I pretty much spent all of February ignoring WoW, Blizzard, or anything related. The call of Valheim and the need for a break was strong I guess. I suppose it is time to take a minute to catch up with a new month on hand. And hey, it is Friday, so bullet points look like the path forward.
Season of Discovery Season 2 and XP Boosts
WoW Classic: Season of Discoveryhit phase 2 early in February, so that is hardly news I suppose, except to acknowlegde that it happened and that I haven’t logged in since before that occured. I had done the WoW Classic zones already a few times, and for anybody who was neither raiding nor interested in PvP, Season of Discorvery doesn’t have much new to offer. The idea of “Classic Plus” was always a fantasy.
The Gnomeregan raid was the headline of phase 2
Well, Blizz has apparently at least realized that making everybody grind through vanilla yet again… they’re on a mission to make us do this once a year I guess… so will be introducing the Discoverer’s Delight buff, which brings a 100% xp boost for level 1-39 characters.
They have also decided to cut the price of level 40 mounts in half and to increase the coin reward for all level 1-39 quests, because while penury was all fun and laughs back in 2004, asking us to scrimp and save to just buy our basic class skills yet again is turning into a non-starter for some.
That will all land next Tuesday next week, March 5th, which is also “Super Tuesday” (of “Stupid Tuesday” as it may turn out) here in the US.
The team did say they won’t change the price of epic mounts, but I am not convinced they will stick with that. Grind for that fast mount just on a server that will go away soon enough?
Blizz is also going to adjust a bunch of raid related things, because raiders are always the main concern of the company. There is also some discussion of level 60, end game, and what happens to these characters with all the special skills and runes when Blizz ends the season. My bet is that they will managed to make people angry somehow when they shut down the Season of Discovery servers.
Microsoft… and I should probably just stop using “Blizzard” or “Activision” now, it is all the Microsoft show, layoffs and all… has announced the first formerly Blizzard title to show up on the Microsoft XBox PC Game Pass: Diablo IV.
Diablo IV
Coming March 28th, you will be able to play Diablo IV by just subscribing to the XBox PC Game Pass, which last I checked was $10 a month, though rumor has it that price will be going up before the end of the year.
Blizz has another WoW item available on Prime Gaming, the tabard of frost.
The promo shot for the tabard
While a tabard is kind of small potatoes, it still looks better than what you can make with the guild tabard generator, a bit of the game still stuck in 2004. Also, only available for retail WoW.
Is WoW Classic Hardcore not challenging enough? Want to prove you’re even tougher than the run of the mill no-lifers who made it to level 60? WoW Classic Hardcore introduced “self found” mode so you can prove you’re a step above the average hardcore survivor.
Hardcore for all your… something… needs
Self found mode restricts your character from using the auction house, recieving in-game mail, or trading with other players so that you can prove the purity of your efforts.
If you decide you have made a horrible mistake in choosing that mode, you can turn it off. But once turned off, it can never be restored.
I feel like I should be interested in what Blizz has going on when it comes to the next retail expansion… though I also feel like I shouldn’t care since I haven’t played since early Shadowlands… so I did poke my nose into the early look at the hero talent trees for The War Within. So, for example, Paladins will have hero talents that work between spec pairs it seems.
This is one piece of a giant chart, let me assure you
And, at some level, “hero talents” sounds pretty cool.
But then the history of the game starts to weigh on me. Specs and talents get thrown in the air and redone with EVERY expansion. Nothing ever builds on the past, everything is a complete rug pull, changing up what you’ve grown used to in order to try and be fresh and new. Also, anything with “hero” in the name is doomed to be nerfed it is as all useful. The history of the game demands it.
Remember when Hearthstone came out… oh… ten years ago! Yeah, back then for launch to get WoW players to try it out, they gave away the Hearthsteed. I will admit, that was enough to bribe me to try it out.
Well, now that Hearthstone is turning ten, they are doing it again, this time offering the Fiery Hearthsteed mount to WoW players who log in between March 11 and May 14 2024.
Hearthsteed, hearthsteed, burning bright…
This reward, like the frost tabard above, is only available to be redeemed in retail WoW. Classic players can suck it… which makes me wonder if I should bother. Oh, who am I kidding, I do Twitch drops for games I’ll never play again, I can log into Hearthstone for this.
So it goes, here on the first day of March. Spring is in the offing, at least here in the US, but so is Daylight Savings Time, so your mileage may vary.
WordPress.com always wants to make sure I have something to write about in this section every month. This time around I am back on about email subscriptions.
Last month I was complaining that they were only getting delievered to my inbox every other day. This month… that stopped completely. No email delivered with my posts any day of the week. This coincided with WP.com removing a bunch of the email section of the subscription UI they put in a while back that looked like they wanted to take on Substack. They have clearly changed their mind or are covering up some failure.
Anyway, if you are still getting email updates from here, WP.com clearly thinks you are special.
Also mentioned last month was the RSS feed issue, where WP.com is updating the feed only every few days. I see this from other sites that use WP as their host, like Game Developer. I will see nothing in Feedly for three or four days from them, then suddenly there will be 35 posts.
If that sort of burst behavior doesn’t bother you, carry on. If it does, you can use the Feedburner RSS feed, though recommending a Google solution to a problem feels like herasy these days. How have they not shut down Feedburner yet? It must drive ad revenue in some way.
WP.com has also gotten extremely finicky about being able to leave comments without having a WP.com account. It seems that you either need to be completely logged in or be willing to leave a full anonymous comment, with no in between. Thanks a lot WP.
Finally, the wierd direct source bursts of traffic continued this month, though it has grown more erratic and seems to be tapering off somewhat.
The Direct traffic line so far this year
Basically, if it wasn’t there I would be getting about 500 page views a day, 300 of which would be from Google search. But with that direct traffic the daily views run between 550 and 1,300. That makes direct traffic the top source so far this year.
Traffic sources so far in 2024
I don’t know what it means, but it does seem to be driving ad revenue. Go money.
Also, I strongly recommend you use Ad Block when visiting here. I want the bots to pay my hosting, not you. I currently use uBlock Origin for my own ad blocking needs.
One Year Ago
We were in Vegas during the Pro Bowl, those that was pretty much on accident. We didn’t go see it or anything.
Epic Games had announced their digital storefront the previous December (2019), but we were finally getting a deeper look at their strategy for taking on Steam. One word: Exclusives. (Some of which were already up for sale on Steam, then withdrawn, making as many people angry as happy.)
Over at Activision-Blizzard they announced record annual revenues for 2018, then laid off 8% of their staff. I suppose, in hindsight, they predicted 2019 correctly, but laying people off while execs get bonuses is never a good look.
Meanwhile, the PlanetSide Arena launch, pushed back to March, was pushed out again, this time until “summer,” with a planned simultaneous Playstation 4 launch given as a reason.
All of that aside, with the approach of the EverQuest 20th anniversary I started logging in to play a bit with a fresh character. I started on Vox, a standard rules server, with an eye on the tutorial. I ran through the revolt in Glooming Deep.
And there was word of a smaller Switch, the end of the Wii Shop Channel, eports was stomping its feet and demanding to be taken seriously, and the Olympics rejecting esports all wrapped up in a Friday bullet points post.
My 8800GT video card died. That was the second one to go.
I had been looking at my dis-used GAX Online account and wondered what gamer social networking needed to be viable. Since then, GAX Online has shut down.
PLEX showed up in EVE Online fifteen years ago. It doesn’t seem like it has been around for that long. And then there was the whole Goonswarm disbandment of Band of Brothers, and act that effectively ended the Great War, and which made the BBC news. This led to talk of how much control players should have over their destiny.
I was still active in Lord of the Rings Online, playing characters on the Nimrodel server. Looking for a class on which to affix the Reynaldo Fabulous name, I put up a poll on the subject. While Minstrel won the poll, Reynaldo ended up being a hunter with a fabulous hat. And when I wasn’t fooling around with alts, I was leveling up my captain who made it all the way to Rivendell at one point.
While over in Azeroth, it was revealed that my mom plays WoW. I wondered at how active Westfall seems to be most of the time. But the answer to that seems to be the Deadmines, which I ran my mom and daughter through. (No dungeon finder back then!) There was a little pet drama with my daughter who wanted a raptor. I also managed my first exalted status with a faction in WoW, the Kalu’ak in Northrend. I wanted that fishing pole.
On the Wii, we had Wii Music, which was crap, and LEGO Batman, which suffered a bit from being yet another variation in the successful LEGO video game franchise.
And then there was the usual blog war shenanigans as somebody was still looking to blame WoW and WoW players for Warhammer Online’s failure to meets its subscriber goals. I think we’re all over that now, right? Warhammer did what it did on its own faults and merits in a market that was well known before they shipped.
And Darkfall finally launched and began its short life as… whatever it was. I didn’t play it.
Twenty Years Ago
The aptly named Gates of Discord expansion for EverQuest launched. While Smed called its bug-ridden launch “SOE’s worst mistake in five years” it did see the game to its subscription peak of 550K and introduced instancing as the default dungeon mode, something WoW would make a genre default soon enough.
The creator of the original Castle Wolfenstein game from 1981, Silas Warner, passed away at the age of 54. I played that game a lot back on my Apple II. Also, that seems young now.
Twenty-Five Years Ago
Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri, arguably one of the best entries in the Civilization series, ships. My only nit-pick is that it ran full screen at pre-set resolutions so, unlike its predecessor Civilization II, if you play it today it either has to be in a small window or distorted full screen on your likely much-bigger-than-1999 monitor.
Star Wars: X-Wing Alliance also launched, one of the better Star Wars titles. But Star Wars was never plagued by bad titles the way Star Trek has been over the years
Once again, the direct traffic surge favored recent posts, so there were only two carry overs from last month. The Lucky Eggs post is a Google search favorite, which is what keeps it on the list.
Search Terms of the Month
“wagering-agreement-meaning-in-nepali”
[I guess I keep this going by posting it]
“aveo-enterprise-agreement”
[Oh now what is this?]
battle of m2-xfe titans lost by corporation
[How about by alliance? I can do by alliance]
poe daily game like wordle
[There are many…]
“civ5-research-agreement-worth-it”
[Still yes…]
gay game
[Not my bag, but don’t let me stop you…]
gay game pc
[Still not much help here]
game java sex gay
[Does being in Java change anything?]
геи игры
[Saying it in Russian doesn’t go anywhere either]
Game Time from ManicTime
The numbers this month pretty much confirm what I probably could have told you based on my gut; I spent a lot of time playing Valheim, to the exclusion of other titles.
Valheim – 89.63%
EVE Online – 5.08%
EverQuest – 3.40%
Forza Horizon 4 – 1.13%
Wreckfest – 0.50%
WoW Classic – 0.26%
The biggest change was WoW Classic, which had been topping the list for months. I clearly took a month off from Azeroth.
EVE Online
I did get in and go on a few fleets this past month. I did not spend a lot of time playing in New Eden, but I kept my PI farm going. That is my sole source of revenue these days, though with the demand for mechanical parts, which among other things are required for fuel blocks, PI is worth about a billion ISK a month to me. That and SRP is what keeps me solvent.
EverQuest
I am not so much playing EverQuest as touring. I have been and out for my posting series for the 25th anniversary. A nostalgia tour of my own. The visuals stimulate memories which I then take and turn into rambling, semi-coherent posts. The touring will continue until my writing style improves… or I get bored… or we get past the anniversaries. The $1,500 Fippy Fest 2024 in-person ticket price certainly did not endear me to Darkpaw.
Pokemon Go
My wife and I are very close to hitting level 45… or we would be if we had finished up that last task. You have to defeat 50 Team Rocket Go bosses to get to 45, and I stand at 25 defeated and my wife at 20. We still have some remedial work to do on that front. It could take a bit. But at least we can still earn xp towards level 46 while we do it.
Level: 44 (75% of the way to 45 in xp, 3 of 4 level tasks complete)
Pokedex status: 818 (+3) caught, 832 (+3) seen
Vivillon Evolutions obtained: 15 of 20
Pokemon I want: Three specific Scatterbugs; Sandstorm, Icy Snow, and Meadow
Current buddy: Arctibax
Valheim
Whether or not Valheim was the right choice, it was the choice I jumped into in February. I have pretty much taked a break from WoW all month to play Valheim, where there is always something to do. We are currently in the mountains mining silver and search for the next boss. I’ve geared up enough that I have ventured into the plains a few times and lived to tell the tale. The mistlands await and maybe the Ashlands will be done before we burn out… so to speak.
WoW Classic
A very quiet month. I did spend a little time in Wrath Classic working on my rogue, who is up to level 72 now. Season of Discovery hasn’t held much interest for me since we got past Westfall. That is kind part of the nostalgia barrier I guess. Happy memories of Westfall and a bit after that.
Zwift
I managed to get on the bike every weekend this month. Color that a win. Meanwhile, the lower level curve meant I racked up three more undeserved levels. Still no glowing neon tire sets available to me yet.
Level – 21 (+2)
Distanced cycled – 1,879 miles (+59 miles)
Elevation climbed – 69,829 (+1,909 feet)
Calories burned – 57,294 (+1,609)
Coming Up
Apparently one aspect of getting old is constantly asking things like “Is it March already? How did that happen?” aloud to your aging friends and family, who all declare their mystification as well.
So yeah, March.
That means that we will hit the EverQuest 25th anniversary on the 16th. Expect a post. Also, I will likely carry on with my own series of starting points posts. A few more zones and then a couple about getting places. I will have to run from Qeynos to Freeport.
You can expect some more Valheim I am sure. Not done there yet. At least not until we get to the mistlands… though reading up on that, things will get more complicated there. Something about magic and a mana-like player resource. We’ll see. We still have the mountains to finish and the plains to conquor.
I will have to cast an eye towards WoW at some point. Things are going on. Cataclysm Classic looms. Descisions will need to be made.
And then whatever news the wind might bring I suppose. I guess we already know that Microsoft is laying more people off in March. We’ll have to see who else carries on with this trend.
On Saturday, June 15th 2024, Enad Global 7… erm… Daybreak… no, not quite right… Darkpaw Games, the Enad Global 7 studio under the Daybreak Games… and I snicker every time I say that aloud as it sounds like “they break games” when I do… which is responsible for the two EverQuest titles, is holding a live online event to celebrate EverQuest, EverQuest II, which is part of the Year of Darkpaw events for the respective 25th and 20th anniversaries of the two titles this year.
Sorry, I may have gotten carried away and that last sentence somehow became a paragraph.
Sure, Blizzard can woo away Holly Longdale and borrow heavily from the EverQuest nostalgia playbook, but two can play at that game!
So Darkpaw is going to have an online Fanfest come June, their own version of BlizzConline I suppose, called Fippy Fest.
From the sound of it general access will be free and you will be able to watch the panels and such, but if you opt-in for paid access you will be able to aske questions live during the event as well as getting in-game items to commemorate the event.
But wait, there’s more.
For a few special individuals there will be tickets available to attend the event in person down in San Diego. The number of tickets available for those wanting to attend live hasn’t been declared, the company has only said the following:
We are keeping the in-person event small and intimate as we delve back into the realm of in-person events.
This might be the first in-person Fanfest-like event since the end of the SOE days. It has been at least a decade. (There was some other “fans invited” event at their offices a few years back, but it felt a little more ad hoc.)
Depending how small they are keeping the in-person side of things, these tickets might be more exclusive than any BlizzCon ticket.
Anyway, tickets go on sale at 6pm Pacific time today. No pricing has been announced yet.
In addition to Fippy Fest, Darkpaw has announced that they will be attending Pax East in March as well. They are getting out there to celebrate the Year of Darkpaw.
Get the fuck out of here. I mean, the digital event prices seem a bit steep, even if they are somewhat volentary. You are paying to be able to ask questions live and for some in-game items. But the price for in person… you really have to love Norrath if you’re going to put out that amount.
But, I am sure someone will pay it.
Related links, each title featuring its own item rewards:
I have on my list of things to write about the effect of the mods we have chosen for our current run through Valheim, how they have worked out and how they have changed our play style. There have been some obvious impacts.
I wrote about the six we initially chose a while back, but we added a seventh to the list, and I want to write about that one today because it had a rather poor impact on our game this past weekend.
First, it allows you to have bigger stacks of things… which I guess is kind of obvious by the name. By default it allows you to have stacks 10x the size of the Valheim defaults. So if you could only have a stack of 100 arrows before, you can now have a stack of 1,000. If ore was limited to 30 in a stack, it is now 300. If wood was 50 before, it is 500 now.
You get the idea. It looks like this,
Bigger stacks of things
The reason we wanted this was because inventory management… and base storage management… is a royal pain the the ass in Valheim. We burn through wood by the thousands of units at times, so we needed stacks and stacks of chests. Food was always overflowing our storage as well.
And Potshot had built a big storage room for our main base, with a nice curve to it so that you could stand in the middle and access all the chests. But once we got into smelting tin and copper and scrap iron, the chests began to overflow and it was either build a whole adjunct set of storage that we would need to manage or find a mod that allowed bigger stacks. Since we were already on the mod train, that won out.
Our storage space
The other thing this mod does is allow the weight of items to be reduced and, by default, with the mod installed, things weigh just 10% of their default game weight.
Now this balances out in a way. If you could carry a stack of 30 scrap iron before, you can now carry a stack of 300 scrap iron. Your stack carrying ability remains the same, even if you are hauling 10x the count.
I was a bit dubious about this aspect of the mod. It felt like we might be crossing the line from quality of life improvements… which bigger stack definately fell into… and into down right cheating, or at least going easy mode to the point of removing too much of the edge from the game.
You can configure the stacking and weight reduction. It could be changed to 20x stacks or half weight rather than 10% weight, the latter being something I tried to set. However, the client doesn’t pay attention to how the server side gets configured. The client side config wins in any conflict. So I left that alone.
And, we got used to the weigh reduction pretty quickly. It mostly meant fewer trips back and forth, which is a pretty nice QoL improvement, while we still had to ship ore and metal manually because it cannot go through portals. There is a mod for that, but we haven’t gone there.
This past weekend Bung got back online after being busy and away for the last few weeks, and I got on with him and explained where we stood in the game, encouraging him to go pick up some of our raw material so he would get the new recipes, starting with the chest where we kept our refined metal.
He then went over to the workbench and forge to check out the recipes while I peeked in the chest just to remind myself how much refined metal we had built up. It should have been a lot, but when I opened up the chest there was very little metal.
Then I realized that every stack he picked up and been reduced to the default stack size of 30. He did not have the new mod and, in the conflict between the server and the client, the client won. Default Valheim says those metal stacks should include no more than 30 pieces so it simply deleted anything in excess of 30. I was very quickly saying, “Oh shit!”
Stacks after I consolidated the remaining iron and silver
There had been almost 700 units of iron and 500 of silver in there along with a lot more bronze, tin, and copper.
I asked if he had seen the mod in the pinned list on our Discord. He had not, which was reasonable. You have to go look at it and we had added that mod while he had been away. It wasn’t an obvious change and I had not considered the consequences of somebody showing up without it installed. It is one of those mods that doesn’t prevent you from logging in, the way OdinShip does.
So we had our first mod-inflicted issue.
He went and got that downloaded and I started looking into what else he had touched. Fortunately, he had stopped at that chest to investigate new recipes.
So we decided to put in some work getting new raw metals back to base, starting with a visit to the swamp. This was a bit of an issue because he was still wearing black forest level gear… troll hide leather… and the swamp… the swamp can be a tough place. A dragur one-shotted him literally two steps out of our swamp base.
That didn’t go well
He grabbed some fully upgrade bronze kit that we had in the backup gear chests and came out in that.
We did get into a couple of crypts after that and were able to load up on scrap iron.
Down in the crypt
Then we sailed that back to our main base. But scap iron wasn’t in short supply. I actually later found a couple stacks of 300 raw scrap iron in another chest that we just had not processed yet. Silver though… that we were now very short on. But getting us up into the mountains… he would need more than bronze.
Fortunately, I had made an extra wolf hide cape the day before… one of my more common mistakes is going to upgrade something and accidently making another one… so he was able to grab that. Then I gave him my fully upgraded iron gear because we had just enough silver to make the first tier of the wolf armor, which has the same armor protect stats.
Then we ran back to the swamp and killed Bonemass to get another wishbone for him. Also, we now have a Bonemass trophy to hang on the wall.
Finally, we headed up to the mountain outpost that Potshot put together and went to work excavating a silver node, doing the routine where you dig it out until it is floating in mid-air, then hitting it a few times until it fractures and all the silver lands on the ground in one big jackpot. Lots of fun.
However, the game had some plans for us. As we were almost done with that, we got the “you are being hunter” message, which is the mountains wolf event. This is a tough one to deal with, as a swarm of wolves will mess you up pretty quick.
We thought for a bit we might be safe. We were down in the mining pit with no ramp down, so the wolves couldn’t get to us. But then they began pushing against each other at the end of the pit until the ones up front started spilling down into the pit where we fought for a while before succumbing to the wolf mass.
This is why we keep meads of frost protection back at the base.
We ate some food, got a mead each, then took the portal back to the base. Running back it seemed that the event was over, so I jumped back into the pit… only to be reminded that the wolves don’t necessarily despawn. There were five in there waiting for me, so I was soon back at base eating food and getting another frost resist mead.
The wolves couldn’t get out of the pit and all our gear was down in the pit. So we grabbed a couple of finewood bows that Potshot had hung on the wall as decoration, grabbed some arrows out of the supply chest, then went back to the mountains and stood on the edge of the pit and shot the wolves. Problem solved.
Dealing with the wolf menace
We were then able to pop the silver vein and haul it back to the mountain base for later transport down the mountainside to our small dock in order to sail it back to be smelted.
Silver is actually considerably heavier than iron, tin, or copper, so has ended up being the first point we hit where we couldn’t just load up and carry about all we wanted. So even with weight being down to 10% of default, there are still limits.
Anyway, we have the three of us now up to date, have recovered a bit on the silver front, and are now live in the mountains
A mountain vista
We have a couple of items on our list still. We need some drake trophies in order to upgrade to the mountains level wolf armor set head piece. We need more silver. And we have to find where Moder, the next boss, spawns.
It’s a very big game, and we feel people will really see how how vast and complete that game is. It’s a really full, triple… quadruple-A game, that will deliver in the long run.
I wasn’t even going to do this as a quote of the day. This quote was back at the beginning of the month, Skull and Bones feels like it is mainly a console title, and while I kept seeing it advertised on Twitter (that UbiSoft gives Elon money is another issue), it was never going to be something I would play.
To start with, it is a UbiSoft title and they have been on my blacklist for a couple of decades now for simply being complete shits. I will buy EA titles, but screw UbiSoft and there customer hating policies. Never is a long time, but I am willing to give it a shot in their case.
Skull and Bones – An original something
Furthermore, we all know, back in the logical parts of our brains, that AAA game prices (there are no AAAA games, knock that shit off before it infects the damn industry) being stuck at $60 for 20 years was not tenable in the real world where the price of nearly everything else has consistantly gone up. So charging $70 isn’t a sin in my book, because if they don’t do that, then it will just be DLC and a cash shop and season passes… wait, they’ll do that even if they do raise the price. That ship has sailed. Nevermind I guess.
But the whole thing came up as part of the price discussion when an investor rep asked why the game couldn’t have been free to play and just loaded on more of the extras, since free will generally draw a bigger audience. Anybody with some history knows how much UbiSoft hates the idea of anybody getting anything for free. My early hate was fed by their draconian copy protection measures, which literally punished people who paid and encouraged pirating.
Finally, Yves Guillemot saying something dumb and annoying is barely news. He is the arrogant face of a company that consistantly tries to prove it sees its customers as the enemy, or such is my extremely biased view. I will repeat, every time I mention UbiSoft, that I hold a grudge.
But then I though about my new year’s prediction about UbiSoft finding some way to piss me off in 2024 and I asked myself, “Did this quote make me say ‘Fuck that guy!’ when I saw it?”
And yes, yes it did in fact make me say “Fuck that guy!” when I saw it. It wasn’t a full throated utterance, but it rose to the point of muttered vocalization, and I am going to say that counts. So I figured I had best document that quote so I can find it come December when I score my predictions.
Then, as icing on the cake as I wrote this I went to go check the review scores on MetaCritic, just to see how the alleged AAAA game was faring. It is hard to tell. I mean, on most days, when the review score range is locked in at 75-100 because gaming sites want ad revenue from the big names, seeing a score of 60 would be a pretty hard blow.
The PS5 has the most reviews, so I chose that
60 is better than 40 or 20, but it also smacks of “how low can we go before Yves bans our site from ads forever more?” I am not completely unsympathetic to that reasoning. Game sites gotta survive too.
Then again, maybe this is the new quadruple A grading scale? Maybe a 60 is good?
Certainly the user reviews made reference to the AAAA quote from the CEO.
Skull and Bones apparently took a decade to make, costs somewhere in the region of $200 million over that time, and there was Yves painting a big target on its back, giving people an excuse to shit all over it and the price because it is also a full on live service cash grab.
I am going to write about politics, but in a somewhat flippant and detatched way, merely because I am seeing a rare event, a congressional race without an incumbent. I am keeping it somewhat vague because I don’t care enough to get that invested, part of which means not using any actual names to avoid any Google search attention. But if you’re dying for names, it is all happening in what is currenly the California 16th congressional district. Google will spill the beans.
The current district map from Wikipedia
For background, I live in what is a safe congressional district for one party, which makes it like most congressional districts nation wide. My disctrict happens to be safe for Democrats, but there are also safe Republican seats in the state. This isn’t even a matter of gerrymandering so much as even when you do bipartisan districting, the two parties will horse trade to maximize the number of safe seats. They’re incentivized to do that as to be in constant competation costs money and they’d rather save that for other races.
It hasn’t always been a safe seat. In my lifetime it has been held by Republicans. But since 1992 it has been held by the same person, so I have essentially had the same congressional representative for more than 30 years. Redistricting has changed the number of the district and the boundaries defining it multiple times, and I have moved five times in that time frame, but somehow I always end up with the same representative. She must like me or something… stop following me around!
I do not hate her, but she is like any other politician and has never failed to disappointment me at some fundamental level at least once per term. I have written her a couple of dozen cranky emails about policy issues and vote and never recieved anything but an automated response… but I got an automated response, which put her ahead of our past state senators.
Like any successful politician, she was mostly focused on what would get her elected by claiming credit beyond the scope a normal person might find tenable. Anything that happened in her disctrict was always something “we” did even if she had no part in it. Pretty typical stuff; sounds good on a flyer, often irksome if you are paying attention.
I took my daughter to an event where she and our state assembly representative were speaking and had her watch how they behaved back stage. They and their entorages treated everybody with mild-to-active disdain, made sure everybody knew they were the important people, and paid no mind to the things they disrputed or got in the way of. We had been watching Veep together and it was pretty much a Selena Meyer skit. Politicians being politicians. This is the behavior we reward and there is a school of thought that every district gets the candidate they deserve in the end.
Anyway, she is finally retiring, which means that there will not an incumbent who will automatically be re-elected. We have to make a choice now as to who is likely to represent us for possibly the next 20-30 years, which is the way this sort of thing seems to go. Everybody hates congress, but everybody loves their incumbent rep.
This means that for the first time since the election of President Clinton, I cannot tell you who will win this congressional election because, with a safe seat, the incumbent always wins unless they have done something very dumb or have moved on to better things, like being US senator fo the state. (We’re electing a couple of those this year too, but that isn’t as interesting to me.)
Which leads me to a set of choices. This is California, where we have had the “jungle” primary system since 2010 where all candidates for the office are on the ballot together in the primary, regardless of party affiliation, and the top two finishers face each other in the main election in November. Who do I have to pick from? There were eleven options on my ballot, which I have ranked below in order of how likely I think it is they will make it to the November run-off.
I have included my gut insight on what they are running on, if anything, and the pros and cons of that approach. This is not deep political analysis. Also, I cannot begin to care enough to endorse one of them and, having already mailed in my vote, and I will only say that it went to somebody unlikely to win. (Oh, and campaign money numbers from Ballotpedia.)
So who is on the list?
The Big City Mayor
Okay, San Jose isn’t a “big city,” even if it is the tenth most populous in the US. It is more like mini-LA, in that it has large population based on an aggressive land annexation campaign back in the 50s and 60s. When you say “the city” here, you mean San Francisco (which actually has a smaller population, but feels like an actual city because it is packed into a 7 mile by 7 mile square), but it is the closest thing to a big city Silicon Valley has.
Anyway, the former mayor of SJ is running and is touting all of his accomplishments, some of which seem dubious or unproveable. How can you tell he reduced homelessness by exactly 11%? And wasn’t that during Covid? More important, he is running on executive branch accomplishments for a legislative job, and I am not sure those translate well… but that assumes voters know the difference between executive and legislative roles. That would not be a safe bet.
Campaign funds: $2,206,228
Pros: Has lots of endorsements, lots of money, is well known (at least compared to this group, I couldn’t tell you who the current mayor of SJ is), and is spending a lot on flyers and ads (his ad is playing in Overwolf in the background as I write this), and has a record to run on with accomplishments to brag about
Cons: San Jose is short staffed and still in a budget crisis after his time there (I could swear I saw an officer still rolling in a Crown Vic not that long ago) which could be a red flag to some, endorsements are from some conservative groups, the district includes a lot of places outside of SJ (though maybe that is a plus for him), we tend look down on the city and its dysfunction out here in the more affluent suburbs, and he comes off sounding like a pre-MAGA Republican running as a Democrat which, while a smart play in a district with a lot of rich people, will still alienate some Dems
Chances for the November ballot: 80%
The Party Ladder Climber
A former city council person in my own little suburb and our current state assembly representative. However, we have term limits for state offices in California, which means every two terms the music starts and everybody has to get up and find a new seat when it stops. Term limits are a failure in my opinion as the party favorites just change roles and rarely ever have to go away. If they can’t get elected somewhere they get a commision appointment to keep thim on hold until they can.
Such is our assembly rep. Fully bought into and adopted as part of the Jerry Brown party machine that runs California currently, if the party endorsed non-incumbent candidates in primaries, he would get the nod.
He was also at the event above with my daughter where his staff demanded a last minute change in the speaking order so he could go first, so managed to win the “most self-important and uncaring” award for that event. Also, once stole credit for something my wife did when sitting in the mayor’s role, so I have a personal grudge.
Campaign funds: $1,369,552
Pros: Absolutely the party machine candidate, has name recognition, and if he gets past the primary he will get the party endorsement which will assure him the seat and he’ll be there for the next 30 years
Con: Absolutely a career politicion primarily interested on furthering his career and it shows when he speaks
Chances for the November ballot: 60%
The Eternal Challenger
A recurring challenger to the retriring incumbent, he has run against her for the last few elections. Represents a very wealthy suburb city next to my own which is so NIMBY they don’t allow sidewalks or street lights. His campaigns tend to be running against the status quo, which is not such a big draw without an incumbent. Despite his rhetoric, come across as a conservative due to being on the city council of said wealthy suburb.
Campaign funds: $289,503
Pros: Has some name recognition, has made it past the primary multiple times, has pulled as much as 36% of the final vote against an incumbent in a safe disctrict, better than Republicans running as Republicans, who have struggled to break the 25% mark
Cons: Follwing his past pattern of promising everything to everybody which has never won in the past, also we’re playing for real this year, so he isn’t going to get the anti-incumbent protest vote
Chances for the November ballot: 30%
The Marine
I know this person was in the US Marines because his flyers feature a picture of him in his dress blues. His actual candidate bio says he is currently an entrepenuer and runs his own cyber security firm along with a lot of things he believes in, which all sound good, but is still an unknown. Has the largest campaign war chest in the race, even bigger than the mayor
Campaign funds: $2,792,923
Pros: Has most campaign money in the race, ctually spending it on mailers, says a lot of the “right” things for our district, and we shouldn’t underestimate the power of voter ignorance
Cons: Saying the right things is the lowest political bar possible, otherwise has no public record to run on, flyers are very much a “throw everything against the wall and maybe something will stick” approach
Chances for the November ballot: 25%
The Shallow Duo
Not one but TWO members of the Palo Alto city council are running in the election, and I am unfairly lumping them together because they are from what we call “Shallow Alto,” where they pretend to be very concerned about many things, until actually asked to do something, at which point the NIMBY wall is erected. The closest the city gets to caring about the poor is subsidizing housing for teachers, and that is only because good schools keep the property values high. (And then they send their kids to private school.)
Campaign funds: $610,860 (combined)
Pros: Palo Alto does represent a wealthy demographic in the valley… though they are really on the peninsula and in the 650 area code… and one of the two might break out I suppose
Cons: The pair of them together haven’t raised even half of the funds of the top three, so no ads, no visibility, and the two of them are likely to split whatever demographic they represent
Chances for the November ballot: 15%
The Two Republicans
There are always a couple. One is running on the “Congress is broken, I’ll fix it!” line in the election guide, which is particularly ironic given that Republicans in congress are currently the ones least interested in doing anything like work. The other wouldn’t pay the money… and you have to pay by the word to have a statement in the election guide… so showed such low commitment to the effort that they cannot be taken seriously.
Campaign funds: $15,080 for one, $0 for the other
Pros: Somebody will always vote based on part affiliation alone… the guy up the street with the Trump flag is probably on board
Cons: Money? Are these two even Republicans? Shouldn’t these two be rich or have Larry Ellison backing them? I suspect the mayor got all the conservative money
Chances for the November ballot: 2%
The Non-Starters
And then there are three more Democrats who haven’t sent out flyers… at least not to my address… and who haven’t stood out at all in any way I can identify without having to read copy straight from their campaigns. I have to keep looking at my voter guide to even tell them apart. People only get one vote and these three are not putting in the effort.
Campaign funds: $1,549,250 (combined)
Pros: The primary isn’t until March 5, so technically there is still time left for a surge, some popular messaging between them, combined they have more money than most other candidates
Cons: Divided they have second tier war chests plus early voting has been open for days now and I mailed in my ballot last Tuesday, so it is too late really
Chances for the November ballot: Less than 1%
So my expectation is that the top two on the list will end up being the pair on the ballot in November and we will see a tug of war between money and the state Democratic machine over influence, and the machine always wins… except when it doesn’t. But I still think the machine will pull it off it, even if they couldn’t keep Feinstein from running in her last election. (She had her own constituency and was heavily supported by Hollywood, for whom she carried water during her time in the senate.)
However, if the mayor makes it in and the climber doesn’t, then it will be a money campaign to buy the seat November.
Anyway, I supposed I can grade myself on my assessment in two weeks.
I have been saving this post for this day because it is a special day, the anniversary of my experiencing the Silicon Valley dream; the IPO! Been there, done that, and literally got the T-shirt. What else can I say? Well, a lot of things it seems.
My wife ironed it a bit
30 years ago today Global Village went public and was availble for trading on the NASDAQ exchange under the GVIL ticker.
Everybody who worked at Global Village on that day got one of those T-shirts. Mine has been sitting in a frame for more than 20 years now. It used to be on the wall in my office at work, back when I was important enough to warrant an office, and it has sat in my home office since then.
Stock options and going public are the things that Silicon Valley dreams are made of… though being bought out by Google used to come pretty close on that front. There are legendary tales of invididuals who got in early, worked hard with the promise of their stock options being worth something some day, and who were able to retire when the magic moment hit. (And equally legendary tales of people who gave up their shares only to later find that they have abandoned riches.)
There is a long standing story of old hands at Microsoft with stickers on their badge reading “FYIFV,” which stood for “fuck you, I’m fully vested” meaning that they could take the money and run any time they pleased.
I know people who have hung around Apple for ages who are worth millions due to stock options they were given over the years, especially options handed out at very low valuations during the bad days between Scully and the return of Steve Jobs.
My story is perhaps less dramatic. It is certainlty less lucrative.
When I started in tech support at Global Village in 1992 I made $28K annually, was given 2,500 options valued at 25 cents each, that being the estimated value of shares when I was hired, and the choice of a better computer if I opted to sit in an interior cube versus a window cube.
And you only need to look out the window if your computer is slow, right?
As with most people, my stock options vested over time. For some reason they decided to set the vesting period for five years, so after working there a year 500 shares would be available for me to purchase at the initial valuation. I would then accrue more shares on a monthly basis until I hit five years, at which point I would be fully vested.
Most places considered four years enough, but somebody at GV got five years in the head. Later, when I moved on to Big Island I complained to Rick that I was going to have to leave behind more than 500 shares of stock because I wouldn’t be fully vested until mid-1997. The stock still had value then. By 1997 it has lost much of it.
As I worked my way out of support and upstairs into engineering, the company was harnessing its success and building towards going public. One of the things that happened was the VCs started putting people in place to run the company, people who would follow their instructions for preparing the company for an IPO.
Our CEOI was one of the marketing executives from Apple who were on the PowerBook project, and the CFO… I forget where he was from, though I recall he later left in disgrace due to some ethical lapse.
But that wouldn’t make him alone in the board room I guess.
We needed two things to go public back then. The first was that we had to have two successful product lines. We already had the Macintosh modem market sewn up pretty well. But modems were all viewed as a single product line. That was where the OneWorld network fax, modem, remote access server line came in.
The Global Village OneWorld
It didn’t have to be super successful, it just had to prove that we had two product lines.
Then we had to show a continuous pattern of growth. This meant that every quarter had to exceed the past quarter for revenue. That mean cutting off some quarters early when we had made enough revenue in order to carry it forward into the next.
This was, of course, unethical and probably unlawful. But our CEO told us they were doing it at a company meeting, so it isn’t like they were hiding it.
And, of course, we had to be profitable. But that was no problem. The Mac modem market was lucrative, the PowerBook segment especially.
This all changed not too far down the line. The rules changed when the VCs decided they wanted to cash out on Netscape about a year and a half later. Netscape didn’t need to make money or have a long term plan, they went public on hype and a pomise that there must be SOMETHING of value in the company because we were all using the Netscape Natigator browser… you were supposed to pay for it, but almost nobody did… and a company that had something on damn near everybody’s computer had to be wise and powerful.
It set the pattern for the dotcom boom, the idea that you just had to have a lot of users, that butts in seats, as it was called, was more important that making a profit or having a business plan that made any sense.
I happened to live at an apartment at Whisman and Middlefield Road, at one end of the series of buildings that would soon have the Netscape name on them. They, somewhat ironically, even had the old Cisco Systems building on Middlefield, a company that was the target model for many startups in the 90s.
As sure as Marc Andreesen provided the spark that made Netscape possible, he also provided most of the very dumb ideas that kept it from being anything beyond a brief flash in the pan. If Steve Case, head of AOL, hadn’t been a sucker, hadn’t believed the hype, he might have saved himself the effort of dismantling the failure that was Netscape rather than buying it in 1998. Instead he bailed out Andreesen and made him even richer. Case was smart enough to only buy Netscape with AOL stock, and he managed to turn around and sell AOL to Time Warner in 2000, so he wasn’t a complete chump.
Anyway, if you see me dismissing Marc Andreesen as somebody who was simply in the right place at the right time, I submit as evidence pretty much everything he has done since the Netscape IPO… and doubly so that he and his current firm are all in on crypto, though they clearly want to be the scammer in that equation, the rent seeking landlord, the house that wins no matter what happens.
But I digress.
So the day came, February 24, 1994, and Global Village went public. GVIL was listed on NASDAQ. I think the CEO got to ring the opening bell on Wall Street that day. We were all going to be rich!
Right? RIGHT?
Well, no. Or maybe. I certainly was not.
The stock opened up at $8 a share. If I had been able to exercise and sell ALL my shares on that date, it would have been worth $20,000. That wasn’t going to buy me a house, much less let me retire, even in 1994. But it could have been a down payment on a nice condo.
Except, of couse, I couldn’t sell all of my shares on that day. I had only hit about a year and a half of vesting, so I only had some shares available. 791 I think.
But still, if I could sell those, it would still net me more than $6K after fees and such.
I could not, however, sell ANY shares because when a company does an IPO employee shares are generally locked out from being sold for a period of time in order to let the VCs and other favored investors cash out in the initial frenzy. We had to wait six months.
And in six months, after the big cash out, the stock was down to $5 a share. That was even less interesting than $8 a share. But our time was not done yet.
The inetrnet was becoming a thing. While I disdained Netscape just a few paragraphs back, a company with no plan and no proven track record that went public on hype alone, the hype was not reserved for Netscape alone.
The market itself was rising. We were past the post Cold War recession, the peace dividend was a thing, Bill Clinton was president, and the internet in general and the World Wide Web in particular were suddenly the most interesting thing for Wall Street. We all wanted to get online, to the point that I wrote about the great dial tone drought a while back. Netscape was a symptom, not a cause of the hype, and any company that was involved with getting online was suddenly viewed with a great fondness beyond anything Lord British ever felt. (If anybody gets that call back reference I will be amazed.)
Among the beneficiaries was GVIL, which was pulled out of its $5 doldrums and began to rise with the internet tide. It passed $8, then $12, then $16 a share. Maybe we would be rich!
The price peaked just past $21 a share at one point. I remember this vividly as I had my shares with a broker and the day it hit that I put in a sell order. I could have sold at market, which would have just gotten me the money. That was in early 96 I think, which would have given me nearly 2,000 shares to play with. That many shares at $20… well, again, I wasn’t going to be rich, but that was a down payment on a real house or maybe a new car paid for in cash, with money set aside for the taxes on the sale.
But I did not put in the sell order at market price. I put it in at $22 a share to eke out just a little bit more cash. And it never got there. I then chased the price down the drain for the next two years. I would set a sell order at a price… because it wasn’t in constant decline, it would bounce back up a bit, before settling down to a lower plateau than before… hoping to catch an uptick, only to have the price drop, never to return.
It fell through $18, $12, $10, $8, $5 and was mucking about around $4 a share, at which point I was hardly paying attention. The modem market had collapsed… modems were becoming a commodity and Apple was at its nadir, that period when it was bouncing around between $12 and $18 a share, when Michael Dell was quipping about the company just giving them investors their money back and calling it a day… and Global Village sold off its modem business and its name.
San Jose Mercury News – April 1, 1998
By that point Big Island was in its own spiral and I was a Cypress Research and had an offer from a company called Edify, that would change my path into enterprise software.
The company became One World, and its stock ticker changed to OWLD. Lots of grandious promises were made and hamfisted attempts to create a pump and dump scam out of the stock were rife in the Yahoo finance forum for the stock.
I sold most of my stock before it turned to OWLD at somewhere around $3 a share. I went from a new BMW to a new PC in value. And I didn’t even sell all of it. Before the pre-IPO I had exercised my first vesting of shares. I have a stock certificate for 500 shares of Global Village in a drawer with my name on them.
Exercising shares before the IPO was a dumb thing to do, and I blame my youthful ignorance and enthusiasm for this lapse. When you buy shares like that, before the IPO, they become directly registered shares. You may have heard reference to directly registered shares as part of the dumbassery around the GameStop stock bubble, where the amateur investors, the “apes,” built up a whole fantasy around direct restistered shares. (If you haven’t heard about that, Folding Ideas has an excellent video about the whole thing. Worth watching, or at least listening to.)
The reality is that such shares are just a pain in the ass to sell because you have to do transactions through physical mail, with all the delay that incurs, to do anything with them. By the time I wanted to do something with them, the stock was already sinking.
Meanwhile, the company stayed in steady decline. OWLD would fall below $1 a share, with delisting threatened, before the company folded up shop in 1999.
It could have been worse. The story was one of the early hires held onto their 25,000 shares until the place went out of business. They believed in the company, and emotional investment in something like a tech company is never a good idea.
But I did learn my lesson. When I took my vested Edify options… a merger caused them all to vest early, which changed the ticker to SONE, a company we’ll get to later… and sold them because my wife and I wanted to buy a house. I set a sell order at market value and cashed them all out at $130 a share. The stock closed over $131, and touched close to $134 before the bell that day, at what was the absolute peak of the dotcom boom. It was literally the bubble just before it burst. I was a bit disappointed that I had sold below the days high and wondered if I had called in too early, if the next day would see the market climb even higher.
It did not. The next day the stock fell to $128. And it fell a bit more the day after that, and more every day for many days to come. I had the good fortune and amazing luck to have sold at just a couple of bucks below its ultimate peak price point. We bought the house and, as it turns out, buying real estate in Silicon Valley in 2000 had a better return than most investments.
Nobody has ever offered me stock options again. It stopped being as much of a thing after the dotcom bubble. Taxes and accounting laws were tightened up and the executives decided that only they deserved stock options for all of their hard work.
I closed my brokerage accounts and have not since invested directly in any stock, avoiding anything like the stock purchase plans that some companies have offered now and then, where twice a year they buy stock for you with money they have held back from your paycheck at the market price less a discount for being in the program… usually 15%.
And at every buy date the stock in question would spike up, much more than the 15% discount, and then fall back the next day, ensuring that the whole thing was a screw job for those who bought in on it.
I have money in a 401k for retirement, in an index fund. But investing in stock as an individual retail customer with an eye towards increasing your money… that is just gambling. And, as with any form of gambling, the house wins and the individuals lose. The index fund is only allowed to “win” because somebody on Wall Street earns their bonus based on that. You’re allowed to win a bit while they win big… though somehow they win big even when you lose.
I’d like to say it wasn’t always like that. But then I think about the 1920s and the great depression that the market caused while people like Joe Kennedy got rich. Even in the calm periods, where the market seemed focused on dividends and stability, the house always won in the end.
Once again I have some bullet points about New Eden related topics on Friday. The EVE Online login server was down earlier today (I had half a dozen updates in my email from the EVE Status alerts page) but things seem to be up and running, so off we go to the bullet points.
The Expiration of the Null Sec South Eastern Agreement
A year back, with the collapse of the FI.RE coalition and their retreat clockwise through null sec, where many of the parties landed in the now defunct B2 coalition (though a few kept on going clockwise and passed into alliance with Fraternity and PanFam), there was a question as to what would become of the power vacuum left in the southeast of null sec.
That led to the South Eastern Agreement, in with the major null sec coalitions pledged not to attack, take space, or put allies into that area with the idea of letting new non-bloc aligned organizations get a footing in null sec. The agreement was set to last for one year, a timeline that ran out last week. Some details:
The agreement was not renewed mostly because neither side in the current bi-polar bloc structure of null sec felt it was in their interest. Pandemic Horde attacked, took space, and put allies into the are during the agreement, letting everybody know they could not be trusted, and the Imperium had no interest in protecting the space or being the enforcer, especially since PH seemed keen to provoke a war out of the situation so they could get their allies to assist. So the agreement ended.
Did it do any good? Maybe. Some groups lived there in fairly relative peace. Now, however, unless they are well out of the line of fire, they are likely going to have to pick sides or be ground down in the ongoing PH attacks on the Imperium down there.
A Successful EVE Online Kickstarter
The War for New Eden Kickstarter campaign ended earlier this week as well, with the project successfully funded, bringing up the success/failure ratio for EVE Online related campaigns a bit.
EVE Strategy Board Game
The campaign closed out with a number considerably over their initial goal.
The final totals for the campaign
If you are just hearing about this and feel like you have missed out, you can still put in a post-campaign pledge at the War for New Eden web site. Some links for those interested:
Now, of course, the question is when are backers going to get this rather large board game with so many pieces and board segments? The promise is by Christmas, but I will be surprised it that happens, even with 10 months to go. We shall see.
And what were the other EVE Online Kickstarter campaigns? There are a number of failed ones including the EVE Online Control Panel, a spiffy bit of hardware, and the badly mishandled Fountain War Book campaign.
And the successes? Andrew Groen’s Empires of EVEVol. 1 and Vol. 2.
Havoc Patch Notes
CCP did a fairly big update that included the return of LP trading and a balance pass through a several ship classes.
Honestly, this felt like something that would have been a dev blog in the old days, but they just stuck it in the February patch notes and rolled on.
There are changes to command ships, marauders, entropic disintigrators, and rapid light missile launchers at the top of the list, along with a host of smaller items. You will, for example, now be able to pre-heat modules while still cloaked and invulnerable after a gate jump, so you’ll be ready to rock when you break invuln and decloak.
I haven’t thought about the CSM since the last election, but they are still at work and went to Iceland for the winter summit. CCP Swift posted the summit agenda back at the end of January, and we have been getting some updates and peeks into what happened over on Reddit, including the following posts:
Since the EVE Online news ecosystem has pretty much collapsed I am not sure how much else we’ll hear about the summit. CCP has run hot and cold on minutes of the meetings over the years, so maybe we’ll get something, or maybe we won’t.
Anyway, it is Friday, the weekend is at hand, and it is going to be warm and sunny here in Silicon Valley, all the better to dry us out after the most recent atmospheric river pass.
This whole round of suvival game focus started for me because the makers of No Man’s Sky, Hello Games, announced their coming title, Light No Fire. The promise of that got me worked up on the genre once more.
Light no Fire… not in 2024 at least
That led to me looking into some possible Valheim alternatives… Valheim being my current gold standard for open world, co-op suvival titles… during the Steam Winter Sale. I actually bought some things and played them!
Of course, the day I put down the credit card to rent a server for 30 days and roll up a fresh world one of the possible alternative candidates, Conan Exiles, goes on sale for half off. I wasn’t willing to experiment for $40, but for $20 I might have.
But I was committed and wanted to play something, though I wasn’t so invested in Valheim that I couldn’t have been derailed… but nothing quite caused me to be so moved.
First up was Palworld, or Pokemon with Guns, which by reasonable measures… dollah dollah bills… has been a huge success and has sold millions of copies. This seemed to be right up my alley, to the point that G-Portal even had server rentals for it right away. This featured on a number of blogs I followed.
I thought about jumping into this… but wasn’t quite convinced. Close, but not quite there.
Then there was Enshrounded, which is also on my Steam wishlist and which also tickled the shared world co-op aspect of my desires, and which was also featured on G-Portal server rentals, and which had also grabbed the interest of some other bloggers. It sounded good and I thought about grabbing it, yet another early access title. But I haven’t so far.
And then this week Nightengale landed on Steam, once again in the suvival co-op crafting genre, and once again grabbing a few people I know, including a couple of the bloggers in the neighborhood. (Belghast was on about it yesterday, as was Bhagpuss.) It is in early access and might need some work, but it did catch my eye. Private servers are not a thing it seems, instead you can share your part of their world with just your friends if I read things correctly… which also means when thier servers are down you’re not playing.
I am sure there was also something else out there that popped up… Last Epoch maybe, or was it some other title… I don’t remember all of them. But it did feel like the universe had decided to mock me a bit for my desire for a Valheim-like co-op experience by throwing all of these new and tempting options at me after I committed to the Valheim.
Then again, I am happy playing Valhelm right now. It has an ease about it that can soak up hours of time, We have been moving through the opening biomes at a quick pace, but that has been helped along by mods and familiarity, which isn’t a bad thing. I suspect that we will slow down a bit at the plains, and that the mistlands will take us long enough to conquor that the ashlands will have finally arrived by the time we finish off that boss, which will give us another biome to master.
So I feel the temptation of these other titles, the fear of missing out if I am not there at the beginning the way I was for Valheim.
On the other hand, if those titles are any good, they’ll be there waiting for us. And I also know that the last three years has seen Valheim improve a great deal. As the song says, fools rush in… and sometimes they get the best seats, and other times they pay the price for being too early on the scene.
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.
Through pixels dim, a vista grand,
Qeynos unfolds, a promised land.
Cobblestone streets, a bustling throng,
Where merchants hawk, and bards sing strong.
-Google Gemini, trying to make some Norrath poetry
Qeynos will always hold a special place in my image of EverQuest. It was the first “city” I visitied in Norrath. It was both busy to look at and a bit confusing to navigate when compared to the simplicity of Surefall Glade or the open spaces of Qeynos Hills or the Karanas.
I remain to this day a partisan of Qeynos and stand against the tyranny of Freeport… or something. Freeport, the city on the far side of the continent of Antonica, was clearly the darling of the developers.
Classic Norrath
Freeport quickly became the popular nexus of the game and for good reason. It was easily reached by much of the game’s population… unless you started in Qeynos or Erudin. If you started on the west side of Antonica, you had a perielious journey ahead of you if you wished to get to the Commonlands tunnel, which was the player created economic hub of Norrath. No auction house, just shouting about your goods and bargaining face to face.
But I am getting ahead of myself. That is all yet to come in my journey. I am still in Qeynos.
How does one even say that name?
Back in 1999 I said it aloud, if I had to, sounding like “Kway-noss.” I knew people who said it more like “Key-noss” or “Kway-niss.” I don’t think I ever heard anybody from the dev team say it until the advent of the SOE podcast, where they said it more like “Key-nose.” I have gone with that pronounciation ever since.
(That is also I heard the name of my server, E’ci, pronounced for the first time. They said it “eee-say,” which was better than my method at the time, which was to simply spell it out, the “Eee, See, Eye” server.)
And yes, Qeynos is “Sony EQ” spelled backwards. And the palindrome of “Bolton” is “Notlob.”
Looking at Qeynos today, it feels almost like Doom, all verticle walls and squared off objects with fairly low resolution textures applied. More sophisticated than Doom for sure, with more patterns, but it still feels closer to Doom than even something like World of Warcraft or EverQuest II, which are only five years younger and headed to their own 20th birthdays later this year.
Look at those textures… also, how many new players drowned in that pond?
Speaking of WoW, one thing I always notice when I go back to EQ or EQII is SOE’s instistance on having doors. It isn’t that there are not ANY doors in Azeroth, but they are few and far between. In EQ there is a door on every damn building, and often a few inside a building. I wonder how much time was spent getting doors to even work right… it is one of those seemingly simple things that is notoriously difficult to implement well… during development of the game? And they are all mildly awkward to use, so I admire the simplicity of Azeroth where you just walk into almost every building.
Once more I will borrow from the Project 1999 wiki, this time for maps of Qeynos… plural beacuse Qeynos was broken out into two zones, north and south.
North was the smaller of the two when it came to being a city, though it had that large “front lawn” with mobs, including Fippy Darkpaw, to play on.
North Qeynos
The points of interest from the Wiki:
Order of the Silent Fist – Monk Guild, Merchant who sells Monk Weapons, Bags, and Bandages
Kliknik Tunnel – leads to Qeynos Aqueducts
Reflecting Pond – tunnel leads to Qeynos Aqueducts
Galliway’s Trading Post – Merchants selling Food and other Goods, Priest of Discord outside
Ironforge’s – Merchants selling Sharp Weapons, Medicine Bags, and Weapon Molds, Forge out back
Jewelbox – Merchants selling Jewelry supplies (Metals and Gems)
Ironforges’ Estate
Merchants selling Medium Cloth Armor and Medium Chainmail Molds
The Cobbler – Merchant selling Boots of all types
Merchants selling Blunt Weapons and Cleric/Paladin spells
Teleport leading to Temple of Life, Cleric and Paladin Trainers throughout area
I am drawn to Ironforge’s, and not just because that name would recur again in a big way in WoW.
Now there is a name that will live large… elsewhere
This is where I learned of the injustice of the layout of the world. I set about to do smithing at one point, Ironforge’s being a place that sold most, but not all, of the supplies you would need.
Missing were bits of metal, the basic ingredient required for all smithing. If I has started out in Freeport, the vendor there… who is within line of site of multiple forges… had metal bits. But in Qeynos the nearest vendor who had them was up in Highpass Hold. If you’re going to go that far, you might as well just carry on to Freeport.
The first of many things thwarted due to starting in Qeynos and the nature of travel in the game back then.
South Qeynos was a busier layout than north, and the place where I would get disoriented and stuck trying to get somewhere.
South Qeynos
Again, the legend borrowed from the wiki:
Tin Soldier – Forge outside, Merchants selling Medium Chain Armor and Full Plate Molds
The Wind Spirit’s Song – Bard Guild Hall, Merchants selling Bard songs and various Weapons
Fharn’s Leather & Thread – Merchant selling Medium Leather Armor and Small Sewing Kit and Patterns
Bag n Barrel – Merchants selling Bags, Pottery Wheel and Kiln out back
Tent Merchants selling Cloth Armor, Small Sewing Kits, Bags, Axes, and Sharp Weapons (including Claymore)
Warrior Training Hall inside the Grounds of Fate (PvP Area), Merchant selling Various Weapons, underground tunnel leads to a variety of evil trainers and merchants in the Qeynos Aqueducts (follow the bones)
Underwater tunnel to Qeynos Aqueducts
Port Authority
Merchant selling Instrument Parts, Spells, Compass, and Fish
Voleen’s Fine Baked Goods – Merchants selling Food, Brewing Supplies, some Baking Supplies, Oven inside
Temple of Thunder – Paladin and Cleric Trainers, Merchants selling Spells, Various Weapons, and Shields of all sizes
I remember a lot of the vendors in South Qeynos, but the most immediate draw was the bank, the Qeynos Hold, because of course inventory management was an issue from day one and bags were small and scarce and so on. Also, if you look at that map, there wasn’t a nice straight line from the north part of town to the bank. No, you had to weave around the place.
Dun is new around here I think
There inside the bank, with the two tellers and the guard… and a very active guard because “A” turned on auto-attack and so many people accidently attacked guards or vendors or what not by accident because of that… was always crowded, with lots of people coming and going or just hanging around idle.
Inside the Qeynos Hold
There were no shared bank slots across accounts and no mailing stuff to yourself back then. I’d get an alt character logged out in the far corner of one of the nearby buildings, then go over to that spot with something I wanted to hand off to them, drop it on the ground, log out, then log in with the alt and pick it up… because stuff you dropped stayed there. Crazy times.
And there was the harbor, where you could take the boat to Erudin or learn about fishing from that guy down at the end of the dock.
The Port Authority
You used to be able to get up on top of the walls inside of town and get out to the end overlooking the harbor and you were high enough to see that the sky box was more like an inverted goldfish bowl, the lip of which would be clearly visible. Lots of things to see in Qeynos.
The clock tower in South Qeynos
It was all very old school and there was nothing like yellow paint or other highlights to guide players to find hidden things like so many games today.
Move along, nothing to see here…
Qeynos is not exactly as it was 25 years ago. There are new NPCs and the teleport book to bring you to the Plane of Knowledge and quests that were not there back in the day. But the crude look and feel of the place… SOE redid Freeport, its darling favorite city and, while it does look better, its new look did away with all the memories that the old location would no doubt bring out in old school players.
Sometimes it is better to be ignored and left alone.
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!)
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ship Class
Count
% of Jan
Hull
Count
% of Jan
Capsule
135,285
27.29%
Capsule
133,673
26.97%
Frigate
71,515
14.43%
Caldari Shuttle
16,388
3.31%
Shuttle
42,364
8.55%
Amarr Shuttle
13,103
2.64%
Cruiser
41,629
8.40%
Venture
12,801
2.58%
Destroyer
37,674
7.60%
Mobile Tractor Unit
12,480
2.52%
Corvette
18,095
3.65%
Ibis
8,391
1.69%
Combat Battlecruiser
14,845
3.00%
Gallente Shuttle
7,881
1.59%
Mobile Tractor Unit
13,070
2.64%
Heron
7,877
1.59%
Interdictor
11,025
2.22%
Exequror Navy Issue
6,164
1.24%
Hauler
9,936
2.00%
Vexor
6,001
1.21%
Assault Frigate
9,603
1.94%
Ishtar
5,897
1.19%
Heavy Assault Cruiser
9,304
1.88%
Algos
5,798
1.17%
Interceptor
8,653
1.75%
Sabre
5,253
1.06%
Battleship
7,787
1.57%
Thrasher
5,230
1.06%
Stealth Bomber
4,846
0.98%
Catalyst
5,221
1.05%
Mining Barge
4,435
0.89%
Caracal
5,015
1.01%
Strategic Cruiser
4,416
0.89%
Velator
4,270
0.86%
Mobile Warp Disruptor
4,374
0.88%
Minmatar Shuttle
4,156
0.84%
Tactical Destroyer
4,361
0.88%
Tristan
3,689
0.74%
Covert Ops
4,211
0.85%
Kikimora
3,604
0.73%
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
Hull
Count
Sum of ISK Lost
ISK per Loss
Capsule
133,673
3,761.30 billion
28.14 million
Vargur
918
2,170.05 billion
2,363.89 million
Ishtar
5,897
1,591.52 billion
269.89 million
Loki
1,732
1,478.75 billion
853.78 million
Paladin
619
1,263.75 billion
2,041.59 million
Tengu
1,408
1,158.49 billion
822.79 million
Gila
1,620
928.75 billion
573.30 million
Golem
379
826.95 billion
2,181.94 million
Praxis
2,764
821.25 billion
297.12 million
Revelation
140
744.72 billion
5,319.43 million
Nestor
290
701.43 billion
2,418.73 million
Kronos
356
691.77 billion
1,943.18 million
Athanor
302
617.89 billion
2,045.99 million
Exequror Navy Issue
6,164
593.09 billion
96.22 million
Proteus
674
548.39 billion
813.63 million
Legion
602
490.35 billion
814.54 million
Orca
259
435.56 billion
1,681.68 million
Naglfar
91
425.98 billion
4,681.06 million
Sabre
5,253
404.17 billion
76.94 million
Occator
473
351.60 billion
743.33 million
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.
Hull
Count
Sum of ISK Lost
ISK per Loss
Leviathan
1
95.99 billion
95.99 billion
Avatar
3
259.10 billion
86.37 billion
Ragnarok
1
78.10 billion
78.10 billion
Cybele
1
49.38 billion
49.38 billion
Revenant
2
65.74 billion
32.87 billion
Nyx
6
185.32 billion
30.89 billion
Wyvern
1
28.25 billion
28.25 billion
Aeon
2
50.73 billion
25.37 billion
Hel
6
151.35 billion
25.22 billion
Sotiyo
1
23.75 billion
23.75 billion
Ark
21
308.02 billion
14.67 billion
Nomad
9
108.68 billion
12.08 billion
Tatara
13
143.57 billion
11.04 billion
Rhea
27
285.46 billion
10.57 billion
Fortizar
32
336.70 billion
10.52 billion
Anshar
14
145.37 billion
10.38 billion
Vehement
1
9.58 billion
9.58 billion
Bowhead
17
139.14 billion
8.18 billion
Azbel
21
142.02 billion
6.76 billion
Rorqual
42
276.49 billion
6.58 billion
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.
Region
Sum of ISK Lost
% of Jan
Region
Count
% of Jan
The Forge
2.01 trillion
4.30%
The Forge
40,916
8.25%
Pochven
2.00 trillion
4.28%
Essence
23,326
4.71%
The Citadel
1.95 trillion
4.17%
The Bleak Lands
22,845
4.61%
Metropolis
1.75 trillion
3.75%
Pochven
20,117
4.06%
Delve
1.66 trillion
3.56%
Vale of the Silent
17,800
3.59%
Vale of the Silent
1.62 trillion
3.47%
Placid
16,526
3.33%
Essence
1.37 trillion
2.92%
The Citadel
15,400
3.11%
Placid
1.26 trillion
2.70%
Delve
15,127
3.05%
Querious
1.25 trillion
2.67%
Metropolis
14,826
2.99%
Catch
1.16 trillion
2.48%
Perrigen Falls
14,228
2.87%
Sinq Laison
1.14 trillion
2.45%
Sinq Laison
14,137
2.85%
The Bleak Lands
1.06 trillion
2.27%
Lonetrek
13,812
2.79%
Providence
1.02 trillion
2.17%
Black Rise
13,353
2.69%
Perrigen Falls
.98 trillion
2.10%
Querious
13,273
2.68%
Lonetrek
.98 trillion
2.10%
Genesis
13,111
2.65%
Genesis
.91 trillion
1.94%
Catch
12,988
2.62%
Fountain
.88 trillion
1.87%
Providence
9,688
1.95%
E-R00028
.83 trillion
1.77%
Fountain
8,869
1.79%
E-R00025
.82 trillion
1.75%
Curse
7,189
1.45%
Pure Blind
.78 trillion
1.68%
Tribute
6,883
1.39%
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.
System
Region
Sum of ISK Lost
% of Jan
System
Region
Count
% of Jan
Turnur
Metropolis
944.35 billion
2.02%
Uitra
The Forge
20,674
4.17%
Jita
The Forge
877.42 billion
1.87%
Jita
The Forge
12,173
2.46%
Ahbazon
Genesis
573.75 billion
1.23%
Ahbazon
Genesis
10,747
2.17%
Heydieles
Essence
518.47 billion
1.11%
Heydieles
Essence
8,890
1.79%
Uedama
The Citadel
514.74 billion
1.10%
Kourmonen
The Bleak Lands
6,469
1.31%
4-HWWF
Vale of the Silent
433.24 billion
0.93%
Fliet
Essence
5,507
1.11%
Ostingele
Placid
415.45 billion
0.89%
MJ-5F9
Perrigen Falls
4,844
0.98%
KBP7-G
Providence
409.90 billion
0.88%
Miroitem
Sinq Laison
4,474
0.90%
Juunigaishi
The Citadel
369.86 billion
0.79%
4-HWWF
Vale of the Silent
4,446
0.90%
Fliet
Essence
334.28 billion
0.71%
Kamela
The Bleak Lands
4,028
0.81%
Kourmonen
The Bleak Lands
300.38 billion
0.64%
Tama
The Citadel
3,851
0.78%
MJ-5F9
Perrigen Falls
293.74 billion
0.63%
Huola
The Bleak Lands
3,733
0.75%
PO-3QW
Feythabolis
287.88 billion
0.62%
KBP7-G
Providence
3,109
0.63%
Miroitem
Sinq Laison
242.79 billion
0.52%
Akiainavas
Lonetrek
2,996
0.60%
J133335
A-R00002
241.54 billion
0.52%
Turnur
Metropolis
2,887
0.58%
1DQ1-A
Delve
215.84 billion
0.46%
J133335
A-R00002
2,776
0.56%
93PI-4
Pure Blind
186.89 billion
0.40%
Uedama
The Citadel
2,756
0.56%
GM-0K7
Immensea
186.27 billion
0.40%
TDP-T3
Perrigen Falls
2,540
0.51%
Sosala
The Bleak Lands
169.17 billion
0.36%
Dodixie
Sinq Laison
2,389
0.48%
Kamela
The Bleak Lands
164.54 billion
0.35%
Abune
Essence
2,185
0.44%
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.
System
Sum of ISK Lost
% of WH Jan
System
Count
% of WH Jan
J133335
241.54 billion
2.94%
J133335
2,776
5.04%
J145753
125.55 billion
1.53%
Thera
1,277
2.32%
J105023
117.63 billion
1.43%
J103948
847
1.54%
Thera
110.04 billion
1.34%
J212302
689
1.25%
J130735
97.30 billion
1.19%
J121745
612
1.11%
J211908
81.27 billion
0.99%
J160455
595
1.08%
J101028
80.14 billion
0.98%
J161107
473
0.86%
J104846
75.30 billion
0.92%
J211908
456
0.83%
J123432
68.06 billion
0.83%
J144107
400
0.73%
J230745
67.02 billion
0.82%
J102844
381
0.69%
J120131
57.87 billion
0.71%
J152255
346
0.63%
J141319
57.39 billion
0.70%
J145937
345
0.63%
J213429
55.15 billion
0.67%
J133119
321
0.58%
J141434
55.13 billion
0.67%
J214006
310
0.56%
J134702
51.90 billion
0.63%
J160941
289
0.52%
J112003
51.37 billion
0.63%
J121416
287
0.52%
J115304
48.29 billion
0.59%
J171142
264
0.48%
J165953
47.02 billion
0.57%
J110656
261
0.47%
J145322
44.74 billion
0.55%
J135705
258
0.47%
J125853
43.84 billion
0.53%
J103228
248
0.45%
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.
Alliance
Kill Count
Sum of ISK destroyed
Singularity Syndicate
617
55.24 billion
[not members of an alliance]
426
45.42 billion
OnlyHoles
515
41.17 billion
Wolves Amongst Strangers
392
27.97 billion
We Forsakened Few
109
19.10 billion
Triumvirate.
329
12.59 billion
Zoo Landers
12
8.24 billion
ur fricked
19
6.21 billion
Atrax Hollow
30
4.54 billion
Aurora Alliance
57
3.77 billion
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.
System
Sum of ISK lost
% of region in Jan
System
Count
% of region in Jan
Kaunokka
133.73 billion
6.68%
Senda
1,791
8.90%
Ala
132.86 billion
6.63%
Otela
1,281
6.37%
Otela
131.98 billion
6.59%
Komo
1,070
5.32%
Angymonne
115.13 billion
5.75%
Wirashoda
1,042
5.18%
Arvasaras
114.75 billion
5.73%
Sakenta
1,035
5.14%
Senda
108.99 billion
5.44%
Krirald
911
4.53%
Wirashoda
105.03 billion
5.24%
Nani
872
4.33%
Vale
99.86 billion
4.98%
Nalvula
859
4.27%
Sakenta
99.36 billion
4.96%
Ala
857
4.26%
Harva
89.20 billion
4.45%
Tunudan
850
4.23%
Konola
84.16 billion
4.20%
Kuharah
771
3.83%
Krirald
80.12 billion
4.00%
Urhinichi
768
3.82%
Kuharah
74.99 billion
3.74%
Ignebaener
746
3.71%
Nalvula
70.75 billion
3.53%
Arvasaras
726
3.61%
Komo
67.50 billion
3.37%
Kaunokka
705
3.50%
Urhinichi
66.36 billion
3.31%
Ahtila
668
3.32%
Skarkon
64.36 billion
3.21%
Konola
659
3.28%
Otanuomi
60.68 billion
3.03%
Harva
637
3.17%
Ahtila
54.58 billion
2.72%
Vale
637
3.17%
Tunudan
47.06 billion
2.35%
Otanuomi
623
3.10%
Nani
43.77 billion
2.18%
Angymonne
616
3.06%
Niarja
37.08 billion
1.85%
Skarkon
609
3.03%
Ignebaener
33.62 billion
1.68%
Ichoriya
459
2.28%
Ichoriya
27.92 billion
1.39%
Raravoss
345
1.71%
Archee
21.60 billion
1.08%
Kino
256
1.27%
Kino
20.14 billion
1.01%
Niarja
165
0.82%
Raravoss
17.83 billion
0.89%
Archee
159
0.79%
And just to cap that off, I will add in the top ten ship by ISK value lost in Pochven in January.
Hull
Count
Sum of ISK lost
Vargur
130
317.28 billion
Nestor
79
194.35 billion
Kronos
62
137.04 billion
Paladin
46
134.42 billion
Ishtar
451
113.21 billion
Capsule
6,515
94.79 billion
Barghest
14
65.34 billion
Eris
1,089
62.20 billion
Sabre
773
57.61 billion
Flycatcher
793
55.76 billion
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.
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.
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