For the sixth year in a row Goons and allies have staged themselves in Jita with thousands of cheap, expendable ships with an eye to destroying as many freighters, jump freighters, and other large industrial ships as possible via suicide ganks. Burn Jita is on.
Last year saw the event bring down the Jita node on the opening day as prime time hit. We will see if that happens again this year.
As I noted in my reflections on the event last year, the process of singling out a target and killing it is ruthlessly efficient, with very little downtime between kills. If you go along you are getting in on a kill about every 20 minutes.
Part of that is because the people who run this event are very good at ganking freighters now, but the other part is that people will continue to blithely continue to undock their ships full of valuable cargo even when local is full of characters named “BJ Bee…” who are announcing Burn Jita in chat over and over again.
You are not safe if you manage to get out of Jita. Bumpers are waiting on the gates in systems around Jita.
The event is slated to last 72 hours, so if you want to be safe take the weekend off.
]]>With all of the alpha testing and news pouring out of the test server these days (most of which I am trying to ignore), Battle for Azeroth is increasingly on the mind as we truck our way through 2018. September 21st is still a ways away, but there will be a pre-launch patch before that, so everyone’s starting to shift their mental gears away from Legion and toward BFA.
I’m no different. Even as I dutifully go through my daily routine and keep making that bankroll, I’m increasingly given to thoughts and plans of what I want and need to do before the expansion arrives.
Probably the most important decision, at least for me, is to settle on a main character. During Legion, I’ve been going back and forth between my Hunter and Death Knight, with each character accomplishing different swaths of content and working on differing trade skills. While I’m not going to abandon my roster come BFA, I do know that it helps to have a single character for that first month or two to advance through the beginning content and get to know the ins and outs of the expansion.
After some evaluation, I think I’m going to focus on my Death Knight going forward. She’s done the most content out of the pair (including the full Suramar quest chain), and when it comes down to it, I just enjoy the look, feel, and playstyle of the DK over the Hunter. I’m going to miss some of my Legion artifact abilities, but we’re still waiting to see how the classes are going to shape up come BFA. I’m not going to stress about it.
Aside from my continuing project of making enough money to buy up tokens and secure my subscription for a good long while, I’m making a list of what I want to accomplish between now and the expansion. Working my way through leftover quest chains is important to me, but there are some other odds and ends that need addressing. Like maxing out rep with the Argus factions to unlock the classes (and mounts).
I still have that 110 level boost sitting around and no real pressing need or desire to use it. Actually, what I may end up doing is “wasting” it on a 110 horde character so that I can access the unlocks for the other two allied races. I keep mulling around the idea of a Highmountain Tauren Shaman, perhaps as a summer activity, and that’s the fastest way to getting one that I can think of at this juncture (all of my other characters, aside form a 60 Warlock, are Alliance).
I am also switching over my Hunter from tailoring back to herbalism. I still have a lock churning out hexweave bags for profit (I’ve long since maxed out the bag space on my two main characters), but I think herbalism would be more beneficial at the start of a new expansion anyway. Plus, I like collecting Felwort right now and the occasional herb farms.
What are your plans to get ready for Battle for Azeroth? What would you like to accomplish between now and then?
]]>I’m sure my hastily mocked up seasonal logo will give somebody a brain aneurysm, but it is what I have. You can email me something better if it is killing you.
While the spring season may pale a bit when compared to the monster releases of summer, there are still some big titles coming up in the next thirteen weeks. Those include:
The next Star Wars story, Solo, isn’t coming until the Memorial Day opening of the summer blockbuster season, but there are some interesting items on the list beyond what I have there. The dominance of Black Panther will fade, the Oscars will pass, and we’ll be knee deep in strange new films.
But that is all in the future. We have to get through week one first, and the lineup looks like this.
Black Panther (SAT) $351 Black Panther (SUN) $263 Black Panther (FRI) $205 Red Sparrow $176 Deathwish $167 Game Night $97 Peter Rabbit $94 Annihilation $53 Jumanji $42 Fifty Shades Freed $30 The Greatest Showman $25 Every Day $17 Three Billboards $17 The 15:17 to Paris $17 The Shape of Water $15
For a third week running Black Panther is expected to dominate to such an extent that it is once again divided up into individual days. Obvious anchor is obvious.
Joining the list this week are Red Sparrow and Deathwish featuring Jennifer Lawrence and Bruce Willis respectively.
The remake of Deathwish hopes to revive the Charles Bronson classic. However the original came from a time of chaos and perceived lawlessness where we wanted vigilantes like Paul Kersey and rogue cops like Harry Callaghan to set things right. In the current moment of gun violence I’m not sure how well that will resonate. But it is Bruce Willis and I’ll watch any crappy movie he shows up in.
Likewise, I’ll watch anything with Jennifer Lawrence in it… I’ll watch her sell mops… though for somewhat different reasons. Also, she looks good with bangs. Take that Zooey Deschanel! Also anything that has a hint of a return to the cold war reality when we all accepted the Russians were up to no good works for me.
But will either do well enough to make them viable alternatives to even a single day Black Panther? The pricing will tell I suppose.
And then there is the rest of the list, which are all too low priced to anchor alone. Three Billboards, having won a few more awards, returns to the list in the run up to Oscars this coming weekend, but is down there in the cheap seats. Meanwhile, to my ongoing surprise, Jumanji is still holding its own mid-pack. I might have to go see this movie that will not fall from the list.
Anyway, I’m leaning towards Red Sparrow as an anchor, but that might not be coming from the logical part of my brain.
And, as a review for old hands and those new to the league, here is a list of sites and tool I’ve been known to haunt in search of box office forecasts.
Good luck in the coming season.
]]>I do not have much to complain about when it comes to WP.com this month. Okay, I hate the new comment editor, the way I hate all the new tools they shove at us claiming they are “better” when they are verifiably not, but at least there still a way to use the old one to correct my typos and insert links after the fact because I am too lazy for format HTML on the fly.
Instead I will just take a few lines to bring up followers. I hit a milestone a while back.
The site continues to get followers. The count, as of this writing, is 1386. Followers are a strange metric. Some of them are clearly in the “if I follow everybody then maybe somebody will follow me back and actually look at my horrible click-bait advertising blog” category. But not all of them.
As far as I can tell the only use for following another blog is that you then seem the blog in the WordPress.com reader which, I will admit, has improved over the years. I am not going to dump Feedly for it any time soon, but it has its uses and I want to do a post about it and some of its features at a later date. But for now, followers continue on.
One Year Ago
Daybreak shut down Landmark less than a year after it officially went “live.” That’s what extended early access will do to you.
In EVE Online applications to run for CSM12 opened up. The CSM itself was reduced from 12 members to just 10. That allowed CCP to potentially fly all members to summits, but also reduced the likelihood of more voices outside of null sec being elected.
Blog Banter #79 explored the benefits and pitfalls of being a long time veteran of New Eden, while CCP posted a nice graph tracking the 25 largest corporations over time. The graph only had starting numbers, so I provided the ending numbers.
We also got an update that introduced insurance to citadels and kicked off the Guardian’s Gala event.
Actually in game I was blown up by battle Rorquals as well as spending time moving my stuff to a new home system, sitting on a titan, sitting on a Keepstar, survived my first capital op, and dipped my toe into the spectacle that was Burn Jita 2017. I also had a new favorite EVE Online screen shot.
I wasn’t playing World of Warcraft, but that didn’t stop me from trying to find information about it in Activision Blizzard’s annual financial report. Good luck there. I didn’t even bother this year. Meanwhile, in an unexplained turn, SuperData Research divided WoW into East and West on its monthly Top Ten chart. I still suspect that was an attempt to make Overwatch look better.
Not only was I not playing WoW, I wasn’t playing any fantasy MMORPGs. Standing Stone was trying to get me to log into Lord of the Rings Online with the promise of a new mount.
I was confronted by a metaphor for a MMO Kickstarter projects when somebody decided they wanted to make an Apocalypse Now based MMO.
I was still working on the mansion road in Minecraft. I hit a setback along the way… fell into lava surrounded by creepers… but still made it past the half way point.
And finally, after taking a bit of a break, I was back into Pokemon Sun, working my way towards filling the Alola Pokedex.
Five Years Ago
Raptr sent me a summary of my 2012 gaming.
Google changed how image search worked, causing a precipitous drop in page views. Google giveth, and Google taketh away… though they have been heavy on the taketh front for the last couple of years.
I wrote of the problem with Bond villains. And it wasn’t that they failed to drive Jags. I also looked at the Netflix remake of House of Cards.
RuneScape joined the rare breed of MMOs with an old rules, nostalgia focused server.
I tinkered with Prose with Bros on the iPad. That was amusing for about two weeks.
In something of a breath of fresh air in an argument dedicated to absolutes and bad analogies, with some game devs equating buying used games with piracy, EA admitted that the used game market wasn’t all bad and that the ability to trade in games might be propping up new game sales. They still wanted to kill used games like everybody else in the industry, but at least they were attempting a moment of honesty about it.
The MOBA version of Warhammer Online was declared dead before it even left beta. The good metacritic score for Warhammer Online remained of little value.
A group got together to create an Age of Empires II: Age of Kings expansion called Forgotten Empires. This was before it was announced that Age of Kings would be updated and brought to Steam.
Blizzard and ArenaNet were both offering deep discounts on their MMOs. I opted for Guild Wars 2, which had an awkward start for me.
The instance group was still without a quorum and a fantasy title to call its own. We were playing a bit of World of Tanks, which gets awkward with four. I also made some short videos about Crushing your VK and a cliff diving BDR GB1. And I was working on my Soviet heavies as well as the French heavy tree.
In EVE Online we went back to EWN-2U, the scene of my first real epic null sec battle. But null sec was pretty quiet, so we also spent time just flying in circles. The Goons did produce a nice guide to EVE Online in the form of a .pdf called Thrilling Internet Spaceship Stories.
I was considering the REAL problem with levels and was wondering why nobody else did in-game music the way Lord of the Rings Online did.
And I answered the magic question, just how many times do you have to sign or initial things when closing escrow on a home refinance?
Ten Years Ago
The month started out with our Pirates of the Burning Sea enthusiasm waning.
The instance group was kicking off its Outlands efforts, after running the required equipment upgrade quests, with Hellfire Ramparts, though first we ran through lower Blackrock Spire and got access to Upper Blackrock Spire.
In EVE Online I lost my Drake to pirates in Rancer. I wasn’t going to pay any ransom. And I managed to make a tech II blueprint as I was getting invention going. I was also wishing for a few things from the game.
Turbine announced that Lord of the Rings Online had extended its agreement with Tolkien Enterprises out until 2014, with an option to go to 2017. As a lifetime member I applauded this extension.
I went to GDC up in San Francisco and had dinner some members of the VirginWorlds Podcast Collective plus Alan “Brenlo” Crosby, and got pictures to prove it. (I had a beard then… and I have a beard now… this is becoming a winter routine for me.)
My daughter got a Nintendo DS for Valentine’s Day.
We played a little KartRider, which is still never made it to North America.
I defended myself against some slander about me being a dwarf.
I summed up the annual EverQuest Nostalgia Tour.
I decided that there was hope for a real science fiction MMORPG.
And I found out my blog was worth $61,534.86,though I couldn’t figure out how to cash in. Since then, the value of the site has gone down. I blame the economy.
Twenty Years Ago
We’re in a dead zone in my personal history where nothing really stands out from 20 years ago. It was probably RTS stuff, StarCraft and Total Annihilation and lots of Civilization II. I recall having setup a series of custom empires. And, of course, there was TorilMUD. But we’re slowly moving into to a time of new titles.
Most Viewed Posts in February
Search Terms of the Month
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[Not by any measure I can imagine]
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[That was my issue]
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[Sure, I guess]
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[See where sexy gets you]
EVE Online
I played the game, went on a few fleets, blew some things up, but nothing was exciting enough to get me to write a post. Just the usual friction in null sec. I got on the killboard for the month and got in my required PAP links. I did do some of the Guardian’s Gala event, picked up a few SKINs I didn’t have along with a few cerebral accelerators and a ton of fireworks. But if I had just ratted for the same amount of time I spent doing that I could have bought all of it off the market and had ISK left over. Aryth asked CCP about the payout for effort I and they said they meant to do that. So there you go. Otherwise most of my posting about the game was about changes, both those that showed up this month and the ones planned for next month.
Minecraft
I wandered back into Minecraft for a bit to work on the long overland mine cart track to the forest mansion I found. I finished the road ages ago, but then started working on laying tracks the whole length. I got bored with that, but came back to it over the last couple of weeks mostly because Minecraft is a good game to play when you want to just work away at something while listening to an audiobook or podcast. Not a huge endorsement I suppose, but it fit into a niche I needed filled.
Pokemon Go
More Hoenn Pokemon were released into the wild, so we all had new things to catch and evolve. There was also an event this past Saturday where for a short window you could catch the elusive Dratini. I totally missed that. But I would have needed to catch 33 of them in order to get the final evolution, a Dragonite. Ah well.
World of Warcraft
I have managed to unlock all the world quest options and follower missions for Argus. I also have both factions there into revered and am on the way to exalted, which will unlock the two remaining allied races for me.
Other Games
Played some more Stellaris, then picked up the expansion, but haven’t played enough since then to have a good feel for how things changed. I also played a few rounds of Age of Empires II just because.
Coming Up
March looks like it will be a double retro MMO month with Trion launching its Rift Prime server and Daybreak launching yet another EverQuest progression server. I am still on the fence a bit about Rift. I suspect that, as with so many things, my memories of playing the game in the past will not line up with the reality of playing it again today.
In WoW… well… I’ll carry on until I am exalted all around in Legion. But what happens after that is up in the air.
On the Minecraft front the rail line I have been working on is close enough to being done that I’m probably just going to put on an audiobook and finish that up.
In EVE Online we’re getting a bunch of stuff with the March update, the CSM election process promises to kick off, plus, and you might be hearing it here first, but Burn Jita is returning soon. Be wary.
And on the blog… we’re having some work done on our house which might get in the way of gaming or writing, so there might be more gaps that usual when it comes to posting if I find there is a couch and a desk stored in front of my computer.
]]>At least they are trying to own the whole naming thing.
Starting as the Battle Royale mode of their zombie survival game first announced almost four years ago was a surprise success, selling in the seven figures and dominating the Steam charts. Rightly wanting to reinforce success, the rest of the game was partitioned off as the aptly named Just Survive while the company focused on the bit that was getting attention.
Of course, what it also did was spawn imitators. We hear all about PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds these days, a title that leapfrogged H1Z1’s success in a way reminiscent of what WoW did to EverQuest, and which spawned its own imitator and competitor, Fortnite and its Battle Royale module.
Meanwhile H1Z1 has slid down the charts, having lost a reported 91% of its player base. Once things looked rosy and there was a deal with Tencent to bring the game to China. Now I wonder if that is in jeopardy.
So it seems like exactly the right moment to leave Early Access I guess. Not that leaving Early Access means anything at all these days. The game was supposed to leave Early Access last year, but then didn’t. Now it has and it doesn’t mean much of anything. There is no launch day bump when you’ve been acting like a shipping product for a couple of years already.
They do have some new features that come with launch, the main one being a car based Battle Royale mode.
Of course, in what I can only see as an ironic twist, they announced a beta feature on launch day. We will see if the updates that Daybreak are bringing to the game with its long past due launch will stem the tide of its fleeing player base. Is it too little, too late?
]]>Mighty and majestic, scaly in hide and shrewd of mind, smoking with fury unabated… these are the Battle Bards! Also, dragons. Yes, in today’s episode, the Bards tackle the soundtracks to one of the most iconic fantasy creatures of all time. So call over your good luck dragon and get your best Sean Connery voice on as we loot the musical hoard of these beasts.
Episode 116 show notes (show page, direct download)
This thirteenth and final week should have been a dramatic one. The gaps between the top six players should have been enough for some changes to occur. The problem was that as far as the week went, there were not a lot of surprises in store. Upsets only come with surprises, films exceeding, or failing to meet, expectations.
There were some new films on the list, but Black Panther was expected to dominate still into its second weekend, and so was split into three days again, leaving the lineup looking like this.
Black Panther (SAT) $534 Black Panther (SUN) $395 Black Panther (FRI) $334 Game Night $201 Peter Rabbit $167 Annihilation $154 Fifty Shades Freed $100 Jumanji $87 The 15:17 to Paris $62 The Greatest Showman $55 Every Day $45 Early Man $26 The Maze Runner $17 The Post $16 The Shape of Water $15
I think it was pretty universally agreed that a screen or two of Black Panther was the safe pick. Game Night seemed to have some potential, but you had to be a bit of a contrarian to run with it. Likewise, if you hoped against hope, Annihilation might have seemed viable, though the reviews out before screens locked seemed to make that unlikely.
I went what seemed to be the safe route and rode on Black Panther, anchoring on two screens of Friday, slotting in a screen of Game Night, and then back filling with Early Man in my ongoing mistaken belief that everybody has fond memories of Wallace and Grommit and that this will make Early Man succeed during a time when even the title seems to be working against it.
I tinkered with various other options, but kept going back to that, locking it in on Friday.
That turned out to be the most popular lineup for the week, and in the Meta League, with four of us going that route.
There was some variation across the league, and some radicals went with four screens of Game Night, but most of us anchored on Black Panther.
Black Panther turned out to be the anchor for the perfect pick of the week, but it was a pair of Sundays that were needed, coupled with a screen of Fifty Shades, a screen of Every Day, and four screens of The Post, a set of picks I wouldn’t have touched. A set of picks a lot of people wouldn’t have touched I guess, since only six people got the perfect pick.
If somebody in the Meta League had gone that route, it could have changed the final lineup. Corr could have come in first. I could have been bumped out of third. But none of our picks were all that radical as the scores for the week show.
The Meta League Legend:
Kraut Screens took the week, but overall there is barely a $15 million gap between first and last place, and the gap between the upper half of the scores this week is a mere $3 million.
That left the overall scores for the season looking like this:
The only change in that list over last week was Vigo Grimborne overtaking I HAS BAD TASTE. Everybody else held their spots.
And so it goes. For comparison House Harkonnen, who won the Season Showdown, clocked in with a total of $1,469,103,137 over the last thirteen weeks.
Congrats to Ben for winning the Meta League as well as the MCats Mulitplex League!
Against my own prediction, in which I declared that Pak and Po Huit would put me to shame this time around, I managed to eke out the win in the TAGN league and held third place overall in the Meta League.
Overall, weekly wins were fairly spread out. Corr and Ben both won three weeks in the MCats League, but only one person there did not win at least one week.
Likewise, in the TAGN league only one person who was in for the whole season did not win a week, with SynCaine winning three of those weeks.
That pretty much wraps up the season. The front end was dominated by Star Wars, while the back end was owned by Black Panther. But I think the film that surprised me the most was Jumanji, which has been in the running for week after week and is carrying on into the first week of the Spring season. I have to give The Greatest Showman in nod in that regard as well. I don’t know how it keeps hanging on, but there it is yet again alive for another week as other contenders have come and gone.
Star Wars, while it opened strong, was a bit of a disappointment over time at the box office. You cannot argue with the money it made initially, but it did not last as long in the hunt as the two I mentioned above or Wonder Woman or Guardian’s of the Galaxy Vol. II from the summer season. Fans of Star Wars had to see it… once. But it seemed to leave what I would consider the core fan base a bit underwhelmed, which led to the usual arguments over to whom the series should cater; kids or the long time supporters. I think the How It Should Have Ended episode of the film sums things up quite nicely… especially the little bit after the end credits.
There were a some cool things the movie could have done, or should have done, but avoided. Oh well, at least there was no pod racing.
As for next season, I am mostly in favor of carrying on posting. I was a little bit worried about the poll I took last time, not because it came out against the idea, but because it garnered so few votes. That seemed like a sign that, at best, people were not reading the posts and, at worst, they were actively driving people away.
However, the poll I took the next day about an actual MMORPG got about the same number of responses, so it looks more like I have about 40 regular readers, having driven everybody else away already, though it could still be possible that various forms of ad block and browser filtering could be eating the polls. I mean, it doesn’t take much to click on two freakin’ buttons, does it? People wouldn’t read the poll and say, “I don’t feel like I have enough information or experience to answer that” would they? That seems like behavior completely contrary to the ethos of the internet.
So I will likely carry on. A few new people have signed up for the TAGN League, Pak and Po Huit are plotting my downfall, and the regular posting cycle keeps me going in its own way. You can join the league as well. I will provide a fresh link in the comments after this goes live. Look for the post for the first week of the Spring Season on Thursday, just to get it into next month, which is a bit late, so don’t wait to do your picks until then.
]]>The standard top four, League of Legends and the three Chinese MMORPGs, maintain their hold on the top of the list, with PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds and Fornite: Battle Royale and World of Warcraft hanging on to the next three slots as they did in December. The only change was CS:GO popping up into 8th place, edging out World of Tanks while Overwatch hung onto the last spot as the cyclical ROBLOX dropped off yet again.
So not much change there, with PUBG and Fortnite holding on, having scavenged most of the remaining customers that H1Z1 was living off of.
It is on consoles where the battle between those two continues. In December PUBG jumped onto the list, taking third position with its release on XBox, while Fortnite lingered down in eighth. With the coming of January though, Fortnite, available on both XBox and PS4, rose in the ranks as PUBG disappeared from the list. The questions is, will Fortnite’s edge on consoles help it overtake PUBG on the PC as well?
Also missing from the console list is the much beleaguered Star Wars Battlefront II.
And over on the mobile list my two touchstone products, Candy Crush Saga and Pokemon Go, made the list at fourth and tenth place. Not bad in such a crowded market. Meanwhile Lineage M, the big mobile money maker for NCsoft these days, remained on the list, though it dropped two spots. Since that appears to have scavenged a big segment of the legacy Lineage user base, long the company financial bedrock, I hope that the mobile version holds on for their sake.
]]>Every so often, I break out of my gaming routine to try something new and different. These turn into my Try-It Tuesday sessions, and they are a mixed bag indeed!
As I mentioned before, this month I’ve been indulging in some Final Fantasy nostalgia, which has led me in part to finally playing through FFIX on my iPad. I bought this version a couple of years ago and haven’t gotten around to it yet, but the time seemed right.
The first and only other time I’ve played Final Fantasy IX was back in 2000 on the original PlayStation. I had just moved to Michigan that year, and living as a bachelor, I had plenty of time on my hands. Chrono Cross and FFIX really helped to fill the time in those waning days of the console’s popularity, and I remember having just a terrific time with this installment. I don’t quite know why I never replayed it afterward, except that probably I jumped into the PS2, got disillusioned with consoles, and stuck to computers solely for gaming then on out.
Anyway, the tablet version. All of Square’s Final Fantasy mobile adaptations have their ups and downs, and this is no exception. I love the virtual controller and everything is fairly responsive, but there’s no cursor memory (at least not that works for me) and the backgrounds are incredibly ugly. They had a problem resizing those backgrounds to higher resolution screens, so they stretched and filtered them into a kind of muddy mess. It’s a shame, because otherwise FFIX is a vibrant and attractive game.
So Final Fantasy IX was an odd entry when it first came out. It was intended to be a return to form after the last few sci-fi games and a love letter to the franchise. It didn’t get a lot of respect due to its more cartoonish look, but I think it’s developed a much deeper reputation since. It was a game with a much more upbeat hero than Squall and Cloud, and it had more humor to boot.
The tablet version is pretty much the FFIX as I remember it, graphics aside. It’s been 18 years or so since I last played, so my specific memories are pretty fuzzy, and I got a few good laughs out of how primitive the 3-D overland maps are. Yet it did spark bits of nostalgia here and there, especially with the terrific music and certain set pieces. On the other hand, it’s a product of an earlier gaming generation with plenty of the clunky JRPG staples, such as long battles, wildly varying difficulty, a lack of a useful map (although there is an overlay on the overworld), and the inability to save anywhere you like.
One thing I really did enjoy — as I did back in 2000 — was the use of “Active Time Events.” Essentially, these were little story snippets that you could activate during various times in the game, giving you the choice to check in with other characters and other situations. It allowed for the party to split up more and gave the player the feeling of directing the narrative in a very, very limited sense. I also appreciated the ability for characters to learn skills from gear and trade that gear around as a type of progression.
I don’t know if I quite liked it as much as I did the first time around. It felt a little clunky and trite at times, with the characters being a bit shallow and simplistic (and Zidane’s 90s-style haircut is painful). But it still looks and plays just fine, and if you’re craving a Final Fantasy fix, I suppose you could do a whole heck of a lot worse.
]]>And while those seeking government intervention were buoyed by the Don Quixote-like tilting at lockboxes via bad legislation of a single Hawaiian legislator, they seem to have missed the part where an actual US Senator reached out to the ESRB in order to get the industry to self-police the whole lockbox thing. The ESRB itself is a creation of the ESA, the video game lobbying group, who will no doubt be throwing money at key politicians to make sure any legislation goes nowhere. Like the sign in the background in Thank You for Smoking said, “The best damn government money can buy!” and asking the ESRB to self-police is essentially a politician with their hand out looking for campaign donations. I have seen nothing so far to make me waver from my prediction at the beginning of the year.
Meanwhile the team at Extra Credits devoted some time to the lockbox thing, taking what I would guess is a more industry insider view.
Building on their previous two episodes about why video games should cost more than $60 and why video games are so expensive to make, which I previously referenced, they espouse the view that lockboxes are, at their heart, a good thing.
They take the stance that lockboxes are not gambling, echoing my own past statements, that under the laws, as currently written, they do not meet the requirements to be considered as such lacking, as they do, a real world payout mechanism.
But they move a step farther by declaring the lack of a real world payout makes lockboxes completely unlike gambling in any emotional or psychological sense, not something at all that would feed on the compulsive nature weakness that some people have. They back this up by mentioning a study that says it is totally not a thing, failing to link to or otherwise reference the study so you can’t check up on it. And then they hedge a hell of a lot even after that, undermining their belief in this alleged study, by saying that more work needs to be done on the topic and that should it come to pass that lockboxes are similar to gambling psychologically, then that would be a red warning light for the industry or something.
It struck me a bit like somebody speaking about addiction without having any experience with somebody in its grip, with a bit of denial sprinkled on top. Grandpa’s not an alcoholic, he just likes a drink or six in the evening to help shed the stress of the day.
Or perhaps it is the view of somebody with a vested interest in lockboxes. You cannot watch that video and not think they see lockboxes as good for the industry, a way to get past the pricing barrier of $60 via the time honored tradition of making whales do the monetary heavy lifting.
They will allow that, if lockboxes were being marketed to children, that would be “evil.” That is one of the aspects around lockboxes that the legislator in Hawaii is going after. However, they don’t seem to think that is really a thing.
I suppose the value of the video is the industry insider aspect of it. Lockboxes are pretty much a necessity in that mind set, a requirement to sustain their otherwise untenable business model. They don’t think companies should be unleashing every trick in the book to make players feel the MUST buy in to play, but admit that some companies will go to far and that the industry should self-regulate.
Of course, with yet another school shooting in the US, the industry has a bigger issue as a predictable demographic seeks to blame violence in movies and video games for the tragedy. Our president even suggested that perhaps a rating system for such entertainment would be appropriate. Such are the times in which we live.
Addendum:
They have done a lockboxes part II video covering the legislation things:
This goes down the gambling path, decided that if they are gambling then virtual goods have real world value and so you could, in that world, never ban an abusive user who spent money on your game or close down a server because that would separate people from their legally obtain virtual goods with real world worth. They also try to hold out an olive branch to the legislator in Hawaii who, in the mean time, proposed legislation that made them throw their hands in the air at the end.
They do, however, rightly call out EA for ruining things for other devs with Star Wars Battlefront II.
]]>Today’s guest post is from DDOCentral’s Matt, who wanted to give Bio Break’s readership a deeper look into Dungeons and Dragons Online’s newest expansion. Check out part one here. Thanks Matt!
Dungeons and Dragons Online (DDO) released its third paid expansion on December 6th, 2017 titled Mists of Ravenloft. The two previous paid expansions for DDO are Shadowfell Conspiracy, released on August 19th, 2013, and Menace of the Underdark, released on June 25th, 2012. These earlier expansions are placed in tabletop Dungeons and Dragons’ most famous campaign setting, Ed Greenwood’s Forgotten Realms.
Mists of Ravenloft explores the popular Gothic horror-themed Ravenloft D&D campaign world created by Tracy and Laura Hickman and the vampire Count Strahd von Zarovich’s domain Barovia on the Demiplane of Dread within that world.
This article is the second in a series of three articles on Mists of Ravenloft, the latest addition to DDO’s growing multiverse. The article will review the content of the expansion’s twelve quests, eleven of which are divided into three multi-quest story-arcs, as well as the Favor and Saga achievement systems that bind all twelve quests together. The third and final article will conclude the series with a review of Mists of Ravenloft’s two raids.
Into the Mists
The quest ‘Into the Mists’ is the only stand-alone quest in the expansion and must be completed first to unlock the rest of the expansion’s content. A mysterious portal appears in both House Jorasco on the Eberron side and in Eveningstar Village on the Forgotten Realms side of the DDO game world. The party is drawn into the portal’s Mists and find themselves in a strange forest unlike that known anywhere in the realms familiar to the characters. Howling wolves can be heard off in the distance and a dead body recently drained of its blood is quickly found by the side of the road leading through the dank woods.
The desiccated corpse is clutching a crumpled letter from the Burgomaster of Barovia, Kolyan Indirovich, that relates that his adopted daughter, Ireena Kolyana, has been bitten by a Vampyr and is now slowly dying from this “unholy wound.” The letter goes on to ask that the Land of Barovia be permanently sealed off by the symbols of good so that the Vampyr may be contained and hence the world saved from the same evil fate.
The party then finds a grievously injured but still fighting solder down the same road, slaying a pack of slavering wolves. The soldier tells the party that he is a Revenant; in life, an oath-bound knight of the Barovian Order of the Silver Dragon, but now in undeath sworn to continue to oppose the vampire Count Strahd von Zarovich. The Revenant reveals to the party that the Mists brought them here and that the Land of Barovia lies beyond the gate in the wall to the west.
This massive iron gate is the only way to enter Barovia’s territory. As the choke point to Barovia, the gate is a trap for those Strahd brings to his Domain of Dread. The party must first thin the ranks of the creatures serving Strahd in the forest – wolf packs, Will-o’-Wisps, and guardian Scarecrows – before exiting and making their way to the Village of Barovia on the other side of the gate.
In the Shadow of the Castle
The first of the three story-arcs in the Mists of Ravenloft expansion is ‘In the Shadow of the Castle.’ Each of the three story-arcs needs to be finished in succession of one another. The final quest in each of the story arcs requires that players first complete the preceding quests in the arc. A bonus end reward is granted to characters in the party for completing each story arc.
The three quests in the ‘In the Shadow of the Castle’ story arc are found in the Village of Barovia and its immediate environs: ‘Death House’ is bestowed by Magdelena the Curious in the streets of the village, ‘Fresh-baked Dreams’ by Aglaya Karushkin outside the Old Bonegrinder windmill in the Land of Barovia explorer area, and ‘An Invitation to Dinner’ by Ismark Kolyanovich, Ireena Kolyana’s brother, in the Blood on the Vine Tavern public area. Speaking to NPC Ireena Kolyana in the Blood on the Vine starts this story arc.
When the party approaches Magdelena in front of one of the old stately homes lining the streets of the village, she will tell the characters that two young children just ran inside the house. This wouldn’t be unusual except that no one has lived in the house for many, many years.
Upon entering the Death House, the party will hear the voice of a young girl speak to them, asking the party to find the two children. Throughout the floors of the house, notes are distributed as an Optional objective that explain the quest’s backstory. Once the party reaches the attic they will find out what happened to the children and once the party reaches the basement, they will find the house’s current monstrous occupant.
A party wandering through the village of Barovia will encounter several NPCs who are “dream pie addicts” as well as an old woman selling pastries from a cart. Dream pies are an edible narcotic that is consumed by the depressed, impoverished Barovian villagers to escape their dreary existences as the pies produce pleasing hallucinations in the eater.
If questioned in the Blood on the Vine, Ireena Kolyana will mention that a brother and sister named Valentina and Alek disappeared yesterday near the Old Bonegrinder mill outside the village. Speaking to the Vistani guide in front of the tavern will transport the party to their aunt Aglaya Karushkin and their dream pie addicted uncle Korga. Aunt Aglaya will confirm that the siblings went missing the previous day after visiting the mill with Uncle Korga and will then ask the party to find the duo.
After questioning Old Morgantha who lives in the mill and makes the dream pies with her two daughters, the party must explore the rugged, wooded area nearby for clues to the whereabouts of Aunt Aglaya’s charges. The party learns the fate of Valentina and Alek as well as the secret ingredient in the dream pies that makes them so addicting.
With the completion of Death House and Fresh-Baked Dreams, Ireena will ask her brother Ismark Kolyanovich to show the party an invitation that he has been keeping for them. The invitation is from Count Strahd von Zarovich to join him for a feast at Castle Ravenloft, the palatial dwelling dominating the skyline above the village. The party has proven their worth to the community, so Ireena and Ismark believe that the party may be the ones who can finally defeat Strahd and save Ireena from becoming his undead bride.
The party enter the immense foyer to the Castle and see Madam Eva, the Vistana fortuneteller, standing before the double doors leading to the Castle’s dining hall. Madam Eva offers to read the party their fortune from her Tarokka Deck of clairvoyant’s cards. Depending on the cards drawn by Madam Eva, the location of the dungeon objectives and the final dungeon completion requirement will differ for each run of this quest. There are seven possible combinations of Tarokka cards.
The doors open, and the party are greeted by Rahadin, the Count’s chamberlain. Rahadin requests that the party meet the Count for a friendly introduction over dinner. However, the encounter fails to go as ostensibly planned and the party find themselves in a duel of wits with the Count, plotting to escape the Castle with the holy Icon of Ravenloft. This treasure is hidden somewhere among the Castle’s many floors, rooms, and labyrinthine corridors. Once the Icon has been seized and the other objectives as determined by Madame Eva’s Tarokka Deck are satisfied, the party may leave Castle Ravenloft and return to the village of Barovia to begin the second story-arc.
The Vampire Hunters
Ireena will now ask the party to travel to the Town of Vallaki and speak with the famed vampire hunter Rudolph van Richten at the Blue Water Inn. Vallaki is also the home of the Keepers of the Feather Patron, Urwin Martikov who administers the Favor reward system for the expansion’s quests and raids. A mysterious secret society devoted to protecting the Land of Barovia, the Keepers of the Feather are one of the few groups known to oppose Count Strahd von Zarovich.
Dr. Van Richten introduces himself to the party and mentions that they have already met his protégé, an NPC whom the party encountered during the ‘An Invitation to Dinner’ quest in the first story arc, Ezmerelda d’Avenir. Van Richten then bestows the second story-arc on the party, ‘The Vampire Hunters,’ that includes the following quests: ‘Oath of Vengeance’ , ‘A Raven at the Door’, ‘A Mad Tea Party’, and ‘Sealed in Amber’. The quest-givers for each of the four quests are located near the respective quest entrances.
Van Richten indicates the party should meet Zigmund Kovalev, one of the Keepers of the Feather, outside Argynvostholt in the mountainous Barovian hinterlands. Argynvostholt was once the fortressed manor headquarters of the knightly Order of the Silver Dragon but is now abandoned and decrepit as Strahd decimated the Order and its draconic leader centuries ago. However, the knights of the Order remain oath-bound to fight Strahd and do so even in death, as Revenants.
The party finds Zigmund Kovalev standing outside the seemingly deserted Argynvostholt, a large stone statute of a silver dragon displayed prominently in its front courtyard. Zigmund wishes that the gigantic skull of the Order’s doyen be returned to the deathless chief of the Revenants, Vladimir Horngaard, and presents Strahd’s former war trophy to the party. The Keepers of the Feather expect that if the skull is returned to the Order, they will once again light Argynvostholt’s beacon – a sign of hope to the Land of Barovia and a reminder of its glory days of legend.
The party must unlock a series of switches and doors in the manor house to locate Vladimir Horngaard deep inside his inner chamber, who is none to cooperative once found. Argynvost’s troubled spirit still dwells within Argynvostholt, and can only be put to rest by placing his skull within the dragon’s mausoleum found on the manor grounds.
‘A Raven at the Door’ begins back at the Blue Water Inn. Van Richten asks the party to return to Castle Ravenloft after visiting in the first story-arc, but this time speak to Oksana Cantemir outside in the Castle grounds. Oksana’s son, Yesper, is a Wereraven and has gone missing in Castle Ravenloft after seeking an unknown object of value within its walls. Both mother and son are members of the Keepers of the Feather and seek to help find a way to destroy Strahd.
The party must again find its way through the winding staircases and tower rooms of Castle Ravenloft, with clues left behind by Yesper the Raven concerning his fate. The quest takes several odd twists in the journey to recover Yesper and his unknown treasure, even introducing the Potion of Gaseous Form from tabletop D&D as a DDO quest mechanic for the first time. The party should defeat the Sisters of Strahd witches’ coven and then unlock the Castle Treasury which holds the Tome of Strahd.
Once back in Vallaki, Van Richten tells the party that there is a rumor Strahd is about to make an indirect play for power on their community and that Jirko Lukresh knows more about this gossip. The party meets Jirko in town and he tells them that Lady Fiona Wachter is having Baron Vargas Vallakovich over for her weekly tea party.
Baron Vallakovich is the Burgomaster of Vallaki and a sworn enemy of Strahd, while Lady Wachter is a blood relative of the Zarovich family and considers herself an ally of the Count. The sudden meeting of these two nobles after years of tensions between them is all the stranger considering these facts. Lady Wachter has issued an open invitation for this week’s tea party to the region’s nobility as well as outsiders. Jirko asks that the party get to the bottom of this intrigue and determine what subterfuge Lady Wachter may have planned at Wachterhaus.
What follows is a cat-and-mouse game that plays out in Lady Wachter’s manor home, involving secret passageways, color-coded metal keys, enchanted mirrors, missing servants, mad relatives, a diabolical “book club,” and plots within plots. The party can decide whether to betray Lady Wachter, Baron Vallakovich, or both!
The fourth and final quest in the second story-arc brings the party to the remote Tsolenka Pass in the Barovian mountains. Van Richten suspects that the Dusk Elf Kasimir Velikov harbors his own plans against Strahd and wants the party to learn what those plans may be. The party greets Kasimir at the mouth of an ancient temple and he asks that they follow him inside. Madame Eva is waiting for the adventurers and reads their fortune yet again, hinting at the hiding place of the Holy Symbol of Ravenkind. Once found in the Amber Temple, the Symbol of Ravenkind can be used as a weapon in the fight against Strahd.
The ornate, arabesque doors of pure amber leading to Temple’s many chambers are magically sealed and can only be unlocked with cryptic phrases hidden on parchments found throughout the enormous structure. The walls of the Temple are lined with the sarcophagi of entombed wizards, waiting for intruders; Amber Golem guardians shield the Temple’s secret treasures from robbers and interlopers. The location of the Symbol of Ravenkind will be different depending on the single card drawn by Madame Eva at the start of the quest and may require exploring the entire temple’s multiple floors to locate it.
The Light of the Land
With the Holy Symbol of Ravenkind in hand, the party travel to van Richten’s Tower (https://curseofstrahd-matt.obsidianportal.com/wikis/van-richtens-tower) on Lake Baratok in the northwest where the final four quests in the third story-arc are bestowed by Ezmerelda D’Avenir, the apprentice vampire hunter. The four quests in ‘The Light of the Land’ story-arc are as follows: ‘The Final Vintage’, ‘Wrath of the Earth’, ‘Ravens’ Bane’, and ‘Sunrise’. The coming showdown with Strahd quickly approaches.
Ezmerelda reveals to the party that she has found records of a weapon known as the Sunsword which may be kept at The Abbey of Saint Markovia. As a sentient, good-aligned weapon, the Sunsword’s special purpose is to destroy Strahd von Zarovich. Ireena Kolyana had previously left for the Abbey at the beginning of the second story-arc, but has not returned since and the Abbey is now closed to visitors as new shipments of wine stopped arriving months ago.
Ezmerelda asks that the party seek out the Wizard of Wines vineyard west of Vallaki and question Davian Martikov, the winery owner, as to why the wine shipments to the Abbey ceased.
Davian tells the party that evil Druids from Yester Hill and their monstrous allies have attacked the winery and stolen the last of the Martikov family’s magic gems. The gems were previously buried in the soil of the vineyard and provided the family’s grapes with a sparkling, sunlit flavor which made the wines extraordinary to those who drank them. Davian says that his daughter, Stefania, is still in the winery and is trying to come up with an antidote to the Druids’ poisons that now contaminate the winery’s storage vats.
The party must search the winery and its cellar for the ingredients to the antidote and then purify the Martikov family’s remaining stores of wine. Along the way, many Druids and their humanoid plant creatures attempt to thwart the party in its mission.
Ezmerelda tells the party that she knows one of the Martikov family’s gems was stolen by the Druids of Yester Hill, which rests at the very edge of Strahd’s domain. The party is to go to the Druids’ hilltop lair and attempt to recover the purloined gem. The Strahd-worshipping Druids can be heard chanting from among the standing stones high on the hilltop and the quest-giver Grilsha Targolova urges the party to stop their vile ritual and retrieve the magical gem.
The final encounter in the quest is a confrontation with the Archdruid and his unnatural summons brought forth from the barren soil near Castle Ravenloft. The party finds the stolen gem hidden inside a towering wooden effigy of the Count, mounted on a broad tree stump overlooking the Druids’ place of adoration.
After getting back the first gem from Yester Hill, Ezmerelda tells the party that she knows the whereabouts of the second stolen gem. Ezmerelda and the Keepers of the Feather have tracked the remaining gem to the ruined village of Berez, having been taken there by the wicked crone Baba Lysaga. The abandoned village rests by banks of the Luna River and is stalked by Baba Lysaga’s Scarecrow constructs, so recovering the gem will be perilous.
The party meets Muriel Vinshaw at the gates of the Ruins of Berez and she warns them that several Wereraven scouts have been captured by Baba Lysaga and need to be rescued. Long ago, Count Strahd flooded the defiant villagers using his supernatural control of the Barovian lands; what remains of the village today is surrounded by a fetid swamp and shelters the magically-warded home of the Hag Baba Lysaga. The party finds the second gem inside Baba Lysaga’s Hut which – it turns out – has a life of its own.
The denouement of this tale of vampires and vampire hunters takes at the Abbey of Saint Markovia. Ezmerelda greets the party one final time at van Richten’s Tower and asks them to find Ireena Kolyana at the entrance to the Abbey. Ireena should be there waiting for our heroes, anticipating the recovery of the venerable Sunsword which may be hidden somewhere within the Abbey’s walls. Ezmerelda promises to follow soon after and will meet the party inside the Abbey.
Upon meeting her in front of the Abbey’s imposing doorway, Ireena tells the party of a vision she had of a man who may have been Strahd’s long-dead brother, Sergei. The man brandished a glowing sword in his hands, which was almost definitely the legendary Sunsword. In this dream, Sergei was standing beside a small pond within the Abbey’s perimeter, at the Shrine of the White Sun.
Ireena beseeches the party to find the Abbot and convince him to let the party (and subsequently Ireena) into the Shrine of the White Sun, but not before locating the Sunsword. Ireena can then confirm that this place is the scene of her strange premonition and help solve the riddle of the missing Sunsword.
The Abbey is guarded by the Belview family, a servant clan of the Abbot’s who the party later learn have become twisted and insane from years of horrid experiments intended to “improve” them. Once inside, the party finds the Abbot in his chapel and inquire about the Sunsword’s whereabouts. The Abbot dismisses the Sunsword as a myth, but requests that the party tour the Abbey and return to him once they are done exploring its environs.
The party finds an inert Sunsword buried on the Abbey grounds, lacking the solar intensity witnessed by Ireena in her dream. After delving the depths of the Abbey’s underground passageways, the party step into a bright light and the outdoor area encompassing the Shrine of the White Sun. Ireena and Ezmerelda both appear, as does…Strahd!
After a pitched battle, Strahd is driven off and the Sunsword is reinvigorated by Sergei’s ghostly presence, setting the stage for the capstone raid at Castle Ravenloft, The Curse of Strahd. Ireena Kolyana is now beyond Strahd’s grasp, at least for the time being. But don’t forget about the Abbot, he has something to show the party…
Saga and Favor Systems
Once all three story arcs have been completed by the party, they may visit Livius Lanston at the Blood on the Vine Tavern to receive the Saga bonuses for completion of the entire pre-raid Ravenloft story. The DDO Saga system rewards players above what is offered for individual quest or raid completions and is dependent on specific story arcs being finished. There are separate Heroic and Epic Sagas for the Ravenloft content, each with different reward options.
Each quest and raid in the Ravenloft expansion also grants Favor to the players, the amount of which depends on the difficulty at which the content is completed. Urwin Martikov, the previously mentioned Keepers of the Feather Patron, offers a variety of gifts for the players’ efforts in a backroom at the Blue Water Inn, including unlocking the Vistani Universal Enhancement Tree for knife fighters upon achieving a high-level Favor tier.
Classic Horror Revisited
When first playing through the three successive story arcs, one discerns how much old storytelling ground is made fresh again with these twelve quests. Not only do the Ravenloft expansion quests adhere faithfully to the pencil and paper D&D source material from Wizards of the Coast’s Curse of Strahd adventure, the quests also touch upon many of the prominent tropes found in the vampire and other horror literary and film genres. From Dracula to The Wolf Man to the classic Hammer studio films, the mood and atmosphere of these quests are an unmistakable homage to the kinds of worlds horror fans have come to love.
Many of the quests contain random elements which will allow players, pug parties, and Guild static groups many hours of replay, with numerous quest optionals to explore – no two runs of a quest may be exactly alike. Madam Eva follows the party throughout the story, appearing at the beginning of certain quests to determine their fates with her Tarokka Deck which then change the quests’ objectives. Madam Eva makes her last appearance before The Curse of Strahd raid which, along with the Baba Lysaga raid Old Baba’s Hut, will be the topic of the third and final article in this series.
]]>Also, some Nintendo gaffs.
]]>I tend to believe CCP operates in good faith, in part because changing your mind in front of a live studio audience tends to be a painful experience and, as noted, makes people mad. It would be much easier to do this in a smoke filled back room and announce the results as edicts not up for discussion. It works for Blizzard.
Anyway, in the grand scheme of things now, CCP has month updates which tend to tune a few things and maybe add a feature, and expansions, which are the vehicle for big changes and spanking new features. Citadels and Alpha accounts go with expansions, ship re-balancing and in-game events and changes to how you blow up a citadel go with updates.
But now I am looking at the mounting number of things planned for the March update and it seems like a lot. There isn’t any single item that seems out of scope for the above rules. Rather, there are so many things with such impact that it is starting to feel like more than an update.
First there was a dev blog about ship balance changes that opened with these two points that came out of the recent CSM summit:
So, yes, both the Mach and the Ferox are taking a hit. I always feel a bit sad for the Ferox when it gets knocked down as it was, for a long stretch, completely nonviable in the fleet meta where Drakes and Hurricanes ruled back in the day. But now it is on the decline.
Meanwhile CCP has been trying to beat down the Mach for a while now, reducing the blueprint copy drops and boosting the cost to make them. But the Russians have been farming those blueprints for so long that the supply is effectively endless. As for raising the cost to make… do you even read the monthly economic report bro? So CCP is now set to clip its wings a bit hoping to push this faction battleship back towards being a rare bling-mobile rather than its current status as a ship of the line for nearly every major coalition.
There were other ships getting specific tweaks while tech 1 battleships got an across the board boost:
Because why not I guess.
The dev blog also introduced the Flag cruiser concept, a hardened FC ship, in response to the ongoing drone about FC headshotting. (A topic covered for Blog Banter 76 a couple years back.)
You can see the proposed stats, as well as the community response, in this forum thread. The debate is heated and one common item that keeps coming up is the lack of a way for an FC on this ship to get on kill mails. We shall see where this ends up. Right now it seems like a niche ship for very specific circumstances.
While that was still in the air another note came from CCP about removing the built-in voice chat from EVE Online. This is apparently another item in the way of a 64-bit client. Built-in voice chat was very much the thing a decade back and CCP, like SOE and a few others, went to Vivox for an integration. (I found out at GDC that the Vivox people came from the same speech/voice corner of tech I have dwelt in for most of my career.) EVE Voice came in with the Revelations expansion back in November 2006 (high level list of features on the EVE Uni Wiki, but the actual Revelations 1.0 patch notes for the release went missing with the update to the community site) and has been lightly used ever since, with CCP declaring that only 0.4% of the players giving it a shot. Of course, we’re finding out now who depends on it, but for the most part you were more likely to use the captain’s quarters than EVE Voice.
Then there was word of a new chat back end coming with the March update. CCP will move to a centralized independent chat service that should make things better for somebody. Currently one of the ways to improve your client performance in a big fleet fight is to close Local, even when TEST isn’t involved. Maybe this will help with that, though it sounds like it won’t change anything you dislike about the in-game part of the chat system.
Then a huge dev blog dropped… huge if you’re in null sec at least… about changes to entosis, tethering, and a 95% reduction in jump fatigue. This was greeted with both cheers and speculation as to whether or not all of CCP had been replaced by pod people or something, this being a heady and unexpected change.
The jump fatigue change, a game mechanic introduced with the Phoebe update in late 2014 because null sec was stagnant and needed a change, will drop the cap for overall fatigue (blue timer) from 4 days to 5 hours and the jump clock (orange timer) from a maximum of 9.6 hours to 30 minutes… because, no doubt, null sec is stagnant and needs a change.
Will 30 minutes be enough of a roadblock to keep titan fleets from ranging across the map, moving from citadel to citadel in great packs? Or will the jump range limitations that came in with jump fatigue be enough? As I tend to say, we shall see.
Finally, in what I suspect is the final package of things for the March release, there was also a forum post of “little things” to be addressed. The list, as it stands right now:
My favorite on the list is the ability to see the ship type that broadcasts for reps. It isn’t that I don’t love you support frigates in the fleet, but I really need to keep DPS, my fellow logi, and the FC alive, after which I might have time to spare a couple of rep cycles for you.
Color coding the watch list will be good as well. Currently I have a stack order for FC, main anchor, snowflakes, logi anchor, and cap chain partners that can get a little mixed up when things go sideways.
Anyway, as I was getting at a thousand words or so back, this seems like a lot for a monthly update. It lacks a big anchor feature to make it an expansion, but for an update it has a lot of chewy goodness packed in.
Finally, I suspect that these updates coming now, after the winter CSM summit, are not a coincidence. Good job CSM12! I suspect that this update will feature in a few re-election campaigns. But my real question is, does this mean having Sort Dragon speak up constantly during meetings is a good thing? His name comes up a lot in the minutes.
]]>One of the facets that I regret about MMOs is that all of this attention and artistry is paid to enemy mobs that we never really get to examine up close because, you know, of all of the frantic flailing and killing on both sides. So when you get a chance to take a selfie with a friendly mummy, by gum, you DO IT. I’m calling this one “Fred.”
So last Friday evening, we assembled a group to run a couple of Dungeons and Dragons Online dungeons for MJ’s stream at Massively OP. It was MJ, myself, and a few members of Onedawesome, the old Massively DDO guild that still survives — somehow! — to this day.
On tap for that evening was a pair of House P quests. I’ve already done these, but what the heck, it’s always more fun with a group. First up with The Tear of Dhakaan, a “very long” quest that was still a better pick than the team’s first suggestion, which was The Pit. I will never, ever go back to The Pit. The Pit is where my first soul got lost and is still wandering around without hope.
With a full team and on normal mode, we cruised through the dungeon without much difficulty. To be fair, it wasn’t one of DDO’s more brain-bending missions; just a lot of killing and dead hobgoblins. We admired the hobgoblins’ underground dwellings and looted with wild abandon. I was also fully obnoxious with my crossbow. Its fwip-fwip-fwip sound probably continues to ring in my party’s ears.
Hail to the queens, baby!
Then we swung over to the Golden Wing Inn to pick up The Faithful Departed. This was a mis-labeled “medium” quest that really was more “long” than anything, and I remember from the one big twist of trying to keep these Venerated mummies alive in the middle of a firefight. The trick this time around was to de-summon hirelings and pets, because they don’t differentiate between good and bad combatants.
Status effects were the bane of the evening. In the first quest, some of us got shot up with a Ray of Enfeeblement, which instantly made us too weak to carry all of the stuff in our bags. When that happens — because DDO has a weight limit — you really can’t do anything other than move around. You can’t attack, you can’t cast spells, nothing. You’re a helpless babe until the effect wears off.
Then in the second quest was a whole lot of blindness. I got zapped with this twice, and for two-and-a-half minutes each, I was just following the minimap on a dark screen like the dead weight that I was. Sure, my other senses were heightened, but those other senses were mostly “hunger” and “Netflix.” Not very helpful in a group situation.
If you’re so inclined (and bored), you can watch me play through the whole thing in this video:
]]>A little over a month back Trion World’s put out their producer’s letter for Rift in which they were explicitly eyeing the seemingly evergreen fields of video game nostalgia with a mind towards making a few bucks on the idea. Leave it to Trion to jump on the nostalgia bandwagon only after Blizzard began lumbering in that direction with WoW Classic. We may not be in Azeroth anymore, but the influence of that world can always be felt across the genre.
Anyway, the plan was for something called Rift Prime, a nostalgia server set to follow the well trod path that EverQuest has been going down with increasing frequency over the last decade. As with the well honed EverQuest model, the basic plan put forward back then would be a server with vanilla content (with some adjustment to the easier to access dials and switches to make the current state of play seem a bit more retro) that would unlock expansion content over time, and which would be available only to subscribers… excuse me, patrons… which would allow Trion to remove much of the cash shop gimmickry that otherwise pays the bills on the standard live servers. All of this, and some other vague statements, were slated to become reality in “Spring of 2018” according to the producer’s letter.
While you may have noticed the rising tide of sarcasm up to this point, let me assure you I was, and remain, in full approval of this idea. While I’d be interest to know whether the idea of Blizzard soon taking up every last seat on the nostalgia bus or the building backlash against lockboxes might have set Trion on this path, that is mostly idle curiosity. That it is happening is the the real thing, the coin of the realm, and I am on board with it.
And spring seemed like a good time frame for me last month. I was still enamored with Azeroth and pet battles and what not, and expected to remain so for another few months or so before tiring of it. The launch could have been quite a while coming, as late as the front half of June, as we will recall from the Landmark Spring launch that came about on June 10, 2016. Massively OP tried to make that something to complain about, but in the northern hemisphere summer is generally accepted to start on the solstice, not on June 1st. A cabal of astrophysicists and calendar makers have made this a thing. Trion just had to get there between March 20 and June 21st.
So when yesterday I saw the announcement that Rift Prime would launch on March 7, 2018, my second thought was, “That’s not spring!”
I know that seems more than a bit pedantic, especially in California where is can get “spring-ish” in February, but I have been trained by years of working in software that an estimate like “spring” generally means as far into spring as you can get away with… like June 10th… the same way that “the middle of the month” means any day save the first or the last of a given month and “in a future release” means a point in time somewhere before the heat death of the universe. Nothing is ever early.
This mattered to me because, as noted, I am still invested in WoW right now and I hate to dump a game I am enjoying for some new variable. A bird in the hand is worth a pig in a poke and all that. And few things can rain on playing another MMO than currently having fun playing WoW.
My first though was, “Oh, hey, that’s my birthday.” I’m not sure if that is a sign or not.
Anyway, I am as ready as I can be I suppose. After the producer’s letter I went and got the Glyph launcher, now considerably more trim since it let go of its Steam aspirations, figured out my login credentials, downloaded and patched Rift, then actually logged in. So I am ready on that front. I still need to buy my way into patron status… subscribe… to get access to Rift Prime, but that shouldn’t be a problem.
But do I want to play?
As mentioned, still being invested in WoW is an issue. I’m on the downside of the usual WoW high and, while not ready to walk away just this minute, it wouldn’t be a tragedy if I did. It might be better if I walked off still hungry for a bit more Azeroth.
Meanwhile, to get in on day one of a new server can be a special thing in and of itself. And Rift’s world, or at least the initial content from launch, was made up of a set of very well designed zones that I really enjoyed the first time through… and the second and the third and the fourth time. So I am good there.
Not everything will be as it was. As the Rift Prime FAQ points out:
RIFT Prime will not be an exact copy of launch RIFT, and certain features that were added to RIFT to expand gameplay or improve quality of life will be available from day one. These include: Dimensions, Looking for Group, Looking for Raid, current Warfronts, and Wardrobes.
Instant adventures is off the table however. That’s okay, IA was something of a “keep people busy while we get some new content out” sort of thing.
The server will also have level scaling for zones, so if you wander into a lower level zone you haven’t finished up, you’ll be scaled down to the level of the content. No running about one-shotting everything. Good as well.
There will be a cash shop, but it won’t offer gear or bags or lockboxes for the RMT currency. There will just be cosmetics, mounts, and services available. However, if you already have Rift Credits on your account… I have a bunch left from the F2P transition… you won’t be able to use them. There will be special Prime Credits for this server, though when the server closes any Prime Credits you have will become normal Rift Credits.
The FAQ says that they expect the server to run for at least a year, which after so much exposure to the mighty mountain of expansion unlocks that come with an EverQuest retro server, seems like a very short time horizon. but Rift just doesn’t have that much to unlock.
And maybe a year is good. Honestly, I am not interested in going into Storm Legion or beyond, the zone design there being the antithesis of the what I enjoyed about the launch zones. So that would leave me playing for a few months before wandering off. I don’t need a server to last more than a year to get what I am looking for. And if it is a success, the shorter duration will likely lead to more such servers.
And, of course, Trion is selling a special Rift Primogenitor Pack in their web store for $30, which gets you the following:
Essentially, if you buy it all just for yourself, you’re getting two months of Patron access for about the same price as two months of Patron access, with a few goodies thrown in to sweeten the deal.
So I am leaning in favor of this. I am not totally sold, but I have two weeks to decide. And since I am crashing from my typing binge, I’ll close with a poll about this:
Take Our PollThere is a poll above this line which, if you don’t see it, might have been eaten by ad block or Firefox or Russian troll bots.
]]>(This is part of my journey going playing through Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords. You can follow the entire series on the Retro Gaming page.)
With appearances in KOTOR, KOTOR 2, and SWTOR, Korriban is one of the very few locations to be visited in all three Old Republic games to date. As I’ve never been this far in KOTOR 2 before, I’ve never seen this game’s version yet, but I assume it’s a lot of repurposed maps from the first title.
It is, indeed, a very familiar planet to my SWTOR eyes, and a very short one as well. The big bad on this planet is Darth Scion, the craggy scarred Sith who looks to be in dire need of moisturizer. After picking our way through the valley of the tombs (in KOTOR 2, these tombs are not explorable), I find my way to a dark side cave.
This is kind of interesting, actually. If you ever thought the dark caves in Empire or Last Jedi were a keen peek into how the Force works, at least you get a small taste of that here as well. I guess if you’re a light side player, you can view this as a test for your character, and if you’re a dark side player, this is… basically a vacation resort? I was never clear on that.
The cave is essentially these illusionary setpieces with notable figures. First there is pre-jaw-ripped-off Malak from the first game giving a pep talk to troops. Then Kreia shows up and everyone calls her out on how evil she is, which is what we call in the biz “foreshadowing.”
And there is a fight with Revan, which presents an existential crisis for players who were that character in the first game. He still looks hecka cool here.
After that is the Sith Academy, another reprise from the first game. Like Dantooine, it’s no longer a learning facility but just a dungeon crawl. A pretty enjoyable one, all things considered, but nothing more.
We do find Master Vash dead in a cell, so I guess I don’t get to kill my allotted planetary Jedi. I found it bizarrely humorous how Vash’s corpse has a lightsaber on her, which mean that she could have carved her way out of here and fought. Maybe she had a death wish.
After that, it’s a way-too-quick confrontation with Scion. It’s supposed to be this nerve-wracking confrontation, but you don’t get to kill him because Kreia telepathically yanks you out of there saying that he’s too dangerous. Speak for yourself, sister.
Back on the ship, we get a call urging us to come back to Onderon. Meanwhile, Kreia is shown stalking crew members while invisible. I’m sure the twist will be that she’s really a good guy in the end. Maybe the taller version of Yoda.
]]>Earlier this month I wrote up a post challenging myself to stop skimming or ignoring the quest text and just read it, already. It seems to be one of those MMO facets that a lot of us have struggled with, if the comments on that post were any indication. One reader did suggest an interesting strategy, at least for World of Warcraft, which was to install the Immersion mod to draw more attention to quest text.
Sounded like a good idea! So I gave it a try for a few days and found it… OK, I guess. Immersion replaces the standard text window with a few semi-transparent windows that puts the quest dialogue right next to an animated portrait of the NPC questgiver. It did make it a little more readable, but I found that I was always fumbling for what to click and where the different options were, as choices were often put on the right side of the screen.
Still, I didn’t want to give up on this concept, and so I took another suggestion — this one from a WoW YouTube host — to try out Catch the Wind. What this mod does is that any time you get into a quest dialogue situation, it grabs camera control and then puts a letterbox over your screen, with the quest text gradually appearing at a somewhat readable pace on the bottom to mimic subtitles.
I was instantly impressed with this. I found myself naturally reading the quest text without having to make myself do it, just by a few cinematic tricks. It also keeps the visuals on the character and the world without covering them up with giant boxes in the middle of the screen. Even the choices, like “accept” and “goodbye” are shown in a subtle, natural fashion on the bottom. I’m going to give it a few more days of evaluation, but so far, I think this might be the choice for me.
I can only imagine what a similar mod would do with the mountain of quest text that, say, LOTRO presents. Maybe an audiobook narration by Ian McKellen? I would pay for that upgrade.
]]>The question of the week wasn’t whether or not Black Panther was going to dominate the box office, but rather which day would be optimum to play. With the opening of a blockbuster on a holiday weekend (President’s Day in the US) there ended up being four different ways to play Black Panther, one for each day.
Black Panther (FRI) $501 Black Panther (SAT) $451 Black Panther (SUN) $348 Black Panther (MON) $220 Peter Rabbit $186 Fifty Shades Freed $155 Jumanji $87 The 15:17 to Paris $68 The Greatest Showman $51 Early Man $49 The Maze Runner $39 Samson $32 Winchester $31 The Post $26 The Shape of Water $25
I bounced around with a few possible variations, with Friday generally as my anchor. My past reluctance to back Friday night on split weeks was tempered when I found out that Thursday night previews get included in that number. It still isn’t an automatic choice, but it is definitely in the running.
But given the hype around Black Panther Friday did seem like a decent choice. I started out with that, Peter Rabbit, and six screens of Early Man. I wasn’t sold on that, with the main question being whether or not Peter Rabbit would out-do Black Panther’s Sunday take. Things often slow down come Sunday for a new release, with the truly interested having gotten in on the first few nights.
However, as the week went along the estimates for Black Panther kept creeping up, so I started looking into how to get more of that into my lineup. I played with various combos of Saturday and Sunday, but steered clear of Monday believing, as the pricing indicated, that interest would have slackened some even on a holiday weekend.
As often happens, I didn’t settle on my final pick until Friday morning. I waited to see what they were saying about the Thursday night previews. Those were strong enough that I wanted Friday in my pick along with at least one additional day. I ended up with Friday, Sunday, and six screens of The Shape of Water which was not only a selection mentioned in TAGN chatter but the same pick my wife made for our home league the night before.
Then the time was up, picks were locked, and I could see what everybody else went with. I shared my pick with two other people, I HAS BAD TASTE and Logan, and was off by one screen from Corr, but there was some variety in picks especially in the TAGN league where all four days of Black Panther were anchors for somebody.
Then as the weekend passed the estimates started to roll in. On Saturday it looked like Friday was the good choice for anchor. On Sunday it was mixed. By Monday the Sunday box office looked to make that day the best performer. Then there was the question as to how well Monday would do. I wrote in the chatter for the TAGN league that if Monday went crazy and hit $40 million then Darren, who anchored on four screens of Monday, would have a great week.
And, of course, Monday turned in a box office of $40.15 million, making it the anchor for the perfect pick of the week, which was four screens of Monday, one screen of The 15:17 to Paris, two screens of The Post, and one empty screen.
To show how wild the week was, the summary says that only four people got the perfect pick, and I only see three people with that pick in the overall FML League. This was a tough week to forecast compared to a few weeks back when nearly a thousand people got the perfect pick.
Darren had four screens of Monday and four screens of The Shape of Water, so did not get perfect, but it was enough for him to dominate the Meta League scores for the week.
The Meta League Legend:
Darren was almost $20 million out in front of the pack, followed up by a group of three in the $155 million range, who all steered clear of the dead weight that Friday turned out to be. And then things taper down, with the last three being people who only picked a single screen of Black Panther. Basically, the more Black Panther you had, the better you did.
That led to a bit of change in the overall season rankings.
Corr managed to edge up a bit closer to Ben, so the race for first place is still on with less than an $8 million gap between the two of them.
The single screen of Black Panther picked for Biyondios! Kabuki & Cinema let me pull back into third place and, while my position is not unassailable, my next pick has to be bad, or Pak has to ace his pick, for me to lose it. As we saw this week, a $20 million margin isn’t impossible.
Two people were dropped from the scoring totals, Liore and the Filthy Fleapit due to both having failed to pick for three weeks over the course of the season.
All of which leads us to the final week of the season.
Black Panther (SAT) $534 Black Panther (SUN) $395 Black Panther (FRI) $334 Game Night $201 Peter Rabbit $167 Annihilation $154 Fifty Shades Freed $100 Jumanji $87 The 15:17 to Paris $62 The Greatest Showman $55 Every Day $45 Early Man $26 The Maze Runner $17 The Post $16 The Shape of Water $15
This week Winchester, Samson, and the Monday option for Black Panther fell off of the list.
Replacing those are three new films on the list, Game Night, Annihilation, and Every Day. But none of them are going to be big enough to assail Black Panther this weekend or, looking at that pricing, even a single day of Black Panther this weekend. That means Black Panther remains split into three days.
Friday, being a work day and lacking the bonus of Thursday night previews this time around, is the lowest priced on the list. Saturday is expected to be the big day, so you can only have one screen of that, with Sunday expected to be closer to Friday in take. So it again looks like a question of how many screens of Black Panther can you get?
This being the last week of the season, next week’s post will be the final scores. My plan has been to then skip the Spring season and come back with a series of posts for the roller coaster of the Summer blockbuster season. However, I thought I would take a poll about it. Doing the posts themselves every week isn’t a big deal. I know I am writing them every week and it can be very much a template to fill out with some commentary around it. But I am not sure that makes for exciting reading week after week. So, a poll!
Take Our PollEither way I will still pick every week for Spring, so the TAGN League will be alive. I will put a link in the comments after this post goes live that will let you join the league. You do need to go create an account at Fantasy Movie League to play and, as I recall, it is marginally easier if you do that first, then join the league.
]]>Well, it had to happen sooner or later in Final Fantasy XIV: I met Hildibrand.
I didn’t go into this completely unwary and uninformed; I had heard of the legend of this bizarre character for a couple of years now and had made a mental note to do his quests if I ever came back to the game. Well, I’m back and am giving myself a break from the elves and dragons of Heavensward by running through some of his quest lines.
I wasn’t unwary. But I wasn’t fully prepared, either.
To those who haven’t played FFXIV, Hildibrand might charitably be described as a private detective who serves as comedic relief. More accurately, he might be described as some sort of LSD-injected Scooby Doo dream that will pretty much leave your jaw unhinged and your eyebrows permanently raised during any encounters. I mean, I thought I was inoculated against Japanese weirdness, but that country keeps on surprising me.
I ran through the first four quests (Patch 2.1) last week, meeting up with Hildibrand (or “Hildy,” as my guildies are wont to call him) as he begins the series dead in a grave but not really dead because he’s a zombie but not a normal zombie no he’s a GENTLEMAN zombie who is influencing all of the other zombies to dress and act well. Also, he’s not a zombie, he just thinks he is. He also has an ADD assistant who is, for some reason, obsessed with pumpkins and explosives.
During this introduction, I found myself absolutely flabbergasted and unable to fully process how I should feel about this. I mean, half of me felt like this was the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen in an MMO. The other half was strangely amused and even laughed on occasion. It’s just so… so… cheesy and cartoonish as it breaks the fourth wall of the game and embraces slapstick comedy with wanton abandon. I was kind of impressed at all of the expressions and actions that the devs worked into these cutscenes.
The running joke is that Hildy is a buffoon and a completely ineffectual investigator even as he somehow stumbles into success time and again. It’s not new territory (see: Pink Panther, Inspector Gadget, etc.) but it does give a different approach to this fantasy world. And the player is allowed in on the joke by enjoying the comments of everyone around this character who keeps calling him out on his inanity.
Although I really, really, really could have done without the quest during which I had to keep rubbing oil onto Hildibrand’s semi-naked body so that he could go for a dip in a one-foot-deep pond. Could have done without his comments, too.
Probably the weirdest thing about him is that he keeps striking these two muscle flex poses that are used over and over again (if nothing else, this game does love reusing poses). I asked a friend why he does this, and I was told, “If you got it, flaunt it.” OK then.
The rewards aren’t great, at least not so far, but I’m willing to forgo monetary compensation if I’m given a good story. And so far, at least I’m not bored with this jackanape.
]]>Like such events before it, Guardian’s Gala is embedded in the structure of The Agency. However, the grasp of The Agency has grown since I last spent some time on an event. The Lifeblood expansion back in October expanded The Agency from an event framework to the “everything PvE” vision CCP had for it. So rather than the event being its own thing it is now jammed in the frame with all things PvE though, if you haven’t hidden it already, you will get some event info on screen.
Having read the event preview over at The Nosy Gamer, I had a good idea as to what ship I might bring. With the NPCs warping in on top of you it reminded me of the Warzone Extraction event from last September. I grabbed the same alt that I ran those with along with the same ship, a passive tanked Drake.
I swapped out the resistance amplifiers to explosive and kinetic flavors in order to match the expected damage and, after one run, swapped the Scourge heavy assault missiles out for normal Scourge heavy missiles along with a target painter to improve damage application.
I’ll paste my crappy fit into a comment on the post if you’re interested… and if I remember. I don’t recommend this fit particularly, I just happened to have it sitting around handy and my alt has all the skills for it maxed out. I also cheaped out and shot plain T1 missiles, though I brought some faction missiles along just in case.
As with the Warzone event, the sites are all over New Eden and when you arrive in a site the NPCs have a propensity for warping in on top of you so you aren’t going to pull range and kite. Unlike the other event, you won’t get warp scrambled or have your capacitor drain. But you will be webbed many times over by the frigates in the site while the cruisers will sit at range with target painters on you blazing away. That range turned out to be “just beyond my heavy assault missiles engagement envelope” which is why I dropped the HAMs for HMLs. With heavy missiles my alt can hit out to 78km and, since I wasn’t neuted, I could run a target painter to help clean up the frigates.
The goal seems to be to slaughter as many hostiles as it takes… the number seems to be about 20 or so.. in order to draw out the guest of honor, so-called, who arrives in a battleship or a battlecruiser. You then chase that down, blow it up, and you’re done with the site.
You are seriously done, because any leftover NPCs align out and warp off at that point. You lose lock on them even before they’ve entered warp.
Anyway I took to shooting the frigates primarily because with the target painter they only required three missile salvos and the less ships slowing me down with webs the better in my book. Meanwhile the sig of my fat ass Drake, boosted by shield extenders, was probably big enough that the cruisers painting me made no difference at all to damage being applied to me. So a double win, frigs died faster and in doing so removed something slowing me down in completing the site.
Site rewards come from the wrecks, the primary source being the battleship/battlecruiser who has, for me at least, dropped a SKIN and a learning accelerator with every round. The smaller ships also have loot, though more often than not it is metal scraps which are hardly worth the effort.
So, in general, easy-peasy. Warp in, shoot small stuff until the big guy shows up, shoot him, profit.
The details are where things get a bit more messy.
For openers, this seems like a good way to kill new players. It isn’t as deadly as the Warzone Extraction event, because this one doesn’t lock you down with a warp scrambler so you can escape… and being webbed will get you to warp more quickly… but things can still go sideways fast if you’re not prepared. My alt with max shield skills and a passive fit Drake that regenerates at 188 DPS won’t have an issue, but somebody wandering into a site with their level 2 mission cruiser may be in for a rude awakening.
But do we care? If we judge who the event is for based on the level of effort required, then it is something for canny PvE veterans I suppose. It does seem to require people who can manipulate the overview because, as usual, the NPCs are unselected by default.
Then there is the open nature of the event. Anybody can see the sites on their overview… even if the ships themselves might not show up because CCP… and can warp on in at any time. And if somebody shows up and gets the last hit on the special end ship, then they get the loot. Or, if they can get to the wreck of the last ship before you do and loot it, it is theirs unless you’re ready to take them on in a fight. That is just the special nature of EVE Online, where you are never fully able to play away from your fellow capsuleers. I went off to a remote area to run the sites and still had this happen to me once. I can only image how this is playing out a few jumps from the crowd in Jita.
And then there is the whole point system that events in The Agency use to distribute additional rewards. This time around they are not too bad in that they are mostly in line with what you are going to do anyway, which is run sites and shoot NPCs.
You earn ten points for killing, in sequence, 5, 10, 50, and then 100 of the small fry, ten points for finishing a site and then a couple of sites, and ten points for killing 1, 2, 5, then 10 of the loot pinatas at that end the site. I managed 80 points my first night out, though I was thwarted twice on that last set, once when somebody showed up and destroyed the boss ahead of me and once when the boss got bored and warped off. I’d read that they might warp off and that I should be patient, but after 10 minutes I figured he wasn’t coming back and that I’d been denied rewards and progress yet again.
The second night I passed 100 points and earned my first reward.
Of course, that would have been a lot more impressive if I hadn’t already looted 1,700 Angels Arisen Fireworks already. To get the next reward I need 300 points and, frankly, the event isn’t that much fun.
Of course, somebody out there is going to be obsessed with the ISK per hour measure of the event, so let me see if I can help on that front.
I timed myself on a couple of sites and it took about 15 minutes to complete and loot in my slow old Drake; extending out to maybe 20 mins if I bumbled my efforts to pick up loot along the way. With a better ship/fit than mine you could easily cut that back some. On the other hand, you also have to find a site. I was pretty lucky out in my area of operation, being the only one in local and having a new site ready every time I finished. Still, let’s be conservative and call it two sites an hour.
I got 250-300K ISK for just shooting things up. I think shooing the cruisers more than the frigates could boost that, but whatever.
You get the skill booster which, depending on which one you get, is worth 15-50 million ISK.
And then there is the SKIN, which is the real wildcard. I imagine the right SKIN would get you some ISK. The problem is that the market is currently flooded with the Spirit SKINs that drop, all the more so because they are the same SKIN that dropped last year, only they changed the name of the set so I thought for a moment it might be a new SKIN.
But it isn’t.
It is still a good SKIN. Not as good as a new, hot pink SKIN would be, but good. In some cases, it is the best looking SKIN that you can find for a few ships. But it is pretty common so it might be something to save until after the selling frenzy settles down.
The most valuable one I got was probably the Gallente Shuttle SKIN, which you cannot even list on the market. You have to sell it via contract, a complication that means that there isn’t much competition for it. But even then, you might get 10 million ISK or so, which isn’t all that much, and which requires somebody to know that the SKIN exists and that it is only available via contracts.
I’ll probably keep it just to add to my collection.
Otherwise the next most valuable SKIN I got was for a Phoenix dreadnought, which might be good for 6 million ISK on a lucky day.
And then there are fireworks. I got a lot of fireworks off of wrecks. And metal scraps. So many metal scraps. And then there was the odd ship module now and again, some of which were useful.
All told, if the odds were ever in your favor, you could bring in upwards of 100 million ISK per hour with optimum drops. But that seems unlikely. Reality is probably closer to 30 million ISK per hour, and that is indirect because you have to schlep back to a market hub to sell your loot.
Basically, you shouldn’t stop ratting in your super carrier to run off and harvest the bounty of Guardian’s Gala. All the SKINs and learning accelerators you want will be on the market in Jita waiting for you and your ISK to show up.
Even my dank 10-18 million ISK ticks in my little Ishtar are a better value as I get that and all the loot and salvage as well.
But as a distraction from whatever you’re doing in New Eden currently Guardian’s Gala probably isn’t the worst thing you could choose. And you might even get a SKIN or two that you want. And it makes for a few nice screen shots.
]]>The gunblade! The gunblade lives in Closers! I’m having crazy flashbacks of Final Fantasy VIII right now.
For this week’s MMO experiment, I took a dip in Closers Online, or as its western version is simply named, Closers. It’s an eastern import being run by the “action combat” kings, En Masse. I thought the cel shaded anime style looked pretty attractive and liked the idea of something that wasn’t outright fantasy. So why not? Free-to-play and all.
The (subtitled) story here is that aliens from another dimension are wreaking havoc all over the world, and a team of teenage “Closers” are brought in to put an end to it with their psychic powers. Why just teenagers? Because we have a demographic to appeal to, fool! I went with the pink haired, dual knives-using Sylvia as a shout-out to my friend Syl. Also, she had the least heaving bosom out of all of the female characters.
While “MMO” may be slapped somewhere on this product, Closers is really just a lobby game that has the option to both solo and join up with groups for very linear stages. There’s no exploration, no real variety here, just a whole lot of beat-em-up action with combos, light shows, and flashy numbers popping out every which way.
Although Closers is pretty to witness, especially in action, it’s not the most user friendly of games. For starters, the control scheme is fully keyboard and fully awkward. You use the arrow keys (not WASD) to move and a handful of keys at the bottom left to activate jump (which isn’t the spacebar), attacks, and specials. I had such a hard time trying to reprogram my finger memory to it that I ended up simply mashing things to make the bad guys die. When I could manage it, I did some pretty impressive chain attacks in the air, but that wasn’t often.
The other issue I had right off the bat was the method of tutorial delivery, which took place in the form of endless windows and on-screen diagrams that couldn’t be removed. When you’re in the middle of frantic combat, you don’t want pop ups distracting you. I think there was a story buried in the middle of this, but the game went overboard frontloading information and equipment and do this and learn this and master this and… pfft. I just started clicking through things until I got to a new stage to actually play the game.
I did get a costume and a pet, so there are a few elements in this game that have some appeal to me. Also, one of my skills allowed me to literally drop a bus on my enemies. The transit authority did not appreciate that, but that’s a small price to pay for one of the coolest moves ever.
OPPAN GANGNAM STYLE
Also, did this city just plaster a giant picture of my team on a skyscraper? That’s a nice gesture, but I’m just level 10 and haven’t really saved anyone outside of the tutorial. Nice thought, though.
I dutifully ran through a few more stages, but to be honest, there isn’t much going on here. It’s all flash and style but little substance, with attractive stages that go from Left to Right until you reach the boss and defeat it. I kind of got my fill with that back in my Mega Man and Super Mario Bros. days, so I feel like I’ve graduated past this sort of fluff.
]]>A couple items… the shields being vulnerable at all times along with the new “low power” mode that removed the armor timer from the mix… were combined to make the removal of citadels easier. You could no longer just leave one sitting unfueled with the vulnerability times set to an awkward hour and expect people to leave it alone because it wasn’t worth the effort.
Or such was the hope.
But any revamp that comes with a flow chart can be a risk in the comprehension department.
Fortunately it seems that the prospect of blowing things up is enough to get people to pay attention and focus. CCP Quant posted a chart showing a huge surge of structure reinforcements the day the Upwell 2.0 changes went live.
Reinforcing Upwell structures was easy now though. You could do it whenever you wanted. The question was whether or not people would follow through.
Looking at zKillboard it appears that they did. The first short timers started to come due on Saturday, Feb. 17, 2018, and if you look at the losses for the various Upwell structure flavors for that date there is a clear uptick in kills.
Astrahus citadels, the most common structure floating around in space, saw a wave of destruction. Looking at losses for recent days, 5-20 seems to be about the range of kills on any given date.
Saturday saw 218 Astrahus kills by my count, most of them being purged from wormhole space. WH space also happens to be the part of space without asset safety so, unlike elsewhere, there is a chance to find a loot pinata. This led wormholers to go after them with gusto I gather.
Likewise, the Raitaru, the other common medium structure, saw 95 blown up on Saturday. Again, this was heavily in WH space.
Other Upwell structures also saw an increase in destruction save for Keepstars and Sotiyos… both are big investments and unlikely to be in low power mode… though nothing close to the above two. even Tataras saw a slight uptick with three going down on Saturday. So op success I suppose. Structures made easier to kill were killed en mass.
After this orgy of destruction it seems as though the pace will slacken. The easy targets have largely been singled out and blow up I imagine. And, aside from those found in WH space, the incentive for blowing up these structures is just kill mails and the joy of seeing something explode. But sometimes that is enough.
Anyway, more things going “boom” in New Eden.
]]>The presentation, done with dry sarcasm, is pretty spot on when it comes to the nature of the game in New Eden. Some of it digs up the usual conflicts about the game like pay to win, balance, null sec being the main point of the game, and the eventual ISK death of the New Eden universe, but it is worth a watch if you’re thinking about finally trying EVE Online.
There is also a video up about the current Guardian’s Gala event and one about ship fitting if you want something on that front.
]]>That will actually put Pandemic Horde up tight against the rest of PanFam who sprawl across Tribute, Tenal, and Vale of the Silent, the latter sharing a border with Geminate. That is probably a good move for them as it makes for a tighter center of mass for PanFam.
Move ops should be fun as people line up to try and catch them exposed on the path to their new home.
But it raises the question of who will move into the vacated space once PH finishes relocating?
Certainly the Guardians of the Galaxy Coalition, led by Darkness, seems a likely candidate. One of their members, Mordus Legion, already holds some space in Pure Blind. But do they want to shepherd that much space?
One of the oft commented upon/complained about aspects of the current situation in null sec is that you do not need to control nearly as much space to have sufficient access to mining and ratting to keep your members happy. The Imperium, for the most part, is fine just in Delve, as the monthly economic report indicates. Farms and fields.
The Initiative went and took much of Fountain when the previous situation there fell apart, not so much out of need as the fact that the space was there to be taken. That put the reach of The Imperium up to the border with Cloud Ring and not so far from Fade and Pure Blind. There went the neighborhood. So PH’s move puts them a bit further from that mess.
Guardians of the Galaxy will no doubt scoop up the remains of Fade, which is small and in which they had maintained a foothold already. The western half of Pure Blind however seems like a lot of space for them to keep an eye on.
And Cloud Ring seems right out. Cloud Ring is already a bit of the Wild West with even some Gallente Faction Warfare pilots, off on a lark, grabbing the Assilot constellation in the region back in September, space that they still hold today.
I guess Cloud Ring could just roll along on its own, but western Pure Blind… GotG either have to take it to cover themselves or get somebody they can deal with to move in. Maybe Tri is looking for a new home?
Then again, Pure Blind isn’t anybody’s favorite region… unless you like to hole up in the NPC in the middle and hot drop on the things. So it will be interesting to see who ends up there and if they will live there or just hold it to keep somebody else from living there.
On the one hand, it is probably good that null sec is now all largely livable space without the useless systems that made people spread out. On the other, if you told me five years ago that there would be chunks of prime, livable null sec that people wouldn’t want to bother with I might have laughed.
Anyway, we will have to see what develops in the hole in the north left by Pandemic Horde’s move.
]]>The story so far, for those wanting a quick summary of my skill point progression over the last decade or so.
Since the last check-in at 180 million I did an attribute remap to chase down some skills not focused on willpower and perception, which covers a spaceship command and a lot of the weapon skills, changing the emphasis to memory and intelligence.
Thanks to the way CCP thinks, I am committed to that remap for a full year, which puts me out to October. You would imagine that a remap token would be something worth selling in the New Eden Store, but that hasn’t occurred to CCP quite yet. They’ll sell skills directly to Alpha clones, but a skill remap would be heresy I guess. So until then I am somewhat gimped if I suddenly need a new ship type trained up or a weapon skill.
Fortunately I have all the sub-cap skills up to IV and many of them to V, so that isn’t too likely.
Anyway, this change was to allow me to wrap up skills around scanning. I was feeling the pain of that after using my alt to scan. He has all the skills up the V and Wilhelm was still languishing with skills at level III of IV. So that was my initial focus.
However, that wasn’t going to take anything like a year so, at this point, scanning skills are all done, pushed up to level V. I haven’t had an opportunity to use them yet, but like so many of the skills I have trained over the years, they are there waiting if I should need them.
That done I started going through and tossing skills on that would be optimized by my remap, or at least not drastically hindered by it.
Spaceship Cmd 61,730,636 (60 of 75)* Gunnery 17,197,141 (36 of 46) Fleet Support 12,896,000 (14 of 15) Drones 12,652,303 (22 of 26)* Missiles 11,111,853 (22 of 26)* Navigation 9,660,314 (13 of 13) Engineering 7,886,130 (15 of 15)* Electronic Sys 7,806,958 (14 of 15)* Armor 6,131,137 (13 of 13) Shields 6,074,039 (12 of 13)* Scanning 5,791,765(7 of 7)* Science 5,714,282 (21 of 39)* Resc Processing 4,756,183 (22 of 28)* Subsystems 4,096,000 (16 of 16)* Trade 3,399,530 (10 of 14)* Targeting 3,207,765 (8 of 8) Neural Enhance. 3,202,510 (7 of 8) Planet Mgmt 1,612,315 (5 of 5) Structure Mgmt 1,446,824 (6 of 6)* Rigging 1,312,395 (10 of 10) Production 1,157,986 (5 of 12) Social 1,130,040 (5 of 9) Corp Mgmt 24,000 (2 of 5) Total ~190,000,000 (345 of 424)
That is a total of 345 skills by my count, up from 338 last time, so somewhere along the line I picked up 7 more skills. Those with an asterisk went up since the last check-in.
Of course, Spaceship Command still reigns supreme as the top category after all these years and, despite the attribute remap, it still went up a bit this time around and a new skill was added. That would be Minmatar Carrier, since the Nidhoggur is the current new hotness in the meta. I don’t own one, but I could get in one and fly it if I had to.
At the top end of the list Gunnery and Fleet Support didn’t get touched, but Drones saw a boost as I started working on the level V versions of fighter skills in order to use tech II fighters with carriers. This was spurred by my going on a capital training op that actually explained how to use fighters in terms I could understand, so I think I can do that now… though I think I already forgot how to send fighters to specific locations using that two-axis command. We’ll see.
A few other slots got minor boosts, but Scanning, as one might expect from what I wrote above, saw the biggest boost overall, jumping over 2.7 million skill points since the last check in. I have all those scanning skills to V now.
All that training upped the count of skills at level V, so my current spread looks like this:
Level 1 - 1 Level 2 - 4 Level 3 - 43 Level 4 - 91 Level 5 - 206
That’s what you get at my end of the training cycle, a lot of skills. As for what to keep training… well… I always have a queue at least two years deep. I have to finish up those fight skills. Then there are things like Neurotoxin Control and Neurotoxin Recovery to enhance my in-game drug usage… all Reavers are Quafe addicts… and others that align with my current attribute selection. There is more than enough there to keep me going through the 200,000,000 mark.
I do wonder how much longer this series of posts will be viable. In part, I wonder when I’ll just be done an start actually training an alt on my account. But mostly I wonder about my ability to get at the data for these posts.
I have used EVE Mon for the data over the years. However, support for it has fallen by the wayside of late and, while it did get an update recently, even if development for it is renewed with some vigor, it still faces the looming cliff of the death of the old API system in the spring.
Come the 8th of May the old API system, along with CREST, will be shut off and only the new-ish ESI API will be left. I get the reasoning and we’ve certainly been given plenty of warning, but it will still mean the death of a number of third party applications that have popped up over the years as the authors decide if it is worth reworking their integration.
That’s the problem with community projects, which make up the bulk of EVE Online tools, they depend on players remaining invested with the game. Once they wander off, support for their tool often stops. I worry that come May 9th we might find something major like DOTLAN EVE Maps has gone missing.
Meanwhile, my experience with the new ESI API system, largely confined to the Neocom II app on my iPad, has been less than stellar. Either that app is messed up or the new interface does not deliver data in an accurate or timely manner. As I noted in my look at that app, it shows me two different skill point totals, neither of which are correct.
Of course, I could just log into the game and dig through my character sheet for the data. However, it doesn’t total up my skills nicely by category the way EVE Mon always has.
Though EVE Mon is fallible as well. It still showed the old 5 subsystems per empire skill plan, but that has been trimmed to 4 now, so it should be 16 total skills for the Subsystem category, not 20. Such is life.
And my alternate choice, EVEBoard, where you can see my character’s skills laid out, also depends on the old API as well, so that won’t help much unless/until they upgrade as well.
So the next milestone is 200,000,000 skill points which, given the usual 7 month cycle, ought to hit at some point in September. We will see then if
]]>First he ate some lettuces and some French beans; and then he ate some radishes…
-Tales of Peter Rabbit
Week eleven has come and gone for our Fantasy Movie League.
The week saw a boost in scores after the Super Bowl slump that was week ten. We saw three new titles show up on the big screen that all had potential as an anchor, Fifty Shades Freed, Peter Rabbit, and The 15:17 to Paris, which were expected, and priced to reflect, landing in the top three spots for the weekend box office.
Fifty Shades Freed $556 Peter Rabbit $276 The 15:17 to Paris $221 Jumanji $126 The Greatest Showman $101 The Maze Runner $83 Winchester $66 The Shape of Water $51 The Post $50 Hostiles $46 12 Strong $43 Den of Thieves $40 Three Billboards $35 I, Tonya $30 Darkest Hour $29
The quest really was just how much each one would take in.
Early in the week there was a forecast post at Variety that predicted Peter Rabbit would pass Fifty Shades, which they suggested would only turn in a $21 million weekend, something that sealed my ongoing suspicion that they post trolling forecasts in order to get page views based on outrage.
As the week went on and literally nobody thought that Fifty Shades would bring in so little, it having an installed based invested in the story, even Variety allowed that it would probably exceed the studios mode modest $33 million prediction. I am not sure who this installed base actually is, never having run into somebody who has anything good to say about the books or the movies, but they are out there. It is a franchise on which Twilight fans look down and to which they seem to feel superior, yet it does okay at the box office, especially overseas.
Peter Rabbit, meanwhile, was the kids picture in a week when there wasn’t much in the way of competition on that front. As with Paddington, I can not recall ever being enchanted with the Beatrix Potter rabbit milieu as a child, the Hundred Acre wood being more my thing, but this Edwardian era bunny retained enough fame that I at least knew who he was sufficiently to mock a middle-school classmate who bore the same name. Still, this felt a bit like the sort of film you drag the kids to because you feel like you should as opposed to there being much in the way of literary merit to be explored.
Then there was The 15:17 to Paris, a Clint Eastwood film that featured the actual soldiers involved in the event reprising their actions from that day on the silver screen. There previews for the film didn’t do much to grab me.
And, finally, on the anchor front, there was the holiday season stalwart Jumanji, which seemed to defy gravity week after week, staying viable as an anchor long after the blockbuster of Star Wars, which came out only a week earlier, fell into the filler category and then off the list of picks altogether.
In the absence of forecasts I thought seven screens of Jumanji, filling the eighth with the similarly buoyant Greatest Showman, might be a viable pick. That was where I started on Monday night. And while I changed my lineup at least a dozen times over the course of the week… I can’t just look at a lineup on the screen, I have to pick it in the FML UI and eyeball it to make it feel real… I ended up back with that come Friday morning.
There were points when it seemed like 15:17 to Paris might be the anchor, or Peter Rabbit might be the key, and one forecast that had numbers that made one screen of Fifty Shades, two screens of 15:17 to Paris, and five empty screens look like a viable pick. But in the end nothing came in that made switch from my initial pick.
15:17 to Paris was under review embargo, which is never a good sign, and declined to have any Thursday night previews.
Peter Rabbit, being a kids film, also didn’t bother with Thursday night previews. I’m not sure what they would have told us in any case. Who brings a kid young enough for that sort of film out on a school night.
Which left Fifty Shades, which did have previews, which were good, but not great, and seemed to be indicative of it doing $38-40 million over the weekend. So my Monday pick stood.
A couple of other people went with my pick. In the MCats League there wasn’t a lot of love for Peter Rabbit, but in the TAGN league Peter Rabbit held greater sway, with five people anchoring on it.
Then came the Saturday estimates and Peter Rabbit seemed to be exceeding expectation and was being tagged as the best performer. Jumanji was still in the running for that, but 15:17 to Paris was falling behind expectations. On Saturday it looked like I HAS BAD TASTE might have the perfect pick and win the week.
Sunday estimates changed that up, with Peter Rabbit pulling further ahead, Jumanji holding, and 15:17 to Paris falling further back while SynCaine seemed slated for the perfect pick.
But when the final results came in I HAS BAD TASTE was back on top, winning the week in both the TAGN league and in the overall Meta league and getting the perfect pick.
Only 90 people ended up with the perfect pick this week, which makes it a fairly rare pick showing how many options there were for week eleven.
That left the weekly scores as:
The Meta League Legend:
Those heavy on Peter Rabbit ruled the roost… or the hutch I suppose… while those who were betting on 15:17 to Paris were way down the list. Both Liore and The Filthy Fleapit failed to pick in time, which is reflected in their scores.
Those scores shook up the season ranks a bit.
Ben and Corr stayed locked in their fight for first place, with Corr gaining a little on Ben. However, both are still far enough out in front of everybody else that unless they forget to pick or blow their pick badly they will remain the top two in the Meta league.
Biyondios pass me and took third place overall and first place in the TAGN league, though we are close enough that those positions could easily change. Pak also moved up a place and is within striking range of Biyondios and myself while Aure fell back to a distant 6th place.
I HAS BAD TASTE was up one position while SynCaine popped up two spots. Logan jumped up three spots and Joanie went up two largely thanks to those who forgot to pick.
So with two weeks left the battle for first place continues while third place could go to three or four different people depending on how optimistic you tend to be.
Which leads us into week twelve, the penultimate week of the season, and a bit one at that. Black Panther opens up this week and is expected to have a very strong box office. It expected to dominate, so it has been chopped up into individual days. But this is also the four day Presidents Day holiday in the US, so it is a four day box office as well. So the price list looks like this:
Black Panther (FRI) $501 Black Panther (SAT) $451 Black Panther (SUN) $348 Black Panther (MON) $220 Peter Rabbit $186 Fifty Shades Freed $155 Jumanji $87 The 15:17 to Paris $68 The Greatest Showman $51 Early Man $49 The Maze Runner $39 Samson $32 Winchester $31 The Post $26 The Shape of Water $25
In addition to four slots going to Black Panther there are two new features, the Old Testament epic of Samson and the Nick Park (of Wallace and Grommet fame) stop motion animated Early Man.
That knocked out some of those Oscar nominees that had been hanging about Three Billboards, I, Tonya, and Darkest Hour, as well as the more recent Hostiles, 12 Strong, and Den of Thieves.
So the question this week is probably just which day of Black Panther do you anchor on? Friday will be huge, all the more so with the Thursday night previews, but it is priced accordingly. Saturday will also be big, but like Friday you can only have one unless you want some empty screens. Sunday and Monday will be more modest, but you can have a couple and still fill out a lineup.
Or, if you’re still feeling it for Beatrix Potter, it is possible to get a lineup with Peter Rabbit as your anchor. But how many rabbits will you need to beat a panther? Likewise, you can get a lot of screens of Fifty Shades, but who will beat whom?
And, of course, finding estimates to help you out will be problematic. Most estimates will likely be a three day weekend total, which will give an idea but not a number you can bank on. And this is a big enough week that blowing it or getting the perfect pick could change your standings dramatically.
]]>As noted in the headline, the biggest changes are probably to citadels, which got the
“Upwell 2.0” firmware update. Or so they say. This is covered in detail in a Dev Blog, including changes that were made after it was initially published, so I won’t repeat all of that. Instead, a few highlights.
Low Power Mode – This is a new state for citadels that have no service modules active which, one would assume, means that they aren’t being used for much besides docking and tethering. When in low power mode any attack will get to skip the second round of assaulting the citadel, skipping the armor cycle and having to just do the shield and structure rounds. Shield hit points for structures in low power mode are also reduced by 33%. This should make clearing unused or abandoned structures, something of an issue in high sec currently, easier.
Updated Vulnerability and Reinforcement Cycle – The timing of attacks have been changed. Probably the biggest aspect of that is now one can attack a citadel and finish the shield cycle at any time rather than having to wait until a specific weekly vulnerability window. After that attackers have to come back during a time chosen by the defenders.
CCP posted a news item suggesting that owners of citadels set these new timers before the update.
The flow of attacking an Upwell structure now follows this flow chart.
There has also been an overhaul of citadel weapon systems that includes the removal of void bombs, which were restricting the composition of attacking forces to doctrines that could hold up while being neuted out.
Moon mining is now available in wormhole space and in 0.5 high sec systems, two items promised since last year.
Again, there is a huge list of changes covered in the dev blog (and clarified in some cases in the patch notes) for those interested.
On to other items, Assault Frigates got a balance pass to make them more attractive, so they are all now a bit faster, a bit lighter, and have 30% more capacitor. In addition the Ishkur, Retribution, and Jaguar got some extra attention, which is covered in this thread and the patch notes.
There is also a new series of Assault Damage Control modules that may be fit only to Assault Frigates or Heavy Assault Cruisers. The new modules give less passive resistance, but can be activated for a short period (13-17 seconds depending on the type) to provide a 75% boost to resists, after which it takes 150 seconds for the module to recycle. We shall see if this makes Assault Frigates or HACs more useful in a universe where battlecruisers, strategic cruisers, or T3 destroyers are usually a better or cheaper option.
Then there is the Guardians Gala Event, which kicks off today and runs through to the 27th of the month,
The event consists of sites that will pop up on your overview all over New Eden which you can attack for loot. They will show up in The Agency interface. The sites come in two flavors this year, normal and VIP. The VIP sites are alleged to require more than one ship according to CCP, but I’m sure somebody will come up with a fit to solo them. There is a scouting report for the event over at The Nosy Gamer.
Among the prizes this year are slot 8 stasis webifier enhancing implants and Eros Blossom SKINs, which are pink… and you know how we all love pink SKINs. In addition some Eros Blossom SKINs (and pink fireworks as well) will be available in the New Eden Store for PLEX.
On NPC structures, Bloodraiders and Guristas shipyards will now no longer be locked into a select set of regions but will now spawn all over low and null sec. I do not see a mention of whether or not there will be more spawns, but I assume that at least the Bloodraiders, which used to be limited to a single spawn, will be increased in numbers.
And both the shipyards and the forward operating bases will have a cap put on the size of their defense fleets.
Objects seen on missions (which CCP still calls “dungeons” in the patch notes because they hate me and want to give me an aneurysm) have been updated for the V5 shader so are probably a lot shinier than they were before. They might even look better too.
Finally, there is a line item in the patch notes that indicates that CCP has updated the Wwise audio engine in order to improve audio stability and performance, which I am sure will get any number of readers to respond with, “EVE has sound?” Audio has long had performance issues in the game and people who end up in fleet fights generally turn sound off just to eke out some additional performance from the client. (Closing Local helps too.) I’ve run this way so long that I’ve become used to fight in space being silent affairs aside from voices on comms. But silence is probably right for battles in a vacuum.
Anyway, the update is now live. You can read up on it in the Patch Notes or on the Updates Page.
]]>Furthermore I had a second allied race, the Nightborne, pretty close to being unlocked. You can go use WoW Head’s Legion Attunement page to see how close a given character is to unlocking the allied races. As it turned out I fell off the final quest line about three quests before it was done. Once I got back on that track I was able to get the requisite achievement.
That, in turn, unlocked the Nightborne Elves for me as well.
So I had the Horde allied races covered. The Alliance allied races… is being allied with the alliance make you an ally ally or just part of the Alliance… were not available to me. In what I will claim is yet another example of residual Horde favoritism from the Chris Metzen era, you could unlock the Horde allied races in the core areas of the Broken Isles, but the Alliance allied races required you to go to Argus.
Argus.
It isn’t so much that Argus is bad. In fact, it follows closely the zone design philosophy for WoW Legion, where zones are actually small but feel big due to good design. The problem is flying. Once Blizzard gives you flying it feels like they’re punishing you when they take it away. We’ve been over that many times, but it is still true. Once the genie is out of the bottle you’re cooked.
I ran once character up to the level cap, went away for months, came back once flying was made available, worked to unlock that, and only then started on alts. Flying makes running through a zone trivially easy as you avoid any unwanted entanglements. This is doubly handy when you just want to zip in and get a few world quests out of the way.
And then you get to Argus and there is no flying. There are not even flight points. You just unlock what are essentially teleport nodes to get around. So, while I started in on Argus, I tended to leave it alone in order to concentrate on efforts elsewhere… like in places where I could fly. Also, Darkmoon Faire, and Love is in the Air, and pet battles kept me busy.
Eventually though I hit a point where I had some time and Argus was still there waiting for me. In fact, getting the Darkmoon Faire “Test of Strength” quest done prompted me a bit to get out a slay some stuff on the ground.
As noted, not so bad. The usual amount of stomping about the various land masses and occasionally trying to figure out how to get from point A to point C when mountain range or chasm B is in the way… stuff you never worry about with flying… but otherwise not an excessive amount of schlepping along in the usual knees bent running about advancing behavior. And the story sticks you in the cut scenes now and again, which I always seem to enjoy more than I should.
A couple hours of quiet time with my wife and daughter out of the house was all it took to get the achievement side of unlocking the Alliance allied races.
So that both Alliance allied races are unlocked by the same Argus achievement is good. That they need me to get exalted with both of the Argus factions is… less fun. As noted above, flying and world quests… and world quests are the way forward for faction… go together like two things clearly meant to go together actually going together.
And my having ignored Argus for a while means that I have a ways to go on both factions.
And I am only that far along with the Alliance allied race faction unlock effort because we had a faction bonus week that overlapped with Darkmoon Faire and its bonus faction merry-go-round booster, which I renewed liberally, and that I am doing this all on a Human character that gets its own boost to faction accrual.
Still, I don’t have to unlock the allied raced TODAY. I can move along, wait for the emissary quests to roll around for Army of the Light or Argussian Reach or Kirin-Tor, the latter which gives you a boost to the faction of your choice, and end up unlocking both in time.
Because the next question is what to do with these unlocked allied races. I am not sure I need four more alts. I am not sure I what classes I would make them or if I really need the overlap that would come with making yet another character of a class I already have. I still haven’t finished the Demon Hunter starter quest line, leaving my Demon Hunter lingering about waiting for me to get back to him.
And then there is the usual problem of the level 110 booster that came with the Battle for Azeroth pre-order. Do I want to use it straight out on one of these allied races? Do I want to get any of them to level 60 first to fill in any sort of trade skill gap I might have when I boost them, because boosting from level 60 also means boosting trade skills as well, or is there some other character I should boost instead?
And then, of course, there are two more allied races to be unlocked once the expansion hits, the Zandalari Trolls and the Dark Iron Dwarves, the latter seeming an odd choice for an Alliance allied race given all the trouble they’ve cause in the past. But the lore is malleable.
These questions will probably linger until summer when the pre-expansion events kick in and I come back from playing Rift Prime or whatever I am likely to try a couple months down the line when I tire a bit of Azeroth.
]]>This, of course, feeds back on discussion that started back in November around another video that was trying to assess, incorrectly, the cost of making video games.
]]>
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]]>Please note that as of 1st August 2015 Contains Moderate Peril has moved. The new URL is http://containsmoderateperil.net.Please update your bookmarks and blog rolls accordingly.This blog is now an archive and no further content will be posted here.
The post This Website Has Moved appeared first on Contains Moderate Peril.
]]>The post Plan B appeared first on Contains Moderate Peril.
]]>I received an email from blog.co.ukrecently informing me that the blogging platform will be closing on December 15th. I also discovered this week that an entire album of images has simply vanished from my Google account. Now you may well be wondering what this has to do with the price of Brussels Sprouts? Well Contains Moderate Peril has content posted on these and many similarsites and services. That means that existing posts are now broken and others will be broken further inthe months to come.
This site has moved several times during its lifetime and as resultthe back-end isa bit of a dogs dinner in some respects. Olderposts are formatted differently, pictures and audio files are often hosted elsewhere and many links to other sites and You Tube videos are now broken. This is something that happens to many blogs over the years. Contains Moderate Peril has over nineteen hundred posts and has existed in some shape or form since 2008. Therefore quite a lot of content now needs to be maintained.
As many of you are aware I have reduced my blogging output of late due to work commitments and other changes in my life. Therefore the chances of me effectively revising and fixing all posts, migrating image directories and multiple audio files is effectively zero. I won’t waste your time or mine asking if anyone wants to help Simply put Contains Moderate Peril has become a little too big to manage and maintain to the standard that I find acceptable. So rather than waste time ona half-assed attempt to fix things, I’ve decided to cease posting new material to this site.
So is this the end forContains Moderate Peril? No it is not. I still enjoy writing and wish to maintain an online presence, so I’ve decided to reboot this site. Therefore I have created Contains Moderate Peril 2.0and will be posting content there from now on. I will also be taking this opportunity to broaden further the websites remit. From now on all bets are off. If I want to write about something in particular then I shall, whether its Bee keeping, Etruscan pottery or all-star nipple teasing. Expect the first post on the new site “soon”.
In the meantime this blogwill simple serve as an archive andwill remain online for the immediate future. However at some point itwill close and the domain name will be directed to the new site. Personally I think rebooting Contains Moderate Peril is by far the best solution and I must admit, it’s rather exciting to be able to start from scratch with a clean slate.Considering that the other option was simply shutting down the old site and walking away, I don’t think Plan B is so bad after all.
The post Plan B appeared first on Contains Moderate Peril.
]]>The post How Will the Stars Align in Captain America: Civil War? appeared first on Contains Moderate Peril.
]]>This post contains spoilers for Avengers Age of Ultron, Ant-Man, Captian America: Civil War, and various a sundry previous MCU adaptations.
Upon returning from taking my family to see Marvels latest large-screen adaptation Ant-Man (which we all fully enjoyed), I began wondering what lie ahead for the plucky ex-thief, as well as for the rest of the Avengers. No doubt this curiosity was piqued by the second (and more interesting) post-credit scene that runs at the end of the film. In the scene (the footage from which comes directly from Captain America: Civil War), Steve Rogers and Falcon hover over an apparently trapped and captured Winter Soldier (Bucky Barnes), discussing their next move. They mention that this would have been easier a week ago, and decide against involving fellow Avenger Tony Stark due to both The Accords and the fact that he may not have helped them, regardless. At the end of the scene, Falcon indicates that he knows a guy who can help them presumably Scott Lang (Ant-Man), who Falcon had been attempting to track down towards the end of the film.
We know a few things about CA:CW that might clear up some parts of the scene. For one, we know that a superhero registration act is in play (either being proposed or enacted, probably the latter, going by the easier a week ago line), and that Stark and Rogers are on opposite sides of supporting this law. From various things Ive read, it seems clear that Iron Man supports the registration and Captain America opposes it, which leads to the inevitable split between the two which will force the rest of the Avengers to choose sides.
If the Marvel Cinematic Universe has proven anything, its that it has been able to successfully inject a whole slew of actors into a single movie and somehow manage to not only develop each character to a degree, but also to advance the plotline of the film and that of the cinematic universe at large. This was executed very well in the original Avengers and Guardians of the Galaxy films, and will be put to the test again in CA:CW. In fact, the heroes may be more numerous in Civil War than they were in Age of Ultron! According to the post linked above, the cast includes Captain America, Iron Man, Widow, Winter Soldier, Falcon, Vision, Hawkeye, War Machine, Scarlet Witch, Ant-Man, and Black Panther. Sharon Carter is also listed, but its unclear if she will play a larger role in the conflict or continue to have more behind-the-scenes influence ala Captain America: Winter Soldier. Also, since this post was published, it has been confirmed that Spider Man will make his first MCU appearance in CA:CW. Whew, thats an army of heroes! Which, I guess makes sense if youre going to stage a war.
At this point, Im most curious how the lines will be drawn. Which Avengers will throw in with Rogers? Which will support the registration act with Stark, and why would they? I had a couple of thoughts on this, though the reality will probably be much more complex:
The tension between Stark and Rogers has been clear since Avengers 1, but none of the other characters slated to appear have previously exhibited a strong allegiance to either man, save maybe Falcon for Captain America and War Machine for Iron Man. Starks strongest ally to this point, Bruce Banner, appears to be out of the picture literally. Thor, who eventually came around to Starks way of thinking and ensured his Vision project succeeded, is presumably back on Asgard, and most likely not very interested in the politics of Earth.
With these things in mind, heres a character by character rundown projecting the possible alliances based on both potential motivators listed above:
Black Widow: Romanoff doesnt appear particularly loyal to either man, and her previous assassin programming would probably allow for greater emotional detachment than some of the other heroes. However, she does fall for Bruce Banner in AoU, and has also been painted as Bartons (Hawkeye) best friend. In Winter Soldier, Natasha is partnered with Captain America on the mission that opens the film, however the two have separate goals that lead to a rift during the mission which appears to have been healed by the end of AoU due to Widows inclusion in the new Avengers at the end of the movie. Romanoff also spent time with Stark, posing as a Stark Industries employee in order to Assess Tonys viability for the Avengers initiative. Her report painted a less-than-impressive picture of Stark. So, while her allegiances dont seem strong, I could see Widow supporting Captain America instead of Tony Stark from a loyalty perspective.
Strategically, however, I tend to see Widow on the other side of the fence. Shes already in hiding (due to leaking information about Shield and herself to the world in Winter Soldier), so she has nothing personally to lose should a registration act be passed. In fact, Widow may see such a decree as her best chance to track down Banner, who went AWOL at the end of AoU. Advantage: Stark.
Bucky Barnes: Im not entirely sold on the idea of the Winter Soldier choosing a side in Civil War. I do think that hes going to be (at least partially) a catalyst for the war, albeit perhaps unintentionally. At any rate, Bucky and Rogers have a history, and, presumably Buckys memories are going to start coming back now that hes no longer receiving treatment from Hydra. Im also catching wind that Bucky may (in his Hydra Winter Soldier days) have been responsible for the death of Starks parents. If Bucky does have an active part of the Civil War beyond simply enraging Stark past the point of reconciliation with Rogers, its tough to see him on Iron Mans side, regardless of political leanings.
Falcon: Wilson is obviously loyal to Rogers, and fits squarely in that camp if the choice is made based on Civil War leadership. Theres really no question, here. Politically speaking, it may be a slightly tougher call. Falcon doesnt have super-human abilities beyond what his wearable technology provides, similar to Stark, so he probably wouldnt be required to register under the act. He is ex-military, so he may have more faith in the government than, say an ex-thief like Scott Lang. On the other hand, he also works with veterans who are sometimes neglected or mistreated by the very governments who sent them to war in the first place. Whatever Falcons political leanings, its difficult to see him anywhere besides in the Cap camp.
The Vision: The Vision is quite possibly the toughest character to analyze, considering how little we know about him in the MCU at this point, and the fact that he appears to be somewhat emotionless and without allegiance. Stark had a large hand in creating The Vision. It is possible that buried down somewhere in that new vibranium body is the decidedly loyal Jarvis, the code upon which The Visions programming is based. If thats the case, Stark may be able to tap into that program and access friend mode with The Vision.
However, in AoU, The Vision showed himself to be highly protective of humanity, and even of life, itself. He appears to only attack when he deems it the lesser of evils in order to protect humanity. So, which strategic method will Vision deem better for humanity? Im guessing that hed side with Rogers on this front, recognizing humanitys desire to be free from tyranny and the potential for abuse of a legal registration.
Hawkeye: Barton is in a strange position at the end of AoU. While he appears to still be a member of the Avengers, hes becoming more and more of the family man that we didnt know he was. Barton is a soldier, and to this end would seem to be a better fit with Captain America. He doesnt seem to have much of a relationship with Stark, but could end up on his side of the Civil War if Black Widow falls under the Iron Man regime. In this case, Hawkeyes loyalty to Romanoff might play more of a role than his loyalty to either leader. Still, looking purely at Hawkeyes character, my gut tells me that hed be more inclined to side with Rogers if strength of character is the deciding factor.
Politically, things get even murkier for Hawkeye. Barton is another of the Avengers without superhuman abilities, and perhaps hes getting a little tired of fighting armies of robots with a bow and arrow. Hes also a father, presumably a protective one. I can tell you from personal experience that certain types of censorship and civil liberties concessions tend to look more appealing when the results contribute towards protecting ones children. Shield is now a thing of the past (as far as Hawkeye knows), and the Avengers cant be everywhere at once, so maybe keeping track of the heroes on Earth wouldnt sound like such a bad idea to Clint. However, Barton also knows what feels like to be controlled, as Lokis influence in Avengers 1 showed, and he may not be so quick to try and control others. Even so, considering all of the above (and the fact that I picked Widow to possibly side with Stark politically), Im going to put Hawkeye in Starks camp from a strategic alliance perspective.
War Machine: War Machine will be with Stark.
Scarlet Witch: We know very little about Scarlet Witch other than she was working for Hydra (despite their apparent detention of and experimentation on her) for the beginning of AoU and switched sides when she realized the full extent of Ultrons plans for world destruction. So, while she seemed to be ok with killing off the Avengers, at least shes got enough of a conscience, or at least the desire for self-preservation, to change loyalties when the situation calls for it. From a loyalty perspective, she may still blame Stark for creating Ultron, which led up to the events that ended her brothers life. Its also difficult to see Scarlet Witch promoting any sort of legislation that would require her to place her name on a registry. I think in either case, well see Wanda on Rogers side in Civil War.
Ant-Man: At first brush, its tempting to say that Scott Lang will side with Falcon, his recruiter, and by proxy Captain America. Scott is the newest addition to The Avengers, and will likely feel in over his head as he steps into a Civil War between superheroes. However, since he is so new, his loyalties will not be especially strong and he may easily sway one way or the other. Stark and Lang have similar interests (technology, preservation of self and loved ones), and similar sarcastic demeanors, so its conceivable that Lang could form a friendship with Stark once the two are introduced. However, Im still betting that the Stark ego will be a turn-off to Lang and that Ant-Man would prefer to stick with his original Avengers contact.
Politically, its also interesting to toy with the idea of Ant-Man siding with Stark. Once again, they are both normal humans augmented by technology and a few talents (intelligence, mainly) that would hardly be considered super-human. As mentioned before, Scott is new to the hero game and may have more faith in the government than some of his seniors. The only thing is, Langs mentor Hank Pym was so prejudiced against the Stark family that he refused to call the Avengers for help against Darren Cross and his Yellowjacket suit, even though the safety of the world was at stake. One would think that this kind of warning would stick with Lang, who would be overly cautious about forming any kind of friendship with Tony. I see Ant-Man with Rogers in either situation.
Black Panther: Its been suggested in rumors that Black Panther has been hunting down The Winter Soldier for some reason or other. If this is indeed the case, and Bucky instead comes under the assumed protection of Captain America, its pretty likely that Panther will (at least) act as an antagonist for Rogers and co, if not an outright member of Starks team. Its possible that Panther sees the registration act (or maybe Stark himself) as the only way to track down Rogers and Bucky, which would result in him throwing in with Iron Man for the Civil War.
However, its also possible that Panther successfully tracks Bucky to Rogers, and the latter (no doubt after some sort of big-screen battle) makes Panther aware of the governments intentions to register super-humans, which would include Panther. Considering Panthers desire to keep his vibranium-rich homeland under the radar, he could side with Rogers despite his distaste for Bucky.
Spiderman: Being that I come to know the characters more from the cinematic universe than from other sources, I dont know much about Spidermans loyalties within the Avengers since he hasnt been involved to this point. My kids (who watch numerous Avengers cartoons on Netflix) tell me that Spiderman idolizes Iron Man. Perhaps Tony Stark comes upon young Peter Parker, recognizes his intelligence, and takes him under his wing. If this is the case, then Spidermans position in the Civil War seems pretty concrete.
However, supporting the registration act may go against Parkers spidey senses. If his powers are internal, then any governmental registration would have to include Spiderman. Then again, maybe Parker is young and inexperienced enough that he trusts Tonys council that registration is a necessary step in the process towards interstellar peace. Im going to put Parker with Stark either way, because I like the idea of a mentor/mentee relationship between the two.
Going with the analysis above, the teams break down like this:
Of course, all of this is pure speculation and the reality of the screenplay will probably contain elements of both strategic ideology and personal loyalties. What are your thoughts on the above analysis? What do your Civil War teams look like?
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]]>The post Burton & Scrooge #7 appeared first on Contains Moderate Peril.
]]>Messrs Burton and Scroogepresent another instalment of their high fibrepodcast, in which they discuss the following:
The MMO Sweet Spot.
The Commercialisation of Fandom.
San Diego Comic-Con.
A Bee Keeping Anecdote.
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]]>The post Uninstalling Games appeared first on Contains Moderate Peril.
]]>It would appearI’m not the only one currently reclaiming space on theirhard drive. Murf has also been blogging about hisongoing gaming purge. I’ve uninstalled at least a dozen or so titles over the last week. It’s a curious thing but the entire process of removing a game from your PC is quite therapeutic. It can be similar to bidding a fond farewell to a dear friend, or wiping some offending matter from the sole of your shoe. It all comes down to how you feel about the game in question.
At present I have seventy eight games linked to my Steam account and a further dozen that run independently or via other platforms such as origin or Uplay. Yet out of those one hundred titles I currently have just six installed. The only one that I’m actively playing at present is Star Trek Online, although I do indulge in some Black Ops Multiplayer, to satisfy my pew pew urges from time to time. It seems quite ironic that despite having a substantial collection of content to draw upon, precious little of it is actually being used. I’ll probably never play at least half of these games.
I guess this cavalier attitude of mine reflect a broader change in gaming. Apart from pre-ordering and the earlier adoption, gaming is no longer the premium priced pastime that it use to be. The vast majority of my gaming library is made up of titles that have been bought as discount bundles. Pricing does affect how a product is perceived and cheap games do smack of disposable items. A 75 pound investment would garner some perseverance. A 2 pound game that fails to engage is given short thrift. My Steam library is somewhat akin to my sock draw, populated mainly by cheap and easily replaceable items.
I think I reclaimed about 200 GB of disk space buy the time I finished uninstalling these games. As I stated earlier this was more of a psychological exercise in “house cleaning” rather than a genuine search for more storage. Hard drives are large and inexpensive these days, so it’s not as if I’m hurting for room for more data. What now remains to be seen is whether I replace these games with other discount titles over the remainder of the year, only to repeat another purge in December. Somehow I suspect I will.
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]]>The post Archiving the Contains Moderate Peril Podcast appeared first on Contains Moderate Peril.
]]>The Contains Moderate Peril podcast ran from 30th January 2011 to 20th April 2015. During thattime Brian and I (as well as associated co-hosts and sundry guests) produced one hundred and seventy three shows. We had immense fun recording each week and although the production process became a major chore at the end, the prevailingmemory I have of this period is laughing a lot. We also has some half decent discussions on gaming, the wider industry and associated topical subjects, of which I quite proud. The show also found a loyal audience that becamefar larger than I ever anticipated.
Now the entire back catalogue of podcasts is still currently available via iTunes and this website. Furthermore, the various statistical packages that I use to analyse web traffic indicatethat these shows are still being regularly accessed. Sometimes you can see that someone has just discovered the podcast and is clearly working their way through previous episodes chronologically. Then there are other specific shows that still get regularly downloaded due to the subject matters discussed. Much to my surprise it would seem that there is still a healthy interest in these recordings.
Hosting such content does have a financial implication. There is the option to migrate the back catalogue somewhere else more cost effective but that would also involve a lot of work editing previous posts and URLs.Thiswould more than likely break the current RSS feed to iTunes. As Contains Moderate Peril is not an ongoing production, I am loathe to undertake such a project, preferring to abide by the old maxim of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. So for the meantime I’d like to leave the present archive as it is, which brings me back to the ongoing costs.
As I have written in the past running a blog and podcast can be an expensive undertaking, especially if the you start to grow beyond a certain size. So once again I’m going to ask for contributions towards maintaining not only the podcast archive but the overall operating costs of all ourvarious projects. Simply put a few dollars and pounds here and there soon adds up and would greatly helps in keeping the things afloat. If traffic continues to grow, which it seems to be doing each quarter,there will eventually come a time when the overall costsof running Contains Moderate Perilwill become prohibitive. However with your help, this can potentially be avoided.
Therefore I would urge all who enjoy this site and the various podcasts, to consider supporting us via Patreon or a single PayPal donation. Every little helps and any donation, big or small, is greatly appreciated. Allwill go towardsthe hosting and other ongoing operating costs.
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]]>The post Classic Movie Themes: Confessions of a Pop Performer appeared first on Contains Moderate Peril.
]]>The UK sex comedy is a curious and niche market genre. Itgrew out of mainstream comedy scenein the mid-sixties and became increasingly more risqu to move with the times and audience tastes. Despite their reputation these were not in anyway pornographic relyingmainly on a mixture of slapstick and nudity. As these were uniquely British products there were manyre-occurring themes, such as class distinction and the conflict between traditional and contemporaryattitudes towards sexual freedom. The “Confessions” series were a microcosm of this genre and despite there poor criticalreviews were incredibly successful at the box office.
Confessions of a Pop Performer made in 1975 sees the misadventures of Timothy Lea (Robin Askwith) as he quits window cleaning to join the band “Kipper”. One of the few things thisfilm doesget right is its portrayal of music on TV at the times. “Kipper”, a Glam Rock band, with just a hint of proto-punk, do a gig in a TV studio that is presented in a terribly archaic fashion. This reflects how the televisionindustry of the time was still labouring under theformat of the Variety Show. As for Kipper themselves, they perform a rather silly but catchy number called “The Clapham”; a song that advocates both dancing and violence. In some respects this is a precursor of the “Oi” subgenre of punk.
The Clapham
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]]>The post Burton & Scrooge #6 appeared first on Contains Moderate Peril.
]]>Messrs Burton and Scroogepresent another instalment of their curiously arousingpodcast, in which they discuss the following:
Reddit.
MMOs & Lifetime Subscriptions.
What Have We Been Watching?
Trove.
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]]>The post The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt appeared first on Contains Moderate Peril.
]]>Throughout my gaming life, one genre has always excited me more than any other: the humble RPG. A quick glance through my Steam library reveals a great affection towards this oldest of genres, with potentially thousands of hours of game time between them all. Thus far no other genre has had the same capacity to draw me into a world, to bring me the closest to that state of immersion everyone is always banging on about. Of the many, many RPGs I have played throughout my life, I have to say that The Witcher 3 might just be the best one yet. So now that my colours are nailed firmly to the mast, so to speak, let me explain why.
The Witcher 3 is the third (duh?) instalment in CD Projekt Reds fantasy series, based on a Polish set of novels sharing the same name. The protagonist, Geralt of Rivia is a Witcher, taken as a boy and transformed using chemical mutagens, trained in the martial life of a monster hunter. A fading relic in a turbulent world, Witchers roam the country seeking work from everyone from kings to commoners. In this game Geralt is on the hunt for a young woman Ciri, formerly his ward, who possesses strange powers that influence time and space. All at the behest of the Emperor of Nilfgard, the dangerous expansionist imperialists. But of course in the grand tradition of epic fantasy RPG storylines, this provides more of a backdrop to the many other activities and quests players stumble upon. The main story acts as a thread tying together all of the smaller, more memorable, and at times more intimate moments together.
Side quests are, of course, amply provided. Alongside these are Witcher contracts which demonstrate Geralt at work and frequently involve some form of investigation in order to learn about the monster youre hunting, as well as its strengths and weaknesses. Sometimes you must break a curse, uncover a werewolf, trick a troll or use a lute to lure a chort. Sometimes what those paying you thought was a monster proves out to be something much less supernatural. The quality of writing on offer really elevates these above your standard RPG fare, and even Witcher contracts are almost always so much more than simply kill a monster. Side quests can sometimes have an impact upon the main storyline and vice versa, and many of the quests bleed in to one another in a way that feels natural, and the world reacts to your actions and decisions. I really cannot understate how well written this game is, and how remarkably capable it is of evoking complex and subtle emotions as well as displaying a surprisingly deft hand at portraying these in the characters excellent facial animations, particularly Geralts. Its moral choices make Biowares efforts look simplistic by comparison. Here we dont get a good option and an evil option, here we get complex choices being made, very often with incomplete information, the outcomes of which cannot be predicted. Sometimes you make a choice without even realising it. A comment you made with little thought might have consequences hours down the road. Often people will suffer no matter what you choose, though this knowledge rarely soothes the weight of the choosing.
The thing I am finding most staggering on my first playthrough (about 80 hours in, though that may not mean much progression wise as I have dallied) is the sheer density of content here. Were talking Skyrim levels of things to do. Except, and I want to hammer home this point, they are not quests given to you by some robot faced NPC whose name you will rarely remember, and usually involve more than go to dungeon x, kill creature y, get item z. Im not having a go at Skyrim here because I think its fantastic, but lets all admit that it tends to the generic in its characters, story lines and lore. So Im genuinely amazed that CDPR have managed to create a game with reportedly up to around 200 hours of content, but managed to hand craft every single bit of it until it the detail sings. It is the sheer scale of it that impresses me so much. Basically, not to put to fine a point on it, these are some of the best quests Ive ever played, and some of the best storylines Ive encountered in any game, not just RPGs. The Bloody Baron storyline in particular provides lasting memories, as it told one of the saddest stories Ive ever known, encompassing domestic violence, alcoholism, abortion and miscarriage, and did so with a sensitivity I found stunningly effective . Make no mistake this is a dark, mature fantasy. Thankfully no, not in the Game of Thrones sense, in which for the last two seasons they seem to have mistaken intelligent, mature, character driven story lines for tits, killings and gore.
Gameplay wise, combat is fine. Nothing too scintillating, but its more than adequate. I prefer this approach to both the other Witcher games but it remains the weakest part of the series. Im currently playing the game on the last but one difficulty, but Im thinking of bumping it up to make the alchemy side of the game a little more essential. Speaking of alchemy, youll be spending some time gathering resources for potions and crafting, though mercifully less than the previous games, Now, you only need ingredients to make potions once and then the potions refill upon resting, provided you have strong alcohol in your inventory to act as the potions base. You can also craft oils which do more damage against specific enemy types, perfect for Witcher contracts, as well as different kinds of bombs. You can also cast some rudimentary spells known as signs. How much or how little you use these different elements will likely effect how you choose to build your character. The game features an MMO-ish talent tree, which could certainly be a lot more interesting. There are some new abilities to be unlocked through levelling, but theres a lot more passive stat increases.
The game looks absolutely stunning. Everything is drenched in these rich shades of orange and pink, each tree is animated to sway in the wind, and riding through corn fields on horseback is like a golden sunrise. The games main city, Novigrad, looks more like something out of an Assassins Creed game than your typical RPG city. I know there was some fuss about a supposed graphical downgrade on trailers released a couple of years ago, but CDPR have been open in saying that those graphics would not function on modern consoles, and without a console release they couldnt afford to make the game. Also the small detail that while everything looked fantastic in those early trailers and gameplay footage, there was also hardly any of the world built at that time, and they later found the game too sluggish at those levels of fidelity to be viable on most PCs. If anybody tries to tell you that The Witcher 3 is not a good looking game though, give them a slap from me, yeah? But its more big picture beautiful than oh my god look a that rock texture beautiful. Actually lets talk specifications a little here because one detail is important. The Witcher 3 requires a quad core CPU. I speak from bitter experience here that a dual core CPU will cause you issues. On my old G3258 alongside a GTX 970, the game would actually run at 40 plus fps, but was also freezing for a few seconds from roughly anywhere between 30 seconds to 40 minutes. I tried in vain to improve this, but in the end opted to pick up a newer I5 processor instead. But you will certainly need a decent rig, with a GTX 660 listed as the minimum requirement, although a 770 is recommended. Im running it on a I5-3690k 3.5ghz and a GTX 970 and the game runs extremely well on ultra settings, even with Nvidia Hairworks turned on.
For my closing remarks let me state that The Witcher 3 doesnt really do anything that new in the RPG genre. Instead it pulls together a lot of different ideas and refines them brilliantly. The Blizzard approach if you will. Theres a lot of neat little things in the game, from boats to tavern brawls, an addictive collectable card game that Ive spent longer than Id care to admit playing, and your beard grows for heavens sake! But if there is one thing that stands out to me it is the quality of its storytelling and character development. The fact that this is done on such a grand scale is quite the feat, and I think what CDPR have managed to achieve here is pretty remarkable.
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]]>The post UI Customisation appeared first on Contains Moderate Peril.
]]>Game complexity can be both a boon and a bane; a selling point and a source of irritation. There are many titles that I enjoy that have a wealth of systems and mechanics that add greatly to immersion and entertainment. The MMORPG genre excels at this.However this data needs to be displayed visually, in an efficient and intuitive fashion.It needs to be readily available and easy to navigate. There is a fine balance between making such a systemaccessible without becoming a source of distraction. This is the challenge that all developers face when designing a user interface. However thisproblem is compounded further by the human element. Regardless of how well crafted a game UI may be, players will always wish to change it to suit their own needs and requirements.
What I often find in the MMO genre, is that the UI is streamlined at the beginning of a game with all the essential data that you need to play, evenly distributed around the screen.This grows exponentially as the game progresses, especially with older titles that frequently suffer from skills bloat. LOTRO is a classic example of this with a wealth of data swamping the screen when you reach level cap. I remember having similar issues when I was actively playing SWTOR. I encountered the samein STO recently, especially with regard to the skills hot bar. This was growing and intruding further towards the middle of the screen, impeding combat.
Mercifully most games have the ability to customise the UI, allowing players to indulge their preferences. Furthermore custom HUD settings can frequently be saved and then loadedwhen required. Monitor size and screen resolution also play a part in this matter and can have a positive impact if altered. Many games also have a cottage industry of players creating and sharing their own custom user interfaces. LOTROinterface has proven to be very popular over the years. The WoW community also has multiple sites and resources for such changes. In the competitive genre of MOBAs, a common interface between team mates can be advantageous.
I currently have a 24 inch monitor with a resolution of 1920 x 1200. It provides a fairly large gaming canvas and broadly spreads the various elements of the UI to the borders of the screen. However an excess of data on the periphery of your vision can be distracting, especially if it flashes or attempts to alert you in some fashion. I also find it an impediment if my hot bars start to encroach towards the centre of the screen. I don’t know if this is due to a foible of human vision but I find it draws my eyes away from where they need to be. I’ve had such problems in STO recently with my hot bar resembling a pyramid, resulting is some judicious customisation.
The ability to alter a games GUI, raises some interesting questions. The most obvious is whether on not you actually need everything on-screen. My view is if you’renot using a specific element of the HUD, then remove it and that goes for skills as well. Then there is the matter ofwhether of not games developers are doing their best toaccommodate the needs ofplayers with a disabilities. Resizing elements and changing colour schemes, as well as assigning audio alerts can all be incredibly beneficial. Fonts can also be a bone of contention, with some not lending themselves to being scaled. A simple change of this nature can often improve gaming.
Personally, I would like to see more customisation added to games. The mod scene in Skyrim really set the standard. I also like the way that some MMOs have built in voice chat and access to social media. STO allows players to utilisethird party audio players while in-game and The Secret World has it’s own internal web browser as part of the narrative. It is to a developersadvantage to keep the player focused and in-game. Facilitating customisation and providing multiple tools aids this process. Flexibility and accommodating change needs to be more of a driving factors in games development because no two players are alike.
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]]>The post The Merits of Shorter Play Sessions appeared first on Contains Moderate Peril.
]]>In the past, one of the things that Id always look out for when purchasing a game was the amount of playtime I would get out of it. The thinking went that more play time is always better than less, just in value for money terms if nothing else. The older I have got though, the more I have begun to appreciate the value of shorter games. I mean sure, I love my 100 hour plus RPGs as much as the next person, but recently Ive developed a real appreciation for the smaller, more self contained experiences that shorter games can offer.
Gone Home is a perfect example of this. The entire thing can be finished in around 2 to 4 hours, but because of that it can comfortably be played in one sittings, which I find adds to the overall experience. Im able to drink in all the details and progress whilst all of it is still fresh in my mind. This helps me feel more immersed in the game, and thus more driven to seek the conclusion of the story. Knowing I can complete something on a Sunday afternoon is a nice feeling, and whilst longer games make up the bulk of my playtime, having these little stories to romp through in a few hours is a nice addition to my stable of games.
I guess the same can be said of games which work well with short play sessions. Although I dont play tons of them, this can be a plus point to a lot of rogue-like games like FTL or Rogue Legacy. Jumping on for a short, fifteen minutes to an hour session, can be really rewarding. Id also extend this to MMOs to some extent. Whilst in The Secret World I generally prefer to play for longer spells, to really drink in the details, mood, and atmosphere, I do sometimes log in just to do a 20 minute mission. But, whilst these games can be played in short bursts, its not quite the same as a completely self contained narrative experience that begins and ends in one play session.
Its not so much a matter of time constraints that makes me appreciate shorter games, it really is the appeal of a short but rounded experience that has begun to draw me to them. I still largely play games which demand a more significant time investment, because I think that often has to be the case for there to be a lot of depth to the game, but its nice to be getting a bit more variety in what Im playing. Plus, its nice to actually finish some bloody games for once!
First published on Gaming Conjecture
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]]>The post Late to the Game: Destiny appeared first on Contains Moderate Peril.
]]>One of the many splendors and joys of being an adult with a career, marriage and two kids is the stunning lack of time and energy I retain to keep up with the current gaming cycles and releases. Gone are the days of me standing in line for a midnight release or pre-ordering a game because the trailer sold me. No, these days, Im late to the game. Rather than mope about it, Ive decided to review games that Ive started playing that everyone else has been playing or has already played and walked away from. Consider this a post-review!
I recently got a Playstation 4, and with it, about a days worth of what should I play? After picking up a couple of digital downloads, I decided to check out what demos were available in the Playstation Store. Destiny was the first one that caught my eye. Now, a little history: Im not a huge fan of FPS games, and I especially hate them when using a controller. Ive never really been able to get the hang of shooter controls using a controller when Im far more comfortable using a keyboard and mouse. That said, it was a free demo, so no financial investment on my part.
I fired up the demo and made myself an Exo Titan (because bad-ass robots have no equal). With three total races and three total classes to pick from, theres enough variety to keep you interested but enough depth in each class to make you work for mastery. The initial opening quest does what every MMO, FPS, RPG game does, teaches you basic movements, firing, et cetera. The use of your Ghost (helper companion) as narrator and guide was extremely well done. Peter Dinklage serves as the voice-actor, and his guidance is gently echoed by what youd hope a helper-robot would sound like. Once you make it back to the original main-hub (The Tower), other hugely notable voice-actors stand out. Bill Nighy, Nathan Fillion, Gina Torres, Peter Stormare, and many more help enrich the emersion of the world. It was around the third quest that I officially went out and purchased the game and its DLC. I was sold very quickly!
As of the time of this article being published, theres two DLCs available, and The Taken King being the third is due for release in September. I wont go into the already well-covered debacle surrounding the pricing and contents of the 3rd DLC and subsequent PR scramble that Bungie did to help repair their image afterwards, thats not tremendously important here and it has been far better covered in other media outlets. What I will say is that even with the two current DLCs, the story is embarrassingly short. The core games storyline surrounds you and your ghost. The first DLC, The Dark Below, revolves around a big-baddie coming back to life, and the second is the House of Wolves which has another baddie trying to unite the various factions of one race under his control. The DLCs story content is again, terribly short and lacking. That said, the story is extremely well-told, well-done and genuinely exciting. Its a terrible shame that not enough story has been injected into the game so far. Theres a tremendous potential for loads more quick story quests or NPC dialogue. What it’s missing in content, it makes up for in repetitive grinding. Daily, Weekly and cyclical vendors and events keep you doing literally the same thing over and over again. Normally, Im no huge fan of gating content in this manner, however, since Im just now playing the game, its far easier and faster for someone to catch up to current content than if youve been playing during the release cycles.
The game is stunningly gorgeous on Playstation 4. I have seen videos on Xbox One and I would rate it identical there. I havent seen or played on PS3 or Xbox 360, but from what I can gather, the previous gen does no justice to the games beauty. One of the features of both current gen consoles that Ive used and loved is the ability to stream/record video of your gameplay. Ive used it a couple times now to broadcast a few random missions and Nightfall quest run (weekly quest with increased difficulty that requires a party to complete). Speaking of the social aspect.
Theres a few highlights of the social aspect of the game that Id like to highlight. The first being Strike missions, these are 1-3 players that go through a replay a quest youve done (or skipped) on a planet but beefed up enemies and more of them. Each planet has one or two Strike missions, and you can either manually select them, join some friends and do the ones that you want to do, or you can do the Strike Playlist (it will randomly matchmake you and drop you into a random Strike mission at predetermined level-difficulty). A fun way to get your class mechanics solid and down, enjoy the chaos of a series of hectic firefights and laugh when you accidentally blind or stun yourself with a bad grenade throw. Theres also raids in the game, and at this time, the only one Ive done was Crota (the big baddie at the the end of the first DLC). I joined a Destiny PS4 clan and went with a couple other of my clanmates. They explained the fights, who and where to shoot, and we were able to do it in two tries. I really cant stress how much fun it was! The flipside, theres not a huge variety of raids still, as such, youll be doing the same ones over and over until more raid-content is released.
In the PvP realm, theres a handful of various activities you can do. From the Crucible (your standard PvP fair with a wide variety of maps, special events such as Iron Banner and Trials of Osiris), you pair with a fireteam of others and fight to the bitter end. Control points, Deathmatch, a semi-related type of capture the flag (Rift), and various others keep the bloodlust players sated. I havent done a single PvP match yet, and will eventually get around to it. PvP faction vendors offer weapons, armor and customization rewards for reputation rank and cashing in reputation currency.
The game continues to expand. Bungie has done a wonderful job putting together a game thats gorgeous and fun to play, albeit repetitive and no where near enough story yet. Its easy to pick up, tricky to master, but an absolute blast. The cost investment depends all on how much youre willing to part with: the core game is commonly found for $20, but the first two DLC bought together are going to set you back another $35. If you pick up the pre-ordered Legendary Edition, it comes with the core game, the first two DLCs and the third DLC once it’s released on September 15th. If you havent picked up the game yet, and you want a blast of an FPS with MMO-qualities, this should be your top pick
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]]>The post Classic Game Themes: EVE Online appeared first on Contains Moderate Peril.
]]>EVE Online is in many ways the most complex, absorbing and time consuming MMO that I’ve never played. I didn’t survive beyond a twenty one day trial and found that the exactingminutiae of the game far too demanding. However although themechanicswere not to my taste, my limited experience left a strong impression upon me and I still have a healthy respect and a strong sense of fascination for this niche market product. I’m not alone in this. Many gamers do not play EVE Online but it still seems to garner a great deal of interest in both is intricacies and community.
Because of the sandbox nature of EVE Online, it’s soundtrack is designed to be more ambient than event specific. Yet the electronic score byJn Hallur Haraldsson superbly embellishes the games overall atmosphere. CCP have made much of games music (about seven hours in total) available on Soundcloud.If you like such artists as Tangerine Dream and Vangelis you’ll find many common parallels with Haraldssons’s work.
Although there is much to chose from, I have decided to use the track Below the Asteroids as an example of the composers contribution to EVE Online. It has an introspective quality that draws the listener in and adds to the ongoing immersion. Due to it’s space setting the game has less visual input to engage the player so has to rely more on the soundscape and complexity of the game itself. This cue highlights exactly howJn Hallur Haraldsson does that.
Below the Asteroids
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]]>The post Burton & Scrooge #5 appeared first on Contains Moderate Peril.
]]>Messrs Burton and Scroogepresent another instalment of their pro-defenestrationpodcast, in which they discuss the following:
What have we been playing?
LOTRO: The MMO that keeps on going.
You Tube and crap gaming videos.
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]]>The post Minions (2015) appeared first on Contains Moderate Peril.
]]>Spin-off movies can be a risky venture. Take the Penguins of Madagascar for example. The characters worked fine inasupporting role in two previousmovies but failed to fully find an audience in their own vehicle. However this is most definitely not the case withMinions. The movie is ninety one minutes of exquisitely crafted cinema. From the opening Universal fanfare (which the Minions sing-a-long to) to the post credit rendition of Revolution, the filmis consistently funny and perfectly paced. The production design and overall aesthetic is beautifully realised and the central characters of Kevin, Stuart and Bob are thoroughly engaging. Actually, forget “engaging” they are genuinely loveable. Directors Pierre Coffin and Kyle Balda barely put a foot wrong.
Set in 1968, the Minions are in an emotional decline as they cannot find a master to serve.SoKevin, Stuart and Bob set off to find the biggest and baddest villain around witha view of becoming their henchmen. They chance upon international criminal Scarlet Overkill (Sandra Bullock) and inadvertently win here favour. If they can secure the Queen of England’s crown then she will find a home for them and restore them to their role as “minions”. This broad plot lends itself to a wealth of sixties pop culture references and clever in-joke, along with continual slapstick humour. This is a movie that entertains on multiple levels which explains why the adults outnumbered the children in the screening I saw.
During the course of their misadventures Kevin, Stuart and Bob drive through a movie set where Stanley Kubrick is faking the Moon Landing, get walked over by The Beatles at the Abbey Road zebra crossing and pull the sword Excalibur from the stone, thus claiming the throne of England. Minions is the sort of movie that will require multiple viewings to fully appreciate all it’s throwaway gags and one liners. The period setting also lends itself to acornucopia of classic tunes by the likes of The Who,The Kinks and The Rolling Stones. Are they clichd? Yes. Do they still work? Most certainly due to the scenesthat they underscore.
I laughed continuously while watching Minions and was more than happy to surrender myself to it’s stupidity and tangential narrative. The minions themselves are just inherently likeable and there is no need for them to possess complex characters and motivations beyond their Joie de vivreandpenchant forBananas. This most certainly has been the funniestmovie I’ve seen so far in 2015 and I felt immensely restored by seeing it. Laughter really does have curative properties. Oh and if you do go and see it, stay right until the end and ensure you watch all the credits and beyond. You’ll be well rewarded.
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]]>The post The Varying Quality of You Tube Content appeared first on Contains Moderate Peril.
]]>“The ability to speak does not make you intelligent”.Qui-Gon Jinn
Over the weekend, I was looking for some video footage from a particular game.I won’t bore you with the details asthey are not that important tothis discussion. Let it suffice to say that You Tube had plenty of content matching my search, as you would expect. I picked one of the resultsat random and watched athree minute video which showed me exactly what I was looking for.What became apparent as Iwatched was that although the tools for producing You Tube content are common place, not everyone is actually good atmaking “Let’s Play” or an instructional video.
The key to producing a good video of this kind is twofold. The video content has to clearly show the game mechanics that are being discussed. Presentation is key. Next the accompanying narration has to be factually accurate, easy to understand and engaging. The former of these two skills can be easily learned. There is a wealth of advice and guidance available on producing professional videos. The latter requirement is not so easy to pick up. In fact for some it is nigh on impossible. Thus there is a broad spectrum of quality when it comes to You Tube content.
Simply put there are far too many You Tube videos where the subject matter is poorly framed and the creator has no discernible public speaking skills. Inarticulate ramblingsandpoorly expressed points are sadly common place. Plus there is absolutely to excuse for being dull. Yet You Tube is awash with poorly made content that often proves to be an absolute chore to sit through. I appreciate that many content creators are driven by enthusiasm but I also suspect that a percentage are motivated by dreams of internet fame or a chance to make a fast buck. Greed often seems to trump quality control.
Now I want to make it quite clear that I’m not in anyway advocating that people should be denied the chance to create You Tube content. I firmly believe in people right to express themselves within the confines of the law. However the moment you place something in the public domain then youare inviting criticism. We live in a media saturated age and the wider publicare extremely tech savvyand expectcontent to be to a certain standard by default. Therefore a lot of existing content creators shouldraise their gameand You Tube needs to introduce a more sophisticated means of providing feedback, other than the arbitrary thumbs up or down.
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]]>The post Sacrament (2014) appeared first on Contains Moderate Peril.
]]>A mans faith allows him to eat anything, but a man whose faith is weak eats only vegetables.
Reportedly iconic scream queen Marilyn Burns last (and brief) film appearance before her untimely death last year, its perhaps somewhat fitting that her last cinematic outing is knee-deep in Texas Chainsaw Massacreterritory. Playing alongside her as her husband is Ed Guinn (the cattle truck driver from the original TCM), whilst the film itself is set in the middle of the Texas bible belt and features teens being the main course on the barbecue. Unfortunately there are no chainsaws in evidence, but the crazed townsfolk of Middlespring seem to be managing just fine without one!
Call it a homage to TCM, but Sacrament(not to be confused with Ti Wests 2013 Sacrament), does offer a few variations on its otherwise well-trodden tale of barbecued butchery. Firstly, theres the central gay relationship between the two male leads which takes on a greater significance in a pivotal payoff later on. Then, theres the religious slant driving the cannibalistic community to commit atrocities against all those unfortunate young sinners. And it does offer Marilyn Burns a chance (albeit briefly) to taste what its like to be the terroriser (and tenderiser) for once.
Its rough round the edges, the acting is (to be charitable) variable in quality, and whilst its never dull it never manages to set the pulse racing or even begin to notch the terror dial above 1. It originally started out as a short (included in the extras), which is recreated in its entirety during the film (with a different actor), and perhaps rather tellingly this remains the most effective sequence throughout.
In some ways its a DTV equivalent of Herschell Gordon Lewis drive-in gore feast Two Thousands Maniacs. But whilst it certainly offers Herschell-like portions of blood and entrails, its ultimately more of a gruesome snack than a gourmet blood feast.
First published onFleapits & Picture Palaces.
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]]>The post Ferengi Nandi Warship appeared first on Contains Moderate Peril.
]]>This evening, I finally claimed the Ferengi Nandi Warship thatI’ve been grinding for the last twenty five days in Star Trek Online. The grind actually wasn’t that much of a chore as it merely involved undertaking the FlyingHigh repeatablemission which is part of the Lohlunat Festival event. It’s something that can be done in under five minutes. Unlike festivals in other MMOs which offers mere cosmetic baubles, Cryptic rewards those who have persevered with a Tier 6 ship which is a tangible asset. I must admit claiming this vessel afforded me a great deal of satisfaction.
Since my primary character reached level 50 in STO, I’ve been using the AvengerBattle Cruiser as my ship of choice. I’ve upgraded the vessel to Tier 5U and have been more than satisfied with my Phaser Beam Array Tactical build. But since I’ve gone to the trouble of earning theFerengi Nandi Warship, it seems only logical to try it out for a while. So I kitted the new ship out with various equipment and consoles I had in my bank and then went on a shopping spree via the exchange. I’m experimenting with a mixture of Plasma Turrets and Torpedos and so far that weapons build is proving adequate.
The main convenience of theFerengi Nandi Warship is the inclusion of bank, mail and exchange access via the bridge. I cannot overstate who convenient this is, negating the need to travel to specific locations when wanting to purchase new items or access stored items. There is also a Dabo table for those with a bent forgambling. A Ferengi Trader is also on hand to offer a selection of unique Duty Officer assignments. I hope they prove lucrative as my reserves of both Energy Credits and Dilithium are somewhat low at present. The only minor quibble I have with the new ship is you cannot visit the interior as extensively as you can on other vessels.
I must admit that I am glad my time on Risa has come to an end. About a week ago I stopped doing the various events other than the one required to claim the ship. All my alts have now got top level Floaters and Powerboards and the novelty of the entireLohlunat Festival was beginning to wear thin. However this is the first time I have ever fully participated in such an event in an MMO, so overall it has been an interesting experience. I suppose whether I show similar due diligence withQ’s Winter Wonderland later this year depends upon what carrot is on the end of the stick.
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]]>The post Cosmetic Weapons Coming to LOTRO appeared first on Contains Moderate Peril.
]]>Update 16.2 is currently in Beta on the Bullroarerserver and one of the new features that is currently being tested is the addition of cosmetic weapons. Now many LOTRO playersare keento get their hands on this new system, however my primary character is a Lore-master and a staff doesn’t exactly lend itself to beingimprovedby a makeover. A stick is still effectively a stick, regardless of embellishments. Yet it’s been a while since I spent any time inLOTRO so I decided to checkout this new feature today.
First off the character copy service that runs via the LOTRO official forums was on a major “go slow”. It took two attempts for me to successfully use the facility with each page takingover five minutes to load. I don’t know what the problem is at the present because this service has been incredibly efficient in the past. Let us hope this doesn’t become another persistent bug as this service needs to work like clockwork when the server consolidations starts later in the year.
Once in-game I discovered that the cosmetic weapon facility has logically been added to the existing cosmetic outfittab via the character window. The new mechanicworks in exactly the same fashion as equipping any other item for cosmetic use. I tried to equip a shovel that I’ve had in my vault for years as a test but then realised that the item was a two-handed implement and therefore could only be used as a cosmetic for two-handed weapons. I didn’t really have anything else suitable for use but at least the error message that I received proved that the system works.
A short Google search produced several videos from more avid LOTRO players successfully showing off their new cosmetic weapons. As the picture above shows (courtesy of ohgollygeewiz) the system can be used to “amusing” affect. However this does raise a question about immersion that I’m sure will be on the mind of role players. At present there are facets of LOTRO that can be disabled. Cosmetic pets for example can be hidden from view if a player see’s fit. The cosmetic weapon system does not support such a facility and I’m sure this will be a point of debate among those who do not wish their immersion broken by such “frivolity”.
There is also the question of the monetisation of this new facility. Personally I think the sale of cosmetic items is the most benign means to raise cash in a free to play game but there are those who object to even services such as this. be that as it may, it seems that this aspect of Update 16.2 is pretty much good to go, so I guess it won’t be too long before this patch goes live.
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]]>The post Burton & Scrooge #4 appeared first on Contains Moderate Peril.
]]>Messrs Burton and Scroogepresent another instalment of their lavishly tooled podcast, in which they discuss the following:
SWOTR: Knights of the Fallen Empire.
Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns.
Why TV shows Get Cancelled.
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