On the docks in Freeport

I sat at the end of the dock for a while, initially determined to go very old school and take the boat across to Faydwer, ignoring the inviting smile Tanslocator Setikan there at the end of the dock and the easy answer his presence implied.

I could send you to Faydwer in the blink of a loading screen…

Hours later… or, more likely, about two minutes into the wait… my impatience got the better of me and I spoke to the translocator and had him send me across the water.  The boat was always a bit of a mixed blessing, both a happy nod to the realities of travel as well as being the indifferent sea bus that would leave without you, stranding you on the dock if you were lucky or leaving you alone and afloat in the middle of open water if you took too long to load.

I have spent some time treading water in the Sea of Tears waiting for the boat to come back in the past, hoping I could somehow climb back aboard.

Just keep swimming, just keep swimming…

There is a whole tale around that from 2011 and the Fippy Darkpaw server if you’re interested in how I ended up getting out of that mess.  If you’re not, it eventually ended only with the intervention of GM Maaku.  I have been a fan of translocation ever since.

My one concession to exploration was to not translocate directly, but to stop in the Sea of Tears on the way, though even that used to have the potential to turn into a fraught venture back in the day if one of the higher level aggro mobs was wandering around the dock area when you popped into the zone.

I was not disturbed on the island and after a quick look around, I continued on to Faydwer and the dock in Butcherblock.  That put me two zone lines from the Estate of Unrest.  First one must navigate through the myriad paths of Butcherblock.

Butcherblock Mountains

That map is a bit more recent as it shows the boat to Firiona Vie, which only shows up when Kunark arrives, but it gives a good sense of the place.

Among other highlights, the zone includes Kaladim, the home of the dwarves, and the chessboard, one of the more interesting visuals in the early game and one that is in the mix of my random banners for the blog.

Kaladim – Lit at Night

I have a whole post about the zone from my 25th EverQuest anniversary series of posts if you want to dig into the zone a bit.  For this venture I only wanted to pop in on Kaladim in order to set a bind point before heading to the south end of the zone and the connection to Dagnor’s Cauldron, the rocky zone that is mostly a lake, which then connects to the Estate of Unrest.

On the path to the cauldron

I let the wisp guide me there, remaining mildly impressed that it still works both as well and as comically bad as it did back in the day.  It will guide you to your destination, but it does not seem very concerned about keeping you on a visible path or dragging you over nearly vertical obstructions.

I had to get the wisp out again to get me to the entry, which is carved out of the crags and rocks at the southern end of the lake, making it easy to miss.  Or easy for me to miss at least.

The tunnel to Unrest

Once through the tunnel I zoned into the estate and… found the modest crowd I expected.  The Estate of Unrest has always been a popular destination for a given level range.  The xp is good and the mobs are plentiful and, if you are a pally or a cleric you can use your specials that only work on undead.

I poked around the periphery.  I was already into the level range for the zone, so the yard trash was all below me in level, so easily manageable, even in groups.  Loving some of those wizard AOE lightning spells.

In writing the phrase “yard trash” I am now trying to recall if this zone spawned the term.  It is laid out as a main building with an open yard around it.

The Estate of Unrest

The progression, back in the day, was to work with your group in the yard and hedge maze, taking on the lesser undead.  Then maybe you would tackle the gazebo, marked as “2” in the map above.  And once your group was good enough, big enough, or high enough in level, you would start in on the manor itself, taking on the first floor before graduating to the upstairs.

Of course, I wasn’t there with a group.  Part of the point of EQL is that you don’t need a group for everything, and maybe only an abbreviated group for raids.  Also, I didn’t want to compete with other people in the zone.  So I spun up my own solo instance, turned off respawns… surprise respawns were part of the charm back in the day, but I was more interested in exploration really… and headed in.

Free to roam I went to clear out stuff on the lawn.

A bit of a picnic on the lawn

I successfully swept up most of the loose mobs wandering about, then cleared the gazebo, before finally venturing inside the manor.

Almost immediately I ran into a rare spawn mob.

The Lesser Blade Fiend

And this is a way in which EQL excels.  The team has decided that if you’re going to spin up your own copy of the zone, they are going to give you all the rare spawns.

The Lesser Blade Fiend, true to its name, dropped a nice 1h sword, which I then went back out into the yard to practice with, tracking down the death beetles lurking in the hedge maze to boost up my slashing skill.  I put a dagger I had picked up elsewhere in my off hand and got dual wield skilled up as well.

Another nice thing about EQL is that they eased up on the skill increases.  There was a time when you could sit for days doing that.

After that I went back inside and carried on.

Facing the dark boned skeleton

I found that, with some care, I could take on pretty much anything on the first floor, at least once I leveled up to 17.  Upstairs was still a challenge, but the punishment for trying and failing is low.  Loss of xp is not a thing.  You don’t even get sent back to your bind point.  Instead you get dropped at a safe spot near the zone line where you can heal up, apply buffs, and carry on as before.

I spent a bit more time there.  It was a nice way to explore an old location.  EQL is an excellent way to revisit the past and dig into some old locations.

But it is also a reminder that I did this sort of thing, even back in 2011,with friends.  Without friends… and being solo in your own version of the zone… is not as engaging.  You get to see things, but the grind… even with the reduction in xp needed to level, the increased power of characters, and the extremely light penalty for death… is still pretty grindy without somebody to share it with.

Surprise!  EverQuest remains a game best played with other people almost 28 years later!

Who could have possibly guessed?

Welcome to the start of year twenty-one I guess.  That is the… I guess downside… I am not sure, really… of anniversaries, that they just blow by and we’re on to the next arbitrary increment of time.

This persistent progression of time starts to wear on you after a while.  Life starts to feel less like it is running in real time and more in an accelerated time lapse approximation of itself.

That is all a trick of memory I am sure.  The pace of time has not changed.  The atomic clock isn’t running any faster.  The shake of a lamb’s tail remains constant.  It is just the perception of the traveler, eternally perched on the razor thin line between what might happen and what has already occurred.  The constant accumulation of mental baggage just wears on you.

Which is why I write all this stuff down, or so I have alleged.

Anyway, this section is supposed to be about the site and not my anchored angst about aging.  WP.com hasn’t screwed anything up month, or not such that I have noticed.  I guess they broke connections to Tumblr for a day… you’d think they would be better about that since they own both… but it was fixed quickly enough.  Also, the insane CEO of the parent company, Automattic, fired all of the directors on the board who stood against and tried to fire him.  I am sure that will work out well.  Also, are there any tech companies not headed by malignant narcissists who feel they are always the smartest person in the room? And will any of them actually pay any consequences for their idiocy?  It feels like a bit “no” on both of those.

Which still isn’t directly about the site either I suppose.  But I got on this whole tangent because WP.com started doing achievements 135 days ago.  I know this because there is an achievement for a daily activity streak.

My top achievements or something

That says a 134 day streak, but it will be 135 when this post goes live.

So there I am.

One Year Ago

The blog turned nineteen years old.

I mused on the whole idea of Labor Day in the US.

I was on about the whole “plus problem,” the idea that WoW Classic Plus, or EverQuest Plus, would ever mean the same thing to different people.

Speaking of which, Daybreak won a preliminary injunction against The Heroes Journey.  That was the beginning of the obviously inevitable end for the pirate server and its attempts to cash in on the EverQuest IP.  This led to a lot of bad takes and even worse behavior, such as one the EverQuest subreddit mods closing down the whole thing in a fit of pique.  The THJ fans were coming off as a pack of entitled brats.

LOTRO put the Kingdoms of Harad expansion up for pre-order.

In No Man’s Sky I was building my first corvette from the Voyagers update.  Potshot and I fiddled around with different designs.

Then it was onto Expedition 19: Corvette, which also showed you how to build a corvette.  This being my first expedition, I spent time looking for things like my echo locator.  I managed to finish the whole thing up despite my mistakes.  I cashed out with quite a bit of stuff.

The whole corvette aspect of Voyagers was pretty amazing and brought a lot of players back to the game.

The group was back to playing with Palworld.  We set out to visit the oil rig as group mission.

Over in EVE Online I was finally fixing my EDECOM standings.  I was tired of getting shot by gunstars in random high sec systems.  That required a second trip to Pochven to finish it off.

I did a Friday bullet points post about EVE Online featuring ships on fire, Alliance Tournament XXI updates, a video from The Scope, ESI updates, and the coming Legion expansion update.

Then I did a follow up about the Legion update dropped, we got more news about ATXXI, and the CSM XX elections were also on their way.  I also took a look at the August 2025 MER.

I did another Friday bullet points post about the failure of Final Stand: Ragnarok, the closure of Tarisland, yet another delay for Squadron 42, Blizz offering a “free” WoW pet with a $75 purchase, Nintendo being jerks with patents, and Elon and Hilmar chatting.

Then there was the disastrous Ship of Heroes launch.  It was a difficult operation and I tried to come up with some ideas to rescue the project, but it was doomed.  It closed down on the one year anniversary of the launch.

We were binge watching Wednesday season 2 on Netflix and Alien Earth on Hulu.

Finally, I was pissed about iTunes wrecking my music listening. (I need to do a follow up about how Apple Music made things even worse.  I mean, seriously, fuck Apple.)

Five Years Ago

It was time to sum up the labors of Blaugust once more.

It was also anniversary time as the blog turned fifteen.  Also, WordPress was talking about putting “sponsored content” into blogs.

I also wrote something about 35 years of connected computing, it marking the anniversary of purchasing my first modem back in 1986.

I was wondering if the level squish had been a good idea a year after Blizz did it.  I still wonder if it was today.

In Burning Crusade Classic the instance group managed to get through the Blood Furnace as a foursome.

But we were kind of slowing down on that, and on our radar was Diablo II Resurrected, which launched at last.

Daybreak announced the Visions of Vertovia expansion for EverQuest II.  Then it was time for the Pandas and the pre-expansion catch up.  Meanwhile, over in EverQuest there was something about perks… for sale of course.  And Lord of the Rings Online announced the Fate of Gundabad expansion.

Meanwhile, Amazon finally launched New World.  Having played in some of the beta cycle, I was moaning about how the vision for the game had changed.

In EVE Online it was once again time for Caldari Union Day.  We also got the Gateway quadrant update, which included yet another new player experience, as well as a UI update for skills that once again proved that the one thing CCP UI designers value over all else is wasted empty space in the middle of informational elements.

CCP was also telling us that 24 million pilots had played EVE Online, though they were not clear about what that really meant.

The New Eden monthly economic report was showing us the impact of the end of World War Bee.  Meanwhile, CCP remain on its path to make players poor, their solution to MUDflation, while I was looking to my own finances in game.

Things were still happening though.  We blew up a Keepstar in Catch and CCP helped up blow up botters in Yulai once again.

I was getting setup with Zwift and our new exercise bike.  A year later I am still using it regularly, even if the stages of every ride remain the same.

We were also binge watching Ray Donovan and all of the Helen Mirren versions of Prime Suspect.

My wife and I went to Maui where we were involved in some minor driving adventure.

Finally, it had been 20 years since terrorists brought down the World Trade Center and I was reflecting on how it was very much a dividing line in history.

Ten Years Ago

It was the tenth anniversary of the blog.

I was looking back at day/night cycles and full zone respawns of yore.

My wife’s Pokemon Go account was hacked, but I recovered it pretty quickly.  That post brings in a lot of search engine traffic looking for ways to hack Pokemon Go accounts.  So many bad people.

Daybreak announced that both EverQuest and EverQuest II would be launching Kunark focused expansions, with Empires of Kunark slated for the former and Kunark Ascending for the latter.

Smed was taking his Hero’s Song project back to the crowdfunding arena again, this time via Indiegogo which, unlike Kickstarter, lets you keep the money even if you don’t meet your goal.

I was going on about problems EVE Online has getting new players to stick with the game… again.  We also had the YC118.8 Update which revamped a the look of mining barges and some frigates, among other thing.  It also launched the Purity of the Throne event that had me chasing white skins for Amarr ships.

There was also the ascension of Caitiz of House Tash-Murkon to the Amarr throne.  All those ships are still lined up in Amarr for some reason.  Did they have to wait a year for the first Jubilee?

And Alpha Clones would soon be a thing, so I was wondering what you could do with one.

In post-Casino War events the Imperium finished conquering Delve and a state of normalcy was starting to come to pass.  I also got my last ship out of Deklein.

And then there was World of Warcraft where the Legion expansion was off and running.  There was even an app for it.  I started off slowly as I figured things out and moved clockwise around the Broken Isles.  That didn’t stop me from checking up on my Draenor garrison though.

And then in one of those bullet point posts that I always hate a year later when it comes time to do the summary I covered Star Trek Online going to consoles, Legends of Norrath card packs, rewards for Omega players in EVE Online, and the then upcoming EVE Vegas.

Finally, No Man’s Sky launched, capping off yet another dismal episode of fan behavior.  After getting death threats for delaying the launch, Hello Games finally shipped the game only to have the fan base explode even more so when it was discovered that features that were straight up said to be in the product… multiplayer being the prime suspect… were not.  Still, it made a lot of money and features have since been added and it got its own Honest Game Trailers video.  There are, no doubt, lessons to be learned here.

Fifteen Years Ago

I did the great survey of blogs that had, at one time or another, included this site in their blog roll over the last five years.  Only 28% of them were still up and active.  There was also the five year anniversary post and all that it entailed.

I implied that Tobold’s mother a llama.  This had NOTHING to do with him not having a blog roll.

I was totally going to resist Steam selling me Rift for cheap.  That didn’t work, and I ended up playing for about a year or so.

Star Trek Online announced it was going free to play, though I couldn’t imagine how it wasn’t already.

In LOTRO, the Rise of Isengard expansion came out and I almost didn’t notice.  Which was odd, because we were kind of playing LOTRO still.

The Goons were going to wreck the EVE economy by blowing up high sec ice miners.  Another vast Goon conspiracy.  I was being nostalgic for my earlier days in EVE.

GameSpy had a post about re-imagining Diablo as a first person perspective game, which was met with much derision.  Me, I liked the idea and even had suggestions for further topics in that vein to explore.  Meanwhile, Diablo III was pushed out to the middle of 2012.

In other Blizzard news, the Official World of Warcraft Magazine went belly up after just five issues.  And then there was a drop in WoW subscribers.  They lost 600,000 players, though I wasn’t one of them… yet.  Good thing they never lost more than that…

I was still playing Need for Speed: World pretty regularly.  I was filming police chases, avoiding police chases, and buying the squarest ride in the game.

In EverQuest, on the Fippy Darkpaw server, the retro experience was made complete by “guilds behaving badly” when it came to contested content.  Some GMs came up with unorthodox ways to resolve conflicts.  Somewhere along the way I got my SOE Authenticator, which I never use.

ArenaNet said something about private GuildWars 2 PvP servers.  I wonder how that would play today?

EA/BioWare gave us a release date for SWTOR at last, so I could start fretting about pre-orders and grace periods.  While I wasn’t in beta yet, BioWare was asking how I was enjoying it.

There was no word about life on Planet Michael.

And, finally, I was wondering how 9/11, which took place just a couple months before the birth of my daughter, would influence her view of the world relative to my own.  This was triggered by her trip to New York, where she visited the Nintendo Store.

Twenty Years Ago

It has come time, I can now refer to blog posts from 20 years ago in these reviews.

There was the first post.  I still haven’t covered all of the topics I promised 20 years back.  But neither have I stopped blogging yet, so there is still time!

After that I was straight into the EverQuest nostalgia, an oft recurring topic here.  The Serpent’s Spine expansion came out for the game.  I would get to that in a bit.

LEGO Star Wars II – The Original Trilogy launched, setting the casual path for future Traveller’s Tales LEGO based games.  My daughter and I would later play this on the Wii, but that was still out in the future.

Pokemon Diamond & Pearl, the first core Pokemon RPG titles for the Nintendo DS platform shipped in Japan.  They wouldn’t reach US shores for another six months.  Again, another series that would show up here as time moved on.

Green Monster Games, later 38 Studios, was unveiled to the public by founder Curt Schilling with R. A. Salvatore and Todd McFarlane as part of the creative team.  What a fiasco that was.  Schilling had no more business going down that path than I would have managing an MLB team. Turns out being good on the mound doesn’t endow you with any common sense in business, finance, or politics.  But that is ever the problem.  Somebody is good (or gets lucky) at one thing and then thinks they have mastered all the things.

Roblox launched.  I didn’t know about it at the time, but the title has grown to be many things, including controversial.

I was into EVE Online, which I began playing just about two weeks before I started the blog.  My first post about it concerned the tutorial, then I went on to my impressions.  I already had EVEMon up and running, because you cannot play EVE Online without it.  And, while I was hardly aware of it, the first titan had been built in New Eden.

I was musing about games slated for the future, including Star Trek Online and Lord of the Rings Online.  I had reservations about both.

I kicked off my old school gaming reminiscences with a post about Stellar Emperor as it was back in 1986.  That was 40 years ago.  Damn continuous motion of time.

The instance group formed up for adventures in Azeroth.

I wrote the first “Month in Review” post.  I am not sure WHY I decided to do that, but it became a thing as here I am doing the that same sort of post a decade and a half later. (About nine years ago I decided month in review should have its own category, so I went back and edited each and every last one to put them all in that category.  Fortunately, being a once a month thing, it was easy to figure out if I missed any or not.  Then I decided that I needed the year in the title, so I went back and redid all those posts again!)

I also wrote something about Saga of Ryzom in that month in review post, which might be the one of the few times I ever wrote anything about it.  It had launched two years before and people were talking about it, but my play time with it was very short and unfulfilling.

But the smartest thing I probably did in that first month was link out to Brent at VirginWorlds in a post, which got him to notice my brand new blog, which kind of got me into the club pretty quickly as well as getting me my first comment.

Thirty Years Ago

Meridian 59 by 3DO launched, about a year ahead of Ultima Online.  M59 remains part of the perennial discussion as to what was the first “real” MMORPG.

Forty-Five Years Ago

Wizardry for the Apple II launched back in 1981, one of the early influential titles for me.  I still have graph paper maps of the levels in a drawer in my office.  Robert Woodhead, one of the creators of the game, would later serve four terms on the EVE Online Council of Stellar Management.  The game itself was ported to a dozen different operating systems and was somewhat recently remastered and is available on Steam.

Apple ][+ The Upgrades Begin

Most Viewed Posts in September

1. Building My First Corvette in No Man’s Sky
2. No Man’s Sky – Playing with Friends
3. Planet Crafter – Terraformed Skeo
4. BlizzCon Bingo – Predictions for BlizzCon 2026
5. Planning My Path to 50 Platinum Medals for Level 80 in Pokemon Go
6. Planning my Platinum Medal Strategy for Pokemon Go Level 49
7. Alamo teechs u 2 play DURID!
8. This One Simple Trick will Up Your Pokemon Go Steps Dramatically!
9. Stardew Valley – Farm Upgrades and Stardrops as the Second Winter Approaches
10. Getting to The Elder in Valheim
11. First Weekend with the WoW Forever Beta
12. The Purloined Letter – WoW Subscriber Numbers Leak from a GDC Presentation
13. No Man’s Sky – Expedition 23 – Starting Off with Our Journey Continues
14. 20 Games that Defined the Apple II
15. Cat Catching in Enshrouded
16. Wrath of the Lich King Zones Ranked
17. No Man’s Sky Remnant, the Furnace, and the Final Colossus Upgrades
18. Making Level 73 in Pokemon Go and onward to Level 74
19. The Journey to Orgrimmar and Ragefire Chasm
20. The Test of Righteousness

For no good reason I expanded the list from 12 to 20.  I don’t know why.  I do it all in an Excel spreadsheet that concatenates things to make the HTML formatted list and it is as easy to do 12 as 20 I guess.  Or maybe I was just carrying on with the number 20 for 20 years.  Who can tell?

Game Time by ManicTime and Nintendo

Something of a split pack for September.  While Planet Crafter is out in front, we also finished that up more than a week back, allowing other titles to creep in.

1. Planet Crafter – 27.21%
2. No Man’s Sky – 17.92%
3. EVE Online – 17.13%
4. Valheim – 14.86%
5. Stardew Valley – 13.32%
6. WoW Forever – 6.31%
7. EverQuest Legends – 2.25%
8. World of Warcraft – 0.93%
9. WoW Classic – 0.06%

Nine titles is a lot for me in a single month, though WoW Classic I am pretty sure I just check in on to compare it to WoW Forever.  I expect that to be the top game come November… but what will be up top in October remains to be seen.

EVE Online

I was in a bit of a cycle of neglect in New Eden this month.  I had celebrated twenty years with the game in August and wasn’t sure what else could be experienced in a game that itself faces a bunch of old age problems.  That and the fact that CCP/Fenris is more interested in its new games and has left the stewardship of New Eden in the hands of a few people who view the aging player base as a problem to be solved.  So I was in a bit of a funk.

And then we had an evening brawl in Amamake and I was feeling pretty good again.  That is the cycle of EVE Online; days, weeks, and even months of fuck all happening, then you get some special high and you’re back at it again.  Sort of.  I mean, I restarted some of my PI.

EverQuest Legends

This kind of got squeezed out with all of the other titles in play for me.  It was in fifth place in a world where I really only have time to really play three titles.  I like it.  I like what I have seen.  I mostly like what they have done.  I even kind of like their plans, which show ambition.  This is headed into EverQuest Plus territory.  But Norrath doesn’t grab me currently.  We’ll see.  There is another post about this in the drafts folder.

Planet Crafter

Potshot and I completed our dual run through all of the content that comes with the base game.  It is a pretty cool game.  It ticks some boxes for me, including a “numbers go up” obsession.  But it also feels like a game that has a specific tool set to make the numbers go up and once you learn them the path forward becomes pretty well defined.  However, it is a buy to play game and I got 70 hours out of it.  I cannot complain.  Pretty cool, had fun, good job.

No Man’s Sky

The 10th anniversary landed last month, but we didn’t get the big update until this month.

I will admit, I was a bit underwhelmed by the Cosmos update, but it didn’t really speak to me.  Not everything have to be for me.

And then the expedition came along and that has been fun.  I have been working through that slowly.  I am sure I will report back when I am done.

Pokemon Go

My wife and I continue on the path to max level, working on the tasks for level 77.  I managed to get my platinum medals out of the way, so it is just getting one more Pokemon to max CP and another 59 max battles.

• Level: 76
• XP Progress: 95.1% of the 203,353,000 xp needed for level 80
• Tasks for Level 77
  • XP: DONE
  • Platinum Medals: 41 of 41- DONE
  • Power up 7 Pokemon to their max CP: 6 of 7
  • Win 100 Max Battles: 41 of 100
  • Make 10 trades with Pokemon caught at least 300km apart: 10 of 10 – DONE
• Pokedex status: 940 (+2) caught
• Pokemon I want: Phione, Manaphy, and Arceus, none of which have been released yet
• Current buddy: Swapping between Pikachu buddies to get candies for another max CP

Stardew Valley

My daughter and I have carried on here, though I have let my other saves linger.  We made it through year two and are headed to summer of year three, when we plan to finish up the community center.  However, this might be delayed because classes just started for the fall quarter for her master’s program, so data science may need to come ahead of Stardew Valley for a while.

Valheim

It hit 1.0, it added the final biome, it introduced achievements, and so I have spent a bit of time there.  Again, with only so many hours in the day it is a question as to when I can find to play this… but it is ahead of EverQuest Legends on the list.

World of Warcraft

I didn’t play a lot of retail WoW, as the game time above indicates.  But I set out to play.  Brewfest had arrived and there was a promise of all the usual goodies, plus maybe some housing decor items.  That got me to patch up.  Then I logged in, got myself to Ironforge, and went down to the Brewfest area, did a couple of things… and wasn’t really into it.  Some days you just don’t feel the vibe.

WoW Forever

This was announced at BlizzCon and went into paid beta mid-month.  So that changed a lot of things and brought out a lot of emotions, not all of them positive.  As I mentioned, the triangle of doom, the retail, classic, and forever subreddits, have decided to go to war with each other over what REAL World of Warcraft is… plus, cash elves… and people who chose poorly with names.

Overall though, I am good with the concept.  I have played some in beta, but not too much so as to not spoil it.  I am watching changes come in with an eye towards kicking off for real in November.  Now I just have to decide if I give it its own category or if I keep it as a tag under the World of Warcraft category.

Coming Up

We are now into the final three months of the year and the start of the real holiday season here, which opens up with Halloween.  That means in-game events all over.

We’re also getting to the point where Daybreak will get out the official announcements and pre-orders for the upcoming expansions for EverQuest, EverQuest II, and LOTRO.

A couple of things are going live shortly.  We get Monster’s & Memories into early access at the end of the week, Enshrouded gets its 1.0 release mid-month, and… I am sure there is something else I am forgetting.

But it is November when some big stuff hits.  WoW Forever lands on the 4th, while Grand Theft Auto VI, the biggest video game release of… what… the last decade maybe… will arrive on the 19th… on consoles only though, there being no PC version at launch.  That feels like anybody marketing elusively to PC gamers might be less worried about it, but we shall see.

Of course, I DID write such a post back in May.  And that wasn’t THAT long ago.  But it still feels closer than it should.  The whole 20 year saga is laid out at the end of the post.

Twenty years and just 310 million skill points to show for it?

Well, there are three characters on my main account who have been trained up at various times, so it isn’t JUST 310 million skill points.

The state of my account mid-September

The skill points breakout from the image above is as follows:

Wilhelm Arcturus   - 310,243,360
Escher Alias       -  96,150,606
Percy Dovetonsiles -  30,331,122

Total              - 436,725,088

No, it is 436 million skill points.  That is what I have to show for twenty years I guess.

But this is really about my main, so time to dig into what I was training for the last four months or so, the last milestone having landed in the middle of May while this on hit about mid September.  I have just been delayed in actually doing the post.

Anyway, the skill point breakdown.

Spaceship Cmd            - 102,190,520 (81)*
Gunnery                  -  41,342,667 (56)*
Drones                   -  25,966,256 (27)
Navigation               -  20,089,568 (15)
Fleet Support            -  16,385,250 (16)
Missiles                 -  12,550,911 (22)
Electronic Sys           -  11,928,629 (15)
Armor                    -  11,204,549 (14)
Engineering              -   8,939,855 (15)
Scanning                 -   7,168,000 (07)
Neural Enhancements      -   6,882,275 (08)
Resc Processing          -   6,433,916 (13)
Shields                  -   6,074,039 (12)
Science                  -   5,714,282 (21)
Trade                    -   5,047,765 (11)
Planet Mgmt              -   4,352,000 (05)
Subsystems               -   4,096,000 (16)
Targeting                -   3,840,000 (08)
Rigging                  -   3,209,100 (10)
Sequencing               -   2,058,211 (10)
Production               -   1,922,644 (06)
Structure Mgmt           -   1,458,138 (06)
Social                   -   1,364,785 (10)
Corp Mgmt                -      24,000 (02)

Total                    - 310,243,360 (403)

As usual, those are the total skill points in each of the major learning categories.  The categories that have changed since last time are marked with an asterisk while the total number of skills I have learned to at least level I is the number in parenthesis.

Not that I have many level I skills on my list.  The breakout of skills by levels right now is:

Level 1 -   3
Level 2 -  10
Level 3 -  15
Level 4 -  77
Level 5 - 298

Total   - 403

This time around I don’t have a lot to discuss as I apparently spent all my time training in just two categories, gunner and spaceship command, with the split being something like:

Spaceship Command: ~6.5 million
Gunnery:           ~3.5 million

Spaceship Command is always at the top of the list.  Every time CCP/Fenris adds new ships there are new skills in this category to go with them.  Spaceship Command is, without a doubt, the category with the most skill points to be learned or earned.

In fact, looking at the list, not only has Spaceship Command rolled over the 100 million skill point mark on its own… I didn’t hit that many total skill points until some time in 2013… but it now represents about one third of all my skill points trained or otherwise obtained.

Meanwhile, Gunnery is probably in second or third place for the category with the most skills and skill points available to train.  I think I was spinning up the skill for the Zirnitra weapon, the Zirn being the favored dread of those with ISK to spend.  My training up the skill was probably more aspirational as I am not in the category of space rich.  Still, dreads are not out of my reach the way, say, supercarriers or titans are.

So it goes.

Now the question is, as always, what to train next?  Wilhelm has a queue of 20 skills currently that add up to another 30 million skill points, so I could certainly let him just keep rolling.  That is probably a year and a quarter’s worth of training time, given the current guideline of about 5 months per 10 million SP if I am diligent and scoop up all the free skill points that the company throws at us.

While I have never used a skill injector on Wilhelm… he as well past the point of diminishing returns when they were introduced… I am not at all bothered by taking the points CCP/Fenris tosses out like cheap Mardi Gras beads.  So there is no more purity, no more “I trained up the old fashioned way” because the company has been keen to corrupt us, to make that no longer a thing anybody can claim.

But I digress.

Wil’s queue is a lot of getting this or that weapon specialization to level V, which will get me another 2% damage boost.  I could chase those for a long time.

Instead I decided to swap over to Percy, my oldest and most neglected alt to get him some skills to help run the upcoming holiday events.  He needs a bit of a tune up on scanning and some more hull options… you can see he was training assault frigates IV in the image at the top… and he’ll be ready to go.

So we’ll see how that plays out.

Meanwhile, for those interested in the timeline of skill points on my main, here it is:

• Start Playing EVE Online – August 2006
• Ten million – November 2007
• Twenty million – June 2008
• Thirty million – January 2009
• Forty million – August 2009
• Fifty million – March 2010
• Sixty million – November 2010
• Seventy million – August 2011
• Eighty million – June 2012
• Ninety million – December 2012
• One Hundred million – rolled right past with the battle cruiser split
• One Hundred and Ten million – September 2013
• One Hundred and Twenty million – April 2014
• One Hundred and Thirty million – October 2014
• One Hundred and Forty million – May 2015
• One Hundred and Fifty million – December 2015
• One Hundred and Sixty million – July 2016
• One Hundred and Seventy million – January 2017
• One Hundred and Eighty million – August 2017
• One Hundred and Ninety million – February 2018
• Two Hundred million – August 2018
• Two Hundred and Ten million – November 2019
• Two Hundred and Twenty million – September 2020
• Two Hundred and Thirty million – January 2021
• Two Hundred and Forty million – April 2022
• Two Hundred and Fifty million – September 2022
• Two Hundred and Sixty million – February 2023
• Two Hundred and Seventy million – September 2024
• Two Hundred and Eighty million – August 2025
• Two Hundred and Ninety million – January 2026
• Three Hundred million – May 2026
• Three Hundred and Ten million – September 2026

That is a little over 20 years of skill points, with relatively few breaks.

But the ping was from The Llama, who is high on my rankings of fleet commanders, and promised shiny kill mails, possibly even a super capital.  All I had to do was log in, get in a Flycatcher, get in fleet, and get on coms.  How hard could it be?

Did I even have a Flycatcher in my hangar?  I logged in to find that I did.  It is one of the common homeland defense doctrines, put together in part to try to solve the “Goons can’t tackle” problem by giving most of the fleet the ability to launch a warp interdiction bubble.  That there is now a “Goons bubbling their own fleet” problem was a logical consequence, but you work with the material you have.

On voice coms they were still sorting out boosts and were asking for more main line ships, so I didn’t think about flying logi.  That was a good thing as where we were headed the mission was mostly to collect kill mails.

We undocked and headed out, having been given a first destination to which to free burn.  We were quickly out of our own space and into the southern end of Etherium Reach, where the locals enjoy a quiet lifestyle of gate camps and drag bubbles to help waylay solo travelers.

Flycatchers landing on a gate as we travel

We were pushing 150 Flycatchers with logi and links through their space, so they warped off and left us alone, though we still get dragged by some of their deployed warp bubbles.

There is a whole art and style to that particular tactic and the locals have honed their skills.  This was enhanced by our own comic attempts to deal with things, where somebody tried to boosh a bubble off, only to place it in an even more annoying location, after which somebody bubbled the fleet.

I missed that because I was stuck a gate back, having reflexively shot the first drag bubble we ran into before the FC said not too.  Well, once you’ve started you might as well finish.  At that point I was at least on a kill mail.  Op success, kill board green!  My goal every month is to get on at least one kill mail, and while I had one in the bag already, a backup is nice.

Once we got ourselves sorted and past the last bubble, we were into low sec, where there are no bubbles allowed.  That seems like an odd place to drive a fleet of 150 interdictors, hulls which specialize in deploying warp interdiction bubbles.  The Llama later explained/opined that showing up in such ships would make other groups underestimate us.  Having a pile of well tanks T2 destroyers that can put warheads on foreheads out to 100km while moving at around 2.4km a second did end up feeling like a good choice.  We ended up losing around 15, which wasn’t bad for the environment we ended up flying through.

But that comes in a bit, first we had to get to the destination, which ended up being Amamake, a low sec system of some renown.

It is my understanding that there was some sort of event planned for the system that we were coming to join in on, but I’m taking a month’s break from Reddit due to the overwhelming amount of bad takes that seem to have shown up lately.  And not just in r/eve, which is a haven of bad takes.  The three core World of Warcraft subreddits are literally at war with each other, some of the other areas I follow have gone full negativeland, and even r/mmorpg, a cesspool on a good day, seems to be plumbing new depths of bad take research.  If it wasn’t for the No Man’s Sky subreddit, I’d say burn it all down.

Anyway, it turns out r/eve is also the only place to get any real information about events in game, so what is a capsuleer supposed to do?  Read the game forums?  Spare me, I’d rather go to Reddit.

Okay, I guess it was in the Friday Community Beat post.  But I hadn’t read that at the time.  In fact, I only checked that after I wrote all of the above, so was completely uniformed.  The tease to get people to show up was:

Our corp and others will be gathering in Amamake around 22:30 EVE time on 9/26/26 and when we are ready, we will be hitting grid somewhere within the system with battleships, a few caps and other fun things! Word on the streets is that Warlock Industries will be conjuring up a Nyx, and allegedly other really cool people are eyeballing their toys as well! The hope is for everyone to just brawl, slug it out and overall have a good time, I will wave my fist very angrily at you if you kite out all fight!

So we arrived in Amamake at almost exactly 23:00 UTC to find about 1,500 people in system and time dilation down at 10%, which is about enough to make a null sec player feel fully at home.

Welcome to Amamake

And it was a good 10% tidi too, just on the threshold so it would rise up to 15% or even 20% during the peak, so the game was moving slow but in a way that gave me time to “look out the window,” as I put it, and take screen shots while keeping up with targets and aligns.  20% is pretty much ideal for logi as it gives them plenty of time to respond to requests for reps.  You can dual box logi in 20% tidi and not break a sweat.  Or I should say that even *I* can do so.  There are a lot of people much better at multi-boxing than I am.

I wasn’t dual boxing though, I was along to shoot things.  However, when we warped in it seemed like we might be on a short trip as we landed in the midst of some Stormbringers, the EDENCOM cruiser that excels at AOE attacks.

Stormbringers at 12 o’clock high

A fair number of those could have made things go bad for us.  There were only about a dozen of them and they didn’t seem keen to press their attack.  They could have quite possibly been keen to just tag as many hulls as they could to pad their own kill mail count.  There was a lot of that going around.

We pulled distance from them and headed towards where things seemed to be happening, where there were blobs of ships, including capital ships, milling about and shooting each other.

Flycatchers with the battle in the distance

In the middle of that was the super capital that the fleet ping promised, a Nyx supercarrier taking fire from all side, the center of the brawl.  That was what brought everybody onto the field as Warlock Industries, throwing a birthday bash and brawl, to tempt us all.

Nyx under fire

We rolled in, shooting at a few things along the way, got in our shots on the Nyx, which exploded not too long afterwards showing nearly 800 pilots on the kill mail.

We then went to work shooting our null sec peers as The Initiative and Winter Coalition both showed up in force.  The Imperium also followed us up with small fleets of Sacrileges along with Sigma Grindset in Omen Navy Issues (who look like they took heavy losses), and Brave in Exequror Navy Issues.

Our Flycatchers scooting around the battlefield

So we spent time shooting our old friends/foes, with The Llama steering us this way and that to pick off notable names of interest.  This got us in trouble at one point and The Llama lost his ship and had to warp us off, then to the Keepstar (which is open to all) in order to re-ship.  By this point some of the Euros were starting to fade, so The Llama had some volunteers offering up ships to replace his loss.

I used that respite to feed the cats, then we were back at it.

Warlock Industries then put a Sarathiel on grid, the recently added Angel Cartel dreadnought, which was blown up in due time.

Saratheil smart bombing on grid

There was also another faction dread, a Vehement, on grid for a bit, piloted by CrackerC, who appeared to be just throwing it in there to add to the spice of the brawl.  That too was blown up.

The Vehement brawling

CrackerC then showed up in an Avatar, and a titan on the field got everybody motivated and more dreads dropped in on the show.

Reinforcements arrive

That Avatar started taking a pounding right away.  But CrackerC did not show up just to be a target.  That Avatar fought back and put down some dreads while it was alive… and it stayed alive for quite a stretch.

The Avatar on grid

We flew past that titan at least three times to tag it to get on the kill mail as we engaged other targets.

The titan was the highlight of the event.  Warlock Industries put some other toys on grid as well, but once somebody has thrown a titan into the pot it is tough to get excited about another faction dread I suppose.

Overall the battle report I am looking at put the losses at 630 billion ISK, which is a respectable amount of carnage for a Saturday evening.

Battle Report Header

It is divided into three parts, with the Imperium groups on the left, other null sec groups on the right, and everybody else in the middle.

Once the titan blew up, with over a thousand pilots on the kill mail, things were about over for us.  We had been out for nearly three hours and, while we achieved the goal of padding our kill totals we were done.  The Llama parked us at the Keepstar and said if we wanted to get back home we could join one of the other fleets that had come out.

I managed to get on 90 kills, which is a lot for me.  Back on my 20 years in numbers post there were whole years where I barely passed 200 kill mails.  Those 90 kill mails were also enough to drop my sec status from 5.0 to 1.2.  Not low enough to be an issue, but I might want to go rat a bit.

I docked up and called it an evening.  While it is only 20 gates back to Insmother, it was past dinner time and I was hungry.  So I docked up and called it a day.

Flycatcher docked up

I had jumped in for what I figured might be a short, one-way run and ended up in a serious brawl.

Now I have a Flycatched docked up in Amamake.  I’ll probably just take it to Amarr, part it out, sell the pieces, and buy a new one back in Insmother.  Or maybe I’ll see if I can sneak it back late some evening.  Just moving ships around can be an adventure on its own.

Addendum: Turns out Sunday night was quiet enough to get home without any drama at all, though I should really go back a bookmark perches for the gates along that route.  There were still drag bubbles left over from the day’s gate camps.

Fantasy Critic League – Like Fantasy Football, but for Video Games

We will certainly get to all of that, but first a review of where the board stood last time around.

Week 38 Scores

For week thirty-nine the first thing out of the gate, Sunday morning, before last week’s post landed, was a hit to Crimson Desert.

• Crimson Moon
  • [Picked by TAGN HQ (Wilhelm)]
  • Score has gone DOWN from 75.2 to 74.1

However, while I had time to add it in, my cut off for updates is Saturday at 17:00 local, so it was carried forward.

For the current week’s titles, we had already had a score posted for Control Resonant the previous week.

Control Resonant

That put up an 84.6, a decent score… though some were disappointed in the title.

That was soon joined by Silent Hill: Townfall, another of the week’s titles.

Silent Hill: Townfall

Also on the board ahead of launch, we just needed to get to Wednesday night for it to launch.

• Silent Hill: Townfall
  • [Picked by S Class Warfare Studios (p0tsh0t)]
  • Now has a score of 81.7

However, the first title up to ship for the week was Nighthawks.

Nighthawks

This vampire RPG was set to land on Tuesday, so I got the notice late Monday night that it had been released in the league.

• Nighthawks has released!
  • [Picked by Pretty Blue Fox Games (Bhagpuss)]

There was no accompanying score however.  That happens, especially with smaller titles.  There was time left in the week.

The things were quiet until Wednesday night arrived and the remaining three title for the week hit their release point.

• Silent Hill: Townfall has released!
  • [Picked by S Class Warfare Studios (p0tsh0t)]
• Nocturne has released!
  • [Picked by Frabjous Day Enterprises (Archey)]
• Control Resonant has released!
  • [Picked by Rusty Shackleford (Shilgrod)]

Silent Hill: Townfall boosted Potshot’s score, though it was not enough to move him up the board, while Control Resonant was only enough to see Shilgrod pull ahead of Bhagpuss.

• Publisher Score Updates
  • S Class Warfare Studios (p0tsh0t)
    • Score has gone UP from 75.3 to 86.9
  • Rusty Shackleford (Shilgrod)
    • Score has gone UP from 30.3 to 44.5
    • Moved from 10th place to 9th place
  • Pretty Blue Fox Games (Bhagpuss)
    • Moved from 9th place to 10th place

That left Nocturne, along with Nighthawks, hanging out waiting for more reviews.  Neither were left completely high and dry.  Both had a few reviews.  But neither had reached the top critic threshold required to get an official score.

Nocturne

Nocturne, described as an ambitious fusion of sci-fi storytelling and rhythm strategy, had an additional issue in that the review I lifted that description from also rated the game at 5.5/10, which was destined to drag down any eventual score.

And then the week went pretty quiet.  The next thing to pop up came on Friday when Ace Combat 8 got on the board for week forty.

• Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve
  • [Picked by Frabjous Day Enterprises (Archey)]
  • Now has a score of 88.2

That left the week with two titles scoring, two waiting for more reviews, and a scoreboard that ended up as below.

Week 39 Scores

I am somehow still holding onto first place, though not for long I assume.

We did have one bid this week.

• Bids in TAGN League
  • Rayman Legends Retold
    • Won by Pretty Blue Fox Games (Bhagpuss) with a bid of $35
    • Dropped game ‘Bradley the Badger’ conditionally

Bhagpuss put down a good chunk of his remaining cash to grab Rayman Legends Retold, the title I dropped last week in order to grab WoW Forever.

That was probably a good swap.  Bradley the Badger still has no fixed release date.  However, the reason I dropped Rayman Legends Retold was that it had already slipped out to December and, while the hype factor was high, it felt like it might not be done slipping.

Meanwhile, the league doesn’t feel very well disposed to WoW Forever, as it is projecting it to score 0.37 points if my final score estimate is to be believed.  We shall see if I made a foolish swap or not.

That leaves the next ten titles in the league as follows.

Coming Up for Week 40

Once again we will have four titles queued up for releases.  Between those and the two titles still awaiting reviews, the final week of September could hit fairly hard.

Related:

• TAGN Fantasy Critic League
• TAGN Discord Server
• Fantasy Critic Site
• Fantasy Critic How to Play
• Fantasy Critic FAQ
• Fantasy Critic Most Desired Reviews
• Open Critic Review Site