It is a cold Friday in March, I turned a year older this week, and I am in a bit of a mood for no good reason besides being a cranky old guy. So perhaps it is time for some bullet point bile, broken up into three categories. Can you put each in its correct place?
The New York Times to Impose Its New Wordle Order
The self-proclaimed “paper of record” took a bit of time from its nearly non-stop headlines about President Biden’s age to go after anybody who was out there peddling any games that seemed even Wordle adjacent.
A bit on the nose, eh Wordle?
The New York Times bought the game from its creator about two years back. The game wasn’t original, the concept wasn’t original, and even the name had been used before. But it became a hit during the pandemic and the Times wanted to expand its word games. One does not live by the Sunday crossword alone I guess.
This week their lawyers began sending out copyright based take down notices to “hundreds” of Wordle-like titles.
This should have been no surprise. The Times has a long history of sending its lawyers after any hint of what they consider infringement. I remember back in the 80s when Infocom‘s company newsletter was called the New Zork Times. They too received a cease and desist letter threatening legal action and had to change the name lest somebody mistake it for a product of the New York Times, which might cause confusion in the marketplace and tarnish the brand of the paper.
None of the regular sites I hit has gone down yet, but I will keep an eye out.
Nintendo Shuts Down Yuzu
Elsewhere out on the legal front, Nintendo won its lawsuit against Switch emulator creator Yuzu, who acceded to the mounting pressure from the video game giant who had been framing Yuzu’s intent as being to circumvent DRM, which would put it in line for violating the DMCA.
In addition to ceasing all development and support of its emulator, Yuzu also had to agree to pay all of Nintendo’s costs, which totaled up to $2.4 million by their calculation.
Nintendo has long been as fierce as the New York Times in sending its lawyers after anybody using their intellectual property, including some innocuous fan projects, and vigorously stomping out anything that might cause one less hardware unit to sell.
Anyway, I am kind of sad I missed out on Yuzu because, for me at least, the worst thing about playing games on the Switch is actually being required to play them on the Switch. I’d much prefer them on my PC. Alas, no longer and option.
Apple and Epic at it Again
Epic went spoiling for a fight with Apple and Google a few years back because… well, Tim Sweeney wants to be as rich as possible I guess. As with his fight with Steam, he just wants to be the person collecting the tax and resents other who got there first.
The fight with Apple has gone back and forth since then and it had looked like things had settled down with Epic getting some of what it wanted, including the ability to have its own storefront. And then Apple banned Epic’s developer account in the EU.
Sweeney was immediately out with histrionics, but Apple was also declaring that Epic was “verifiably untrustworthy” and would not live up to the developer agreement they had signed. This will all draw the attention of EU regulators again, who will be wielding their Digital Markets Act, it “tax the US tech companies” regulations.
How do I feel about this?
Survey say… let them fight!
It is hard to feel sad when rich people are fighting to be incrementally more rich.
Having chased away all serious, paying advertisers on the Twitter platform… we have Cheech & Chong, Crypto scams (still!), and nazi ads left, and I block all of them besides Cheech & Chong… Elon has been thrashing around trying to find SOMETHING that will make money for his $44 billion boondoggle. And so they have announced Articles.
From the @write account
You can have BOLD, ITALIC, and STRIKETHROUGH text. And images!
Freaking amazing, right? RIGHT?!?
Oh yeah. Who needs quote blocks or inline links, just give us money and we’ll let you do long form and give them a special icon and tab on your profile. We totally won’t change our mind in three months and disappear the whole thing the next time Elon has a brain fart, we promise!
I am just waiting until he finally gets around to re-inventing Twitter… a version without him on it.
EA Jumps on the AI Bandwagon
I mean, EA has a long tradition of being dumb, or at least not being able to read the room. And they are ramping up to lay off 5% of their staff. So they have to give the investors SOMETHING to be positive about, and AI is the magic wand currently. Just say that and Wall Street will love you, right? So how did EA CEO Andrew Wilson do on that? Let’s go check over at PC Gamer… and… oh my!
Truth in Headlines
I am not positive the bong hit was verified, but Andrew did ramble on about 3 billion people using EA tools to make games while he painted a picture of a future where EA simply didn’t have to pay any of those pesky creative or technical people who actually make literally everything they sell today.
There was some law of hiring I recall where bad managers only hire people dumber than they are, so when we’re at a point where the CEO of EA wants to fire everybody and I am starting to suspect that we are seeing this in action. Dumb guy achieves life goal, promoted to CEO and fires everybody.
That is probably being too hard on him. As we all know by this point, as a public company you must meet the infinite growth demands of Wall Street, and when you’ve got nothing you have to make shit up. This is a classic “making shit up” performance. He’ll probably get a huge bonus and lay off even more staff.
Cataclysm Classic Closed Beta Begins
Finally, Blizzard announced that Cataclysm Classic, which will remake the WoW Classic progression servers now lingering in Wrath of the Lich King into a new world, has started its closed beta test.
Can you re-run a cataclysm?
I’ve actually been waiting for this to show up, having worn out on Wrath Classic after five characters. However, closed beta doesn’t mean we’re close to actually getting it, and the roadmap that Blizzard put out at the beginning of the year made it seem like we would be into summer before the cataclysm hit. Still, it is nice to see it is finally in motion.
And on that bit of upbeat news, it is off to get through the day and to the weekend.
I’ve briefly written about Qeynos, the first city of Norrath, at least in my heart. But I cannot move further afield until we get to the bottom of the city, for underneath the city lays the Qeynos Aqueducts. Also, I apparently misspell “aqueduct” at every opportunity. I think I have fixed them now.
Qeynos Aqueduct System
While there was a whole front yard of mobs to work on before north Qeynos, snakes, skeletons, beetles, a few gnolls, interspersed with a few higher level mobs including Fippy Darkpaw at least once a night, those were mostly very low level and the return on slaying them diminished quickly with a few levels.
As has become the normal pattern, this was meant to encourage you to move further afield, to go out and explore the world. And there were opportunities not too far off. Just north lay Qeynos Hills, which had some higher level mobs in the mix, and also led to the chaos that was early Blackburrow, which I hope to get to next, and the Karanas, where the real size and scope of the game would start to make itself known.
But, right beneath you in Qeynos, there was also the aqueduct, a zone seemingly less useful for supplying the city with water than providing a refuge for rats, bandits, skeletons, spiders, piranhas, sharks, and the occasional gelatenous cube… which were, in fact, perfect cubes just like in the Monster Manual of old.
Cube Ahoy!
Granted, the old school cubes were alleged to have been shaped by moving through perfectly squared off dungeon corridores, while the Qeynos cubes move like a six sided die rolling down a channel.
Cube in motion
You would think that would wear them down to spheres, but the limits on available polygons probably prevents that.
Also, in case you thought I was kidding about the shark.
As advertised
I don’t know what a shark in the aqueduct of a city whose only nearby water is a presumably salt water ocean says about the drinkability of Qeynos water, but there it is. (The whole place feels more like a sewer system, and I habitually refer to it as the Qeynos sewers, but what do I know?) How it got there remains a mystery, though no greater of a mystery than the piranha I suppose.
Not a shark, but still bitey
The level ranges of the mobs down in the aqueduct varies greatly and a low level explorer looking for adventure could very quickly find themselves in over their head after defeating a few of the easier mobs that show up. Also, I don’t think this should need to be said, but having seen enough corpses, don’t jump in the water with the shark.
But the trick of the aqueduct is less about the mobs and more about simply finding them and getting into them… not that there aren’t a number of ways in. Go back to my previous post about Qeynos proper and look at the map legends and you will see a few ways in. And good size bit of water, like that pond in the north half of the city, has a way into the aqueduct.
Down at the bottom of this pond
There is even a poorly hidden entry outside the city if you want your troll, ogre, and dark elf friends to come join your party down below the city. There is bit of false wall, which is a different color from the rest of the city wall.
Move along, nothing to see here…
Furthermore, that bit of wall practically glows at night, guiding you to it.
Big red arrow probably not required
No, the problem was, and remains, how to swim in the game.
Being able to control your swimming to allow you to do simple things like swim down to the entry to the aqueduct or just get out of the water before you drown, requires you to be zoomed in to first person view. If you have scrolled out and are playing in the third person, over the shoulder view, which I certainly prefer if only for the greater sense of situational awareness it allows, then you are going to drown.
The number of corpses I have seen in that pond above over the years… yeah, drowning is a real possibility. So you really had to kind of commit to the swimming thing before you could even get started on getting to the aqueduct.
No, you need to be in first person view!
And not being able to swim was only the start of issues. If, for example, you went down through the hole in the pond in front of Crow’s Pub, when you zoned in you were under water and your limited breath meter was counting down.
Trying hard to drown people here
Back in the early days of dial up internet, slow speeds, high latency, and frequent disconnects, it didn’t take much of a hiccup in the system to end up as another corpse floating around at the zone in point.
This is not such a big deal now, both due to better internet and the fact that they have since upped the breath timer, but it was a hazard early on.
All that aside, for many of us the aqueduct was the first dangerous, dungeon-like experience we had in EverQuest.
As with past posts, I am going to swipe the map from the Project 1999 wiki, where it is also referred to as the Qeynos Catacombs, a named derived from its zone name within the game.
All that stuff under Qeynos
The connections to Qeynos have letters on the map:
A. Exit to Secret Entrance in Newbie Area of North Qeynos
B. Exit to Pool between Crow’s Nest and Monk Guild in North Qeynos
C. Exit to Rogue’s Guild in North Qeynos, Pits fall into Area #14
D. Exit to Water by Magic Users Guild Halls in South Qeynos
E. Exit to Hidden Entrance beneath Grounds of Fate
F. Exit to Water near to the Bank
G. Exit to Water in the Bay near Docks
And the locations on the map are numbered:
1. Spawn Area for Vin Moltor
2. Various NPCs appear here
3. An undead knight (Qeynos Aqueducts) who drops Limestone Ring
4. Bloated Alligator who drops Alligator Egg
5. An injured rat who drops Alligator Tooth Earring
6. Mercenaries with a shady mercenary who drops Thick Black Cape
7. Drosco and A Nesting Rat who drops Golden Locket
8. Temple of Bertoxxulous
8a. Enchanter, Magician, and Shadow Knight Trainers, Banker, Merchants selling Spells and Weapons
8b. Warrior, Wizard, and Necromancer Trainers, Merchants selling Necromancer Spells and Equipment
8c. Shadow Knight and Cleric Trainers
9. Sewer Sentinels
10. Cuburt spawn area
11. Frogloks
12. an injured brigand
13. an exhausted guard
14. Shark Pool with two lvl 17 a shark
15. Smuggler Camps with a smuggler, a courier and Malka Rale
16. Various NPCs and Beggar Wyllin spawn here
17. Thug Camp with a thug
In addition, the wiki has a second map, which is a little more clear to me, and which calls the whole thing the Qeynos Underground. That is apparently not the revolutionary movement I thought it was.
A little better map of the whole thing
The one thing is that, whatever you call it, the area under Qeynos lends itself to the classic graph paper mapping methodology.
And that is about all I have to say about the Qeynos sewers, or whatever you choose to call them. I am finally going to get on the road out of Qeynos at this point, though we have one last stop in the Qeynos Hills first in order to visit some gnolls.
On Saturday Potshot broached the idea of maybe giving The Edler Scrolls Online a try.
The Elder Scrolls Online
While this was unexpected in the moment, it wasn’t a complete surprise either. Our group has clearly fallen off the WoW Classic wagon for the moment. We have played out Wrath Classic and jumped into Hardcore and Season of Discovery a bit, but the latter two are really just replays of content we’ve already done with minor changes, so were not all that engaging. Then there is Cataclysm Classic, which is probably a few months away still, and a bit of an untested destination for us, so the draw of Azeroth is very much in decline.
Meanwhile, a return to Valheim wasn’t everybody’s cup of tea, so there was an position open for a more worldly MMORPG with the group. Valheim will keep going for us… we have the Mistlands to explore, and maybe the Ashlands if Iron Gate can move things along…. but having another title for the group seemed appropriate, and The Elder Scrolls Online has managed to survive for ten years… I gather the launch anniversary is coming up in April, so maybe it was time to try it out.
I believe they hit that date, but it was a decade back so I don’t remember
ESO, which seems to be its preferred acronym even if it never seems to go without the definite acticle when spelled out in full, was, along with WildStar, the last gasp attempts by the genre to make a subscription only MMORPG. There was a sense by both teams that only a subscription model would let them remain pure to the traditions of the genre or some such.
The fact that the word “monetized” exists points to the heart of the issue for us: We don’t want the player to worry about which parts of the game to pay for – with our system, they get it all.
For ESO, the mandetory subscription plan was ditched less than a year after launch. It remained a buy to play title, selling things in the cash shop as well as expansion content to earn its keep. (WildStar lasted longer, but still had to dump the subscription… but even that wasn’t enough to save the problematic title.
Anyway, that was all ages ago and a lot has changed since, but ESO still abides, so there must be something there. I told Potshot I was in and went over to Steam and bought the base game for $20 and set Steam to installing it.
However, ESO is a title that is in Steam, but not of Steam, so that only downloaded the installer, which itself had to run. That then brought up the launcher, which had to do some patching of its own. Then I had to create an account… but I figured I already had an account because I was pretty sure I had played a bit in the beta. I am sure there are some blog posts about that.
I found the account and managed to recover the password then got that linked up to whatever I was doing in Steam so it was all on the same page. Later on, when I figured out where the in-game mail was I found that I had a reward for participating in the beta.
Thank you for your service!
I also had a vague recollection that server choice was not going to be an issue as the game had gone to some sort of “mega server” system, with one for each side of the Atlantic. All those Massively OP headlines rattle around in my brain I guess. So we would not have to worry about server choice.
Of course, when you have one server for everybody and that server goes down… well, then everybody was out of luck. And on Saturday morning the server was down.
We are not accepting connections at this time
Not a fortuitous start to our venture, but these things happen and we all had stuff to do that day anyway.
That evening I sat down and was able to log in and make a character. I made a Redguard Templar, because that seemed tanky, and grabbed heavy armor, a sword, and a shield as we walked through the tutorial.
The tutorial was annoying but short. It imparted a few useful facts, but was guided by a chirpy NPC in that annoying “I’m going to tell you things directly and make you demonstrate them before we move on, but not in any connected way.” Tutorials are tough, I know, and there are few that appeal to me, but I found this one more grating that most because it managed to be condescending while assuming knowledge it hadn’t passed on.
Fortunately we’ve been playing Valheim recently, and the basic combat and movement controls are about the same, so I picked that up quickly. The fact that this is both a PC and console title was quickly obvious… so much so that I picked up my controller to give it a try, only to put it down immediately as the camera got away from me. So everything is a series of menus designed for our most slow witted console brethren. That it still confounds me at times probably doesn’t reflect well on my own wits.
I made it through the tutorial and was brought to a room with a bunch of portals and was given some extremely unhelpful guidence about where I should go. Even my NPC guide called it overwhelming while dispensing useless tidbits. Do I care about the great alliances? I don’t know, should I?
Looking at the portals
I tabbed out and Googled which portal I should choose and the answers were mostly “Go to your race starting area and do those quests first,” which didn’t tell me where I should go. Some of the portals had chains across them and wouldn’t let me in. I assume those must be expansion content. Of the others I went with Stos M’kai, in part because it said something about pirates, but mostly because I heard it in my head as, “Mkaaaaay” in that South ParkMr. Mackey voice.
And so I was off into whatever ESO is or has become. We’ll see how far our group gets.
Valheim’s boss based progression system… the next tier of gear and upgrades necessary for conquoring the next biome requires something from the current biome’s boss… means that knowing where the next boss is located is a key aspect to moving forward.
We had been pretty lucky so far. Eikthyr was practically on our doorstep in the meadows. A runestone that pointed us to The Elder was found very quickly on arrival in the black forest. And while Bonemass was a bit of a trek from our main base, we had him on the map soon enough due to a runestone in the sunken crypt.
In fact, finding a boss hasn’t been much of a problem because the runestones that put them on your map have been, both in this round and in past runs at the game, pretty easy to find.
And then we came to Moder, where this time around a runestone wasn’t forthcoming.
Granted, the mountain biome, with its harsh, vision obscuring weather, tough mobs, and the need to conserve stamina for all the climbing required, hasn’t been our favorite biome. This time around we took a somewhat minimalist swing at base building in the mountains. In the past, Potshot has built up some quite formidible mountain bases with defenses to keep the stone golems at bay. This time around he just built up around an abandoned stone tower where I placed a portal on my first exploration.
Nothing too special, just a foothold in the mountains
As it so happened, that particular mountain biome was not only fairly close to our main base… we just haul the silver ore downhill to a workbench, make a boat, and sail across a stretch of water to bring it home… but it was also extraordinarly rich in silver. At one point I was digging out a silver vein and found it to actually be three veins interlaced… all about 50 feet from two more veins. So we didn’t have to go far to do the mountain harvesting.
But our nice, silver rich biome did not have a runestone that we could find. No runestone, no directions to Moder.
So we set out to explore, to find other mountain biomes, to either find Moder’s summoning spot or a runestone that would guide us to it.
[Insert montage of Wilhelm running around mountains fighting wolves]
As part of our expanding search, Potshot was well off to the west southwest of our main base in a boat at night, when he ran aground on an island in a plans biome and was ganked by a couple of fulings. He had to log off for the night before recovering his gear.
So I sailed out to check the situation, and I found a stretch of meadow biome from which you coud literally see the island. So I built a mini-base, put up a portal, and scouted as close as I could.
The island, tombstones just visible
At this point I had mined out quite a bit of silver to replace the mishap of the previous week, so went back to our main base and upgraded my armor, made the helm for the set… drake trophies were pretty rare as well, so it took a while get the two needed to make the helm… and set about seeing if I couldn’t get close to the island to thin out the locals a bit.
I managed to take down two deathsquitos from the boat, then stormed ashore and managed to get the furlings hanging out there one by one. Island secured.
On the island
I put up a couple of workbenches, as they suppress mobs spawning within a short distance, grabbed Potshot’s main gear and weapon, then brought that back to the nearby meadows base and put it all in a chest for him, then sailed back to the island and put up a portal so he could grab the rest of his inventory quickly.
In scouting around the meadows base, finding the edges of that relatively safe biome, I had noted that there was a mountain biome close by. I had to get across a bit of plains biome, but I was starting to get comfortable taking on the fulings, before I could start my ascent into the mountains.
I got in there, found one of those sunken ruins, the circular holes in the ground with steps down, and setup a scouting base there by putting up a portal. Then I began to range around that mountain biome as I had so many previous ones, avoiding stone golems while thinning out the wolf and drake populations.
And this time I was in luck. I found a ruin off not to far, though up a steep climb, and in it was a runestone. This was exactly what I had been seeking for so long.
The runestone found!
I clicked it and Moder’s location was revealed to be… about 100 yards from the runestone. Basically, had I ignore the ruin I would have found the location on my own less than a minute later.
I went back down to the portal I had setup, went back to our main base, grabbed gear for another portal, then set that up in the ruin near to Moder’s summoning location.
The map of the story so far
We now had a base very close to Moder.
The base viewed from Moder’s spawn
You can also see a pillar I raised with a hoe as part of the prep. This time around, rather than just going, “There she is, get her!” I read a bit about the fight and it recommended raising a few such pillars to hide behind as, unlike things you might build, those won’t get knocked down.
There were also some dragon eggs to gather as you need three for the summoning. Those, like the runestone, were just a short walk from where the fight would take place.
When the weekend came we were about ready. We did some final gear upgrades and a weapons check… we were both swinging Frostner by default, which does frost and spirit damage to which Moder is immune, so we swapped out, me for an iron sword and Potshot for the spear of the fang… and headed up to take on the boss.
Once again, being prepared meant that the whole thing went pretty smoothly. If you look at posts using the Moder tag, you can find evidence that we have not always been prepared. This time it went well.
When Moder was up in the air Potshot hit her with poison arrows while I went with obsidian, because poison arrow damage over time doesn’t stack.
Plinking at flying Moder
When Moder landed for some ground fighting, we put up the Bonemass buff and got in close to give it to her.
Getting in close an personal
I have to say, I am a convert to the Bonemass buff now. I used to be all-in on Eikthyr, because stamina management is a bit of a pain and it is very useful when kiting with a bow. You can see I am going into low stam in that image above.
But Bonemass allowed you to get in there, toe to toe, and do a lot of damage. Melee damage was a lot more effective than plinking away with arrows.
So we managed to defeat Moder without any drama or deaths. She dropped the 10 dragon tears that are required for the next tier of crafting station and related items along with her head as a trophy.
From there it was a short walk to the portal and back to our main base where we hung it up to unlock the Moder buff.
Moder displayed
We are now cleared for the plains… not that we haven’t already been there a few times. But now it is time to head there with an eye towards the next boss and the materials we’ll need to best them and get to the mistlands.
It appears that based on the success of the first pass at WoW Classic, which was hugely successful to the point of probably saving the WoW team from more layoffs in a time when retail was just failing to hold people with Shadowlands, that the whole “special rules server” idea is here to stay.
Discover this!
I won’t call them “classic” servers because people get their panties in a bunch over classic when it isn’t exactly the version of classic they want. That was always going to be an issue, I just didn’t think the winging would be so loud. Also, “classic” limits the appeal to just nostalgia which both restricts us from some ideas and… well, let’s face it, the vanilla WoW card has been played.
The vanilla card worked once because there was huge, pent up nostalgia for the old game which was no longer available from Blizzard. That nostalgia was never going to be satisfied by pirate/private servers, which were never going to cater beyond a small, self-selecting, technically adept group of indiviuals. Any plan that starts with users needing to torrent a specific version of the client automatically excludes 98% of the WoW player base.
But now that the vanilla card has been played, that pent up demand is gone. There are still vanilla servers available, but those who really wanted the experience got into it during the pandemic nearly four years ago. Nostalgia requires some level of restriction on access, and I don’t think Blizz is going to go all Disney on us and put vanilla in the vault for seven years in the hope of driving another WoW Classic frenzy.
So that leaves special rules servers to keep the retail alternative revenue stream perculating. The progression through the expansions will keep some people engaged, hardcore is having its moment still, and the Season of Discovery experiment was interesting for a bit, but they need a bit more to keep that flame alive.
And we’re not going to get new content. Classic Plus is a pipe dream. It will never happen. New content is, and will always be, the realm of retail WoW, so the classic and classic era servers, as they are called, will need to live within the content we all know and… love, hate, or just remember.
What Blizzard CAN do within that limitation is tinker with the dials for xp, difficulty, gear, and even some of the skills given what we have seen in Season of Discovery, which rides on the classic era code base.
Given all of that, which I will sum up as “no new content” and “playing with the dials and switches” I thought about what they might get up to in the classic era line.
1 – All raids have a five person group option
What if, you know, the goal wasn’t to take five person dungeons away from players to turn them into raids? I know the response in retail varies between “non-raiders should not be allowed to see raids unless they can bring 10-40 fully geared people with them” and “wait a couple of expansions and go solo some raids,” but seriously, there is some content that could be opened up to a wider audience.
This is one of those things where people who raid will say it isn’t that hard to raid without realizing the commitment it really forces on people, not to mention the cultural norms that raiders have adopted that drive people away. Go watch Why it’s Rude to Suck at WoW for a fuller take on that.
Even getting past that, there are issues. Raiding is not as hugely interesting in vanilla, where it is 59 levels away from where you start, as it is in some of the later expansions where a lot of thought went into making raids be a bit more interesting. Five person raid options in Wrath interest me more than in vanilla, though maybe that is just me.
And there is precedent for this. Blizz did go back and turn a couple of vanilla raids into five person heroic dungeons in Cataclysm, and they were really cool.
Pros: New perspective on some content
Cons: Annoys raiders and might not be a huge draw for non-raiders?
2 – All raids and dungeons have a solo option
I will call this the Tour de Azeroth option maybe, the sightseeing version of WoW Classic, where you can play through the game, seeing all the sights, without even the need for a group, much less a guild, to support you. There is a demographic for this, I know it.
Again, the 59 levels of vanilla make this hard to jump start, but it agruably gets more interesting as expansions roll on.
There is of course a whole “how do I tune this to even work for all classes and specs?” aspect to this. Maybe the whole follower dungeon idea from retail could be borrowed, so you declare your role and you get the other two roles filled in?
There are also some social dynamics to play with in this. What if you turned it into silent WoW? No chat, no emotes, no guilds, no groups, no auction house, just you and a bunch of others silently co-existing in a strange new Azeroth.
Or maybe not. That might be too much, but there are things to play with in this idea.
Pros: Really the only way some people are ever going to see raid content. Some possible interesting side paths.
Cons: You think tuning raids for groups will be bad? Raiders now incandescent with rage. Are we beyond the WoW audience with this?
3 – All content requires a group
And, having done the “make everything easier” route, let’s go the other way and make every mob outside to the initial tutorial elite. This is a world where you can’t kill your ten rats without a tank, healer, and DPS around to support your effort.
Pros: You want people to group up, this will make people group up!
Cons: The appeal of WoW was being able to make some progress while your friends were not around, so what happens when that is gone?
4 – Cataclysm vanilla fresh start
What if we all started fresh in Cataclysm era WoW?
No, seriously, hear me out.
I know “we hates it” because it destroyed our childhood or whatever, but there is an argument to be made about the quality of the 1-60 zones in that era. This was supposed to be the re-do that would fix things and make them more focused, include stories, and simply be less chaotic and more playable.
Yes, there is the problem that a good portion of the story lines are predicated on something that happened in vanilla, and they would have to adjust the xp gain to make sure you were not out-leveling every zone before you hit the halfway point. But it could be something. I am not sure I would let it go beyond level 60… Outland and Northrend don’t change… but it might be interesting. Maybe?
And there are aspects that could be played with here, making it an achievements race or some of the other things that the Daybreak crew has done with EverQuest and EverQuest II special servers.
Pros: A never before seen new server starting point!
Cons: Does anybody care? Is our resentment too strong to embrace this?
5 – Open world, full loot PvP option
I love this idea and I hate this idea. And I only love it because I believe it would prove the point that nobody really wants this as an option. So yeah, what if we had Darkfall rules in a WoW Classic context?
My prediction is that the whole thing would collapse within two weeks, but it would bring me joy when it does even if all the forum trolls who always demand this sort of garbage idea will 100% go “Well akshully..” and explain that it failed due to some irrelevent detail.
Pros: Might prove to some that this is almost always a bad idea
Cons: It won’t prove it to the people who need to hear it the most
Anyway, those are a few idea. What else could they try?
I have generally kept my mouth shut about Camelot Unchained since I got most of my money back just four years ago… I had gone in with a bigger pledge than I generally do on these campaigns based on the misguided belief that Mark Jacobs would know how to size this sort of thing… because I didn’t want to become “that guy” who is constantly complaining about some title they won’t ever play. If I want those types I can find them over on Reddit.
Camelot Unchained: Delivering nothing since 2013
So I have not mentioned the game, save for inclusion in my annual predictions where it never fails to earn me a few easy points every year by failing to ship bascially anything.
But there were always going to be a few eventualities that would garner a post from me. Some major event, like actually giving access to backers, announcing yet another title, or shutting down shop would make it worth the effort, noting a milestone and the distance from the actual promised date and all that as a warning to those who might consider backing an MMO on Kickstarter.
You should not back MMOs on Kickstarter, in case that was not clear. That is my opinion on the topic.
Yesterday there was a bit of a news update. As the headline indicates, Mark Jacobs, through a press release covered by a number of sites (some linked below, because interviews don’t go his way these days), has said that there will be some sort of early access for Camelot Unchained in 2025, though given more than a decade of missed targets and excuses, I find that hard to give to give that statement any weight. I will predict right now that it won’t happen in 2025 and, if it does ship, even in some limited early access mode, I will post about it and note that I was wrong. I do not expect to be wrong.
Anyway, the fact that Mark is making another ship date claim or that their second game, Final Stand: Ragnarok has been up on Steam for early access since October 2021… where it has six reviews and so little play time that it doesn’t even register on Steam Charts, so it really seemed woth pissing backers off for a title that is essentially a tech demo… wouldn’t have prompted me to post. Even the transparent attempt to hide the failure of Final Stand: Ragnarok by claiming it has really been in “first access” and not “early access” is about par for the course for the company.
Even Mark going on about the Unchained Engine, which has been previously speculated about as the real project that his company has been working on, is just more of the same empty talk that would only be worth me mentioning on an especially slow news day. I could write about a dozen other things, why would I waste my time promoting that BS?
No, it was one little tidbit in the middle of that PC Gamer story that piqued my interest. Among the backers who have invested in City State Entertainment, now changing its name to Unchained Entertainment, is Andreesen Horowitz, or a16z.
You may remeber a16z from such past tales such as Marc Andreesen’s techno optimist screed where he is a big baby about possibly being held to account for his actions (everybody loves personal responsibility until it applies to them I guess), being behind the exploitive pump and dump scam that was Axie Infinity, and the backing of CCP’s Project Awakening, where a16z has promised to fund them with up to $40 million to make a cryto blockchain version of EVE Online. Garbage on top of garbage.
All of the other stuff in that press releae faded into the background once I saw they were involved. I mean, the Camelot Unchained team writes dev updates every month and promises are made and broken on a regular basis and words out of the mouth of Mark Jacobs lack substance for me until they are backed up with actual tangible action for backers.
But16z being involved… well, they are all in on crypto and blockchain and being the rent seeking slumlords of a future internet of absolute shit, so that simply has to be a red flag at some level.
Their involvement does not mean that Camelot Unchained will now launch with some underlying crypto, blockchain, NFT, pay to earn bullshit mechanic built into it. [Edit: Mark Jacobs put out a backer email that said it would not though, again, he is overdrawn writing checks on credibility at this point.]
And, of course, not everything a16z touches turns to garbage, but when you get those shitheels involved, the question does necessarily come up. You lay down with dogs you wake up with fleas, as they say.
So I am adding to the events that would cause me to post about Camelot Unchained. The new trigger event, after “actually ships” and “goes out of business” will be the announcement that Mark Jacobs has completely sold out and gone down the Lord British path to complete irrelevence by embracing all that crypto blockchain bullshit.
Related posts, which vary from not cutting an slack and bringing up the long history of the game (Massively OP) to gullible belief in everything Mark wrote (VentureBeat), some of which couldn’t resist sarcasm or apologetic quotes in the headlines:
I wrote previously about the angst and frustration at trying to time friendship milestones in Pokemon Go. These can be the biggest single xp events you have in the game and using a lucky egg will double the amount of experience you get… if you time it right and don’t mess it up.
Pokemon Go – Since 2016
The fact that my post about this one of the most popular posts I have written in the last year based on search results indicates that I am not the only one who felt this might be an issue.
You want the big xp, pop a lucky egg in time!
However, Niantic has apparently heard our frustrated outburst when somebody becomes a best friend and you find you’ve forgotten to pop that lucky egg to make the most of it.
This past week I noticed a few updates with the game, the biggest one being the button I saw last night on a friendship milestone.
Use a lucky egg? Yes Please!
There is now a big button on the alert that allows you to use a lucky egg and apply it to your milestone, even displaying how much additional xp you will get for it.
I am sure this will benefit Niantic in that it will drive lucky egg sales from the shop, which will, in turn, drive coin sales. But for this change I don’t care. As a player lingering in the mid-40s, these friendship milestones are a big deal for leveling up.
In addition, Niantic also put in buttons when you use a revive or a heal that allow you to “revive all” or “heal all,” which can be very handy after you have done a few raids and are catching up to your group. It also lets you use up all those lesser heal potions quickly rather than just trashing them for taking up too much storage space.
Of course, the ways of the Pokemon Go client are strange. I had the new revive and heal buttons show up days ago in my client, but my wife doesn’t see the in her app. However, she saw the “use lucky egg” option. So if you don’t see any of these today, you should see them soon. Just hope you don’t miss a friendship milestone while you wait.
And then there is the “two steps forward, one step back” aspect of things.
Niantic has messed up the daily streak tracker in the app.
Which day am I on?
When you look at that, have I completed the two day 6 activities? It looks like it. Or maybe it is day 7 now and I have not done that yet.
But no. In this screen shot I have done the catch but have yet to do the spin on day 6. Can you see any diffence between the two rows? Because I can’t.
This at least once caused me to use a lucky egg thinking it was day 7 during the big streak bonus they had going recently. The big streak bonus is gone, so no more 40K payouts on day 7, doubled with a lucky egg if you remembered and were not fooled by the UI, but the steak indicator still needs to be fixed.
The worst part is that this bit of the UI used to work fine… then they broke it.
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.
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