My last post on LORTO was saying, “Oh wow, I am in the Lone Lands already!“

This time around I am saying, “Oh wow, I am done with the Lone Lands already!”

I have been trying not to pass the guild designated goal levels, which hasn’t been that hard, since it seems like every time I get close they go up.  I thought I might stop in the Lone Lands, but then the bar was raised to 35.  And once I hit 30 around Ost Guruth I decided to wrap up my time in the Lone Lands.  There was more to do.  I had not yet finished up the Red Maid or the swamp area.  But I was ready to move on.

I like the Lone Lands as a zone.  There is a comfort going through it, knowing where to go for all the quests.  It is the one zone where I really feel like a ranger, so familiar am I with the terrain.  But at best now it ranks as my second favorite zone, at when I hit level 30 I was ready to go to my current favorite: Evendim.

Revamped Evendim that is, not the original which caused so much pain… and required so much swimming… back in the day.

You can certainly make the case that it should not be my favorite.  It is designed in a way that has been declared “bad” by those who purport to know best.  In a game where the now maligned quest hub structure is common, Evendim takes the quest hub idea almost to extremes.

You show up at a quest hub, you get a quest with a big reward that essentially tells you that you must do the quests of a handful of other NPCs in order to get that reward, and then you are stuck servicing all their varied whims.

That might have ended badly had the quest design not been above par for the game.  There are the requisite “go kill an oddly specific number of something” quests, but they are well leavened with all sorts of other different, and sometimes goofy, tasks.  Like collecting farm animals for hobbits.

Hen teaser coming through!

You also get to set things on fire now and again.  The zone seems to set you against the idea of boats.

Must have been carrying something volatile

And occasionally being asked to go to some high point in the zone simply to look (/look command) at the zone around you, which if nothing else puts the grandeur of the zone right in your face so you can’t miss it.

The quests are also pretty well focused around the story line of the given location.  They give a feeling that there is a legitimate task at hand and that you are helping them along with something more urgent than, say, collecting lynx pelts so they will have warm clothes for winter.

And then there are the rewards for the zone.  The Wardens have their own currency which can buy three pieces of very nice gear and getting your standing with them up to the “kindred” level opens up some more options.  Finally, finishing out the quest line in the zone fills in a few more pieces, leaving you rather well equipped if you finish the zone.

So far I have managed to horde enough of the currency to buy the three pieces of the Forgotten Hope armor set available from Cannuion.

I also managed to make it “kindred” status with the wardens rather quickly this time around.  In the past I have been well into the final set of quests in the heart of Annuminas before getting there.  This time around I was a “made warden” before I got to the series of quests at the tombs of the kings.

Vikund, now a Warden

That opened up my next weapon, the level 40 halberd from the reputation vendor as well as the special mount.

The Wardens favor a simple mount

I am now level 39… because our goal level got raised to 50… and on the last couple of quests in Annuminas, after which I will have the final piece of the captain’s Forgotten Hope armor set and be done with the zone.  Of course, that last bit is a doozy, even with Orchalwë and my herald in tow.  Actually, especially with those two in tow, as they seen to find joy in pulling in adds.  But even if they were perfect, the the Banners of the Iron crown is a tough nut to crack alone, and I have to go in there no matter what, as it is also the final location to finish off Orchalwë mission.  I might have to get Gaff over to help me.

Then I will be fully outfitted, level 40, and ready for the next zone.  I am clearly not playing enough alts if I am moving this fast.  And, honestly, I have stopped so often in the past at this point, I am not quite sure what the next zone is.

Angmar I think.  Off to Angmar.

The CFC goes to war on a simple, tested strategy: grind the moons down, and only later bother grinding sov. Hostiles should be either massacred or blueballed to ensure their playing experience is ruined. Relentless metagaming should take place such that the conflict is as demoralizing and unfair as possible. To us, sov is essentially meaningless once jump bridges have been snapped; what matters is that our foe does not want to log into the game. We have taken out superior forces by ruining their gameplay to the point that they do not bother logging on; this was how we dealt with the massive Raiden pre-nerf Titan blobs in the Tenal campaign. You can kill a hostile spaceship by blowing it up, or by ensuring that it never logs in in the first place.

Now that such a huge and ridiculous band of hangers-on have joined the ‘independent’ TEST to fight their war for them, it is important that the CFC remembers how we fight: it has been months since Tribute, our last grinding hellwar, and we have many newbies. At every turn you should consider how to ruin the fun of the foe, while still enjoying yourself. We care nothing for ~honor~, ‘gudfites’, or any of the pubbie views of how warfare ‘should’ be. We have massacred, griefed and blueballed our way across the galaxy since Red Alliance first taught us how to win sov wars in late 2006, and there is no reason why we will change our methods now.

The Mittani, GSF CEO Update: Slouching Towards Bethlehem

The Mittani, back from E3, has provided an update on the war.

In the situation room

The update itself contains salve to sooth all possible worries of the rank and file, including my own concerns that we had let things get out of our control on the diplomatic front.  We are told that TEST is screwed and hurting for money, they fear us and so are staging out of low sec right from the start, their allies are only in it for the fights, and that we have managed to break off Black Legion from TEST’s pack, in large part due to TEST’s promiscuous ally policy.  (Though, with that last one, there are some tales as to what transpired floating around.)

Oh, and we are all heroes, having stepped up and worked overtime to launch the invasion.  Go us!

Liberation of Fountain

Now, how much of the CEO Update you believe will no doubt reflect where you stand.  If you are from TEST or one of their recent allies, you are probably standing on your chair shouting, “Lies and damage control!” and wondering how The Mittani’s trousers have not yet burst into flames.  The comment thread on the post over at The Mittani (he’s both a space tyrant AND a web site!) is running about as you would expect.

You will also see on the comment thread a recurring mention that this sort of update is really only focused at an internal audience, that it is a morale booster for the troops, and that you should view it in that light and not blow a gasket.

That is a lie.

There is a long history of posting the CEO updates publicly.  They used to get reposted on Kugu.  Now, with with access to their own gaming news site, updates get posted in the GSF forums and to the front page nearly simultaneously.

These sorts of updates are clearly crafted for public consumption and often contain sections directed squarely at the enemy.  They are propaganda.  They are part of the meta game.  And an enemy has to parse this sort of thing whether they agree with it or not.  They have to ask if we really believe what was said, if things really are going to our plan, if people will keep logging on if fights dry up.  Enemy leadership won’t express any doubts to the rank and file, but they have to assess the message and decide where it should fit in their world view.  And if an enemy blows a gasket over an update… and does something stupid… so much the better.

Other alliance heads mask their updates in secrecy.  We hear about them through leaked recordings and transcriptions.

The Mittani publishes his updates for all to see and makes them do double duty.  They bolster the morale of the troops and attempt to raise fear, uncertainty, and doubt in the enemy and its leadership.

Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier.

-Colin Powell

Everybody thinks their side is winning.

There is a huge temptation to look at the last battle, the last kill vs. loss report, the last sovereignty change and to pronounce that one side couldn’t possibly winning because look how badly they just did.  That is what most of the forum and comment thread crowing is about right now.

The thing is that fights, even losing fights, are motivators for both sides.  Such fights are why a large majority of the rank and file show up every day.  We want to blow things up.  We want to use all those skills we have trained, to fly all those ships we have bought. It is fun.

And so we have had 10 days running of thousand plus ship fights.  The war goes on and the pitched battles continue because it is what most of us want.

As for other indicators of winning or losing, they seem rather mixed.

The Casus Belli

The CFC’s biggest claim to winning is that we have deployed forces to Fountain and have taken and held systems in the region.  The last I heard, we have also knocked out more than a score of TEST moon mining stations, the key assets over which this war is being fought.  Executing to plan, as one might say.  And the “not winning fast enough” theory was discredited last year with the campaign in Tribute and Vale.  The CFC has proven they can stay in the fight over the long haul.

On the flip side the CFC diplomatic corps wasn’t able to set favorable terms for the battle before hand.  This has always been part of the power of the CFC, the ability to rig the odds in advance through back channels.

This failure has allowed TEST to run a very successful “Come Kill Goons” campaign as it sought allies.  Who would have thought so many people would respond favorably to that rallying cry, right?  Hah!

Meanwhile, who has the CFC picked up?  Fweddit.  There is a propaganda victory in that, what with Fweddit sharing with TEST an origin in Reddit.  But the CFC can’t really run a “come shoot shit posters from Reddit” counter campaign now, can they? (Though, hey, well played Fweddit!  Thanks!)

So the CFC is looking at a lot of motivated enemies who seem pretty united on the “Kill Goons” part of the strategy.  This has meant not only facing fleets of equal size at all turns, but has unleashed a series of attacks in the CFC backfield.  The convoy route to the Fountain front is camped and disrupted regularly.  Gents has had some capital ship assembly arrays at home destroyed, while Goonswarm lost a system in Tribute.  Life is getting difficult for the CFC and will remain so for some time, barring a diplomatic break through.

On the other side of the battle, TEST’s biggest claims to winning right now is that they have all these allies ready and willing to shoot Goons, that they are causing the CFC pain, and that they have shown the wherewithal in the past to ride out a sovereignty grind until the other side gives up.

The problem with their claims is that it is hard to explain away the fact that the CFC continues to hold 10% of Fountain despite efforts to retake systems.  The sovereignty change listing for Fountain shows a lot of flips in ownership, but TEST has not been able to push the CFC back.  Moon mining operations in the region have been thoroughly disrupted.  Plus, historically, a focus on defense has always been a losing proposition.  TEST and its allies really haven’t brought the fight into the CFC homeland in any significant way to distract them from Fountain.

And then there are the TEST allies.  What happens when you invite so many wolves into your camp to defeat a bear?  Where do all their interests lay?  Granted, that is more of a post war diplomatic problem, which won’t matter if TEST loses.

All of the above is great fodder for forum wars and comment thread battles and, more importantly, feeds the propaganda war.  Because it is the propaganda war that likely to have the most impact over time.

It is very difficult to take sovereignty from an actively resisting alliance, even when they are vastly outnumbered.  Remember how long the Walltreipers Alliance held out in Delve last summer?

But if an alliance loses heart, if it starts thinking it cannot win, that the fight isn’t worthwhile, if members stop showing up for fights, if people start hauling things out of null sec “just in case,” well, then the war might be over.  Remember White Noise back in early 2012 or, going back to Delve last summer, how Nulli Secuda folded over their treatment by Against All Authorities even as Walltreipers was holding firm.  Nulli wasn’t beaten by external forces, they simple ceased to believe in the fight.  That is all it takes. And then there was Northern Coalition (who ironically now live in the south) and their retreat from Tribute and Vale after they tired of the sov grind.  (And in one of those “the more things change” events, Northern Coalition, Nulli Secunda, and former White Noise ally Raiden are all in with TEST at this point.)

That is how I imagine the war in Fountain will be decided.

One side or the other will decide the fight isn’t worth it and stop showing up.

Again, at this point, everybody thinks the opposition will fold.  How can they not, facing such odds?

As long as both sides hold on to that idea, and barring and serious shift in the balance of forces, the war will grind on.

This morning there were a number of fleets in motion laying what appeared to be traps and counter traps.  The CFC had a Caracal fleet out shooting structures.  TEST sent fleets out to chase off or kill the caracals.  I was sitting on a titan with Mister Vee’s Hamgu fleet waiting to jump in once TEST was committed.  And then TEST had carriers set to bridge in once we were engaged.  And then we brought in some capital ships.  All of which lead to another large battle in 10% time dilation.

While local was just shy of 900 when I got popped, people were still bridging in, so I bet we ended up past a thousand players again.

But the strategic upshot for the moment is that TEST killed the territorial control unit in the system, rolling back the CFC sovereignty claim on the system.

Fountain – June 15, 2013

The tactical result was pretty close as far as I can assess, with both sides showing up in about equal numbers.  They killed a lot of Tengus and Tempest Fleet Issues, we killed a lot of Rokhs, Apocalypses, and Apocalypse Navy Issues.

Since I spent a good portion of my time in the fight jammed, I had plenty of time to take screen shots.  The most unique ship I saw during the battle was an Osprey.  Actually, there were three in our fleet.  I am not sure I have actually seen an Osprey since I started mining back in 2007.  Anyway, pictures.

(Another report on the battle.)

There wasn’t anything before MUD1…

Richard Bartle on MUDs, from the Birth of MMOs interview

That is the best I could do in trying to extract an inflammatory, out of context quote from the article. (Hey, it inflamed at least one guy.)

That aside, the linked article is an interesting read, though you may already know the tale of how we got to World of Warcraft and beyond from MUD1, plus the whole Bartle Types thing.

And the article ends up with something of a “But what of MUDs?” theme, where it is pointed out that the very limitations of MUDs make them easy to use.  It is all done in text, so it is much easier to whip up a virtual world when you do not have to worry about art assets, something that lead to an explosion of MUDs during the late 90s.

As for an audience for MUDs.

Sure, they’re not going to have the success they once had if people have been conditioned to judge graphics as being the mark of a good game. They will still appeal to connoisseurs, lovers of language and people with vivid imaginations, though.

Somebody will play them.

Left unanswered: How are today’s MMOs impacting MUDs?

I know I have seen changes in TorilMUD over the years that have clearly been because of what has happened in games like WoW, things that would have been anathema a decade or more back.

Screen shots from Gaff, who was there in a Caracal.

That is pretty much a giant battle every day for the first week of the campaign in Fountain.  A hectic pace for a what will no doubt end up being a long war of attrition.

Hey, I can take fuel out of the jump bridge!

What is the password for the bubble on the gate?

How do I use FoF missiles?

-What voice coms are like when we don’t have a solid mission

A couple of years back I was having some sort of comment thread argument with SyCaine about the absolute near-nil likelihood that I personally would ever see a thousand ship fight in EVE Online.  At the time it was something that had happened once and took a good deal of pre-planning by CCP for it to even work.

Since then much has changed.

Early last year with the war in the north, I saw a number of battles where the total number of pilots in local exceeded one thousand.  I was impressed by the battle at EWN-2U, where the total number was around 600.  That seemed like a lot.

Likewise in Delve last year, such large battles happened a number of times.  Remember 49-U6U?

And with the war of conquest going on in Fountain, I was in 1,000+ ship engagements every day for the first five days of the war.  Hell, we had a thousand ships in J5A on our side alone when TEST declined to show, and two thousand on the gate in B-DBYQ when the final timer battle broke out.  If there is a serious fleet op coming up, there can easily be a thousand in local in B-DBYQ with no enemy in sight.

I am starting to wonder if EVE is can keep itself together in the face of its ever growing popularity.  Last year, one of the side effects of Burn Jita was that the system reached a population cap and you couldn’t get in.  Ha ha, very funny, all those people sitting on gates trying to get in.

I logged in last weekend with my Jita alt and was kicked to an adjacent system.  Jita was just full.  It seems it has been reaching its population cap lately, even without Goon help.  Meanwhile, once sleepy Amarr has been hitting a thousand players in local and has had the Jita treatment applied and now resides on an exclusive node.

It is getting busy in EVE.  As Nosy Gamer asks, is 60K the new 50K in EVE?

So in the face of all of that, it was kind of nice to go on a small fleet op last night.

And by small, I mean Lyris only had about 200 people in his Caracal fleet when we pulled out of B-DBYQ in search of… something.

There were other fleets going up and off to do things, but we did not really seem to have a concrete mission.  We jumped into fountain.  I had actually just escaped from Fountain, having been stranded there after the big “server is going down” interruption of the the big fight in EI-O0O the night before, when we were all told not to log back in when EVE came back up.  I take it we were not doing well.  But with the call for fleets last night I logged back in and slipped past a gate camp that just happened to be warping off when I landed on the gate.

Back in our staging system I swapped out for a Caracal and joined the fleet just in time to start hunting the very same group that was camping the gate.  We chased one group around for a while, picking off a ship or two now and then.  I got on a kill mail for a Merlin and an Enyo, both tech I frigates.

Die frigate, die!

I did not even do any damage.  I got credit because I had missiles headed to the target, but both were gone before they got there.  The odds were heavily in our favor.  But that is the face of PvP in EVE a lot of the time.  A dozen ships sit on a gate or a drag bubble killing single passers by and telling people they were in a “skirmish.”

There, stuck into Fountain and, I would guess, acting as a screening force for other operations… we were in the pipe that TEST deploys though… word came down the line that we had serious business to which to attend.  Somebody was shooting up a jump bridge on the convoy route from VFK-IV to our staging system.  We were detailed to go put a stop to that.

Unfortunately, that meant traveling back out of Fountain and then half way up the convoy route to the jump bridge under attack.

And seeing this damn message yet again

At this point our fleet size began to work against us.  Push 200 ships through a gate or a jump bridge and time dilation kicks in, slowing everybody down.  Well, everybody in the fleet.  The people shooting the jump bridge were unaffected.

Caracal Fleet coming through a jump bridge

Tidi also seemed to aggravate some of the new Odyssey bugs, like that one with the overview where it cannot identify the pilot for some reason, so you get a list of neutral ships where the pilot name is the ship type.

Don’t shoot these guys

Every new expansion brings its own little bundle of joy.

We struggled up the convoy route and managed to land in the our destination system just in time to hear that the fleet that had shot up the jump bridge had just left, their mission complete, the jump bridge now off line.

So we warped to the jump bridge where Lyris put people on repping it.

Jump bridge module

As a shield tanked fleet, our logistics were able to repair the shields on the jump bridge, but the slow acting armor repair drones they carried couldn’t begin to make a dent on the armor damage.  The vast majority of the jump bridge hit points are in the armor, the ratio being 1 million shield hit points to 15 million armor hit points.

Lyris tried to whistle up an armor fleet and some triage carriers to come help, but was eventually told by the command structure not to do this.  Apparently, when a jump bridge has been knocked offline, it is easier just to get rid of the old one and install a fresh module than it is to try to repair it in the field.  The POS repairman would be out to take care of things later.

That mission… well… done if not accomplished… we headed back to B-DBYQ as it was getting to the end of US time zone prime time and people like me needed to get off to bed.  Those on summer vacation or in Asia-Pacific time zones carried on the fight.

And the whole night, I never saw more than 800 people in local.  The first time so far in the war.

Of course, that was in part because there had been a giant fight in PNQY-Y earlier in the evening, before I got on.  I just missed that one.

Thousand plus ship fights seem to be a regular thing in this war.

• Scripts in the Cloud: Create aliases and triggers once on the web client and use them from anywhere.
• Script packages: Organize scripts into “packages” that are shared throughout your account and usable by every character.
• Aliases: Create aliases with support for variable matching and multi-line commands.
• Triggers: Design powerful triggers with the use of full-featured regular expressions.
• History: Recent commands can be easily traversed via the up and down arrow keys.
• Scroll lock: Auto-scrolling intelligently pauses whenever you begin manually scrolling, and will resume when you scroll all the way down or enter a command.
• 256 Colors: Goodbye 16 colors – the web client has 256 colors all the time.

Right now the Web Client is only usable if you have created an account and rolled up characters through a traditional telnet client, but I imagine that if things go well, all of that will eventually be included.

The URL for the web client is in the article linked above, and it sends you to an account login page.

Welcome to TorilMUD

Logging in gives you a list of the characters you have associated with your account.  The concept of an account login is still somewhat new as well.  Back in the day, every character had its own login and password.  Once logged in, you get a list of the character on your account.

A few of my choices

Once you choose a character, hey presto, you are in the game.

And you’re in!

From there, things look very much like a standard MUD client that supports ANSI color.  That used to be one of the big things about TorilMUD, and its predecessor Sojourn, the full on support and usage of color in their text.

My old main character was still there.

He used to be level 50

You can go about your business in game, or camp out and select one of the other characters associated with your account.

The in game list

And it all looks good and responds quickly.

Now color is great, but not really required to play the game.  You could open up the Windows command prompt and telnet into TorilMUD and play it if you so desired.  Why people don’t do that instead opting for a purpose built MUD client is for things like triggers and aliases.

Triggers are automated responses to text coming from the game.  I mentioned those the other day.  The simplest ones can be things like drinking from a container when you get the “You are thirsty” message.

Aliases are short cut commands that set off more complex actions.  One of my oldest ones would let my type in “cpff Rarik” which would then output “cast ‘protection from fire’ Rarik” to the game.

These two items are not required to play the game.  I played Sojourn/TorilMUD for the first five years with an ANSI terminal emulator that supported 10 simple macros I could configure on the fly.  Everything else I just typed by hand. (Which made me a very fast typist in time.)

But life is definitely better, especially doing zones… the TorilMUD equivalent of raids… when you have 15 other people in your group and you have set responsibilities and need to both see and respond quickly to situations in the midst of what can be an incredibly spammy flow of text.  Buying zMUD back in the day was an investment I do not regret in any way.  I think at one point I lost my key when a machine died and I just bought a second copy.  It was totally worth it.

And the beta TorilMUD web client supports triggers and aliases.

Script UI

You can create groups of simple triggers and aliases to help automate some of the more mundane tasks in the game.

Creating a ‘cast armor’ alias

And, anything you create gets saved in my butt the cloud… well, on their server in any case.  People throw around the term “cloud” pretty loosely, despite it having a pretty specific meaning. (Hint: If my data is on a single server or in a single location, it isn’t in any sort of “cloud.”)  Anyway, scripts you create are there for you when log into the game from other locations.

So is this the end for dedicated MUD clients like zMUD or Tintin++?

Probably not.

Leaving aside some bugs in the current implementation, the HTML 5 web client for TorilMUD is like that basic Craftman tool kit you buy for somebody when they first get their own place.  It has a couple of screw drivers, an adjustable wrench, and a few other items that will cover very basic situations.

A MUD client like zMUD, on the other hand, is like the super deluxe Snap-on tools setup that has you covered for just about every obscure need.

So with zMUD I can have conditional triggers, triggers that parse multiple terms in a single statement, triggers that turn off or on other triggers, triggers that highlight text, triggers that parse data and write to a log or a database, triggers to generate statistics, a whole world mapping subsystem, the ability to pipe specific data to other windows, and a myriad of other things that let you create your own custom client and UI.

Plus… and this is a surprisingly important point for me… zMUD maps the 10-key pad on your keyboard to be movement keys.  The almost immediate, fall flat on my face moment for me with the web client was moving.  I had to think about how to do it.  I have to press “n” and then return to move north, rather than just spamming out directions on the 10-key as I have been trained to do for the last 15 years.  Ah well.

No, what this web client represents is a way for new players to see a MUD in the best possible terminal emulation while giving them some of the basic tools of the trade, all within a browser interface.

It is an easy gateway into the world of MUDs.  And for that, it is a fine solution.

See the TorilMUD web site for more details.

I actually have not been playing Rift for a while now.  Not because of the business model transition, but because our Rift group is on summer hiatus so I have been off in Middle-earth and New Eden.

Never the less, I remain mildly bemused at the change.  The new currency has been unleashed.

$100 for the BEST DEAL!

Once down the cash shop path you start, forever will it dominate your destiny.  Consume you it will, until lock boxes and random card packs seem like perfectly reasonable ways to generate money and you start to pander shamelessly to the so-called “whales.”  Or something.

They still want people to subscribe, and hand out a set of benefits according to the store page.

Subscribers are called “Patrons” now

You can even buy subscriber benefits in 1, 3, 5, 15, and 30 day increments with the RMT currency.  And then there is REX, which lets people exchange in-game currency for RMT currency benefits.

So Trion has a plan.  I have no doubt that, during the initial “happy time,” everything will seem just dandy, with more people playing the game and revenues jumping.  And if you don’t mind the game selling just about anything from their cash shop, life will be good.

And if that sort of thing… or the whole equity equation…  bothers you… well… I guess there is still WoW and EVE Online.  Though WoW is bad at the equity thing in its own non-cash shop way.

Addendum: Happy time… engaged!

Microsoft went first.  I think this sums it up.

Remember that Sony had all day to soak in MS's presentation and KNOW they were about to destroy them. How good a day was that for them?—
Chris Hanel (@ChrisHanel) June 11, 2013

It is hard to come to a conclusion besides “Total Victory for Sony” at E3.

The PlayStation 4 will:

• have a base price of $399, $100 less than the Xbone
• support used/traded/rented games
• not require an internet connection to play
• not have that creepy always on Kinnect watching your every move

I am not in the market for a next generation console, but if I were I know which way I would be leaning.

Still, it is only June and the PlayStation 4 isn’t due out until the holiday season.  There is still time for Sony to follow its tradition of screwing something up with each console launch.

Meanwhile, I thought I heard somebody mention something called a “we-you” or some such.  It was hard to tell with Shigeru Miyamoto sobbing in the corner.

DoraTheExplora Taft > Log the fuck in and get your friends in!  Ill be raffling plexes away at random to people if we get over 900 in our fleets.  Ill start off with 5 plexes and add an extra plex to each additional 50 pilots we get.

-A TEST motivational technique in action

The war over Fountain has been through its first big weekend.  The CFC picked up five systems in the region over the weekend.

Fountain – June 10, 2013

But the biggest point of conflict was the system J5A-IX.  If TEST controls that system, they can stage there and make CFC operations difficult while being able to strike at the CFC staging system at the other end of the jump gate.  If the CFC takes the system, then they can stage for operations in Fountain more easily and it takes some pressure off of B-DBYQ.

TEST couldn’t get the numbers for the first round on Friday night/Saturday morning.  The CFC had more than a thousand pilots roaming around J5A while TEST couldn’t get the numbers to fight back.

Sunday night/Monday morning was the final timer for J5A.  It was the make or break point for the system.  Sunday the CFC had been busy running around Fountain shooting structures.  I was on an op with Caracal Fleet to turn the station in XUW-3X.  It is kind of silly to send cruisers out to turn a station, and we ran out of ammo at one point despite being told to fill out holds.  The capital ships, which would have made short work of the station, were busy elsewhere with other targets.

I ended up having to leave before the op was done, so stayed in one of the NPC stations.  That left me stuck in Fountain.  Not wanting to risk flying solo back to B-DBYQ, I jump cloned back for the next big op, the final J5A fight.

The CFC rallied over a thousand pilots divided up amongst Tech Fleet, FU Fleet, Tengu Fleet, Caracal Fleet, and the usual suspects in the capital ship fleet.  Time dilation was out in full force.  B-DBYQ was running at 10% as we undocked, staged, and then finally moved into J5A.

In J5A we held in our staging POS.  The number of players in system peaked shy of 1,200 as we waited for TEST to arrive.  Multiple fleets were hanging around in there at various times.  I am sure I was probably in proximity of Poetic Stanziel, who has his own report up about the battle.

Time ticked by.  Tension mounted as we were told to be quiet on coms.  All the fleet commanders were getting news on the intel channel as to what was going on, and us talking in their ear at the same time was a distraction.

Then a cyno went up in system.  And then another.  The count in local began to rise, slowly at first, then by great chunks.  It topped 2,200 when orders began to come through.  We were to align to the B-DBYQ gate.  We were fleet warped to the gate and told to jump through or we would die.

Then began the longest gate transition I have ever experienced.  I think we were all stuck in the transition for a good 10 minutes, watching that gray Doctor Who tunnel slowly churn by at 10% tidi speed.  Many of us had session change duration errors come up, which actually let you invoke a debug stats window that at least showed you that things were still happening.

As that was going on, we were let in on some of the strategic situation.

TEST, in addition to bribing their own members to log on, had been getting other alliances on board with the “You hate Goons? Come kill Goons!” message.  So in addition to TEST and Tribal Band, they also had Black Legion, Retirement Club, Northern Coalition, Nulli Secunda, Pandemic Legion, and more riding with them, swelling their numbers past 1,700 according to intel I heard.

We were going to fall back and let them come get us.  It was assumed that they would not commit their capital fleet to a battle in B-DBYQ, thus evening up the odds some.  Once we were through, we sat on the gate, bubbles up, watching.

The first few ships that came through and broke cloak were picked off easily.  Then the numbers began to mount and the bloodbath began.

I got popped not too far into the fight, they must have been sorting Z to A or by distance, which was probably a good thing, as the operation had been going on for two and a half hours at this point and I had to call it a night.  Work was still going to be there in the morning.  I did get on a few kill mails, but the battle had a long ways to go.  As I tried to make my way to the edge of the bubbles in my pod, I was hit by a smart bomb and then it was just my corpse floating in space.  Back to the station and done for the night.  Judging from kill boards, the slaughter went on for at least another hour… which at 10% tidi is six minutes of actual combat at normal speeds.

In strategic terms, this was a win for TEST.  They let the CFC grab systems in Fountain already, but they managed to rally a huge force to defend J5A.  However, J5A is back in reinforce again.

The tactical results of the battle are less clear.  I haven’t seen a kill board result yet that I fully trust (this one maybe?), but it looks like the CFC, sitting on its own turf and able to reship and return to battle, was able to extract a greater cost on TEST and its allies than it had to pay.  I’ll link battle reports here as I see them.

• Lazerus Telraven report at Kugu
• EVE News 24 Battle Report
• Situation Summary at The Mittani
• Poetic Stanziel

The real question is what this battle portends.  Will TEST be able to motivate the troops and rally allies every time they face a decisive situation?  Black Legion and Retirement Club might be willing, but there was a rumor going around that Pandemic Legion had a break with TEST during the fight.  No idea on the real story there.

I suppose the next big fight will tell the tale.  The battle of attrition has begun.

Now I just want to know who in TEST won PLEX for showing up.

As usual, I have some pictures from operations on Sunday.  Wide angle shots are from Gaff.

MY PEOPLE: TEST is vowing to stand down and cede us J5A, leaving the first ‘battle’ of Fountain to us. Why? Of 900 online in their alliance, barely more than 300 are in Karan, their new lowsec staging point. Our response to this will be more sieging and flaying. TEST is vowing to return for the J5A armor timer.

DBRB is going to go on a rampage to hurt the remaining infrastructure

-Jabber Broadcast from The Mittani to a thousand online CFC pilots

One of the theories flying around after the beginning of the war for Fountain was that TEST was a sure thing to win because they bring the numbers, as happened at NOL last earlier.  Meanwhile, it was speculated that Goons wouldn’t show up in numbers for a fight that is over mere ISK.  Gevlon, ever the people person, assured us that is not how Goons are motivated and that The Mittani has made a fatal mistake in that regard.

Now, we are only one fight into the war, but like many pre-war theories from ages past, that one might need to be revised a bit.  We shall see.

Last night we were getting ready for our first big attack of the war and, as noted, TEST was expected to put up a defense.  Time dilation was running in B-DBYQ an hour before the 03:30 EVE time call for fleets.  I sat outside the station and watched capital ships jump in, with as many as nine cyno beacons running at once.

When the time to move off to the fight came, time dilation quickly fell into the 10-15% range as three fleets went to undock and move first to staging points and then to the gate to J5A.

Earlier in the day I had taken a jump clone back to VFK where I bought a Caracal, as that is one of our fleet doctrines for this war.  It is cheap and I wanted to shoot something.  I caught a convoy back to B-DBYQ later, as the route to the front has been heavily camped.  Everybody knows where we are going.

So I got out my Caracal and joined Raeglan’s fleet.  And then we farted around in B-DBYQ for about 45 minutes trying to overcome tidi, mumble issues, and the usual problems of getting a thousand people pointed in the same direction.  At one point we were sitting in a POS and a Ragnarok jumped straight in with use sending people flying.  In Soviet POS, titan bumps you.

Eventually enough people made transitions… they left the station or they jumped into or out of the system… that the tidi went away.  The Caracals moved out and made the jump to J5A.  There, we flew to another POS and waited.  Then the announcement at the top of this post came through.  There would be no contest for the ihub at this time.

We went by and took a couple of shots at the ihub as the cap fleet was putting it into reinforce.  Then we jumped back to our POS while the coalition leaders decided what to with the forces at their disposal.  There was talk of putting more things into reinforce.  While we were there, we got the message about the ihub.

At that point we had been out and about for 90 minutes and I was ready to call it a night.  I had been up early for work that day and I had to get up early again for my daughter’s soccer tournament in the morning.  So I broke off from the fleet and headed for home.

Lulled into a false sense of security by the fact that there were more than a thousand of us in the vicinity, I jumped back into B-DBYQ and headed straight for the station undock without checking anything.  This was, of course, a mistake.  I set myself in motion and tabbed out to another window, then tabbed back to find that Rote Kapelle had set up a bubble on the way to the undock.  Ripard Teg, aka Jester, was there, making it the first time I have seen him in game, even if the meeting was  extremely short.

B-DBYQ undock welcoming committee

There went my Caracal and capsule.  You snooze, you lose.

My first loss in the war.  It certainly won’t be my last.

I had at least set my medical clone to the station, so I popped right back into game at my destination.  And it looks like more ships are going up on contract at B-DBYQ, so I shouldn’t have to fly back to replace my loss.  And I have my two logis and a Celestis that Gaff hauled out for me.

Gaff got tapped for cap fleet and took a few screen shots of their op for me.  I have some of my side of the operation as well.

And the war goes on.  Gaff has been out and about with cap fleet today.  I am sure there will be more to follow.  Fights loom.

Meanwhile, Endie has a summary of the war so far.

B-DBYQ is essentially the last system in CFC space and sits on one end of a jump gate connection that covers the big gap between Cloud Ring and the J5A-IX system in Fountain.

If I am looking at the map right…

That is our gateway into Fountain.

Fortune was with me, as a convoy was forming up for the run from VFK-IV down to B-DBYQ right then.  The question was, what to pack?  Or what to fly?

The State of the Goonion announcement said there would be no call for Alpha Fleet ships.  Drake fleet is no longer really a thing.  And I do not have any ships, other than logistics, for the remaining doctrines that we will be using.  So logistics seemed to be the way to go.  I pulled out my Tech Fleet Oneiros, joined the convoy fleet, and flew out to the staging POS to wait for the FC, Reelism, to get us under way.

Oneiros in the POS

Tech Fleet logistics seemed to be a good plan.  I saw a lot of Tech Fleet ships, especially Tempest Fleet Issue battleships, along for the ride in the convoy.

Tempests on the way

I realized, as we started off on our journey, that this was the first time I had really been in space since Odyssey launched this week.  So there were actually new things to see.  For example there is the sensor overlay effect that happens every time you enter space or jump into a new system.  This gives sort of a 360 degree sweep of the system around you, highlighting points of interest.

My first impression of that was it wasn’t really all that practical.  Often when I jump into a system I am busy doing other things while that scan happens, and I am not sure if it can be invoked again later.  But it is something.

And then there are the update jump gates.  The graphics of the games themselves have been updated to be more active.  There are elctro-static effects and such ships are jumping through.

Jump gate discharge

And then, once you jump, your camera is aimed down the center of the jump gate, there is a whole new “warp tunnel” effect as you travel, and then a somewhat sudden transition as you arrive at the far end.

Because of its newness, there was some discussion of all of this on voice coms.  The consensus seemed to be that, while it was perhaps not the best thing since sliced bread, it sure beat staring at a loading screen or a progress bar or the like.  Give then bittervet demographic in the fleet, that seems to be an endorsement of the change.

The trip down was otherwise pretty quick.  The distance wasn’t all that great, but I have been on convoy ops where we have taken an hour to go 8 jumps.  And there wasn’t much opposition.  There was a report about some TEST bombers… TEST bombers are shooting us on purpose now, which given past events, might mean we are actually safer… but we managed to avoid any encounters.

Once down in B-DBYQ, I met up with Gaff who had a couple of spare ships for me that he hauled down in his carrier.  He had a Scimitar logistics ship and a Manticore stealth bomber for me.  The Scimitar was good.  I now have logistics ships for all of the likely fleet types.  The Manticore was cool though.  I trained for stealth bombers a while back, but never got around to buying one.  And the updated Manticore model looks pretty neat.  At this moment, it is featured in the blog header.  Plus, that gave me a potential “shooting” ship for operations.

And then it was time to look for something to do.  Jabber was quite active.  However, it was almost all for convoy ops to B-DBYQ from various points in CFC space.  Gaff was off on a POS shoot with the capital fleet.  He sent me a couple of screen shots.

Caps shooting a POS

Around B-DBYQ, there was a lot of travel activity.  There were capital ships all around the undock.

Big ships on the undock

There was even a titan hanging around the station on bridging duty.  Seeing a titan no longer counts as a big deal for me I guess.  But it is still rare to see one sitting by itself in space, rather than inside a POS bubble or in a fleet.

Ragnarok on the station

Titans are extremely high value targets and titans that get caught alone in space tend to attract hostiles like flies.  Everybody wants to be on a titan kill mail.

So I pottered about.  I flew my new stealth bomber around just for the sheer hell of it.  I had dinner.  I watched some hockey.  I checked Jabber every so often.

Eventually DBRB and his Tengu fleet arrived back in the neighborhood and I was able to hop in a Scimitar and fly with them.  Not that we went very far.  We ended up camping a gate in J5A-IX, the system next door, our foothold system in Fountain.

Scimitars

This meant keeping bubbles up on the gate and hoping that TEST would stumble into the system.  A couple of singletons did show up, but the highlight was when 50 TEST Talwar destroyers jumped showed up and were shredded.

Destroyers to pods to corpses

Coming up against a Tengu fleet, the Talwars pretty much had no chance at all.  Our mix of ships was off the biggest contingent was logistics, so we were even able to save most of our frigates.  We saved a Rifter that got targeted.  Total losses were approximately 50 Talwars for the loss of one Atron.

And then things were quiet as we flew around the gate.  The Mittani showed up in our op channel after the repeat State of the Goonion, this time with questions and answers, and there was a promise of going off to do something at some point.  But we mostly just sat at the gate.  I flew around, looted a couple of wrecks (I have a pile of faction light missiles now! Go me!), looked at the SBU that was off the gate, and listened to coms.

SBU with our bubbled gate

We eventually pulled back to our in-system POS to wait for a titan to show up so we could bridge out for whatever was planned.  That ended up taking a while and, it being a week night, I wasn’t able to hang around any longer, so I called it a night and headed back to the station in B-DBYQ.

I am deployed down by Fountain though, ready to be part of the fight.  The theme for the day, due to the date, was the D-Day invasion.  We are going to liberate Fountain.

TEST says that they are going to fight to the last Rifter.  This weekend should be interesting if that is true, but it can be hard to tell what is propaganda for the troops and what reflects the real situation.  I remember the famous declaration from White Noise a year and a half back.  At least TEST is not claiming they were surprised by all of this.

We’re going to war.
This is a fact we can’t ignore.
We’re going to war.
In case you hadn’t heard before,
I think they think we’re going to war.
We’re going to war.
I think they think we’re going to war.
We’re going to war.
We’re going to war.
We’re going to war!

The War Song, from Duck Soup

The State of the Goonion just announced on mumble and via a public live stream that the CFC is officially off to take the Fountain region.

Straight from the live stream

Not because of any grievance, but because we need the moons and the income they provide.

Where we are headed

(Map taken from the usual source and edited.)

It is a war for R64 moons, the ones that provide the valuable bits for Tech II production,  and TEST is in the middle.  Off to Fountain we go.

Fountain – June 6, 2013

And so the post Odyssey sovereignty war begins.  Time to find a convoy to the front.

Cap Fleet stages for Fountain

Pic from Gaff, who is in Cap Fleet convoy.  Will it be another trail of tears?

One of the posts I ended up re-reading was from February 2011 about what I called the Commoditization of Roles.

In that post I was trying to explore the holy trinity of tank, healer, and damage and how that trio really wasn’t a “thing” until it World of Warcraft went that direction, and that once the Dungeon Finder came in, the whole thing was set in stone.

The Dungeon Finder only works because Blizz has built content that requires three roles in a specific ratio; 1 Tank, 1 healer, and 3 DPS.  So roles become a commodity in a sense, each class has talent trees that reflect specific roles, and if you want to play in such groups you have to adopt one of those roles.

It is practically an analogy for the move from individual craftsmen to the production line.  Dungeon Finder remains a massive success… in terms of how many people use it, if nothing else… because because every player has to be one of the three types of widgets the machine uses.

Old news, I know.  And I am going to assume, not having used it, that the Raid Finder codified the ratio of roles in raid groups as well.

Anyway, part of the background noise that got me to write that post was a considerable amount of hate being directed at players who chose the DPS role.  They were, to quote somebody who commented on that post, “dumb DPS” and/or “lazy lords.”  And that attitude was echoed pretty far and wide.  Tobold, for example, called DPS players selfish simply for choosing that role.

About 18 months have gone by since then and I haven’t heard much on the topic lately, which makes me wonder if people have gotten over that or if we just have bigger fish to fry.

So with an eye to picking at an old scab that might not be healed, I have a poll.

What do you think of 60% of your Dungeon Finder group?

An update went out last week around some new changes that included this item:

The “You receive your share of experience.” death message has been replaced with a new message that shows you the exact numerical XP gain as well as the percentage to two decimal points.

That was notable for me on two fronts.  The first has to do with triggers.

I miss triggers.

In a MUD or like game (MUSH, MOO, whatever) a trigger is generally something set up in the client you use to connect to the MUD (in my case, zMUD) that parses the text scrolling by on your screen waiting for a specific set of characters to which to respond.  There were endless useful and silly ways to use them, and they totally failed to translate into the graphic MMORPG world.  Macros and log parsers and such are neat, but triggers were a world apart.

In the case of the bit above, one of the first triggers I made back in the day was to save when I got experience from a kill.  As we have discussed before, MUDs crash to the point of dictating player behavior… and influence the whole MMORPG genre.  However, most MUDs I played, including TorilMUD, did not save the state of your character to the database on every change event.  Rather, there was a timer that would save your character every 5-10 minutes.

You could see it happening.  Every once in a while a little “saving” message would appear which, aside from being mildly informative, made a great base for a keep alive trigger to keep you from being disconnected for sitting idle too long.

Anyway, if you gained experience, looted a mob, or generally benefited from you actions and failed to save… and the auto save hadn’t rolled around yet… and the MUD crashed, your character would be set back to the last save point.  (In the perverse nature of such games, all the really bad things… death, corpse destruction on a resurrect attempt, and so on, included a save point.  A crash couldn’t help you there!)

So, on obtaining a decent MUD client, one of the first things you would end up doing was creating a set of “good thing happened, save now!” triggers, giving you things that looked somewhat like this.

There is the “You receive your share of experience.” message that was part of the quote above.  The “save” after it, in yellow-ish text, is the trigger response to parsing that string.  I think I picked up zMUD over 15 years ago (having used a simple terminal emulator before that) and have had that trigger ever since.  And now it no longer works.  It is like the end of an era.

Not that it is the first trigger of mine to fall by the wayside.  The first mildly complex trigger I had to create was to retrieve a fumbled weapon.  You used to drop your weapon on a bad roll.  You would get a message like:

You fumble and send an inlaid silver longsword flying!

The trigger would have to get the weapon off the ground and then equip it again.  That was easy enough to create, just copy the line to trigger off of, and then put in a response like:

get longsword
equip longsword

Piece of cake!

Then you would find a better weapon and suddenly the message would be:

You fumble and send the flaming holy flamberge of the efreeti flying!

Your trigger would just sit there.  No match.  Back to the drawing board.

You could just make a trigger for each new weapon.  Or your could be lazy in the long term and work hard in the short term and create a trigger that knew which part of the message was the name of the weapon… the red part in the above… would save that in a variable and then parse out of that the right word… or just take the last word… and use that for the get and equip commands.

You had your universal trigger!

Then you would get a weapon where the visible name had none of the keywords for the weapon and curse the immortals and the perversity of the universe.  I had a couple of different “longswords”  that had keywords “long” and “sword” but not “longsword.”  At one point you could use the generic term “weapon,” but that would pick up the first weapon on the ground, which might not be yours, and swearing would ensue.

The fumble mechanic was one of the things that never made it into the live version EverQuest… I expected it might, but am very happy it did not… and eventually it got turned off in TorilMUD, so I need not worry about that one any more.

Enough on triggers.  Now the second front on which that initial quote was notable for me, and that has to do with information.

The idea that, in TorilMUD, you would be told exact experience gain numbers as well as percentages down to two decimal places… well… at one time it would have been Bizarro world insane to suggest it.

The founders of TorilMUD had a specific philosophy on how you should play in their world.  And included in that philosophy was the idea that all the underlying numbers… and as many of the character level numbers as practical… should be hidden from the user.

You were to adventure in the world and not focus on min/max or optimizing or beating the numbers.  You were there to group up to go forth and find adventure.  Your mind needed to be on the world described, not on some die roll.

And so when you rolled up a character, you were shown only vague descriptions of your stats.  Your charisma might be average, your strength excellent, but your constitution above average.  Do I take that character to be a ranger, or do I roll again. (Roll again, anything with less than excellent CON is not worth having, as I learned the hard way.)

Once you were in game, the stats got more precise descriptions at level 10, and you got to see actual numbers at level 20, and by level 25 all of the stats you were going to be allowed to see were finally visible to you.   The thinking here, I gather, was that by 25 you would be committed to the character.

The reality was that a lot of characters hit 20 and never went forward.

Likewise, you couldn’t see gear stats directly.  You could guess the armor class by seeing how that changed when you put on an item… unless you were below level 20, where there were only descriptions at every 10 point increment, so unless you crossed a boundary, things would remain the same.  And +hit or +dam on any weapon could only been seen after level 20 as well.

The only was to get the stats on a weapon was to use a scroll of identify, which were prohibitively expensive for new players.  But if you could afford them, it would give you a read out like this:

Name ‘the flaming holy flamberge of the efreeti’
Keyword ‘flamberge efreeti flaming sword holy’, Item type: WEAPON
Item can be worn on: WIELD 2H
Item will give you the following abilities: NOBITS
Item is: MAGIC NOBURN NO-CLERIC NO-THIEF NO-MAGE NOBITS
Weight: 25, Value: 100000
Damage Dice is ’7D4′
Resists:
Fire  : 5%
Can affect you as :
Affects : HITROLL By 6
Affects : DAMROLL By 3
Special Effects : Flaming Ball

You had better copy and save that off, because once that data scrolls off screen, it only exists in your memory.

You can see the keywords to which I alluded before.  And that, but the way, is a weapon with about all the stats you can expect.  It does 7D4 damage on each hit, is +hit, +dam, will proc fireball randomly, and applies resist fire. I always think of this when I get equipment drops with a laundry list of stats and bonuses.

Oh, and the value is the base vendor value in copper coins.  But since vendors were eventually set to buy at a fraction of the base price (and sell at a multiple, to prevent fraud exploits ambitious money making schemes), that number had little practical value.

Anyway, if you were lucky and could afford it, you could get that much information… unless the item had the “NO IDENTIFY” flag, in which case your scroll of identify got used up and you got nothing.

Basically, information was hidden as much as practical and players were encouraged not to share information they learned in any general way.  And the idea that you would publish data in a public fashion was, as I discussed in the past, practically an anathema.  The idea that there would ever be an online stats database was just crazy talk.

And that applied to experience earned.

In the early days all you got was the message at the top, indicating that you earned some experience.  To find out how far into a given level you were, you would have to go to town and visit your guild, where in response to your query you would get one of ten responses that indicated how far along you were.  Somewhere I have all those guild leader messages saved.

Later, in the most recent age of TorilMUD, players were allowed to see their experience progress in the “score” result, first as a series of has marks, each representing 2% of a level, and then later an outright percentage.

Now you can see raw experience.

And I couldn’t tell you if that makes the game better or worse.  If more information is always good, or if hiding things away made for a better game.

The latter certainly kept us busy trying to figure out the stats… which I guess meant we weren’t playing the game right.

TQ is open for business ladies and gentlemen! Welcome to EVE Online: Odyssey! #tweetfleet #eveonline—
CCP Fozzie (@CCP_Fozzie) June 04, 2013

I suppose one of the joys of EVE for people whole live on the West coast of the United States is that all this downtime generally happens while we are asleep.

Odyssey – June 4, 2013

And as much as I would love to see even more Red Wedding metaphors (if you have to ask, it is a spoiler… but have you seen this Twitter feed of Red Wedding tears?), I hope we are all good to go today,  and doubly so after the Sunday shut down, the recent issues with the new launcher, and the prospect of Joffrey’s wedding next week.

And what to say about Odyssey?  I hardly know where to begin.  The patch notes alone are epic in length, coming out nearly as long as some CSM7 minutes, providing you exclude the parts they spend just talking about themselves.

The Odyssey feature page lists these items:

• Scanning and Probing changes
• Exploration site changes
• Exploration career missions
• Radial navigation tool
• Navy issue battlecruisers
• Null sec outpost services
• Tags for security status
• Starbase updates
• Storyline progression
• Dual character training
• Updates to visuals and sounds

At this point I am not sure how much of that list will impact me or change how I play the game.

And then there is the ship tiers and roles revamp, which isn’t on that list, but which is covered heavily in the patch notes and associated dev blogs, and which touches in some way nearly every ship I fly regularly.

CCP’s chart, now in JPEG format

More things to ponder there, though I know of one immediate impact.  I went to bed last night with just about 99 million skill points.  When I woke up this morning, I should have had a little over 105 million skill points to cover the skill changes (destroyer and battlecruiser skills were broken out into their own racial versions) to ensure that I could still fly the same ships today that I could yesterday.  Maybe.

(Plus another 50K skillpoints for the downtime.)

All of which sounds neat… more is better, right… but which really just pushes me that much closer to a more expensive clone at this point.  Though the patch notes have a little relief for me on that regard:

All clone costs have been decreased by 30%.

That at least drops my current clone replacement price with each death from 30 million to 21 million ISK.

So that is where EVE Online (or should it, to steal somebody’s joke, be ADAM Online?) stands today, with the 19th expansion out the door.

Is there anything on the list for you?

And can somebody tell me what this portends?

Hey Guys! I can now officially tell you I work at @CCPGames . You may refer to me as CCP Mintchip :D Bwahaha #tweetfleet #Eveonline #dust514—
Mintchip (@Mintchiplol) June 04, 2013

More cats in EVE videos?  Will the next trailer be done from her bedroom? (That seemed to be her usual set back when she was doing EVE videos.)

How would that have changed the Odyssey trailer?

…all microtransactions that sell game content also destroy equity.

-Ramin Shokrizade, in his The Barrier to Big post

Free to play, revenue models, and why some MMOs succeed while others fail remain hot topics in the MMO blogesphere, with a myriad of different opinions represented.

One recent thread has been the impact on MMOs of players being able to buy items that would otherwise be earned through game play.  The argument was made at one point that, since you cannot “win” an MMO, that how other players acquire their gear and the like has no impact on you.

Mr. Shokrizade’s reply to that is quite succinct.

What if I spent three months earning the first horse in a game, and then a few days later I found out that 500 other players now had horses. But this was not due to a bug per se, this was because the game host decided that horses were cool and that players would pay real money for them. Again I describe this in Mona Lisa. Now horses are not cool anymore, and my equity has been destroyed. I’m upset! More importantly, I have now lost confidence in the game world and it’s hosts because I know they will not protect my efforts

It is not about winning.  Winning, which exactly nobody was arguing in favor of, is just a straw man.  It is about the value associated with your play and the developer not making you feel like your efforts were for nothing.

It is, in fact, about equity.  Aradune‘s famous flaming sword in EverQuest would have been less cool if we all could have had one for a few bucks.

That sword

And, frankly, cool is a serious factor in an avidly social game.

This guy has never been cool

This is part of the reason people get worked up about free-to-play, when the allegedly “cool” items are in the cash shop.

Anyway, despite a few obvious errors (as Edward Castronova will tell you, in detail, that EverQuest quite clearly had an economy before WoW… and WoW did not come out in 2003), and a rather specific use of the word “content” (something else people have argued about… this is not SynCaine’s usage… or maybe it is), it is a decent, if short, article that briefly examines why two games were successful… WoW and EVE Online (clearly a different definition than Strauss Zelnick used)… while other games failed to get there after those two blazed the trail.

Just the other day I put the player economies of the two games in different leagues. I wonder how that figures into things, and if new games are taking note or not?

Now who is going to argue that they love it when MMOs trivialize their efforts?

I am sure somebody will.

Or they will argue that you shouldn’t care about equity at all.

Bonus points for saying “it’s just a game.”

Saturday afternoon/evening my local time it was becoming difficult to log into EVE Online.  Rumors started to float about a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack

First there was this

At 02:05 GMT June 2nd, CCP became aware of a significant and sustained distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS) against the Tranquility cluster (which houses EVE Online and DUST 514) and web servers.

Our policy in such cases is to mobilize a taskforce of internal and external experts to evaluate the situation. At 03:07 GMT, that group concluded that our best course of action was to go completely offline while we put in place mitigation plans.

While we initially reopened EVE Online and DUST 514, we have since re-evaluated. With the highest sense of precaution we have taken Tranquility and associated websites back down for further investigation and an exhaustive scan of our entire infrastructure. We will update you more frequently via our Twitter feed (www.twitter.com/eveonline), however, an extended service interruption of several hours is expected as this process should not be rushed.

From the EVE Online Facebook page

Come Sunday afternoon/evening my time, we got this message over Jabber.

since there is no eve servers the op in 1 minute is now cancelled

### Original broadcast from vily at 2013-06-03 00:13:40.703671 ###

No strat op.  EVE Offline.  Which was a bummer, as it was firmly in my time zone and I was ready to go.

Instead, we were all looking at the new launcher’s offline mode.

EVE Launcher – Offline Mode

Not a good sign for CCP.  So it was off to play other games… GSF went up against Black Legion in League of Legends… or ponder the potential approaching war.  I went so far as to listen to the Shit on Kugu podcast, which in many ways is an audio simulation of reading the Kugu forums.

However, it seems like CCP was able to address the exploit that was being used to attack the system, and EVE is reported to be up and online again.  The EVE web site is up again and has a statement about the event.  There is even a mention of compensation for people being unable to play, a hotly debated subject during the down time, with a lot of people explaining how it won’t happen, as it would reward people for whistling up DDoS attacks.

There is no mention yet if this will impact the release of the Odyssey expansion and its list of features, which is due tomorrow.

Good thing I started my long training plan early.  Jump Drive Calibration V isn’t set to be done until early July.

Addendum: Odyssey expansion to be deployed as planned.

Aside from putting all of my banners in a post where I (and everybody else) can easily find them, general site related news has been pretty slim.  And after a month of record setting page views, things are back down to the level of mere mortals… and down a bit from even there.  Not writing as much about actual games takes its toll.

So this month I will do what I often do, and pick on some dubious WordPress.com feature.

This month: Reblogging.

If you have a WordPress.com hosted blog and you use the somewhat dubious WordPress.com Reader (let’s just say it is not going to replace Google Reader in its current state), among the options you get is to reblog the posts you read.

Reblogging SynCaine – Always Fun

And if you click that, you get a short excerpt of the post added to your own blog as an independent post.

Which is okay, I guess.

It appears to be an attempt be a bit like Tumblr, where people with picture focused… Tumblrs… repost from each other all the time, which means you will see the same picture over and over in whichever of the many Tumblr silos you happen to follow.

However, with WordPress, it looks kind of awkward.  The post before this one is a reblog, so you can see what I mean.  I picked on Tesh for this, since he has pictures, which adds to the effect.

All of which is neither here nor there, except that 99% of the time I see anybody use this feature is in attempt to create some insta-blog with content.  At least three times I have had some blogger reblog every single post on my other blog, EVE Online Pictures.  I can see no good reason to spend the time doing that.

Since my other blog is all pictures, I think maybe those rebloggers really belong on Tumblr.  Or maybe my picture blog does.

One Year Ago

I played Portal finally.  Now Zoidberg makes the cake joke!

I wrote about camping rare mobs and how this all came from the fact that MUDs used to crash pretty often.

There was the Newbie Blogger Initiative thing.  I summed that up already this month.

On the Fippy Darkpaw server, The Gates of Discord unlock vote shut down that expansion.  This caused some hard feelings.  And then it failed the vote again.

38 Studios went tits up due to managerial incompetence.  Not how you run a start up.  But the myth of what greatness might have been lives on, fostered primarily by those whose reputations would benefit from such tales.

The instance group was clearing out King’s Breach.

Diablo III came out and… error 37.  Then error 75.  And installer problems.  High expectations, huge sales, its always online nature, and memories of past Diablo games probably doomed it the eyes of many.  Still, we played it a bit.  I compared it to the beta version of Torchlight II, its primary foe in the click to kill genre.  I moaned about atmosphere and the influence of WoW on it.

And then I complained about talent trees.  Most people seem to like them more than I do.

But mostly I was on about EVE Online.  There was a summary of Burn Jita.  Hulkageddon V came and sort of went.  There were spoils from the war in the north to be handed out.  OTEC actually got out there, putting aside differences, to defend its financial interests.  We blew up an IRC CSAA in Cobalt Edge.  There was a question as to whether PLEX was cheating.  I mined in null sec for the first, and so far only, time.  There were stats about Escalation and Hulkageddon and just ships being blown up in general.  And I made a post around John Smeldley’s tweet about Drakes and new missile graphics.  He dropped me a note in reply.  Turns out he is not only a huge EVE Online fan, but was in the CFC as well.  As Mittens would say, one of us.

Five Years Ago

My daughter and I were finishing up the final battles in the base game of Pokemon Diamond as well as staging our own gym battles.

In EVE Online CCP gave us a date for the Empyrean Age as well as giving us all a gift on the five year anniversary of the game.   Meanwhile I was building battleships, refining my Drake fittings, and laughing at a the EVE Online guide to talking smack.

Oh, and I was being propositioned in a standard Goon scam.

In World of Warcraft the instance group was doing some quests to level up a bit because the Mana Tombs were proving to be a challenge.

And, in the industry in general, Turbine got $40 million dollars to play with (wonder where that ended up) while Age of Conan launched amid immediate declarations of success and failure.

New Liking Blogs

The following blogs have linked this site in their blogroll, for which they have my thanks.

• The Electric Garden Gnome
• The Korvus Kut

Please take a moment to visit them in return.

Most Viewed Posts in May

1. Running Civilization II on Windows 7 64-bit
2. So What is the Verdict on Google Reader Alternatives?
3. Further Mutterings about MMO Revenue Models
4. New Blogger Initiative a Year Later – Who Survived?
5. It is Never Too Late to Head to Mordor
6. Considering Star Wars Galaxies Emulation? Better Grab a Disk!
7. Memories, Timelines, and the Bigger Picture
8. Rift to go Free to Play on June 12
9. Diablo III – Now Featuring Hyperinflation
10. Party in Amarr – EVE Celebrates 10 Years
11. Blizzard – WoW Subscribers and the Diablo III Economy
12. The First Computer Game I Ever Played

Spam Comment of the Month

Spamhaus a bunch of liars and criminals

Spreads slander about isps and their customers

Blackmails ISPs to comply to their rediculous “demands”

[two additional pages in the same vein cut]

When I get semi-literate automated comment spam claiming that an organization dedicated to fighting spam is bad, I want to applaud their work.  Spamhaus must be doing a good job if spammers are taking time out of their evil ways to criticize them.  Poor spammers are sounding butt hurt.  Plus who doesn’t love to nitpick about the difference between slander (spoken) and libel (written).  Though who knows, maybe Spamhaus is saying things aloud about spammers as well as publishing lists.

EVE Online

It has been relatively quiet for me in EVE.  There was the 10 year anniversary.  I did go on a couple of small fleet ops.  I actually ratted a bit to earn some ISK.  Mostly I have been training skills, which is something that goes on with little interaction from me.  The goal, I think, is a carrier.  I am currently working on Jump Drive Calibration V.  And I am about to hit 99 million skill points.

Lord of the Rings Online

The approach of summer has seen a return to Middle-earth.  How far will we get?  We shall see.  I am already into the Lone Lands, a place where many a summer group has left off.  I have to say that now, after six years, the lifetime subscription I purchased back at launch was officially a good deal.

Neverwinter

We have started to look into this.  I am not sure where it will lead yet.

Rift

Rift seems to be on the back burner for now.  It goes free to play next month.  We shall see what that ends up meaning in the both the short and long term.  Details have been sparse.  One interesting idea that has been broached is selling additional crafting skill slots, so you could work with fewer alts.  But would you spend $50 to have one character with all the professions?

World of Tanks

Somewhere along the line I just stopped playing this in May.  I am not sure when.  So call it a break.  I still have more than half a year in which to make it to my tier IX tank goal.  There is always the 8.6 update and all the arty changes to come.

Coming Up

As mentioned, Rift goes free to play next month.  That should at least make for some discussion if they find some new way to serve up F2P.

In EVE Online, the Odyssey expansion comes out.  That will shake some things up in null sec, to the point that there is a promise of war.  Fun stuff.

And, at some point over the next month, barring a last minute reprieve, I am going to have to have to switch from Google Reader to some other RSS feed reading tool.  Despite all the helpful feedback, I am not sure where I will go yet.

Reblogged from Tish Tosh Tesh:

“How many MMOs have been successful in the U.S.? Two. World of Warcraft and EverQuest. Kind of a bad slugging percentage.”

Take-Two Interactive chairman Strauss Zelnick, arguing that MMOs don’t work in the West

I am not sure what measure of success you would be using if you declared that the only two successful MMOs ever in the U.S. were EverQuest and World of Warcraft.

I guess if you don’t wildly exceed your initial expectations, you have failed.

Ah, Neverwinter.

A new MMO-ish sort of game based on the Dungeons & Dragons campaign environment of Forgotten Realms.  What is not to love?

Well, there is the Cryptic Studios factor.  I haven’t liked their last three games.  Two of those were super hero games, City of Heroes and Champions Online, and super heroes are not my thing.  But then there was Star Trek Online, which I really, really wanted to like.  And which I cannot bring myself to play.

So my approach to Neverwinter has been half-hearted.  I did download the client during the first weekend of open beta.  And then I proceeded to let it sit untouched until last weekend, when it was just I and the Potshots on to play.  So I got into the game at last.

And, for the moment, it reminds me a lot of Dungeon & Dragons Online.

Certainly the parallels are there.  Character creation shows you in an epic armor set.

Meet Epic Sven Sverdsk

And then the game tosses you on a beach and forces you to scavenge for equipment in what is becoming the video game equivalent of the of starting your D&D campaign in an inn.

Why can’t I get the stein?

You get some gear, learn a few of the game mechanics, finish up the intro quest, and end up in town.  This is where I met up with Potshot, in the guise of Fergorin, the dwarf guardian.

Sven and Fergorin

And, continuing the DDO parallel, the town is pretty much a lobby.  There is no world to explore.  Rather, the game is made up of a series of instances and shared zones.

Where Neverwinter starts to break the parallel is in how good the game looks.  DDO is into its seventh year and the graphics, especially the character models, were really feeling their age the last time I played.  For Turbine, DDO was the game before LOTRO, and while I love the Middle-earth environments, the character models were never award winners, and they were an improvement on DDO.

Neverwinter though looks marvelous.  Character models look good, environments are rich, and animations seem to be mostly spot on.  My warrior’s first attack animation seemed to go off without his weapon a good portion of the time.  He would whack somebody with an invisible sword first, then his giant two-handed sword would materialize in his hands.

As a group we ran through the first instance together, clearing out a vault in town.  Adventures seem to be built in stages.  You fight your way through some bad guys, avoid some traps, and make your way to a camp fire, where you heal up and start the next stage.  Okay as far as it goes, though the camp fires do show up in odd spots.  who builds a fire in the middle of a vault.

Game mechanics took some getting used to.

Neverwinter combat is very active.  Common MMO style combat is face the bad guy and press buttons.  Neverwinter ends up closer to the Diablo series, where it is click to kill.  You primary attack abilities are mapped to the left and right mouse button, and movement is in the FPS style, where you steer by aiming the camera.  You also have to aim your character at an enemy to attack.

That meant me stumbling over the controls for quite a while, and even when I started getting used to it, I still kept setting of secondary abilities that were mapped to the Q and R keys, because I use those keys to strafe left and right normally.

We made it through the first instance.  The game is good about showing you where the loot it.

Treasure chest highlighted

That done, we decided to go see what The Foundry had to offer.

The Foundry could be the big draw for Neverwinter, as it allows people to create their own campaigns.  We picked one that was rated high and which had several stages and gave it a try.

Overall it was well done.  It had indoor and outdoor segments.  Things looked good, including some very nice lizardman models.

Now THAT is a lizardman!

And there were even good, old fashioned traps, highlighted in red once detected or tripped… in our case it was mostly tripped.  We should have brought a rogue.

That was a painful room to cross

All in all, the adventure we chose, which had a few follow-on segments to continue the story, was very good, to the point of not being obviously different from the initial quests that the game itself offered.  I am not sure if we chose from a particularly talented author or if the tools offered by The Foundry are just that good, but it seems to bode well for the game.

Which brings us to the inevitable catch.

I am just not feeling it.

And I cannot tell you exactly why.  I just do not feel any big pull to go back and play.

Maybe I just haven’t played enough.  I am past about the three hour mark (Raptr says I have less than that, but it didn’t notice I even had the game installed until after our group night), which is not a lot of time.  But I have been hooked on games in far less time than that.

Or maybe it was the lack of edge to the game.  At no time did I feel my character was in any real peril.  He seemed to be able to kill stuff as he was.  He got a couple of item upgrades along the way, but I couldn’t tell how much of a difference they made.

Again, it is too early to call the game “easy.”  We were just doing starter things, which should be on the easy side, and Foundry stuff with a group of three, which may have been too many.  I don’t know.

And then there is the lack of worldliness.  I appreciate the game getting us straight to the action.  You jump into an instanced adventure and it is go time.  But, while I complain about pointless or repeat travel at times, at times travel has been part of the adventure.  Even out short time with Neverwinter Nights 2 involved some tales of the road.

Anyway, that is where I stand at the moment, though the jury is still out.  While I am not hooked on the game yet, neither am I fed up with it and ready to move on.  We shall see where I end up in the next few weeks.

There was a bit of a push in our kinship to get to level 25 ASAP, with the intent of doing the Great Barrow in kinship groups… erm… fellowships.  Kinship fellowships just sounds odd.

So I put in a bit of effort to get there, though not as much as I expected I would have to.  The levels flew by.  If I spent time running down quest lined in one zone it inevitably pushed me beyond the level requirements of the next.  I hit 20, which is when the game prompts you to head out to the Lone Lands, having completely bypassed Adso’s camp and almost all of the north and south Bree fields as well as The Old Forest and the Barrow Downs, except for my visit with Tom Bombadil, which is part of the epic quest line.

All my old friends are so happy to see me!

Granted, it helps that by this point in my relationship with the game I know most of the quests.  Not a lot of time is wasted figuring out where to go or what to do, though I do get ahead of myself once in a while.

And it also helps having the right rock in your pocket.

Bonus Rock

Of course, it is hard to tell exactly how much that pocket item hurried me along.

Traditionally, LOTRO has given the lion’s share of experience for quest completion, while monster kills have tended to be a pretty meager second source of experience.  Likewise, they have added experience to harvesting and crafting, but the actual experience per action is pretty small.  However, I did go explorer with my two highest level characters, so I did do a lot of harvesting and processing, so quantity probably made up for the small individual contribution of each action.

I suppose I will see once I catch up with the group and swap that rock out with something else.

Interestingly, the LOTRO store also sells a pocket item that turns off all exp.  I am not sure I would spend Turbine Points on that yet.

Despite my start with a hunter, and then a short diversion with a lore master and then a champion, I think my group character this time around will be a captain.  I have never played one in a group, though they seem ideal for such.  A test with a skirmish showed the benefits.  I was even able to keep Pengail alive during his goblin murder spree without much effort, thanks to the captain skills.

Pengail and his obsession

They actually seem to have tweaked Pengail a bit.  I seem to recall him going half a mile out of his way to gank a goblin who he thought might have looked at him cross-eyed, but now he seems to be content just to murder those who get within aggro radius.  Still, he is easily one of the more aggressive escort quest mobs in the history of the genre.  He does hate goblins.

So, plumed hat at a jaunty angle and my armsman in tow, my captain is just about set for the Great Barrow.

Redraw has been a bit slow in town…

Now to see if I can keep the alts under control.  Those crafting materials pile up and it is always tempting to make an alt just to use them up.

Developers have been diverted to other projects while the core team starts over.

So, World of Warcraft will be paying most of the bills at least until then, which puts a little bit of pressure on the franchise after it dropped another 1.3 million subscribers last quarter.  Still insanely profitable, but that line is headed in the wrong direction.

Meanwhile, no Diablo III expansion has been announced yet.  StarCraft II just got an expansion, so the next one is probably two years off.  And Blizzard All-Stars, a free-to-play MOBA is reported to be coming along, but I cannot imagine that will be live before the end of the year.