There is math behind this, and you could make a spreadsheet, but I’m going to stay superficial on this.

You can, if you change your mind on your training focus, remap your attributes.  Maybe you want to go in heavy on ewar, which means you want memory and intelligence as your primary attributes.  Then those skills will train faster.

Except, you have to be careful, because once you remap there is a 365 day count down until you can do it again. If three days later you feel you really want more jump clones, so need to focus on neural enhancements, which are charisma and willpower, well you’re kind of stuck with some slow training times.

It is one of those things that sounds like an interesting choice until you’ve done it for a bit.

Attributes are the last vestige of an earlier time in the game, when there were skills you needed to train to make skill training go faster.  They took those out back in 2010.  And the lack of a queue for skills, or a limited queue for skills.  Those impediments have been gone for years now too.

Attributes remain, in part because I think CCP feels they have to have SOMETHING on the character sheet besides your ISK and skill point totals.  And they are such an anachronism that I have to dig around to find them in my character sheet because they mean that little to the game most days.

And the crazy thing is… attributes are the one thing they won’t directly monetize.

CCP will sell straight up sell skill points, no pretending they are completely generated out of thin air, they will sell you a temporary attribute booster, they will even sell you a fully fitted ship now and then until people check the store and get mad about it and then they go hide it in the game so the offer pops up after you do the right career agent missions.

But will they sell you an attribute remap?  NO!  Not for love, money, or PLEX!  You made your choices, now you have to wait a year!

And when that year is up you’ll be hesitant to change, because it will be another year long commitment with no out once you choose.

Selling a remap seems like a no brainer… but then again, removing attributes altogether seems like it might be a good choice as well.

I wrote about this back in 2015, so I guess I was due for a return to the topic.  We’ll see if anything changes in the next 8 years.

I mentioned in a previous post about gearing up my hunter, that week of work for welfare epics, using honor gained in Wintergrasp.  That didn’t get him all the possible gear and upgrades, but it came pretty close, boosting him up past 4,400 in gear score for a modestly diligent effort.

Waiting for another Wintergrasp

Wrath of the Lich King was a long time ago.  We’re coming up on the 15th anniversary of its launch in November which, even for an aging gamer like myself, represents a gap in years significant relative the entire arc of my life… as in the gap between now and the expansion’s launch was about a quarter of my life so far. (And for my daughter, who played with us back then, that was two thirds of her life ago.  Oh my!)

There are a limited number of things in my life that have endured that long, my marriage and this blog being two that spring to mind. (And absolutely in that order dear!)

As such, I am sure I have forgotten a lot about what Wintergrasp was like back in 2008 and 2009.  I mean, I know I played a lot of it.  Wintergrasp during Wrath was my peak time for battlegrounds, because Wintergrasp was one of the few battleground I enjoyed playing.  And I still enjoy it.

So part of what I am trying to remember is whether it was as big of an honor dispenser back then as it appears to be now.  I mean, I remember buying some gear with honor back then.  But I also went into Cataclysm as a ret pally still wielding that 2H sword from the Argent Tournament.

Again, it was a long time ago and maybe I just don’t remember, or maybe I just wasn’t aware of the honor vendors the way I am now.  The back half of WotLK was pretty much a solo effort once the group had done Utgarde Pinnacle.

I also know that Wintergrasp in Wrath Classic is different in a very substantial way from the original.  Back in the day, you queued for the battle that took place just on your server.  On our server horde generally had a poor showing except during some weekend peak hour time slots.  I took a screen shot of the record at one point on our server.  I have a whole post about that experience.

Horde not winning so often

I haven’t been able to find a similar record in Wrath Classic, though I suspect that is because rather than being a server-centric event as in old, Wintergrasp is now a queued battleground instance where you get as many sessions of the battle every three hours as is needed to accommodate the demand for the event.

This has not only changed the flavor of the battle… if you queue early you get a full 120 v 120 battle every time and you never get locked out because your side on your server has already filled its 120 character roster…but essentially opened up Wintergrasp to anybody who wants to give it a run.

While the battles run every three hours… which end up being 12, 3, 6, and 9 am and pm in my time zone… allowing people to queue up only when it is time, you can now show up 15 minutes after the hour and still get in a match.  Granted, it is sometimes a strange, lopsided match.  I have come late and ended up with 40 alliance versus 120 horde start, though alliance players do tend to keep dripping in as the match progresses… which means that some people are showing up as late as 30 minutes after the hour, queuing up, and getting in a match and earning some honor.

Seriously, I have won quick matches with one character, logged out, logged another character in, the ran a second match.

And the honor is damn good.  We have an ongoing meme in out guild chat where we announce another shameful loss, and then how much honor we earned, which can range from 4.5-9K for a well run loss.  Winning gets you more, and I’ve walked off with more than 14K for a win, but even the usual 6K or so for what is usually no more than a 20 minute effort seems quite generous.

In the context of all of this, the fact that Wintergrasp is rate limited to once every three hours seems like a benefit.  You queue up, collect a bunch of honor win or lose, then are free to go do something else for the next 2.5 hours.  That seems like a better routine than queuing up for Arathi or Warsong over and over and getting dribs and drabs of honor… at least relative to Wintergrasp… over the course of a few hours.

Of course, it probably doesn’t help that I really do not enjoy any of the other battlegrounds.  So I might be biased in that assessment because I do actually enjoy Wintergrasp.

But I cannot help but wondering if all that honor is sustainable.  I mean, a lot of people… myself included… are there, at least in part, for the honor bounty.

And, since I rarely ever ran battlegrounds before or since Wrath, I cannot tell if it is too much honor, or about right relative to the way things worked in previous or later eras.

All I do know is that I have geared up, or partially geared up, four characters now, with each getting a basic set of upgrades that put them over 4K in gear score in about a week.  Seems kind of crazy, but I can’t tell if it really is or not.

My wife and I are still playing Pokemon Go despite Niantic’s obvious dislike of anybody who doesn’t play exactly the way they intend.

Pokemon Go – Since 2016

We’re still trucking along, in part, because it is something we do together and it gets us out of the house now and then… though we’re often then the old couple cruising the community center in our car for raids and Pokestops.  Not as intended.

We still do the events that pop up, though we were not ready to pay Niantic $15 for access to community day tasks.  Last week they popped up a new event, the name of which seems to promise a master ball… another master ball… at its end.  The question is, can we finish it.

It involves a range of tasks.

The list

Some of those are very doable within the generous 82 day time frame.  I took this screen shot the day the event started and you can see I am already well on my way to wrapping up some.   As of this writing I am done with the XP and Stardust tasks, have 95 out of 100 difference species, and have spun 100 Pokestops.

A few on there will take some effort, but feel like they could be accomplished well within the time frame.  Field research just takes some getting out, as honest does the 60 raids.

Hatching 30 eggs… that one is just some effort as well, but really feels like a push to get us to buy some incubators.  But at least that goes hand in hand with exploring 50km, though that means walking (or driving slowly) for that distance.

And then there are the excellent throws.  I am still working out a strategy for this one… a strategy that, right now, involves doing some raids against large Pokemon with big target circles so the hit zone for an excellent throw is big enough for me to manage on my phone.

The flaw in this is that the common raids right now are all Katranas, which are tiny little legendaries with tiny little target circles.  Unless we get something big, this will be our downfall.

It is that date again, the anniversary date of the start of the blog, an event that now sits firmly 17 years back in the rear view mirror.

This is the number 17, that is all this image means

It hardly seems like 17 years ago but, as they say, objects in the mirror are closer than they appear.  Or is it further?  One of those is right, and the other one probably makes more sense.

Anyway, with that date comes the post, as it has on 16 previous occasions.  For your retro pleasure:

• A Year of Living Noobishly
• Two Years Below the Masthead
• Three Years We Grew in Virtual Sun and Shower
• Four Years In, No Further From Noobdom
• Heroic Results of the First Five Year Plan
• But Now I am Six, I’m as Clever as Clever
• The Seven Year Kvetch
• Eight Years of Link Rot
• Nine is a Magic Number
• A Decade Under the Influence of Online Games
• Elf
• The Dozens
• The Thirteenth Floor
• Condition Report for the Fourteenth Interval
• My Blogging Quinceanera
• Sixteen Years of Driving the Blog

This year, due to a combination of factors, including me having to travel for work lately and just being tired and done with summer, I haven’t quite found the energy to do the over wrought, too long to be of any real use anniversary post that I have often managed in the past.

Though, as I have said in past year, this whole anniversary post idea peaked at about year six… look at some of the effort I put in on those early posts… and it has all been downhill since then.

And yet I can’t quite drum up the apathy to simply give up and skip the whole thing, or pretend I forgot until I get a second wind or some such.  So this year you get a mercifully abbreviated post.  The sections that take a lot of work, or which do not deliver much of a bang, those are out.  The things I can just screen shot and paste in, those you’ll get.

The Basic Stats

I can’t quite give up on this one, but this will be the most effort I put in for the whole thing I am pretty sure.

Days since launch: 6,210 (+365)
Posts total: 6,796 (+384, the same as last year… how odd)
Total Words: 5,693,521 (+430,339 words, not including this post)
Average words per post: 837 (+17)
Post Likes: 20,961 (+2,717)
Average posts per day: 1.094 (-0.003, again, same change as last year)
Comments: 37,435 (+1,033)
Average comments per post: 5.51 (-0.17)
Average comments per day: 6.02 (-0.21)
Spam comments: decreasing, because WP.com only counts back 12 years now
Comments written by me: 7,906 or 21.1%
Images uploaded: 20,691 19,422 (+2,637)
Space used by images: 3 GB of my 13 GB allocation
Blog Followers: 2,416 (+179)
Twitter Followers: 787 (-13, which is surprising it is that little)
Tumblr Followers: 22 (+4)
US Presidents since launch: 4
British Monarchs since launch: 2
Prime Ministers of Italy since launch: 9

At some point I threw in the politicians because I thought I was making a wry point of some sort, comparing something like the British monarchy to the prime ministers of Italy.  However, given the last few years, I think I should have gone with UK prime ministers instead.  That would have gotten me 7.

More of this after the cut, which I will do to keep the screen shots from filling up the front page.

Data Unfiltered

So what is going on here at the blog?  People still come to visit.  Not as many as used to, but many more than I figured ever would.  So let’s see what the numbers are, starting with page views.

Page views by month

At the moment I took that screen shot all of those little boxes totaled up to 6,158,291 page views.

Then there are the average daily views for each month over the life of the blog.  The basic “how many people show up every day?” question answered.

Average Daily Views by Month

At some point I’ll go on about how, back in 2012 or 2013 I was getting more than 2K daily visitors on average.  You’re free to remind me that only occurred on four months over the life of the blog.  Most of the peak of the blog was closer to 1K, and the last few years that number has been more in the 500 range, even during 2020 when people were so bored at home during the forever that was March that they were literally dying for anything to read or play online.

And what does Google Analytics say.  I’m going to grab one chart from there to reinforce the search engine dominance of traffic.

Sources of traffic for the last 12 months

Social spikes up now and then, as does referral traffic, but search engines consistently dominate.  That big peak, that is May 24th, 2023, and represents the sudden popularity of an odd rant I did about EverQuest and capitalism.

All of those lines total up as follows:

Source            Sessions            Percent of Total
Organic Search    102,694             69.602%
Direct             32,162             21.798%
Organic Social      8,123              5.505%
Referral            3,337              2.262%
Unassigned          1,226              0.831%
Organic Video           3              0.002%

Total Sessions 147,545

I am honestly surprised that I have even three session starts from organic video, which means YouTube.  I think somebody linked to a post of mine related to a video.

Then there are the annual insights, a chart I actually like.

Annual Insights

I like that chart because it has the total words column… and, if you copy it our of the WordPress.com dashboard, it pastes correctly into MS Excel so you can play with the data a bit.

Though, honestly, all I am going to do is total up all the words for all the years, which happens to be 5,686,725 words as of this moment.  That is a lot of words.

For no good reason that mention of words made me think of a girlfriend I had in college who, when I bought a novel that proclaimed it had 15,000 new words from that particular author (or maybe it was 12K, or 20K, but it was some five digit number) she looked at that and proclaimed in mild despair, “You know too many words already!”

Anyway, those are the core stats.

More Frivolous Data

I am going to do a little bit of work here, but mostly because I can copy and paste the format from last year’s post and update a few numbers.  I do like the category count, though this year I am going to just do the top ten.

1. EVE Online – 2,185
2. World of Warcraft – 1,632
3. EverQuest II – 790
4. EverQuest – 651
5. Blizzard – 534
6. Lord of the Rings Online – 481
7. Instance Group – 433
8. CCP – 382
9. WoW Classic – 363
10. Sony Online Entertainment – 345

That is the same top ten from last year, with just SOE moving to the bottom of the list.  I do not write about them as much as I once did.  EVE Online, however, remains my top writing topic.

That is what I put my effort into, but which categories do people view?

Recently Popular Tags & Categories

That chart only goes back about a month or some limited number of views, so it isn’t for all time like the list above it, but it does capture what brings people here.  WoW is on top, though lately an old post about Pokemon Go has been bringing the boys to the yard.

I am happy that “Rambling Detected” made the cut.  Somebody is seeing the real me, the me of cluttered and continuously changing and updating thoughts.  Or maybe they just like posts with a lot of words.

That sort of leads us to what people read, so these were the top 20 most viewed posts over the last year, complete with view count.

1. Minecraft and the Search for a Warm Ocean 3,653
2. Timing those Lucky Eggs for Friendship Milestones in Pokemon Go 3,273
3. Flight in Pre-Patch Outland 3,266
4. Alamo teechs u 2 play DURID! 2,871
5. Late Stage Capitalism Ruining Things: EverQuest Edition 2,272
6. 20 Games that Defined the Apple II 1,883
7. The LOTRO 2023 Roadmap – No Consoles, No UI Updates 1,687
8. Delta Force – A Memory of Voxels 1,336
9. The Altar of Zul and Jintha’alor 1,267
10. The Fall of the Tranquility Trading Tower in Perimeter 1,221
11. Making the Grey Pit in Valheim 1,184
12. The Level 70 Boost Question for Wrath of the Lich King Classic 1,102
13. Stuck in the Gym in Pokemon Go 1,068
14. Only Twitter can Kill Twitter 1,037
15. RimWorld Ideology 915
16. CCP Takes Aim at Cloaky Campers in EVE Online 871
17. CCP Lets EVE Online Players with Multiple Accounts Subscribe Secondary Accounts at a Lower Price 845
18. CCP Releases the ESS Reserve Bank Keys and Hands Out ISK in EVE Online 795
19. The Rising Price of PLEX 765
20. Five New Eden Maps Better Than Either EVE Online In Game Map 752

WP.com lets me export that data to a .csv file now, so that was easy.  But I am not doing the links.  That would be work.

Then, for the sake of sheer randomness, and because .csv export abilities, here are the countries, according to WP.com, which have sent fewer than five visitors to the blog.

• Benin 4
• Gambia 4
• Liberia 4
• Falkland Islands 4
• Mali 4
• Guinea 3
• Turkmenistan 3
• Chad 3
• Tajikistan 3
• St. Pierre & Miquelon 2
• Tonga 2
• Central African Republic 2
• St. Barthélemy 2
• Kiribati 2
• North Korea 1
• British Indian Ocean Territory 1
• Eritrea 1
• Montserrat 1
• U.S. Outlying Islands 1
• South Sudan 1
• Equatorial Guinea 1

I mean, you can see some reasoning for many of them.  What I write about doesn’t really align with their reality.  That said, I’m a little disappointed in the Falkland Islands.  I generally do pretty well with places where English is spoken by the population.

Also, I do wonder who in North Korea ended up here.

Finally, there is this odd chart that is in the WP.com stats which, oddly, I cannot export as a .csv file.  No Power BI for this data!

Number of Shares

This is related to the sharing buttons that are at the bottom of the post.  I originally had just the top five on that list visible, but added the rest when Mastdon got added, just to see what would happen.

So far as I know, no human as shared anything ever from this blog to Pintrest, except for maybe that LEGO race car ramp post from 2008.  I suspect that spam bots are doing this for some sort of engagement boosting.  All I know is that when I added the new ones, the bottom four didn’t really go anywhere, but Nextdoor took off.  I do not know why.

Also, I actually use the Mastodon button to share to Mastodon, in part because it was getting literally no clicks and I felt sorry for it.  There is a metaphor in that somewhere, I am sure of it.

Some Sort of Summary

I wrote earlier this month about that time back in 1990 when I started a BBS.  That was a five year project, which had probably three years of enthusiasm, a year of coasting where I was, and then the final year, which ended when I had to move to a location where it was no longer possible to keep the BBS.

Had I not moved, or moved to some location where I could have had a BBS, the story might have ended differently.  Maybe.  The writing was on the wall for modems, landlines, and the stand alone BBS already in 1995 when I shut it down.  The world wide web was all.

And I compare than to my time with the blog, which had its own arc of enthusiasm.  There were a couple of years where I came close to hitting 500 posts in a single year.  I did not write as many words per post, and I was all over the map, with little consistency.  And then I sort of leveled out, with less chaos and a little more focus and routine.

But even that changes.  My routine of five years ago, with things like the monthly SuperData charts, has changed.  Even as I sit still here, 17 years into the blog, writing as though I had always written this way, thought this way, been this way, I know that it is not so.

I only have to go back and read what I wrote 15 years ago, 10 years ago, 5 years ago, and even 1 year ago to feel like I have changed.  Not always drastically.  Sometimes I see something when preparing that month in review post and I find I have softened on one opinion and maybe hardened on another, or that something I cared about in that moment of writing now seems distant enough that I wonder what I really saw in it at the time.

I am subject to enthusiasms.  Ask anybody who works on my projects.  They should use that very phrase in fact, because I warn them when I am so enamored that way.  What do you do when the project manager tells you all his faults while simultaneously demonstrating them?

So the question, here at as we close out year 17, is what is it that has kept me going?  Why wasn’t this a five year project?  Why hasn’t it reached an end point?  Is that a reflection of me or my life?  Has this been the most stable era of my existence?

Or is it the medium?  Does the web just lend itself to an ever growing archive of essentially meaningless trivia about video games, film, TV, and random old man stories that kids these days just won’t sit still for?

Maybe I’ll figure it out during year 18.

I am going to admit… and you might have sensed it in my writing… that I was a bit dubious of the appeal of a hardcore server for WoW Classic.  It felt like a gimmick in a genre where the long term connection to your character and their progression is important.

Hardcore for all your… something… needs

But now that I have played it for a few days at least, I will admit that as a server type it does have its own special feeling.

And I am not just talking about comedy, a topic I covered last time with the Deathlog Addon, where I couldn’t stop laughing at the last words of some characters.

No, I am talking about the very palpable sense of tension that you get when you’re out in the field in an area where mobs are patrolling and knowing that you’re in the middle of an area that might suddenly become dangerous should you get a few poorly timed addons.

Things go from being a low risk, low cost death and revive that you’ve experience so many times in Azeroth by now that you barely thing about it save for maybe being annoyed that the graveyard is so far from your corpse, to being a bit freaked out over every unexpected add you get in a fight.

Do I have enough health, enough mana, enough damage to to power through this, or do I need to drink one of my rare health potions and maybe just run for it.  I was level 9 out in Mulgore and got two level 11 centaurs that patrol the east end of the zone on me and I was running, casting rejuvenation, and using one of my two health potions in order to get away.

Add in the flip side of Deathlog, that in addition to the comedy aspect of it, it is also a constant reminder than characters are dying all over the place all the time, and it definitely sets a mood.

Is that mood fun, healthy, and sustainable in the long term?  I am not sure.  Going down at level 4 means a few minutes of remedial work.

My first hardcore death

But when I see somebody at level 48 get the big banner on my screen from Deathlog, I wonder how I would handle that.  That could be a rage quit moment.  And Deathlog is quick to remind you that a lot more characters die in their 30s and 40s than hit level 60.

You get a server announcement in chat every time somebody hits 60, and you don’t see them very often.

Deathwings evade death… now what?

Granted, the server hasn’t been around long enough for a mass of people to hit level cap, but you still feel the comparison of so many characters falling on the way to 60, and all the mundane ways in which they meet their end… including falling.

This thing is a freaking death trap

There are corpses at the bottom of every elevator… though I suspect, given a few of the names, that not every one of them was an accidental death.  But many were.

So when my druid, Hurmoo, made it to level 10 and it was time to acquire bear form, that meant leaving the relative safety of Mulgore for the land of death that is The Barrens.  Once again, Deathlog has been setting my perception.  Fortunately the rest of the group was on, so we went out as a team to boost survivability.

Heading to The Barrens

The thing is, right there at The Barrens, that isn’t a level 10 safe spot.  No, right as you enter the zone you’re in the land of thunder lizards.  I saw a level 18 off to the left, while off to the right, seemingly in the path between me and where I needed to commune with the spirits to summon forth my new form, was one that was simply level skull… to high to bother telling us.

We were keeping a fair distance from that guy

We spent a bit of time running over to Camp Taurajo, which is pretty much right there, in order to get the flight point, a moment of optimism that assumed we would survive this encounter.

That done, we waited a bit for our skull level friend to move away.  He wasn’t very interested in doing so, but did take a few steps in the right direction, enough to allow us to feel confident that we might be able to edge along the hills that form the barrier between Mulgore and The Barrens.

We managed that safely and I was able to snort the powder, see the vision, summon the owl form guy, and slay him… with the rest of the group providing supporting fire, because we were not taking any chances.  We succeed.

That meant skirting back around the thunder lizard again, who had an unnerving habit of walking towards us a few steps whenever we happened to show ourselves.  Then it was time to get back to Thunder Bluff.  There was a bit of a debate about whether or not we should fly back.  The cost of the flight, 1 silver 4 copper, was literally 20 percent of my total cash.  Plus the flight point is at the top of the central spiral ramp in Thunder Bluff, another noted point of death.

In the end though, not having to run the length of Mulgore yet again was the stronger call.  We flew.

Getting the hell out of The Barrens

We made it back and didn’t fall down the ramp… though when you drop off the flying mount it puts you right on the edge of the fall… and I finished up the quest for my first druid form.

I’m a bear… rawr…

Now to get to level 14 and my next form.

That is the way it goes in hardcore I guess.  you take every small win and you look out for the things that will do you in.

Could we make that a giant trampoline instead?

We will see how long it lasts.

I arrived at Global Village Communication (there is no “s” at the end, which was always a point of contention, and a tidbit that will enter into a later story) in the midst of one of the crisis points in its history.

The monochrome version of the original company logo

I wish I could find a good version of the original color logo, but I cannot.  For later posts I will use the updated logo, which we used to call the Kid Pix logo because it was much simplified.

It was 1992 and the company had found some sudden success, but had dealt with it poorly.

The company started out in 1989 with their Teleport ADB modem for Macintosh, a 2400bps device that plugged into the Apple Desktop Bus port rather than a serial port, an important feature as the Mac, by default, had just two serial ports and if those were in use for something like, a printer, which everybody had, and something like that Farallon MacRecorder I mentioned in the last post, you had no place for a modem.  And modems were very much a coming thing at that point.

Well, fax modems were.

I mean, modems were getting popular for data in some areas, but things to log into were limited, had arcane and often bizarre interfaces, and, in the case of online services, were often pricey.

But everybody had a fax machine in 1989.  And the chipset that the first Teleport modem used had fax send and recieve capability, so the team looked into adding fax capability.  The modem already needed some special software to emulate a third serial port so apps could use it, so they expanded that to add the fax ability to it.

The software, dubbed GlobalFax, was light and fast and easy to use.  Its major claim to fame was that it allowed you to hold down a modifier key which would turn the Print function in an app into a Fax function, so if you knew how to print you knew how to fax.  That was often billed as a huge innovation of ours, though a competitor called Prometheus did it about a year before Global Village.

The back of the box GlobalFax copy

But they never called us out on it, likely because the had problems of their own.  Also, their fax software sucked.  In fact, relative to Global Village, everybody’s software sucked.  That was, in large part, because we were entirely a Macintosh shop and bought into the whole simplicity and “less is more” philosophy that ever Apple had a tough time adhering to… and their fax software sucked especially bad.

So the Teleport ADB earned the company a niche in the market.  Not enough to get rich off of, but enough to sustain the company until they could figure out something better.  They just needed the right moment, and it had presented itself in 1991 with the advent of the Macintosh PowerBook laptop computers.

The primary driving founder of the company, Rick, had a lot of contacts inside of Apple so Global Village was able to get itself lined up to produce a fax modem for this new laptop… and to link the popular GlobalFax software to it.

It was going to be a v.32 modem… meaning 9600bps.  The PowerBooks would all have an internal port onto which a modem could be attached, with an opening in the back for an RJ-11 phone jack to plug into, and this freed the company from the limits of the Apple Desktop Bus, which couldn’t handle much over 7K bps of data.  (The Teleport ADB said it was 2400bps data, 4800bps receive fax, 9600bps send fax, but I never got more than 7,200bps out of the fax send due to the ADB limitations.)

This gave Global Village the first high speed modem for the Apple Macintosh PowerBook computers, as they were officially named.  And Rick knew the importance of being first, so the initial modem out the door, the PowerPort v.32, was a compromise.

While the 2400bps modems available at launch, like Apple’s own Express Modem, fit nicely inside the PowerBook, only part of the PowerPort v.32 was within the computer.  Rather than an RJ-11 jack on the back, there was a special port where an external dongle containing the whole digital to analog predator (DAA)  was contained… that being the bit that turns the noise you hear on the phone line into a digital.

It was a necessary move because they DAA design the company wanted needed an new chipset from AT&T which was just becoming available and would have held back production, possibly allowing somebody else to be first.

Being first was absolutely the right move.  The PowerBook computers were an immediate hit.  People like to disdain Apple for being style over substance, but style sells when done right.  You can tell me that there were laptops before the PowerBook and you would be right.  You can also tell me there were smart phones before the iPhone, but nobody stood in a line that went around the block to get a Palm Treo or a Blackberry.

And the PowerBook itself set the style for laptops, with the trackpad and keyboard positioning and space to rest your hands on the unit as you typed.  People could sense in some way that this was just right and PowerBooks sold out immediately.

PowerPort v.32 modems also sold out, despite having a list price of $795.  CEOs and VPs were having their staff order PowerBook 170s, the top of the line, and wanted all the goodies.  RAM expansions, modems, you name it, if it was for the PowerBook line it was selling like no other in that moment.

I happened to be working at ComputerWare, as mentioned in the previous post, where I had stepped in as the tech for the Sunnyvale store when all this was going on.  So I spent a lot of time installing PowerPort v.32 modems in brand new PowerBooks.  We were also about three miles from the new Global Village offices on Middlefield Road and the big Mac only retailer in the valley, so the GV reps would come by to see how things were doing.

Global Village was able to move to new offices in Mountain View, from a sketchy location in Palo Alto… this was before home prices effectively eliminated the idea of sketchy areas in Palo Alto or Mountain View…  because of the boom caused by the PowerPort v.32.  They were expanding.

The proximity to our store got my boss to apply over at GV and then, he recommended me and I sat down with Rick, who was acting as VP of engineering and support, and he saw the dedicated enthusiast in me and I was hired.

This was the era of startup expansion where companies needed people, even amateur enthusiasts like myself, to propel growth.  Today I would never have gotten that job, the great wall of HR would have trashed any resume that did not have a computer science degree.  At my last job, the person who replaced me got the job because they had a masters degree in computer science, which was the “preferred” option on the job listing.  They were also on an H1-B visa so would be locked to the company for a few years at a lower salary than my own.

But back in 92, an enthusiastic amateur had a shot.  So I jumped in and started in tech support just as the crisis was hitting the company.

The VCs had insisted that the company now needed a “real” CEO, which in VC speak often means a sinecure for one of their buddies.  The founders have done the work, now the VCs need to get paid.  In this case the new CEO, who was let go the week I started, had fucked up in that way that so many VC appointed CEOs do.  He didn’t know the company, he didn’t know the product line, all he wanted to do was turn the place into a “real” company, which meant better offices, better furniture, art on the walls (the more expensive the art is on the walls, the worse the CEO is), and chairs.

Big, black, expensive wooden guest chairs for everybody’s office and cube.  More than 100 of them as I recall.  Though they were some other color to start with, so he had them painted black right before they were delivered, so they turned the offices into a toxic zone as the fumes from the freshly painted chairs made being inside the building untenable.

Meanwhile, the next round of modems was behind because all of this superficial nonsense was screwing things up.  We needed to get the next round of PowerPort modems out the door and get desktop companion set of modems finished to fill out the demand for our fax software combined with a high speed modem.

So the CEO was fired, Rick was given free reign over the technical side of the company to right the ship, and within the first month there was a big layoff… my second Silicon Valley layoff, but the first of many I would survive over the next two decades.  In a classic HR gaff, they didn’t quite get to everybody who was being laid off, so in the middle of the survivors meeting they had to pull my direct supervisor aside and let him know he was out.

Rick’s ad hoc solution to running support was to put myself and Yuji, another ComputerWare alum, in charge to figure it out.  We quickly split into personnel and technical responsibilities, with Yuji being the boss and dealing with problem customers, at which he excelled, and myself being the technical second line support person to figure out complex issues… or not so complex issues, as the a lot of the team answering the phones was not even very computer savvy, much less modem knowledgeable.

I set up a quick ad hoc BBS to allow people to download software updates, something rather amazingly overlooked at a modem company.  I also set up an AppleTalk Remote Access server that people could dial into for updates as well, as that was often easier than teaching people how to use the absolute garbage terminal emulator software we were including in the box.  And I set about pestering Rick to get somebody to Dave Alverson’s ZTerm terminal emulator app bundled with our modems because it was light and easy and supported the ZModem file transfer protocol which would auto start and complete file transfers without the need for user action.

I don’t remember who actually reached out and set that up, I just felt good that we were paying somebody for a good package rather than throwing in free bloatware into the box.  I don’t think this made Dave Alverson rich or anything, but I was glad he got the money.  And whenever somebody would come by and ask the support team if they would be okay if we replaced ZTerm with some other free package… which was usually a pared down install that users could pay to upgrade… they would respond with a universal negative.

I also became the liaison between engineering and support, which meant going upstairs to where the coding and testing happened.  That wasn’t always smooth, because I was an opinionated end user, but I was also willing to sit up there after hours and prove my point.  I wrestled with somebody up there about spending a few more cents on a cable that had the carrier detect pin available as the high speed desktop modems, the Teleport Silver and Gold, 9600 and 14,400bps respectively, were being developed.

I used one of the beta units on my BBS for a while and used the Hermes software to demonstrate the functionality of the carrier detect pin and how its lack could screw things up for any serious modem user.  I pushed so hard on that issue that I am surprised they didn’t mention it specifically on the box.  It was important to me.

The Teleport Gold data sheet

At the end of that, when we finally shipped the Teleport Silver and Gold… the Teleport ADB was renamed the Teleport Bronze (not to be confused with the Teleport Bronze II, about which there is a whole different story) to fill out the medals lineup and to match the now shipping PowerPort Bronze, Silver, and Gold modems… I was upstairs permanently, on the QA team.  I think my name even went into the GlobalFax credits.

Once again, I was the modem nerd, the person who went home at night and did stuff online, in a group of often much more technically trained and accomplished individuals, for whom the modem was just a product.

I still have a beta Teleport Gold in a drawer, the ones with the gold LED lights, as opposed to the red LEDs that went into production models.  And I still have, on a shelf in my office, a new, in box, still shrink wrapped, Teleport Gold.

The big box of modem

That isn’t a first production run box.  I didn’t even think to keep the one they gave me in box when it shipped, instead opening it up to use it… even though I had access to all the modems I wanted.  To be in my 20s once more.  That is a later edition package that I picked up after the fact when I realized I didn’t have any of the products I worked on new and in box.  That said, I know my name is in the credits of all the software in this package.  I spent a lot of time on the GlobalFax OCR software.

I have loose samples of other projects I worked on… I’ll have to dig out a drawer full of PowerBook modems of various flavors to take a picture at some point… but this really felt like the first one.

That headline is mostly true, give or take a few hours.

The end is nigh, time is running out, act today!

You have a little more than a full day left to vote in the CSM18 elections.

CSM18 is coming

I covered all of that back on Monday, including links to all of the candidates, but just in case you need a refresher, here are some relevant locations:

• CCP – CSM18 Election Opening Announcement
• CCP – CSM18 Voting Page
• CCP – Weekend Fleet Pack
• Twitch – CCP Day One Candidate Interviews
• Twitch – CCP Day Two Candidate Interviews
• Twitch – CCP Day Three Candidate Interviews

The elections close at 11:00 UTC on Monday, September 11th, with the results slated to be announced live at EVE Fanfest on September 21st.

Then there is the EVE Online 20th Anniversary Collector’s Edition, which is being handled by Limited Run Games.

What you get

Once again I covered what you get along with the fact that CCP will be granting PLEX to make up for the rather steep tax and shipping charges that go along with the order.

The final date to order was listed at September 10th, though no specific time of day was given, so you might have more than a full day left to order.  But if you want to order the collector’s edition, you should probably do so by tomorrow.

You can find the order page and relevant details here.

And so it goes.  Time moves on.

There seems to be, out in the social media circles I frequent, something of a vague consensus that the next retail World of Warcraft expansion needs to return to old Azeroth, the lands of Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms, that the retail side of the house needs to rediscover its roots and go back and explore the foundations of the franchise.

2004 Azeroth

I suspect that there is, once again, some “we need to stomp out that whole ‘classic’ idea and get everybody back on retail where they belong” feelings behind that tentative agreement.  Nothing unites the core of retail than plotting the demise of WoW Classic.

Lest you think that means there is unanimity in the retail community, let me assure you that there are many varied views in the “no more strange places, no more classic, let’s all go home together” banner.

To start with, there are pirates.  Somebody suggested pirates and a pirate themed expansion would be a good way to go back to Azeroth and explore some new content in the context of the old lands.

That, to me, seemed like a perfectly cromulent suggestion.  Hell, I think EverQuest has done a pirate themed expansion at least twice now, and maybe three times.  In talking with Potshot about this, we could both get behind an expansion that, say, explored the world of the Bloodsail Buccaneers.

Loop in the south seas pirates, get in a few other factions, maybe give Kul Tiras locations and art work some re-use, and Blizz could build out a very satisfying expansion.  I’d be down with it… if it wasn’t for the fact that retail is so Bizarro world different than classic now that I am not sure what to do over there.  But I could get over that so long as there aren’t any under water zones.  You have to draw the line somewhere.

The response to this pirates idea, by a small but loud segment of the “back to Azeroth” faction was, “OMFG No!  That wasn’t what we meant at all!  Pirates? Yuck!” along with some weak statements about pirates not being a substantial enough part of the lore on which to base an expansion, as if pandas were I guess.

Stop complaining about the pirate idea

This was mostly echoed by the “We need another Cataclysm expansion style world update” clique.

Though, to be fair, they seem to waver on how much of a remake the old world needs.  The only real agreement point is that it should be updated so that everything aligns with the story so far as indicated by the current expansion, Dragonflight.

I am not sure what is worse, the idea of doing another Cataclysm event to remark the world, both layout and content, or an attempt to rewrite and update all the quests and lore to make sure nobody makes reference to the present in anything that actually took place before Dragonflight.  I do not think Blizz has the stomach for the former and the latter sounds like both a wasted effort that will be obsolete by the next expansion… unless somebody expects Blizz to go back and update everything for every expansion now… and seems patently designed to drive more people to their hated foe, WoW Classic.

Pirates and WoW are not mutually exclusive

My favorite part is that one particular pedant is calling out people for failing to spot nuance, which happened to be their own particular failure in the discussion as they stomp their feet and try to thread path between “people want to go back to familiar places in Azeroth” and “I mean something completely different from Classic” which is presently available to all subscribers.

All of which is very much the typical overwrought gamer reaction where somebody takes as gospel that their own desires for a franchise must be universal.  And, yes, I know I am picking out some very niche positions in the community, but they do tend to take on that role of trying to speak for everybody and the magic of persistence and the algorithm has amplified these opinions to the point that even I have noticed them.

Best of all, in this discussion, is that whatever the next expansion for retail WoW is going to be, it has already been decided, so this pouting and posturing is all likely in furtherance of nothing.  Blizzard has long been somewhat disdainful of fan ideas on where the franchise should go.  That has worked well at times, when they had a quiver of ideas they could pull from in the RTS Warcraft games.  So the idea that a slap fight on Twitter and the forums will move the needle seems pretty silly.

Then again, maybe things will change.  As I have pointed out previously, having Holly Longdale in as executive producer over all of WoW has started to show some results.  Those dragon races over Kalimdor, that is straight out of EverQuest II.

Also, one of the long running themes of EverQuest expansions… and EverQuest is coming up on its 30th expansion this year, making WoW‘s nine expansions look pretty mild… is returning to old locations… except Qeynos.  No love for Queynos, which still looks like it did in 1999.  The Norrath team she ran knew how to dip back into old favorites now and then before going off to new lands once more.

Did I mention that EQ has also had pirate expansions?

I personally think it is well past time for a return to Northrend.  I know, we got a peek at it with the opening of Shadowlands, but that wasn’t a Northrend expansion.  We’ve already seem re-imagined vanilla content with Cataclysm and re-imagined Outland content with Warlords of Draenor and Legion.  Actual content in Northrend is due.

Anyway, that is my wishcasting guess.  What is yours?

Again, my expectation is that we’ll hear about this at BlizzCon… though even that I feel less than 100% about.