It is always fun to find new thing in Valheim when returning.

I was up at the trader to sell off some of the plunder from the crypts out in the swamp that had been collecting back at base when I noticed her had a Thunder stone for sale… cheap.  I couldn’t remember what a Thunderston did or if it was new or had been around.

For sale now though

So I bought one, wondering if it would unlock a new recipie.  And it did.  It unlocked something called the Obliterator, which I dearly hoped was what I thought it was.  I headed right back to base to see what it did.

With the Thunder stone I had all the ingredients to hand, so I started looking around as to where I could build it.  I ran all over the inside of our main base looking for a location, but it seemed to be a tall item, so eventually I headed outside.

The second place I ended up building it was out in a clear patch of land next to our main base building, where a generated structure had been when the world was first generated.

The Obliterator it a container with copper pipes running all around it and what appears to be a tall copper mast antenna sticking up into the sky, which is what kept me from building it inside.  You can open it up and put things in it, then there is a lever on the side you can pull when you have closed it up again.

Pull lever to make things happen

And when you pull the lever, thunder booms and lightning descends and strikes the mast, covering it with electric power, and a message shows up saying that the items were obliterated.

What happened? Items obliterated!

Now, this actually solves a problem in Valheim, which is what to do with stuff you no longer want.  You can decontruct building materials, but things like armor or weapons, they just hang around taking up chest space.  And they don’t even stack, so it is annoying, and once you upgrade your armor a couple of times you are never going to go back to the cloth rags again.

So being able to get rid of stuff is a good thing.  Enter the Obliterator.  Better than sailing out to the ocean and dumping stuff overboard… and dumping stuff overboard didn’t always work because some items float and you can end up picking them up by accident later.

And, if you put enough stuff in the Obliterator, Odin gives you something.

What is Odin’s bounty?

It is just coal, but coal is always useful.  The ration of coal to items is pretty bad, according to the wiki, so you wouldn’t want to give up your kiln in favor of the Obliterator.  But getting a bit of coal for a pile of garbage isn’t bad.  I didn’t mind just being able to destroy thing.

You will notice that I am standing back from the Obliterator because when the lightning hits it does some AOE damage to things with its immediate vicinity.

And that was how we ended up with a hole in the side of the base, because the FIRST place I built it was right next to the wall.

Well, that can be mended

I suppose I should be glad that I didn’t find a place inside where the ceiling was high enough to build it.

I guess all replays of a game that is centered on progression will inevitably be quicker.  The learning curve and (some of) the mistakes have been marked out or made already and you often know what the next upgrade brings and that drives you to move forward.  So it has been going for me.

Look, starting out last week, all I wanted was some obsidian so we could get the next workbench upgrade.  Obsidian means going to the mountains, but it is just the mountains.  The mountain biomes are already close by, easier to get to than the swamp. C’mon, I’ll zip in, pick some up, and zip right out again.  I just wanted to get my troll hide armor that last upgrade.  I put that on to go hunt and harvest because I am fast and stealthy in it.

I just needed to brew up some frost resist meads… and I’ll barely need those, practically a waste to comsume one for such a tiny mission… and I’ll be set.

The wolves in the mountains though, they had different ideas.

Wolves say “No!”

This led to a series of events that caused me to have to go and clear up death markers on my game map as they were becoming rather too frequent and obscuring some terrain.

Upgraded bronze kit sufficient to tank The Elder is not up to the task in the mountains.  Also, you cannot mine obsidian with a bronze pick, something I was reminded of when I was up in the mountains… but the sound of a bronze pick hitting obsidian, that is still loud enough to alert the local wolves and send them your way.  Another death.

At one point I was in a situation where I had a few corpses to recover and the naked run just wasn’t cutting it.  I decided I needed to gear up to get this done, so I raided our strategic iron supply, the pile of iron we had been slowly building up, and forged myself a set of upgraded iron armor set, along with iron mace and iron pickaxe.  I drained our iron reserves dry, but I got up there and got my stuff back… killed a few wolves… and grabbed some obsidian.

Mission accomplished I guess.

Then I spent the balance of last week binge mining armor, breaking into crypts to clear them out… iron gear made the dragur easier to deal with… and hauling scrap iron home to be refined.  I managed to get 900 iron back over the week, though we’ll get to the dynamics of that in another post.  There is a mod aspect to that.

Along the way, as I pillaged the swamps, I finally found some turnip seeds growing.  Those too went back to base to be cultivated until we built up a supply of seeds sufficient to maintain production in support of upgraded food.  Also, you need some turnips to make the spice rack upgrade for the cauldron to get upgraded food.  So all good there.

Turnip Seeds in the swamp

Turnip seeds are kind of tough to find because, unlike carrot seeds in the black forest, there isn’t as much ground suitible for them to spawn on… or so goes the theory online.  Seems reasonable.

Now I was upgeared and up gunned… or up bowed, having made the huntsman’s bow… and those wolves in the mountains were not such a terror.  But I needed frost resist meads to hang out in the mountains, lest I freeze.  The way around that is silver, which you need for the wolf hide cape, which gives you cold resistence.  But silver is only found in the mountains and it is mostly buried which means you need the wishbone to find it.

I did try to find some opportunistic silver.  You can find veins above ground now and then.  The world generation algorithm allows for that… or is imperfect, depending on how you look at it.  But exploration, while getting me more wolf hides, did not turn up any free silver.  William Jennigs Bryan wept.

That meant we needed wishbones, which meant killing Bonemass, the swamp boss.

Bonemass’s location had been revealed to us previously and I had taken a side trip to put up a portal by his spawn point.  To get ready to fight him I came up with a plan.  Usually, if there are a few of us, we build a few platforms and snipe away at him, mostly out of range.

However, one of the other aspects of this run at Valheim is that it has become mostly a Potshot and I venture.  That is fine.  We’re perhaps a little more into it than Ula or Bung, so it might be a pleasant break for them.

But with two of us, just arrows seemed like it might take a while.  Also, we had a limited amount of the most potant arrows against Bonemass, frost arrows.  While in the mountains I had killed a few drakes, enough to put together 200 frost arrows.  That would keep one person going through the fight, but somebody else would need to be on the ground.

First things first, I went out to the swamp and started on a platform.  This was hindered a bit at one point when an event happened, I got the message about the ground shaking, and trolls showed up and started smashing everything.  I guess I hit the threshold of structures that made the area constitute a base.  They took some effort to deal with as kiting in the swamp is tough as you’re always wet and have to wade through deep water if you don’t have a clear path.

Swamp Troll Getting His

I managed to fend them off, then went back to rebuilding, putting together a covered gallery for the sniper role.

A vantage point in the trees

That was just above the summoning are, which I had cleared out and leveled with the hoe.

The area of the coming fight

I was a bit worried about line of sight from the perch.  It seemed okay, but you only really know once the fight is on and the big bad is rolling around.

View from the shooting gallery

That all setup, Potshot and I got out there and setup, him in the perch loaded with most of our frost arrows and me down on the ground in the iron armor, upgraded as fully as possible, with a few frost arrows for some ranged attacks, but mostly planning to get stuck in with the iron mace, blunt and cold being the two weaknesses of Bonemass.

Once unleashed… summoning bosses now just requires one of whatever item calls them it seems, in this case a withered bone… I gulped down a poison resist mead and tried to get in there and pound on him when I could.

Bonesmass Unleashed

He summons blobs, which were one-shottable, and brings forth a big old cloud of poison, which you want to get away from even on a poison resist mead, and he does a couple of big attacks that you want your shield up for.  The trick of being on the ground with him is knowing when to get in close and beat on him and when to run away.

I did try laying back to hit him with frost arrows but, while they did damage and Potshot was consistantly ticking away at him, it was the mace that really made his health bar move.  So I got in close when I could, managed not to die, and took a health mead when I mis-timed a block or didn’t dance away in time, and we brought him down.

We returned to the main base to hang up the trophy on the henge and unlock his abilities, which are decent combat resists.

Bonemass on his hook

I still prefer Eikthyr for the running away potential, but Bonemass isn’t bad.

We also picked up a wishbone each, which we equipped.  Then I went through to a portal near some mountains and ran up to a ruin I saw previously that looked like it would make the core of a decent base and build a workbench and a portal.  Potshot joined me up there and, frost resist meads running, we found a silver vein not too far off and mined out our first silver.

Then we ran it down the mountain to bring it back to base.

At least running downhill is quick

The refining of silver has begun.  First items produced were wolf hide capes for the cold resist.

We still need a bunch of iron, and have plenty of crypts in the swamp mapped out, but now I can explore the mountains as well.

What to say about enterprise software?

I asked Google Gemini… Google Bard had to change its name… to draw me some pictures of enterprise software… it also does images now… and it came up with some respectable output that gave me the *feel* of what I was looking for.

Tell me how this makes you feel…

I asked because when I think of enterprise software I think of some Paul Zwolak prints that were in our office at Edify that were meant to represent the concept as well.

Taken in 2001 with a cheap digital camera

Those three prints… those were just the ones I took pictures of with the now rather primitive Fuji 1MP digital camera I had at the time… were part of a series meant to suggest the effects of our software.  They were titled:

• Tackling the Enterprise through Self Service
• Software for Interactive Service
• Extending the Reach of Interactivity

I wish I had better images of them.  I also wonder what happened to them.  They probably ended up in a dumpster like so much of the companies I worked for.

I have been thinking of the approach I should use for the next stage of my career in telephony related technology.  I do want to keep going, in part because I did actually get to work on a bunch of interesting things, often by dint of raising my hand when some director or VP asked if I wanted to go work on something new.  (New stuff is fun and interesting, and leaving your mistakes behind is always a relief.)

The thing is, we will also be moving from an era in my career where I can point at products and services I worked on that thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of people used… Global Village modems were everywhere if you had a Macintosh in the mid-90s, and even Jasmine hard drives were pretty well known in the late 80s and early 90s… to a stage where almost nobody could see what I was working on directly.

I can point at some things that I touched that people used.  Did you ever use the voice verification feature when calling in an order for Home Shopping Network?  Were you a GM employee who needed an employee discount code to purchase a car?  Did you access your Banamex checking account over the web?  Did you call up to check on your jury duty status in Los Alamos county?  Did you ever call AMC’s toll free number to find out a movie show time?  Did the Royal Auto Club send you a response to an email you sent them ages ago and to which they had already responded?

I was involved, or at least sat next to somebody involved with most of that in some way.  (I had a cube across from the recording studio where the AMC movie line updates were recorded.)  Most of those are well in the past, but there are tales to be told.  (If you call 1-888-AMC-4-FUN these days it just tells you to use the damn web site like a normal person grandpa!)

Wikipedia has a pretty good general entry on enterprise software if you want to know what I am even going on about.

Anyway, as I mentioned in my previous post in the series, I had found the golden ticket and was on the path into enterprise software.

Golden ticket?  Why yes, because while you work in anonymity compare to other types of software… there are very few About boxes that credit devs because companies don’t want competitors poaching their key staff… the pay is better.  How much better?

Back in my early days at Global Village, when we were hiring contractors to do some manual testing, one of the people at an agency we used laid out the hierarchy of pay/abilities for their staffing.  It ran, from lowest to highest:

• Educational Software
• Video Games
• Productivity/Desktop Software
• Utility Software
• Enterprise Software

That was an off the cuff comment, meant as a general illustration, but the truth of it… not just for testers, but for developers and other engineering staff as well… has stuck with me all these years.

Yes, there are exceptions.  The trio that made Valheim (and hateful old Notch and Tim Sweeney, and some others) certainly made much more on games than your typical enterprise software developer.  But those tales also reflect an ownership stake, and the boss always takes most of the pie.  The old ditty about “my boss makes a dollar while I make a dime” is only wrong in that the ratio has move closer to a hundred dollars for every dime a worker makes.

And there are crappy enterprise software companies that pay poorly.  I could name a few.

In general though, as somebody seeking employment, the pay scale holds pretty true.  New college grads make more in enterprise shops than many senior devs at video game companies if the the industry compensation reports are at all on accurate.

And once you go up a rung on that ladder it is difficult to step back.

At one point, further down the road, I applied for a position at a video game company as a manager for their server ops team, something I was nominally qualified for on paper, plus I knew somebody at the company and had a strong recommendation.  But I didn’t get past the initial screening call because they said a couple minutes into it that, based on my most recent position, they were not going to be able to offer me anything comparable in pay.  My resume alone had priced me out of the industry.

It priced me out because it said at that point I had been in enterprise software for a dozen years and was a senior manager acting in a director level role at a large multi-national company.

Now, there were good reasons to not hire me that would have no doubt come out in any interviews.  I am not saying they owed me the job or anything.  But they couldn’t see the point of trying to move any further for the stated reason of price.  Oh well.

Why does enterprise software pay better than the other categories?

Often the deals for software licensing at the enterprise level can be for tens of thousand to hundreds of thousand to millions of dollars for a single implementation.   And since these implementations are often considered “mission critical,” there is usually an ongoing maintenance contract that goes with the deal that often generates more revenue over time than the initial sale.

So you only need a few customers to be viable in enterprise software, and a couple hundred on maintenance will make you quite profitable as they are all paying for the same team to do updates and support.

This does tend to make those customers somewhat demanding when it comes to support… though honestly I have had people yelling at me on the phone about a $129 modem they purchased three years ago be more demanding than some of enterprise customers.

Then again, there are enterprise customers who want something for nothing all the time… but we’ll get to Walmart eventually.  I’ll just say that you probably don’t want them as a customer ever.

Anyway, for some reason I felt the need to meander off into the topic of enterprise software before jumping to the next step in my career where I end up doing something other than what I was obstensibly hired to do.

Our overruling principle is to always maximize shareholder value in any given situation.

-Embracer Group, Calendar Q4 2023 Financial Report

This past week the train wreck that is the once ominously (and now tragically) named Embracer Group declared that sure, they were laying off staff and cancelling almost every project they had going, but it was because their “overruling principle is to always maximize shareholder value in any given situation,” which is such an astonishing lie that I combed Swedish police blotter entries for reports of individuals whose pants were literally on fire.

Embrace This… Comic Sans font used on purpose to register my disdain

Embracer Group has been the victim of tragicly incompentent management of the company, studios, and brands they own.  Remember, these are the people who own all of Tolkien and declared that they were going to fix their issues by exploiting Middle-earth to the maximum.

If there were any justice in the world the senior execs at Embracer as a whole, and CEO Lars Wingefors in particular, would be run out of town on a rail, then face lawsuits and possible criminal charges for their overtly deceptive behavior at the helm of the enterprise.

Instead of reprecussions however, those execs are trying to claim they are very concerned about shareholder value while being shocked and surprised that their gamble with shareholder money did not play out.

The thing is, when you’ve screwed things up so badly and so deliberately, if you start spending your Saudi blood investment money before you’ve closed the deal and you don’t have the good sense to have a plan, then you have already blown your fiduciary responsibility to the investors, you have already proven that you do not, in fact, in any way, have the maximization of shareholder value in mind in the operation of your business.

You cannot fuck everything up and then claim to be a champion of the shareholders.

There is a lot to hate about that quote at the top of the post.  Certainly at the top of the list would be equating short term stock price with shareholder value.  Shareholder value is a lot more than that, or should be.  I am keenly aware of the perverse incentives that reward short term thinking, that only what is happening in the current fiscal quarter matters, and how captial management groups and Wall Street in general hold  companies accountable only on that dynamic.

All of this late stage capitalism where gambling on stock prices and demanding that the line must always go up is very bad and will always end in tears.

Tom Toro cartoon from The New Yorker

(You can read a bit about Tom Toro here.)

It is easy to get mad about that, and more people should be mad about that.

But Embracer isn’t even in that league.  These fuckwits screwed things up in patently predictable and obvious ways, during which time they were clearly not considering shareholder value with any more depth than if they had gone to Vegas and put all of their money on red.

It was only after screwing things up and getting the company in a bind that they decided it was time to come out and make an empty declaration about shareholder value.

I am reminded of a Dennis Miller quote about nobody finding Christ on prom night.  It is only when you’ve fucked everything up that seeking salvation seems like a good plan.

For once I am on the side of Wall Street.  Or I would be if I had any hope that they would see through this bald face lie and vote the rascals out at the earliest possible opportunity.  Again, justice would be the executive staff finishing their lives working at an off-brand fast food restaurant where their shift leader asked them at least once a week how the shareholder value thing was going.  Hey Lars, how is the shareholder value today?  Did that customer get any shareholder value with their lutefiske Lars?  What are you doing at the deep fryer that is maximizng shareholder value Lars?

A man can dream.

Alas, it won’t come to pass.  If there is one thing I have learned in life is that the rich take care of the rich.  As a CEO you only face actual reprecussions if you betray your class.  Even if they drive the whole thing into the ground, which they could still do given the business accumen they have shown so far, they’ll still get positions of responsibility, serve on boards, and prosper in all the little ways that show how the rich take care of their own.

Related:

• Game Developer – Embracer says it’s looking out for shareholders after cutting almost 1,400 jobs
• Massively OP – Embracer confirms layoffs of nearly 1400 people were part of efforts to ‘always maximize shareholder value’
• Kotaku – Embracer Cancelled Nearly 30 Games In Just 6 Months
• IGN – Embracer Warns of More Layoffs Despite Already Letting Go 1,387 Staff
• Games Radar – Embracer Group quietly cancelled 29 unannounced games and shut 7 studios within six months last year
• PC Gamer – Embracer reveals it laid off around 1,400 people in 6 months last year, but don’t be a bellyacher—this is all about ‘maximising shareholder value’
• Fandom Wire – “always maximize shareholder value”: Embracer Group Shows Its True Colours After Sacking More Employees
• Gamesindustry.biz – Embracer CEO says layoffs are “something that everyone needs to get through”

On Tuesday Enad Global 7 released their Q4 2023 and overall 2023 financial results.  You can find the documents over on the investor relations site which I have linked at the bottom of the post.  These things always get tagged as “interim” or the like, but if they change anything they are going to have to do a filing and publicly announce it.

Enad Global 7

The overall message was something like, “We did okay, but things are tough all over.”  While they didn’t explicitly call out the pandemic income bubble, they talked about pain in the industry, the massive amount of layoffs, and the “irrational exuberence” of thinking the good times would continue to ramp up. (I am sure Alan Greenspan regrets that phrase to this day.)

While EG7 did better in 2023 than in 2022, that was largely carried by the sudden, surprise popularity of My Singing Monsters, which started in Q4 of 2022, but which has been tapering off every quarter since then.  So EG7’s forecast for 2024 is a decline in revenue.

EG7 Q4 2023 – Medium to Long-term Outlook

I am not sure what they base their 2026 forecast on, but clearly they are hoping they’ll turn out something big in 2025.  All they have on their plate is Mechwarrior and the revamp of H1Z1: Just Survive so far, leaving aside the usual round of expansions.  They are either hopelessly optimistic or have something else up their sleeve they’re not yet sharing, because they aren’t going to magic their way… gathering or otherwise… more than a 50% boost in revenues on that.

Meanwhile, looking at the revenue for the last five quarters and the cumulative revenue for the trailing twelve months, that Q4 2023 was not a winner for the company.

EG7 Q4 2024 – Revenue and Earnings

This is particularly grim when you consider that Q4 encompases the holidays, which is traditionally a peak quarter for video games AND when Daybreak launched expansions for EQ, EQII, and LOTRO in Q4, plus updates for its other titles, and the company was still down to its lowest ebb in a year.

That is why they have a grim outlook for 2024.  You can see how the two biggest games group in the company did in 2023.

EG7 Q4 2023 – Game Division Revenues

Daybreak was actually up in revenue slightly… again, not good enough for a quarter with expansions where things should be up a lot more… but was down on net earnings.  But it is Big Blue Bubble… very much a deflating bubble… and the falloff of My Singing Monsters that was dragging down the overall numbers from the games side of the house.  The whole reason that the company was even up in 2023 was the MSM spike, so as it falls the company overall declines, and there is nothing likely to replace it as a pillar of earnings.

One item that piqued interest all over was a bland comment in the interim report that said:

Daybreak successfully closed on the sale of a non-core IP for USD 5.9 million. The transaction provides EG7 with further improvement to its liquidity. This transaction will not affect EG7´s business plan and performance other than the P&L effect from the asset sale.

That led to a bunch of questions.  It turned out that the company sold off the PlanetSide IP, though what that actually means for the current PlanetSide 2 title, which is on PC, PlayStation 4, and XBox, is unclear.  It is also not clear who really bought the IP.  The copyright was transferred from Daybreak to Bay Tree Tower Limited on the 24th of last month, so there is some speculation that maybe the private equity firm Bay Tower bought it.  But there is no word on what the plan is.

I am a bit mixed on this sale.  The PlanetSide franchise was always Smed’s darling, propped up by his enthusiasm, but was always low on the revenue list, as EG7’s chart from last year points out.

Daybreak monthly gross revenue by title

Back in 2015 the creative director on the project described PlanetSide 2 as “really struggling” in a Reddit AMA, so I suppose it isn’t the biggest surprise that it was on the list to be cut.  The question is, “what happens next?”  There has been no word so far on what it means to the current title or the Rogue Planet studio within Daybreak that develops the game.

Not covered in the report or presentation were the recent layoffs, though EG7 reported that the total of those let go was “less than 15” from the EverQuest, Dungeons & Dragons Online, DC Universe Online, and Lord of the Rings Online teams.  So call it between 4 and 14 people laid off I guess?  Why say “less than 15” if it isn’t 14?  I don’t know.  Nobody from PlanetSide 2 was on the list I guess, but given the previous paragraph, I’m not even sure that they work for EG7 any more.

Also not addressed were the “major shareholder” demands I mentioned in Sunday’s post, though the presentation was likely already done and legally vetted before then, so wasn’t going to change.

It was clearly stated that EG7 will begin to execute on its shareholder value plan, where by 50% of net profits will be earmarked for dividends or stock buy backs.

Finally, Ji Ham’s acting career continues at EG7, where he remains acting CEO

And there we go.  Now to see what happens to EG7 in 2024 as their winter of major shareholder discontent grows.  Will they sell off anything else to keep the wolves of Wall Street at bay?  Or will they start shopping the company around as has been demanded?  And if they do, who would buy it?

Related

• EG7 – Investor Relations Page
• Massively OP – EG7 Q4 2023
• Massively OP – Daybreak sold PlanetSide for $5.9M
• Game Whisperer – PlanetSide IP sold to Shell Corporation
• Inventory Full – Games for Sale
• Massively OP – Daybreak’s DC Universe Online studio Dimensional Ink hit with layoffs
• Gaming Idustry.biz – Daybreak confirms “less than 15” layoffs

I set out this past weekend with a simple goal in Valheim; to defeat The Elder, the second of the bosses, the Black Forest boss, that we might progress past bronze and into iron and related gear.  We had been mining quite a bit of copper and tin and had done some upgrades, but I was already itching for the next stage of the game.

We had previously scoped out the nearest location of The Elder and built a small base with a portal close by.  I had also cleared away some space around where the fight would take place and then fenced a bit of it in.

The Elder’s platform

That wasn’t to contain The Elder so much as to keep wandering mobs at bay.  Our first run at The Elder back in the day was interrupted by skeletons, greydwarves, and a troll, so keeping the locals away is now something I consider.

It was just Potshot and myself this time around, but we were game for the fight.  In past runs we have tended to all just go with the bow and some fire arrows.  I had read since that a player in max bronze armor available and a big shield can tank The Elder, pinning him down while others hit him from range.  So I donned the bronze suit and got out my upgraded bone tower shield and stepped into the ring, summoning our target.

And it worked out.  I had to step away from the roots that The Elder summoned, but otherwise it was a fairly smooth fight.  Only one of my walls damaged by the whole thing.

The Elder goes down

We collected the trophy and the swamp keys he dropped and headed back to the henge to mount the trophy and unlock the next ability.

Trophy mounted successfully

The Elder unlocks improved wood cutting… which I guess could come in handy.  It is, however, not at the top of my list and I held on to the Eikthyr ability, even if I constantly forget to use it when I really need it.

That successfully wrapped up in much less time than expected, we decided we were pretty much invicible and headed to the swamp to get some of that sweet, sweet scrap iron to refine.

And… there were issues.

I died some… we both did

That map doesn’t really explain the depth of our misery and how we set ourselves up for some extra work.

Our closest portal was across that strip of water in a sliver of swamp, complete with its own Surtling flame and spawner.  The spawner is in the water so… free cores and coal!

That Portal requires a boat to get to the swamp

But we had to sail across… or swim across, in with the leeches… to get to the crypt we were first assailing… you can see its outline to the left of the image above… and then to get back to our corpses.  Fortunately, OdinShip mod we were using has an inexpensive small boat, so we were able to keep building them.  (That little hut next to the portal is over a work bench.)  But the whole thing was hard on the boats because there was a swamp abomination hanging around, and he was pretty keen to smash any boat we left parked on the shore.

The Abomination lurking around the crypt

That said, the abomination only killed us one I think.  It was inside the crypt where we found ourselves in a bit of trouble.

We had been flirting with dragur on the edge of the swamp now and then as part of exploring which, along with our quick win against The Elder, made us a little more aggressive than maybe we should have been.  Three dragur in the opening room had me down and running back pretty quickly, though Potshot managed to finish them off.

Later, a bit deeper in, a room with a dragur spawner managed to pop a dragur elite and a one star dragur and it took a while and some corpse runs to get that sorted.

Potshot’s character remains

Multiple deaths and much scrambling about later, we did eventually clear the crypt.

You may see, if you look closely, that our deaths leave behind two tombstones, usually one right on top of the other, though occasionally one on the ground and one way the hell up in a tree.

One of my own deaths

One of them just has the name and the other says “equipment” on it along with the name.

I believe this is due to one of the mods we have chosen, equipment and quick slots, which gives you extra gear and equipment slots.  It drops a tombstone just for those items, since they are not in your inventory.  That is actually kind of nice… so long as, when you’re in a hurry and running from mobs and trying to grab your stuff on a corpse run… corpse runs, still a thing in 2024… and you click on the wrong one and get all your inventory stuff but are still naked and running around with some hostile mob after you.  Comedy all the way.

We managed to get out of there and our first load of scrap iron home.  That crypt also gave us the location of the next boss, which was two swamps over.  So we landed there and began operations… and died some more.

Seriously, I had made it to the fight with The Elder having died twice.  Lots of close calls, but only two deaths.  And then we got to the swamp and started dropping like flies.  But we did get a decent foothold in that swamp.  I also cleared a ruin in the first swamp and put a portal in there so we wouldn’t have to cross the water every time.  Potshot actually swam that channel multiple times and lived.

In hauling scrap iron back I finally ran into one of our old friends, a sea monster.  We had been commenting that we hadn’t seen one so far, but then you get a boat full of scrap iron on a night run back to base and suddenly there one is.

Running with the wind, the monster in pursuit

That run actually had two sea monsters.  But the small boat runs as fast they do if you have the wind at your back, so they just chased me until the hit their limit, then turned away.  I was able to safely get the scrap iron home to our base.

Arriving home with the dawn

So we are now harvesting and gearing up and look at what we can do with stone as a building material once again.

I spent some time fiddling with settings for this post because I wanted to see if there was a way I could get the fog, the middle-distance mist that was used to hide the fact that back in 1999 the 3dfx Voodoo2 card 3D rendering card I was running in parallel to my actual video card had a draw distance that was comically small even relative to soon to be dominant nVidia TNT2 based cards.

This probably seems like trivia… something like draw distance and the atmospheric technique that SOE used to try and hide the fact that hardware wasn’t up to the task of drawing a lot of polygons out to much distance.  But I cannot emphasize enough both how effective this technique was and the moody, menacing effect it could have on play.

Rather than being like, say, MODERN DAY WOW CLASSIC, where it just doesn’t draw stuff like bosses who can murder you to death if it doesn’t feel like it, causing them to pop into existance against a background of terrain you could already see from a miles away, early EQ managed to make that limitation feel like a part of the game.  I’ve been over that before if you want more about that.

I did manage to get the fog to return to Surefall Glade by reigning in the LOD slider.  The trees now don’t obviously end in a ceiling.

Wait, those aren’t trees! They are just giant pillars!

Now they look a bit more organic.

Okay, I can pretend they are trees again

However, out in the wider world I could not get that similar fog effect to show up.  A bit of a bummer, that.

Why am I on about the fog thing yet again?  Because it explains some of my behavior back in 1999.  I mentioned previously that when I arrive at the road that led south from Qeynos Hills, that I was given pause and avoided going that way in part because the road led across an open plain that disappeared into the mist.  It seemed ominous.

Without that atmospheric fog however, it just seems to lead into… well… nothing?  Infinity?  Some undefined state?  You tell me.

The south end of Qeynos Hills

The other reason I did head south was… nothing indicated that I should.  When you get to that last crossroad there is a large stone marker giving directions.

Coming up on the marker

When you look at one side it has an arrow pointing back north to Surefall Glade, from whence I had come.  That was easy.

Been there and done that

On another side was an arrow pointing eastward declaring “To the Karanas.”

The Karanas this way

But nowhere on the stone was any indication of what lay to the south.  So not only did the plain to the south seem somewhat dubious, with higher level mobs wandering about, but as a destination from Qeynos Hills it did not even seem worth mention.

Later it would become clear that the stone was to guide people coming from the south, which was an important location in Norrath.  It was just that half elves weren’t allowed to be from Qeynos, but had to start off in Surefall Glade.

Qeynos Hills with the crossroad to the south

Eventually though, as I ranged further and further south in search of mobs to fight as the game became more and more busy each evening, I managed to stumble across the zone line.

There were two types of zone lines in old EverQuest.  There were the ones with a narrow path that often zig-zagged to keep you from expecting to see through to the other side, like the line to Surefall Glade or West Karana on the map above, along with the connections between different parts of a city.

And then there were the unmarked, invisible lines across a wide swathes of terrain that you could only discover by running into them.  That was how I managed to step through into North Qeynos, I hit that invisible line and everything froze.  I cannot recall if it put up a message about loading the next zone, the way it does now, or if it just left you hanging there with a static screen.  Either way, I landed on the other side and there was stuff to see.

From the zone line in North Qeynos

I suspect back in the day the mist kept you from seeing Qeynos from this distance, but the road led south and to the front gates of the city.

The Gates of Qeynos

I had discovered my first actual major city.  Granted, in this era half elves were not the only ones to start in their own little small town and then have to travel to Qeynos or Freeport.  Surefall Glade was just one of the more meager starting points.  Halflings and dwarves and elves, both high and wood, had much more substantial starting towns.  And I suspect I will get to them at some point here as I follow my initial path through Norrath.

But not yet.  First I have to explore Qeynos before moving further afield.

Having arrived at the gates of Qeynos, I went AFK for a few minutes standing there, the logout counter running, only to come back and find myself in one of those very Qeynos situations.

It was night, I had been standing there, and Fippy Darkpaw ran down the road, past the guard, through the front gate, and started beating on me.

Wait, how do you think this ends?

Being level 90, he couldn’t touch me, but I had to laugh at the absurdity of this.  I turned on auto-attack and one-shotted him, my reputation with many of the locals improve by the effort.

+1 all over for slaying Fippy… except Blackburrow

I had forgotten the faction standings aspect of the early game.  I cannot remember if it had any effect at all on what happened to me as a player in those days.

The story so far:

• EverQuest Starting Points – Surefall Glade
• EverQuest Starting Points – Qeynos Hills

Well, I dug into the EverQuest 2024 roadmap a bit previously, so I suppose I should give its younger sibling its due as well.  I was going to do this the same week as I did EQ and then things happened and now suddenly we’re in the middle of February.  How does this happen?  Also, happy Mardi Gras!

EQ and EQII Celebrating in 2024

I am not sure how to process an EQ/EQII image that doesn’t include Firiona Vie and Antonia Bayle.

EverQuest II will be celebrating its own big milestone come November when, just a couple weeks ahead of World of Warcraft, it will turn 20 years old.  So the EQII roadmap is also a celebratory exercise, or should be.

EverQuest II 2024 Roadmap

As with the EverQuest 2024 roadmap, it is a little dense on the text front, making it difficult to read even if you click on and expand that image to full size.

But Daybreak has a forum post that breaks it out into a more accessible format.  I am going to work from that.

I am also going to do what I did with the EverQuest roadmap, which is filter out all the recurring monthly swag store, give away, sound track, forum question, and like entries that are somewhat apart from playing the game itself.

The one exception is raid unlocks that come with the monthly Masquerades of Divinity anniversary events.  Those feel like in-game content.

So what does 2024 look like?

January:

• Zimara Breadth: Crested Expanse [Raid] unlocked

February:

• Aether Wroughtlands: The Delves [Raid] unlocked
• Erollisi Day event returns
• Varsoon unlocks The Shadow Odyssey Mid-Content
  • The Emperor’s Athenaeum, Kurn’s Tower, Munzok’s Material Bastion, Ward of Elements, Miragul’s Planar Shard, Shard of Love

March:

• Chronoportal Phenomenon event returns
• HAPPY 25th ANNIVERSARY EVERQUEST!
• Brewday Festival event returns
• Beast’r Eggstravaganza event returns
• Game Update 125 Beta opens
• DirectX 11 API Port on Test Server

April:

• Bristlebane Day event returns
• Game Update 125 launches
• Varsoon unlocks Sentinel’s Fate

May:

• DirectX 11 API Port launches
• New TLE Server Beta opens
  • This is not a TLE, like Varsoon, this will be a different experience. We will be announcing more details soon
• Patches of Pride event returns

June:

• Summer Jubilee’s Tinkerfest event returns
• Summer Jubilee’s Scorched Sky event returns
• New TLE Server launches
• Varsoon unlocks Sentinel’s Fate Mid-Content
  • The Icy Keep: Retribution, Underfoot Depths, Zraxth’s Unseen Arcanum

July:

• nothing

August:

• Extra Life incentives announcement
• Summer Jubilee’s Oceansfull Festival event returns
• Game Update 126 Beta opens
• Game Update 126 launches
• Expansion Prelude begins
• Varsoon unlocks Destiny of Velious

September:

• New Panda, Panda, Panda content

October:

• EverQuest II’s 21st expansion beta + Pre-Order opens
• Nights of the Dead event returns

November:

• Heroes’ Festival event returns
• HAPPY 20th ANNIVERSARY EVERQUEST II
• Extra Life Game Day
• EverQuest II’s 21st expansion launches

December:

• Frostfell event returns

As with EverQuest, that is not a bad year.  But is it a special year?

The major technical update will be the move to DirectX 11.  There will be a new special rules server rolled out in June.  I am sure there will be some special events on the anniversary itself, and there are the monthly cosmetic things that can be earned as part of the Year of Darkpaw.

But otherwise the year is kind of normal.  We get the usual series of holiday events, there is the big game update, and then the annual expansion.  I suppose it says something good about the game that all of that is “normal” and not extraordinary.

Anyway, we shall see if Daybreak has anything else to add on top of what they have on the roadmap.

The monthly EVE Online economic report has arrived for January 2024.  The start of a fresh new year and a fresh new column in my tracking spreadsheet!

EVE Online nerds harder

As usual, I am going to focus mostly on destruction. You can find things about the general New Eden economy here:

• CCP – January 2024 Monthly Economic Report
• CCP – January 2024 MER Forum Thread
• Reddit – January 2024 MER Thread
• TNG –  January 2024 Activity In EVE Online
• TNG – A Look At The January 2024 Active ISK Delta

Overall Summary

It is starting to look like Havoc might well and truly be a success.  Its launch saw an increase in activities, but then we got into the holidays and events and that can cause a rise in activity on its own, so it felt like January might tell the tale.  Would the uptick in activity and destruction carry on into the new year past the Winter Nexus and all that?

The answer is yes.

For the top level January number CCP recorded 495,697 losses.  While that is down from the November Havoc launch peak of 570,018, it is still an uptick from the 481,332 losses recorded in December and the holidays.  Before November you have to go back to December 2021 to see that level of loss.

The total ISK value of recorded losses was 46.8 trillion ISK, down a bit from the 47.28 trillion recorded in December.  So on par there.

Moving to my average kills per day metric, January saw 15,988.94 kills per day, well down from the November peak, but a bit of an uptick from December.

So all in all, January turned in solid numbers for CCP.  This aligns with Jester’s rolling average player chart for this month, which shows numbers holding through January, though the seven day average was already starting to droop at the end, perhaps suggesting things were cooling down by mid-month.

Average players online through January 2024

The pattern of destruction through the month is not as indicative of that, though it does continue to follow the usual wave pattern of Saturday and Sunday peaks and mid-week valleys.

January 2024 – Losses by Day

Top 20 Most Frequent Losses by Class and Hull

On to the charts, starting off with the usual count of losses by class and hull.

I commented about the Exequror Navy Issue showing up in such numbers a couple of months back, but now the Imperium has that as a doctrine ship, so we can see it is part of the null sec meta.

Hulls Lost only Once This Month

What was so rare that it was only lost once… filtering out POS towers and modules and fighter groups.

No so many singles in January, but a couple of choice ones, such as the first ever Cybele, an AT XIX ship, destroyed.  Another Geri downed as well, an AT XVIII prize ship.  The Echelon was a give away for the Incursion expansion.  And that Miasmos is a rare version of the ship that has a bay specifically for hauling Quafe.

Total ISK Lost by Hull Type

Most ISK per Hull Lost

This chart is starting to wear on me a bit, if only because the fact that capitals are expensive to lose is a bit of a “duh” sort of result.  Also, the Cybele listed there is probably under valued at 49.38 billion due to its rarity.

Top 20 Regions by ISK and Hull Losses

The regional losses show some evidence of the ongoing boost in faction warfare areas with the Havoc expansion, while null sec is somewhat quiet.

Top 20 Systems by ISK and Hull Losses

When broken down to the system level, you can see that Turnur is one of the prime conflict points, being one of the locations of the ancient Jovian stargates to Zarzakh.

Meanwhile, Uitra continues to dominate the total kill count with the shuttle killing BS that several groups are doing there to exploit some in-game mechanic.  I covered the totals previously, including the fact that 24% of all shuttles destroyed in 2023 were destroyed in Uitra.

Top 20 Wormhole Systems by ISK and Hull Losses

Wormhole space tends to be the most opaque part of New Eden to… well, me at least, so this month I though I would break out some data from that part of the game.

Overall, WH space saw 8.21 trillion ISK in destruction, which was 17.5% of the total amount recorded in New Eden in January, and 55,073 hulls destroyed, which was 11.11% of the overall January count.

2,434 systems in New Eden that fall in the category of WH recorded at least one ship destroyed.  These were the top 20.

J133335 was the hot spot in WH space in January with 241.54 billion ISK lost in the system.  Looking at the losses, which included some structures, there was something serious going on.  Of the participants, these were the top ten alliances when it came to total ISK destroyed.

What Happens in Pochven Stays in Pochven

Finally, with Pochven up in second place for total ISK lost per region, I thought I would break out which systems were the hot spots there.  Pochven saw 2 trillion ISK lost and 20,117 ships destroyed, which are broken out like this in the 27 systems in the region.

And just to cap that off, I will add in the top ten ship by ISK value lost in Pochven in January.

Anyway, that was January in New Eden.  We look to be off to a destructive year and CCP hasn’t even started messing with null sec yet.

Remember how happy we all were when Enad Global 7 bought Daybreak and how upbeat and happy Robin Floodin was about the future of the company?  The irony of this is that I suspect we will soon look back on the Columbus Nova years… I mean Daybreak years… of being a privately held company as a time of stability.

Enad Global 7

I mean yes, Jason Epstein, Ji Ham, and the executive crew there were at best uncommunicative and at worst bald face liars, incapable of investing in any new development, content to live off the milk that the herd of games they bought from SOE could provide.  But now that Daybreak is part of a publicly held company, things look like they could get much worse.

Of course Jason Epstein and Ji Ham engineered that and turned the whole thing into a reverse merger, so I won’t be praising them.  This is all a situation of their making.  I will merely be irked at the fact that, like Bobby Kotick, they will profit greatly from the misery of their staff and customers.

What am I even on about here?  Let me go back a bit.

Last May a capital management group Alta Fox made a series of demands of the EG7 board of directors.  Alta Fox wanted dividends and stock buy backs, and they wanted EG7 relisted on the NASDAQ exchange in the US.  The former would be immediate money in their pocket while the latter would make it much easier to scam restail investors… I mean would make the stock more accessible to a wide range of investor likely leading to a higher price.

And the board at EG7 acceded to those demands.

They announced a very aggressive dividend and stock buyback plan, dedicated a minimum of all profits towards that.  That is now money that will not be available to develop new products… which, I guess was kind of a faint hope given the history of the board leadership and their run at Daybreak… but will be earmarked to enrich shareholders.

That isn’t necessarily the worst thing.  The stock market existed for decades on dividends as its primary driver and reward for investors.  It is only in times where companies promise infinitely increasing share prices that we are headed towards a truly epic economic fuck up. (Avert your eyes from all those companies doing stock buy backs in a vain attempt to keep up that sort of promise.  I am sure it will work out well this time!)

And EG7 has shown signs that it has been working on a move to NASDAQ… though, technically they are already part of the NASDAQ, they are just traded under the First North Growth North NASDAQ umbrella, which limits the company’s reach, so really they want to be in a more central part of the exchange, and probably one that does valuations in US dollars… by making changes in the organization to support such an effort.  (NASDAQ runs what one might consider the second tier stock exchange in the US, behind the New York Stock Exchage, but is where a lot of US tech companies go public because the requirements are less stringent.  It is where VCs take their investments to cash out.)

So investors like Alta Fox should be happy, right?  Right?!

No, never.  Well, it doesn’t help that EG7’s stock price has been down of late.  I guess they haven’t laid off enough people yet.

But the third thing that Alta Fox was demanding was a top to bottom review of the company with selling the company as one of the possible outcomes.

Well, over at GamesIndustry.biz there is a report that a major shareholder is demanding the sale of EG7.

The story doesn’t identify which shareholder, which seems like journalist malpractice… I mean serioulsy, WTF… but I don’t think we have to think tooooo hard to take a stab at which capital management firm might be making such a demand.  To paraphrase the Deep Throat, “Follow the winging.”

Why now?

On Tuesday EG7 will be holding its quarterly earning call to cover Q4 2023 and 2023 overall.

This is clearly an attempt to put some public pressure on the company.  If they answer questions as part of the call, and they generally do, the question of selling the company will now be at the top of the list.  An evasive answer will be given to this question, a prepared one, but the board will be on notice and a bunch of news stories will feature the possible sale of the company in headlines, which will further reinforce the idea that it will happen.

Meanwhile, the major shareholder will be publicly on again about how the EG7 stock is undervalued, down 80% from its all time high… a high that happened during the Covid bubble and which was so clearly unsustainable that even I was wondering aloud how gaming companies were going to deal with the post-pandemic reality when things went back to “normal” and revenue fell… and how it is the cheapest video game stock around.

That will serve to boost the share price for them for a bit.  Even a hint of blood in the water will bring the sharks.  But eventually the company will have to actively explore selling to a competitor or put forth a plan to please shareholders that does not involve a sale.

Not selling means more dividends and more stock buy backs and getting on a better stage in the NASDAQ domain.  But they are already doing that and can only do so much more.  The only real recourse is to abandon all they new game development plans they spoke about last year and dump the cash at the feet of the investors.  But even that probably won’t be enough.

Which leaves selling… which itself is a bleak prospect.  There are two questions there, who would buy EG7 and what would happen next?

The who is grim.

I mean, you’d love Microsoft or EA or Sony or somebody, if not big at least healthy, would buy them.  But what do those companies need with EG7’s little camp of misfit toys?

No, if you go back to a post I did about who could have bought CCP back in 2018 besides Pearl Abyss, you will see a range of second tier brand exploiters whose plan is always to buy themselves into revenue growth (on Wall Street, every asset is assumed to be worth exactly what you paid for it, so any revenue you get is an increase) by purchasing companies and cutting them down to the minimum viable staff possible to keep them going.

There are a couple of players possible I suppose… Tencent maybe… and we should probably all be happy that Embracer’s management has screwed the pooch so badly that they won’t be acquiring and destroying any more companies in the near future.  But companies like Gamigo still lurk out there.

The upside of Gamigo is that the titles would survive for a while.  It might do well to heed the annual question over at Massively OP about which is the most vulnerable title at Daybreak.  Somebody like Gamigo buys EG7, then H1Z1 is closed pretty much right away and we start betting on which of the lowest performing titles is next on the block.  (I would bet on DDO, if only because there is overhead going to pay Hasbro for the use of the license.)

So, just to sum this up in a cheery way, the paths forward seem to be:

• EG7 abandons any pretense of new titles and just shovels profit into dividends and stock buy backs in an attempt to sate the cavernous maw of capitalism.
• EG7 is sold to a competitor that maybe keeps most of the title active, but staff is cut and a maitenance mode existence is likely the happiest outcome.

Anyway, we shall see how pessimistic I am really being come Tuesday.  Who knows, maybe EG7 made bank in Q4 and the stock price will go up and the situation will be saved for the moment, allowing us to retain the oft abused hope that we’ll see another EverQuest title.

It could happen, right?  Right?

Twitter abides still despite Elon Musk’s best efforts to tank the place.  I summed up the story so far at the one year mark back in October, and it hasn’t gotten any better since… but neither has it gotten that much worse.

Sure, he has driven the valuation down to $12.5 billion from the $44 billion he paid for it… and evidence has come out that the real reason he bought the place was to shut down the Elon Jet Twitter account that tracked the movements of his private jet via publicly available data, announcing how much pollution he was discharging into the atmosphere….  Musk banned the account when he took control of Twitter…  but it remains more alive and popular than any of its competitors and I am still hanging around because groups there that I follow and interact with remain.

Yes, Musk is a nazi supporting, great replacement theory spouting nut case who went as far as turning off community notes on his posts as the community took great joy in pointing out what an ignorant shitheel he really is.

Here is the thing; blocking people liberally and sticking to the “following” tab on Twitter… and nobody ever calls it “X” except in an apologetic “my editor made me call it that” sort of way… makes it a reasonably tolerable experience.  I can still read posts from the game devs and companies I follow, still stay tuned into the arms control and entertainment feeds I enjoy, and Elmo…. oh, poor Elmo.

Elmo checking in…

That tweet seemed to tap into the universal angst and elicited a storm of responses, not all kind, in something a cathartic knee-jerk reaction to arguably the most annoying muppet, enough so that Elmo’s tweet ended up with mainstream media coverage.  That, in turn, led to a muppets-wide set of responses supporting emotional well being since we’re all pretty wound up it seems.

As for Elon, more annoying than even peak cloying Elmo, I blocked him long ago… him and his fan boys and much that was objectionable in an attempt to cleanse my little corner of that site.  I have to work at it.  I remember a time when I felt it was slightly uncouth to block accounts, but now I do so with abandon.  It works for me.

Honestly, if I want to read about what Elon is up to I have to go to BlueSky or Threads, both of which have loud groups there that pick apart his foibles with glee… only taking time out to shame people still on Twitter even as they can’t stop going on about Twitter.  And you can find some classics on those sites.

I never thought he was the first… but I knew people at PayPal so had the inside scoop

I mentioned the ongoing dominance of Twitter… and I think that the fact that it is a prime topic on other services serves as evidence towards that, along with the large number of people who still cross post to Twitter and one of the pretenders to the Twitter throne… but there are arguments to be made that Threads is approaching for sheer numbers of users.  Threads fans on Threads are always there to let us all know that Threads was in the top ten downloaded apps in the Apple Store or wherever (though Twitter topped the charts again on news of Drake nudes being posted there… a moderation error or not?) and the user/traffic numbers seem impressive.

But it also seems like the most likely place show up at accidently.  When I am on Istragram with my personal account, scrolling through classic cars, cats, airplanes, and model trains, it will stick posts from Threads in there… and then I find out I have an account there because if you have an Instagram account you have a Threads account.  I guess, on the plus side, you can now at least access Threads via a web browser.

And Threads could get even more reach through integration with ActivityPub, which will link it to the Fediverse, previously the domain largely dominated by Mastodon.

Mastodon server admins natually greeted this validation of their vision of a unified yet independent network of social media domains with enthusiasm and rolled out the welcome mat for Threads and its users!

Haha, just kidding.  The universal reaction seems to be to pull up the drawbridges and premptiely block any Threads content from polluting the purity of their vision.  I have said that Mastodon is the Linux of social media sites, and here they are rejecting Threads the way the core Linux community rejects anything beyond a command line interface when it comes to UI.

Which brings us back to something I have mentioned before, which is that if there is something partisans of the new sites seem to hate more than Twitter, it is the other sites trying to be Twitter.

So when this past week, when BlueSky finally lifted its “invite only” policy on new users… I guess nobody needs my invite codes now… the joy of that unleashing was not universal.  So, for example, the avacado toast lady, between posts asking people to subscribe to her YouTube channel, had words.

BlueSky bad, posted on Threads

Saying that BlueSky is the worst on security features… and people on Mastodon have been vocal on that front… seems to have some basis in fact.  At least somebody there had a long list of grievences to fling at me when I mentioned having access keys.

Having any sort of monopoly on insufferable users however… hooo boy.  Each of what I think of as the “big three” outside of Twitter has that issue, and nobody is more likely to call out that sort of thing than those who have moved from one of those services to another.  Lectures, gate keeping, shaming, and a ceaseless obsession with Twitter seems par for the course.

Meanwhile over at Spoutible, which I am not sure why I bother posting to as literally nobody who followed me early on seems active any more… well, their external API was happy enough to cough up all the information you would want about accounts if you asked nicely.  This would probably be a big deal if somebody cared.  I went and changed my password.

It is enough to make one wish a plague on all of their houses.  But then what would be spend our time scrolling through?

I, for one, would not mind somebody other than Twitter being the top of the heap, to see one of the pretenders to the throne surpass Elon, if only to see Elon taken down another notch or two.

But the reality is that content is king.  I go where my interests are best served, something that Twitter has a decade advantage on over the other sites.  Looking at ManicTime, it is clear which site holds my eyeballs.  Here is my breakdown of time spent on social media sites over the last six months:

• Twitter – 62.28%
• Mastodon – 11.79%
• Reddit – 10.45%
• BlueSky – 9.36%
• Threads – 2.37%
• Spoutible – 2.18%
• Facebook – 1.57%

I will say that my BlueSky time has been trending up some… though there is still a lot of cross posting… and Threads wasn’t even available in a browser for that whole period of time.  But, in the end, Twitter is where I go.

And at least the Cheech & Chong edibles ads are back on Twitter.

Calling out Idaho

They might be the least objectionable advertiser on the site some days.  But, like Elon, you can just block those noxious ads and move on.

We are coming into the Lunar New Year weekend, and CCP is embracing its sizable Chinese user base with some specials in the EVE Online store.

New Eden Lunar New Year

It is the Year of the Dragon and CCP has some dragon themed SKINs and apparel for players.

• New Launcher Mandatory Now

The new launcher became available and was made the default for anybody new showing up back in November because it was required to support the bolt-on addition of EVE Vanguard.  While CCP would remind you about this launcher, you didn’t have to use it.

Well, now CCP says you have to use it.

something, something, new launcher

I have been using the new launcher since November and… it is fine.  As I noted back then, you can configure the login process to behave like the current launcher and drop you into character select the way you are used to.  Or you can leave it at its default and do character select in the launcher.

The news item promises it will move all your credentials over, but it totally failed to do this for me on my laptop this week.  The recommended recourse is to just install from scratch and reconfigure.  That they include this in their instructions means they know they have a problem.

On the topic of problems, they also can’t seem to fix the fact that everytime they update the launcher it disappears from your pinned start menu options and you have to go re-pin it again.  New launcher problems.

• The Ongoing War for New Eden Kickstarter Campaign

The War for New Eden board game Kickstarter campaign carries on.  It is now past the half way point of its 28 day run.

EVE Strategy Board Game

The campaign broke out and almost tripled its goal on the first day and was closing in on 5x by the end of the second, but has since fallen into the usual mid-campaign low interest rut so common when a company doesn’t have a mid-campaign plan. (Or has a plan that is indistinguishable from having no plan at all.)  You can see the halftime slump in progress over at Kicktraq.

War for New Eden so far

The chart will likely end up with a spike in the last few days as people who were on the fence finally commit, but I always wonder if going a full four weeks is worth the effort, especially for a physical box item like this that they will likely be selling as a retail item eventually.  They will be selling this retail, right?

• January 2024 Monthly Economic Report and Minerals

The January MER dropped this week while I was travelling for work.  I will find some time this weekend to do something about destruction, but I always peek in on the economic side as well to check and see if… for example… CCP has managed to fix the isogen bottleneck that has kept the mineral price index up near its all time high.  And did they?

Jan 2024 – Economic indicies

No they have not managed to address the isogen shortage that they created.  Their rather paltry “blue star” strategy appears to have had little to no impact.

But that doesn’t mean CCP is punishing players pursuing a production path in New Eden, right?  Right?

• SCC Tax Increase

Over at TNG Noizy has a post up about the SCC industry surcharge increase that popped up in the patch notes at the start of the month.

The SCC surcharge component of the Industry Job Installation Fee has been increased from 1.5% to 4%.

Yes, that isn’t technically a “tax,” but only because they gave it a different name.  It has the same goal of any take, which is to take money out of the economy and… as any economist will tell you… dissuade people from participating in that activity.  Taxes are disinicentives, and CCP has bumped up this one.  Does that mean CCP wants fewer producers or that they do not understand economics?  I think the ongoing isogen issue might argue for the latter.

Anyway, happy Lunar New Year to those who celebrate!

On that first day in March of 1999 I ventured from Surefall Glade into Qeynos hills.  It was the first “real” zone I saw in EverQuest, the first place I slayed a mob, the first place there was danger, the first place I died.

A wolf passing by the Surefall Glade entrance

Danger and death were not hard to find.  They were literally in line of sight from the entrance cave to Surefall Glade, right over there at the haunted ruins.

The place is lousy with skeletons

You can see the cave there in the background.  And, should you emerge from the cave at night, you would absolutely see the unearthly glow of the ruins… and maybe even be drawn to it, thinking it friendly.  And, my low level friend, you would be in trouble should you venture too close.  The skeletons… sometimes roaming about, sometimes a seeming harmless pile of bones… would go straight for you if you got too close.  And mixed in with the low level skeletons that you might manage were a number of high level variants… high level for a newbie zone in a spot line of sight from their starting point into the world… that would kill you dead before you could make it back to the guards hoping they could be roused to defend you.

And that laugh they had.  That has to be one of the most distinctive sounds from the early game, one so well known that they carried it over to EverQuest II.

How crazy aggro were they?  Here I am trying to take a screen shot of Holly Windstalker, a notable NPC in the zone and where Holly Longdale got her “Windstalker” nickname, with a level 90 cleric and a freaking skeleton is coming for me.

Restless doesn’t even begin to describe it

Also, for some reason I turned on “shadows” in the settings and… frankly… they look awful and I promised to turn that off again for all future screen shots.

That is Holly’s updated NPC model.  She was a lot more stiff with far fewer polygons back in the day.  But so were we all.

She wasn’t even that special.  She didn’t have a quest or anything.  She would just beat the crap out of you if she caught you abusing the wildlife, which was kind of tough to deal with because the early useful quests in the zone let you trade in bear or wolf pelts for armor.  So you would be going after a wolf, struggling to come out on top, and then she would show and and pound you into mush.

Aside from Holly and the Millers, who had the hide quests, there was also the first of a number of like buildings in what I think of as the West Karana style.

Just out at the crossroads

There were vendors in there you could sell things to and buy crafting supplies from if you had the coin.  You probably couldn’t use any of it early on, but you could buy them.

As a zone Qeynos Hills doesn’t seem very big or complicated or surprising in retrospect.  Here is the map, once again swiped from the Project 1999 wiki.

Just a big rectangle really

But I have to admit that, while it feels small today wandering it with a level 90 character, its polygon hills and depressions, not pictured on the map, made it seem like a much bigger place at the time.  Back, exploring it as my first REAL zone, it seemed like there was a lot going on.  There was the big Gnoll head entrance to Blackburrow.

I’m glad they never revamped this, it should remain as ugly as it was on day one forever

There was a tower guarding a path that I would later learn headed to West Karana.  But the tower seemed a warning, and having died and struggled to recover my corpse from the freaking haunted ruins already I was heeding all warnings until I got my footing.

Meanwhile at the southern end of the zone, past the house and its crossroad, south of the tower, there was an open plain with a few trees.  The mobs there seemed to get higher in level. That was where the wisps were, a seeming high level mob for a mere newbie, but a mob that would drop a greater lightstone on occasion, a coveted light source in a game where the nights were menacingly dark… at least until I discovered the gamma slider in the settings… such that groups would get together to try and take them down.

And that plain of higher level mobs faded into the now missing mists such that I feared to tread very far down the road that led through it.  I mean, after the haunted ruins what else could be waiting for me.

So I lingered in the Qeynos Hills for a while.  With the distrotion of time it feels like I waited days, maybe even a week, before striking out down that southern road.  But it was probably more like a couple of hours.  But in that couple of hours I ran around exploring Qeynos Hills, trying to find its mysteries and hidden places.

One fond memory for me is always the small lake behind a ridge in the northwest of the zone.  On the shore there were a couple of boats.  And, on jumping into them the game told you how to control them and you could sail them around on the water.

Back on the lake, the boats are still there

This was kind of amazing for me.  That here, in this early zone, you could control a boat.  What else waited for us out in the world?  Surely this was just the start of amazing things!

Well, the boat, in the end, was something of an unfufilled promise, and idea never really expanded upon.  They were out in Ocean of Tears and Lake Rathetear, but were never much use and would not lead to other, more majestic options.

Out on Lake Rathtear during the Fippy Darkpaw Era

They were kind of thrown in there, an interesting little idea that was never expanded upon, so was left to itself.

Anyway, I eventually steeled myself up to head south to see what lay beyond the mists at the far end of that southern road.

We are trying not to speed run our Valheim experience, but there is also very much a tension that drives us forward to unlock the next thing.  So we got out there quickly to fight Eikthyr on our first weekend out because we wanted the staghorn picks so we could start mining copper and tin to create bronze and some of the nice things that brings.

Given some of our past mis-adventures… I remember running naked through the woods in the rain to get back to my corpse while Eikthyr chased me in that first run at him two years back… this fight went rather smoothly.  I got up front with spear and shield and tanked him while Potshot and Bung, whose new character is Stinky, hit him with arrows.  It all went by the numbers.

Eikthyr down before we knew it

Looking back, I guess our second run wasn’t so bad, but this third time seemed especially mild, in part because his altar was in an open field so we were unconstrained and unobstructed in the fight.  His fearsome lightning antlers did not sting us as they once might have.

We ran back to our base and created the pickaxes so that we could start mining right away.

And… perhaps mining isn’t the most enjoyable activity in Valheim, and being in a rush to start might seem curious, but the fruits of that labor, the bronze end product of those efforts, were what we desired.  So it was into the Black Forest and those first few copper nodes on the periphery, to dig around them and find their full extent before breaking them down and hauling them off.

The clatter of all that banging away with pickaxes… speaking of which, the staghorn picks are not very durable, but you can repair them at a basic, covered crafting table… always brings out the neighbors, including the trolls.

Trolls are a known quantity to us on this third run.  You can see that we were already wearing some trollhide armor in the picture above… I have a full set on, all the better to sneak… but the first order of business with the first load of copper and tin was to make a bronze axe so we could harvest birch and oak for fine wood, which in turn meant fine wood bows, a significant upgrade which made dealing with the trolls that much less of a burden.

Kiting a troll out into an open meadow, fine wood bow drawn

Meanwhile, the small boat from the OdinShip mod I mentioned in a previous post made hauling the ore back down the coast to our base all the easier. (I have a review of mods set for later, including one we have added since that first post.)

We were well and truly into the bronze age once more.  The initial trickle of bronze was allocated to important things.  As noted, the very first bronze item… once the forge was build, which requires copper… was the bronze axe.  And for a day or so we had just the one, which we shared and kept in a chest in the middle of the base… until somebody forgot to put it back when they were done (yeah, that was me) and more were made.  But we had enough bronze by then for everybody to start upgrading tools and weapons.

I went for the bronze mace, the headache on a stick, all the better to smash skeletons and greydwarves in the Black Forest, though I eventually built up a bronze spear as well, for those times when you need to get straight to the point in a stabby sort of way.  (Throwing the spear though… that I need more practice with.)

We also had our first epic corpse recovery… and our first death by the dreaded deathquito.

It is hardly Valheim without such adventures.  Our first epic deaths in the game also involved the plains and deathsquitos.

Potshot was out exploring in the Hercule, the fishing boat from OdinShip, when he came through a fog and up hard against a stretch of plains biome, where the deathsquito spotted him and gave chase.  He got away from shore, but we had to team up to get back to his boat.

So we took a one of the small boats up that way, stopping at a stretch of meadow a short sail from his corpse to build a portal… just in case… before getting back to his corpse and abandoned vessel.

The first of no doubt many such rescues

Exploring further from there we stumbled upon Hildir, the OTHER vendor and sister to Haldor.  She is new since we last played.

Finding Hildir’s camp

Hildir, who spawns in meadow biomes far from the initial player spawn point, has a set of cosmetic items for sale… something to do with the gold that does start to pile up once you buy all the needful… as well as a set of quests you can finish to unlock additional items.

There is a map on the table before her that, when examined, puts the locations on your map.  Those locations are dungeons with a non-transportable, heavy reward that you can bring back to her.  That will give us something new to do as a group.

Our main base has also been expanding.

The base in the bronze age

We have to get to iron to have stone walls, but you can just see a moat has been dug around the perimeter… curving around the unchangable zone that the trophy henge represents… we may have build a tad too close to that… in an attempt to at least slow the invasions.

Not that the occasional invasion was so bad.  To start with, before Eikthyr, it is just the animals of the forest attacking, which is like having groceries delivered frankly.  More please.  Even after Eikthyr the greydwarf attacks were almost like a supply run.  We just sit out there with bone shields and a big stick and collect up the remains, which is generally wood, stone, and resin.

Eventually though the trolls will be invading, and the house of sticks is only marginally better that a house of straw when the big bad trolls come knocking.  We need bricks… or stone… for that.

We will get to that.  We have to slay The Edler first and then start in on exploring the swamps.

In the mean time, our base has a bit of charm.  Potshot built a location for our beehives that looks like a huge flower.  You can see it in the image above, but here is a closer look.

The bees are happy

Then, around back, we now have docks suited to our boating needs.

Places to tie up your boat

Now if the wind would just blow where we needed to go rather than obstinantly in our faces on every trip, we would be set.  But that skill comes later.

Since my post last week I have I have chosen a path forward for the EverQuest 25th anniversary, which is to attempt to walk along my original 1999 route through the game zone by zone.  It will be easy for a few posts, then probably chaotically hard, but we’ll see how it goes.  I might change my mind.  But for now, this is the way.

Back on March 16, 1999 after having arrived home with the EverQuest box, fresh off the shelf at Fry’s, and installed it and managed to get logged in… easier for me over ISDN, but still not an easy trick that first night… I made my first character.

I made a half-elf ranger.

It is like I never learn.

It is as though the gaming community saw Aragorn and his rangers and thought, “that’s cool… we must thwart anybody who aspires to that!”  So I was abused for making a ranger back in the day, and as a class rangers have either generally sucked or become completely focused on bow and arrow ranged attacks such as to become Legolas rather than Aragorn.  It isn’t as though I dislike the bow, but I just want a warrior with some attunement to the magic of nature.

Anyway, that is a complaint for another day.  But part of why I made a ranger is that I was coordinating with some friends who were also starting out and they claimed druid first and to this day I regret not simply making a druid as well.  Few classes were as handy or beloved as the druid in early EverQuest, handing out buffs like candy and in demand by every group.

And so a ranger was born back in 1999, a half-elf which meant showing up in Surefall Glade, a little starter zone seperated from Qeynos and reserved for half-elves, because half-elves always get stuck in their own little ghetto, unloved by the elves and not trusted by the race of man.

Classic Norrath

Qeynos itself was on the unfashionable western end of Antonica, the largest continent of early Norrath.  The cool people started in Freeport or in one of the chic starting areas on Faydwer.  I will eventually get to traveling across Antonica to meet up with other friends who started as dwarves or elves, but on that first night we seemed to be a happy bunch of half-elves, as yet unaware of the cruel reality of our geographical situation.

Surefall Glade seems small when you first show up.  There is a modest pond… too small to be anything like a lake… on which the residents have built a solid guild hall under the soaring trees.  Or soaring trunks.  Back in the day when there was a mist to limit line of sight the trunks disappeared up into a fog that felt mysterious.  Now, however, with the mist long gone they seem seem more like textured columns that might be holding up a distant roof.

Wait, those aren’t trees! They are just giant pillars!

But the guild hall is still there.

Here, because we like to be on the water

Here was your first chance to fall in water and drown, because land was apparently at such a premium that they stuck the place on piers in the water.  When I say it is on the pond, it is not just fronting on the pond but literally in the pond.

Time to learn how to use a door!  This seems like a simple thing, yet this whole 3D world was strange and new and there was no World of Warcraft to set standards for interactions with the world… or maybe even suggest that doors were not strictly necessary.  How many doors do you see in Ironforge or Stormwind?  Even the Goldshire Inn lacks doors, and we all know what was going on in there.  When you tell somebody to “get a room” it implies a door to close to hide their shame.

One clicking on the door established how to open it up, inside there was one of the ranger guild masters and the fletching supplier.

Welcome to Surefall Glade

That was back when you had to go and train skills back at the guild every level or so.  And then there were spells, which were every five levels, modeled on the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2.0 pattern that TorilMUD used.  The spells were available over at the counter from the triplets of Surefall.

There were not enough NPC models to waste any on half-elves

Meanwhile, hanging around outside were more rangers, some standing at an archery range pretending that archery was a useful skill to have in early EverQuest.

Here we are, practicing archery!

It was not.  Hager Sureshot?  More like Hager Pants on Fire!

I spent a long time with the fletching kit making a bow and some arrows and trying to shoot things and… and… I still wish I had just made a druid.  I mean, Spirit of the Wolf!  I think rangers got that at level 41 while druids picked it up at level 6.

My memories of the day involved me pretty quickly wanting to get out of Surefall and into the world, there not seeming to be all that much in the zone.  However, there is a whole hidden set of caves in the back of the zone… a lot more than I remember looking at the map that Project 1999 wiki has posted.

Surefall Glade Map – Circa 1999

That Project 1999 wiki is going to be very useful for these posts, and I am not going to be shy about swiping the maps since they themselves harvested them elsewhere.  I’ve posted a few of them here before from other sources.

My vague, 25 years in the past recollection is that there were some bears in the cave and a quest and a campfire or something.  But on day one I was on my way elsewhere, which meant going through the most awkwardly long tunnel in Norrath.  The map does not due justice to how long that tunnel to Qeynos hills feels… and how sudden that stop comes when you finally hit the zone line and thing the game has frozen, then how long you wait for the next zone to load.

And that next zone is Qeynos Hills.

Guarding Surefall Glade like anybody would want to get in there

We’ll get there shortly.  It is still loading.

I had successfully made my way to Northrend with my rogue, now my sixth character to get into the content of Wrath Classic.  But I was a bit behind on a few of his skill, which meant returning to older content to catch up.

The first was mining.

One of the errors, in my view, of The Burning Crusade was the necessity to have harvesting skills up to 300 before you could use them in Outland… well, except herbalism.  Somehow they saw the light on herbalism, mostly by putting some vanilla era herbs out in Hellfire Peninsula.  But mining… forget about it.  You need 300 mining skill to get fel iron ore, and Chad was sitting at 245.  Not even close.

Fortunately I had done the thorium loop in Winterspring in the past so knew what to do.  I had to pass some rich deposits at first, but soon skilled up enough to get them.  A couple of sessions of that… one can only run in a circle mining for so long… and I had hit the magic number.

Then it was out to Hellfire Peninsula to mine fel iron until I hit 325, then to Zangarmarsh where Adamantite gets thrown into the mix.  I hit 350 quickly enough… my main problem was another person out there flying the same loop for the same reason… and I was on to Borean Tundra because the devs learned their lesson and made cobalt mining require just 350 skill level.

So, problem solved.  Also, Chad’s other harvesting skill was skinning, and that is almost always maxed out… especially after Nagrand and Hemet Nesingwary.

Which brought me to lockpicking.  Having only barely played a rogue in the early days… technically, my first character in the group was a rogue name Blintz, but he was replaced by my paladin when the group caught up to him in levels… lockpicking never really entered into it that much.  I remember doing some leveling up with a bunch of locked boxes that spawned out in Redridge, but I mostly just ignored the skill after that.

And then, at some point, the skill just went away and your lockpicking skill was a function of your level and nobody mentioned it ever again.

But not yet.  Not in Wrath Classic.  There I was still in the era of having to skill that up and I was… way behind in lockpicking.

Some work to be done

That picture I took a bit into my efforts.  I was down at 135 when I started.

Where to even go to get that skill leveled up?  Fortunately, when it comes to WoW at least, there is always some site out there that has the answer.

First it was off to Ashenvale to the coast around Blackfathom Deeps where I ran around in a large loop by the naga and the wildlife looking for chests to get to 150.  Then it was off to Angor Fortress in the Badlands for the next segment of training.

Riding into the Badlands

I spent a good part of an afternoon there.  The lockboxes upstairs will get you to at least 175, and then you go downstairs and can get past 250.  That is still a lot of locks to pick in a place where I estimate no more than five are active at any moment and you can easily outrun the spawn rate.

I ran that until all the chests were green difficulty before moving on to Searing Gorge, where you have to go into the mines with the Dark Iron dwarves and find their chests to unlock.

Sneaking around the tunnels

That stage also took a while, because chests are scattered about and only a couple seem active at any given moment.  I pushed that until I wasn’t getting skillups because the next suggested location was Blackrock Depths.  So off I went again.

Down the chain and to the instance

The guide says that there are four locks you can do at the start of the instance.  There are three doors that will give skill ups and then the shadowforge lock that is in one of the first crowded rooms where things can go wrong if you don’t manage your aggro radius.

The shadowforge lock

I pushed Searing Gorge for all it was worth because, while it is easy enough to run in and pick these locks… I did it with no problems and got my skillups… you can only reset an instance 5 times in an hour, so I wanted to get to within 20 skill points of 300… once again, the barried for Outland lockpicking… so I could do it all in one go.

I succeeded in that.  From there it was off to Outland and Zangarmarsh, where there are a bunch of chests along the north of the western side of the swamp.

These chests seem flimsy enough to just break…

And then, once those went green in difficulty, it was off to Nagrand and one of the fortresses there that has boxes to pick scattered about.

Pardon me while I pick your lock

That was actually where I had to do some work and be careful because, at level 70, I was still in the level range for the mobs around there and couldn’t just one-shot anything that looked at me cross-eyed.

With that I made it to 350.

Professions leveled up some

I also stopped for a minute to slay a few Talbuk so I could get my cooking skill… at 349 in the first screen shot… over the 350 marker so I could start in on recipes in Northrend.

So Chad is all tuned up on lockpicking.  Now it is just the detail of getting him to level 80 at some point before Cataclysm Classic.

While I have spent quite a bit of the last few days moving things from the old machine to the new, I am trying to limit the whole thing to things I feel I need and ongoing work and things I use regularly… or maybe just do not want to find and configure again.

But I am also trying to NOT bring over things that I am not using, something that weighs heavily on the video game front.

My goal is to start out installing ONLY things I am playing currently.

A few of those were easy… and were on my C drive so were migrated as a whole.  So I started off with:

• EVE Online
• World of Warcraft
• WoW Classic
• WoW Classic Era

Those seemed like a gimme… and you get all the WoW titles as a group… along with some support software like Overwolf, which ended up owning Curse Forge, to start with.  Also, Combat Mission: Barbarossa to Berlin is in there, largely because the new machine does not have a built-in opitcal drive.  It has been a long time since I had a machine without some built-in removable media.  I think I have to go back to the Apple II era for that.

Apple II external floppy drives

Things on my old (and new) D drive however, those I was going to be somewhat more discerning about.

For example, there is Steam, the directory for which had 96 titles in it.  Some of those were the remains of uninstalls, leftover config files and such, but quite a few were still live.  That is less than half of the 204 titles Steam says I own, but a solid majority of the 131 it has logged play time for in the last 13 years.

My SteamDB Stats this morning

So, despite the fact that Steam will nicely copy files across the network, I wasn’t going to restore everything.  For example, all the titles I was trying out in search of a Valheim-like experience, those can fall to the wayside for now.

For Steam I ended up copying over just:

• Forza Horizon 4
• Wreckfest
• Valheim

Three titles out of the list.  Valheim was easy.  Wreckfest I copied to have a driving game

Steam grabbing from the old PC

Then driving that I decided to pull over Forza Horizon 4 again, though how much I will play it we’ll see.  I mostly wanted to test the built-in BlueTooth on the motherboard with the controller I bought for it.  It took me a bit to get the 8BitDo SN30 Pro+ Blluetooth gamepad paired because the instructions online for it reference an older revision.  But there was an answer on Reddit to help me out. (The online docs reference a switch that isn’t there. Instead you hold down the unmarked pairing button for a few seconds and the unit will become discoverable.  Easy, but when you haven’t done it for a few years and the docs say something very different, not as obvious as I would have hoped.)

Yes, I am leaving behind, never to be installed again, late titles such as Hero’s Song, H1Z1 Just Survive, and EVE Valyrie.  They are being jettisoned to the footnotes in video game history that they represent.

Everything else I can install again later if I get the urge.  Steam has my achievements and what not, and there is nothing there that I cannot start or re-start from scratch pretty easily.

Then there are the other titles I kept on the D drive.  Returning for the new rig are:

• Civilization II
• EverQuest
• EverQuest II
• ZMud

The EverQuest titles have anniversaries coming this year and I have been logging into EQ a bit here and there.

Civilization II is my patched and updated 32-bit copy of Civilization II Gold, which is all that will run on the current OS.  I have an image of the CD it came on and a utility to mount it so I can play it.

And then there is ZMud, which probably won’t run.  I had a hell of a time getting it to run on Windows 10, and only managed it because Microsoft still kept around and supported a bunch of MDAC related patches the last time I tried.  For Win11… it might work.  I am keeping ZMud around mostly for the sake of nostalgia.  Maybe I will write a couple more posts about it at its heyday.  But it is a 30 year old MUD at this point and, frankly, the scrolling text of combat… always something of an unreadable blur in my relative youth… gives me a headache just trying to look at it.  I may have aged out of MUDs.

Titles I opted not to bring over include Guild Wars 2, Runes of Magic, New World, Lost Ark, LOTRO, Rift, Path of Exile, Minecraft, World of Tanks, and any flavor of Diablo.

If I want any of those, they are all out there.  And their remains are backed up on an external phyical drive should I feel the need to restore them, should a fresh install not do.

This is one of those benchmark posts I suppose where, six months or a year from now I’ll post about how I am installing this or that or wonder where I put that drive with all the screen shots or mods or config files.

But for now I have settled on which titles are coming to the new system on day one.

I mentioned back at the start of December that my thoughts were bending towards an upgraded computer.  My wife, on reading that, pressed me to just go order something right away, unable to bear my fussing over building or even configuring a system for months on end, as I tend to do.

She had done a rather outstanding job in real estate in 2023, her commissions more than doubling my own salary, and while the bite of the tax man looms in the coming months… we send in estimated taxes and I claim zero deductions just to buffer us, but even so the tax bill is always a bit of a mystery every year, so ome years I expect to pay and we get a refund, others I am sure we’ve paid and then some, only to end up writing another check on April 15th… we had money in the bank.

So I did as she asked and ordered a rig from Digital Storm, choosing their Lumos line as my foundation.  The holidays were busy and they were having a special, so the 15 business days stretched out by a bit, but my old computer was still chugging away and I wasn’t in a huge hurry.  When I got the message on Monday that it was ready to pick up, I set an appointment and we drove down to Gilroy, a once rural community south of San Jose and a place where a company like Digital Storm can afford to rent enough space behind the outlet mall along the highway to accommodate their operation.

They have a clean and spacious, if somewhat unadorned, facility where we had to ring the bell to get somebody to come around and let us in.

I opted for the drive because, even though there was an offer of free shipping when I put in my order, I did not want to subject it to the whims of delivery even in the mild rains that coastal California calls winter.

We were let in where I showed my ID and signed for the big box, which we then drove home.  Once in the house, the cats were, of course, attracted to the sight of a new box.

Rigby senses a new adventure

I unboxed the unit as they watched intently.

Miles stands behind me, waiting for the box

Then, when I had the system out on the floor, they played in the box.  Everybody was happy.

So what did I get this time around?  This is from the order list:

• Chassis Model: Digital Storm Lumos
• Processor: Intel Core i7-14700KF (5.6 GHz Turbo) (28-Thread) (20-Core) 3.4 GHz (14th Gen)
• Motherboard: ASUS Prime B760M-A AX D5 (Wi-Fi) (Intel B760)
• System Memory: 64GB DDR5 6000MHz Kingston FURY Beast RGB
• Power Supply: 750W Digital Storm Performance Series (80 Plus Gold)
• Storage Set 1: 1x SSD M.2 (2TB Samsung 970 EVO PLUS) (NVM Express)
• Storage Set 2: 1x SSD M.2 (2TB Samsung 970 EVO PLUS) (NVM Express)
• Graphics Card(s): 1x GeForce RTX 4070 12GB (VR Ready)
• Extreme Cooling: H20: Stage 2: Digital Storm Vortex Liquid CPU Cooler (Dual Fan) (Fully Sealed + No Maintenance)
• Operating System: Microsoft Windows 11 Professional (64-Bit)

So I am pretty happy with that.

However, the excitement of getting a new computer is off-set a bit for me by the prospect of having to get things moved from the old unit to the new.

I always have this dream of just starting fresh and downloading only what I need, but the reality is that I have to drag stuff forward, things that I need, things that I think I might need, and things that I do not want to lose.  So I have directories with things archived like the invitations we designed for our wedding… and we’re going to be celebrating our 25th anniversary later this year.

While the new computer entered the house on Tuesday, it did not end up being setup in my office until Friday at lunch.  It spent some time in my daughter’s room where I set it up with my old monitor, a keyboard and mouse, and an Ethernet over power connection to the router so that I could work on transferring data.

I used Zinstall to transfer key stuff like settings and some apps.  I had hoped that Windows would do some of the heavy lifting on that front.  It jumped right in there once I linked the new machine to my Microsoft account and said it would get all the settings and programs… and then it did nothing of the sort.  It grabbed some inadequate subset of settings and put shortcuts to apps in the Windows menu, then balked at downloading any that were not in the Microsoft store.  So I fell back on Zinstall.

Zinstall is excellent at grabbing all sorts of things I might only realize later that I want, though it is also very good at dragging forward things that maybe I don’t need.  That ran over night and later I had to go through with the Registery Editor to clean up some things that it got a bit carried away with.

Then I used Windows file history and a 5TB external USB drive to restore additional files and directories from my old system to the new one.  That worked surprisingly well, though could be very slow at times.

I did find that Steam was helpful at getting things installed.  If both machines were online and had Steam running, it would grab files across the network rather than over the internet to install on the new machine.

Steam grabbing from the old PC

And some stuff I just did fresh installs with.  Not a lot, but a few key items.

By Friday at lunch I had hit critical mass on the new machine and swapped the two units in the house, making the Digital Storm box my office machine so anything new I did would be there.

I still have stuff to grab from the old machine and things to figure out.  I’d love to get Notepad++ on the new machine to magically open up all the damn text file tabs I have on the old one, but I’ll figure something out.  And I am going to take the one archive drive with old screen shots and pictures and just put it in the new machine.  That will solve that problem.

But I have mostly made the transition.  Then, when I am feeling sure I am done I’ll back up the old rig one last time, then wipe it and set it up fresh for my wife to use as her machine.  She is soldiering on with a rather old Dell box and a 1280×1024 monitor that I think I bought back in 2003.  Things accumulate as you age.

So far so good though.

One thing I did buy was Stardock’s Start11 utility that lets you change the look of Windows 11 Start Menu back to something more familiar.  I got used to the Windows 10 look, but Win11 is just a bit too goofy for me.  I say this as somebody who had Windows XP setup to look like NT 4.0 because I am just that guy.

Blizzard had a few things happen in the last week or so, which means it is probably time for a quick catch up.

It’s a Blizzard in here

I don’t even have much of a side story for the opener.  It is raining here.  That is something, though it is hardly a Blizzard.  Also, “first Friday” is a thing with some groups, a day to go out and have dinner or just hang around with pals.  Sometimes it is a civic thing.  Not something that I have ever observed, but it was either that or a Groundhog Day reference, so let’s move on.

• A New Blizzard President

After the blood letting of last week Microsoft has announced a new leader over at Blizzard to replace the mediocre Mike Ybarra who either jumped or was pushed, depending on who is telling the tale, from the pinnacle at the company.  Either way, he had a golden parachute to soften the blow considerably and is gamely talking about exciting new opportunities as though his caretaker stewardship of Blizz was a monumental achievement.

Replacing him will be Johanna Faries, who starts in the position on Monday, but who has already sent out an anodyne and artificially upbeat company-wide email heralding her arrival.

Faries previously headed the Call of Duty franchise on the Activision side of the house so, while I know nothing about her, she at least knows how to deliver content more than once every other year, something Blizzard and the WoW team could likely learn from.  There are a bunch of new articles about this, but I was most amused by the Venture Beat entry which breathlessly asks if she can save the studio!  SAVE THE STUDIO that is probably still bringing in close to a billion dollars annually.

Save us Johanna Faries, you’re our only hope!

I for one welcome our new Call of Duty overlord!  Please don’t make me regret that statement.

Also, I do wonder if she is getting the Mike Ybarra or the Jen Oneal compensation package, because Mike’s compensation was high than Jen’s.

• A Pet from Prime Gaming

Blizzard once more has something for you in retail WoW over at Amazon’s Prime Gaming.  This time it is a companion pet.

Cap’n Crackers Arrives

Once claimed on your account you can summon your new pet and interact with it.

Sail the seas of Azeroth with Cap’n Crackers. Just don’t say anything you wouldn’t want repeated for the next 20 years. Cap’n Crackers is interactable: if you /whistle at this pet, Cap’n Crackers will sit upon your character’s shoulder. This pet is summonable at any level.

Now, is it any good at pet battles?  Or is it just another generic avian?

WoW Instructions page for collecting this pet.

• Season of Discovery Update February 8th

We already knew that phase 2 of WoW Classic Season of Discovery was coming up in February… next Thursday to be exact… and some of the more general information about it, like Gnomeregan being converted to a raid, but Blizz now has a post with much greater details and it is up on PTR which means the data miners are going crazy.

Josh Greenfeld has some words about the data mining over on Twitter:

I wanted to take a moment to talk about datamining and the PTR.

You will see many things in datamining if you seek it out, some of it is real, some of it is experimental things that will never see the light of day. I’d take all of it with many grains of salt. Additionally, any stats or abilities are subject to change at any time.

Re: PTR – The only thing testable normally on the 1.15.1 PTR is non-seasonal Era and Hardcore, and you may be wondering “Why did you put 1.15.1 on the PTR at all?” and that’s a fair question. The full and real answer is that by having no PTR for the SoD content itself, we put a lot of pressure and stress on our live operations and support teams that help us run the game as we may have increased live support requirements around our launch for any issues that may escape to live.

Having no Era PTR for the patch at all compounds this further because then we can’t catch systemic problems such as server issues and crashes that will affect all versions of vanilla classic, and we run the risk of making the launch unstable for many players.

So don’t believe everything you read I guess… or just don’t go digging into that stuff if you don’t want spoilers or disappointment when things seen do not come to pass.

Meanwhile, in emphasizing the raid-centric view of the WoW team, Blizz was all over social media about how phase 2 would not allow GDKP for raids going forward.  That led me to two questions.  First, what is GDKP and, and second, what is Blizz going to do about it?

Google answered the first, at least somewhat generically.  Blizz, on the other hand, has been less than informative.  But there assumption up front seems to be we all know what it means, what they’re on about, and what they’re going to do.

It is one of those things where Blizz reveals what they care about and who they are really communicating with.  If you don’t raid you aren’t on their radar.

Anyway, even once somebody explained it to me in a jargon free way, I was still kind of “so what?”  But PC Gamer, they assert that this change has SET THE COMMUNITY ON FIRE!

Save us Johanna Faries, you’re our only hope!

• Which Diablo is This Diablo?

In a surprisingly low key announcement Blizzard announced that the first two Warcraft titles, Warcraft: Orcs & Humans and Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness, were now available in the Battle.net online store, along with the original Diablo.

And I have questions.  We got versions of those, including the original Diablo from GoG.com a few years back.  Is this the same version of the game as that, including the same issues and limitations?  Is this something new and better, or at least something that has updated compatibility.  But over at the Battle.net store it is as quiet as the Sphinx, posing a riddle it will not answer:  What am I getting for my ten bucks?

Which Diablo are you really?

If it was improved I might consider it.  If it is the same as the one on GoG.com, I already own it and am not keen to buy yet another copy of the game simply to get one that is tied to Blizz directly.

And the same applies to the two Warcraft titles.  I can’t tell if this is deceit or indifference on the part of Blizz.