So we know Cataclysm Classic is on the way.  We have the timeline, with dates already pinned down for all the major milestones.  In a little over a week the pre-patch will arrive and it will be time to decide if we’re in on another WoW Classic adventure.

I find it a bit amusing that on social media Blizz has been pushing the idea that this will be a speedy experience… as opposed to the original which, in addition to pissing people off by destroying the vanilla world, felt like it languished too long for a five level expansion.

Granted, in the grand scheme of things the wait from the launch of Cataclysm to the launch of Mists of Pandaria was actually at the short end of the scale, even if it felt long.

• WoW Launch to The Burning Crusade – 784 days
• The Burning Crusade to Wrath of the Lich King – 667 days
• Wrath of the Lich King to Cataclysm – 754 days
• Cataclysm to Mists of Pandaria – 658 days
• Mists of Pandaria to Warlords of Draenor – 779 days
• Warlords of Draenor to Legion – 656 days
• Legion to Battle for Azeroth – 714 days
• Battle for Azeroth to Shadowlands – 832 days
• Shadowlands to Dragonflight – 734 days

But it was also the first time when WoW began dumping subscriptions dramatically mid-way through an expansion.  That seems normal now, the second half slump, and Blizz still hasn’t figured out how to abate it, but back then it was the first time the company had experienced the line going down rather than up.  Losing a couple million subscribers… more than four times the peak subscriber numbers of most of the breakthrough generation of MMORPGs that preceded WoW… was shocking.

In a panic they offered WoW players a free copy of Diablo III (once it launched, which is a whole different story) if they would just sign up for the annual pass, a one time full year subscription to WoW.  Very much worth it if you stuck around and played Cataclysm through its second half… but how many people did that?  I mean sure, more than played Shadowlands after even four months, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Our group ran up against a lack of interest in the expansion, though that was because we believed the hype… and I’ll have a whole hype retrospective post at some point, as it was in many ways the peak of my hype for WoW… and wanted to start fresh in the revamped new world… only to find it really not very much fun.  Overland solo zones were better, but as a group, the dungeon content had all been neutered, chopped up into little, digestible bits guaranteed to be runnable in 30 minutes or less with even the most half-assed grab back of dungeon finder despicables you could imagine.

Add in the dungeon finder and it became the “sit in town and queue for the next dungeon” game that made many question whether or not accessibility had gone too far.  This is why, when drawing the line between “classic” and “modern” WoW I usually point at the dungeon finder rather than Cataclysm.  Oh, and there was only five levels of content, the dungeons were not really all that memorable, and if it wasn’t for the heroic five person versions of the vanilla troll raids I might argue that this was a completely skippable expansion on the road trip through expansions that WoW Classic has inevitably becomes.

So there was very much a question in the air in our group as to whether or not we were going to bother or how much effort we were going to put into it.  We had fallen off the Wrath Classic train back in January and have been on vacation from Azeroth pretty much ever since, spending time looking for Valheim alternatives, then playing Valheim, and then spending some time in Conan Exiles.

Looking at ManicTime tracking, I spent almost not time in WoW Classic in February and March.

But now we have a date for the pre-patch and another for the expansion, so the time to decide is upon us… and we appear to be leaning towards playing.  We have had a nice vacation from Azeroth, but thoughts have begun to return there and, in doing so, seek a plan.

Specifically, Potshot started looking into what classes might best suit his dual-boxing play style as he continues to do the heavy lifting to get us to five people for dungeons.  He has the healers job, and had had a hunter as his secondary, auto-shoot and the occasional special attack at range being somewhat manageable.  But his research indicated that for Cata, a DK might be another option, so he has set about leveling one up.

Fortunately they start at level 55 and with Joyous Journeys still active you are apparently level 59 or so when you exit the tutorial.  So he is off to Outland and was heading into Nagrand last I checked.  All of which is preferable to giving Blizz $60 to $80 to get a level 80 character boost if you have the time.

Seeing him back, I started poking around with my rogue who I had run through Outland and into Northrend late last year with an eye towards getting one more level 80 ready for Cataclysm Classic.  I was always going to do the five levels of Cata, the question was the level of commitment.

So we’re waking up in Azeroth again, warming up some characters while we wait for the pre-patch to drop and screw up our build.  I forget which classes were most screwed over by the Cata respec, though I am tempted to say “all of them” because one of the great aspects of Wrath was that most classes were pretty OP.

Blizzard has a consistent through line of hating it when we all feel comfortable with our classes.  It is as though if the players feel good, they feel bad, something that carries on to this day… see the great Diablo IV nerfing.

I wrote back in late February about how my congressional district was experiencing that most rare of events, an election without an incumbent.  Our congress critter of the last 30+ years finally decided to retire… though I will give them credit for doing so before they were too infirmed to do the job, like our late senator, who had no business running in her final election.

There are few more reliable jobs than that of an incumbent congressional representative in a safe seat.  In the time our departing congress critter was representing us I have had six jobs, been through seven mergers or acquisitions, and have been laid off three times.  Everybody hates congress but loves their own representative is the cliche.

Anyway, I put up some odds for the likelihood of success for the range of 11 candidates that were going into the March 5th primary, from which only two would emerge on the ballot in November.

And I could claim to be absolutely correct in my estimates… if I were to go full Gevlon… because the top two candidates in my ranking will, in fact, be on the November ballot, “The Big City Mayor” and “The Party Ladder Climber.”

However, to have correctly predicted the actual outcome would have been like somebody flipping a silver dollar in the air, asking you to call “heads or tails,” you calling “edge,” and the damn coin actually landing on its edge.  I certainly did not do that.

We will have a three way race in November because there was a straight up tie for second place.

I have been watching this race every day since election night with an eye to doing a follow up post about how off I was… and the count went on for weeks.  I have screen shots from various election tracking sites showing Evan “The Party Ladder Climber” Low being as much as 200 votes down early on.  But as they went through and validated provisional ballots and hand verified the race got closer and closer.

The last couple of screen shots I have are from the morning of April 2nd, so the updated results from the previous day, which put Joe Simitian up by five votes.

Then I checked back that evening and Evan Low was up by one vote.

And then it settled down to the tie above, with both having a count of 30,249 votes.

I kept watching daily as the April 12th certification date closed in, but nothing changed.  Evan Low at one point declare a win… in that he had made it to the November ballot.  I suspect Joe Simitian did the same.  Local news coverage here in the valley is poor.  As is the case in so many places, a conglomerate bought out all the local newspapers, hollowed out the newsroom, and now mostly prints AP wire stories and whatever their minimum wage J-school grades can string together when they aren’t at their second job.

With a race so close, you might ask about a recount.  But there are no automatic recounts for primary elections, only for the final election in November.  Either of the second place candidates COULD request a recount… granted, in a primary, their campaign would have to pay for that recount… but neither has an incentive to do so.  They made the November ballot and the last week or so of updates made it clear that a recount wouldn’t necessarily favor one or the other.  So we get three names for my district for the final election.

[Addendum below: The Liccardo campaign has apparently asked for a recount, potentially to knock out one of their two potential November rivals.]

Interesting times.

But back to me.  How did I do on my estimation in the race?  Let’s match my guesses up to the results in descending order.

I put Sam Liccardo, the “Big City Mayor” on top largely because he raised the most campaign money and spent the most on advertising.  He also went in early on ads, so had visibility ahead of other candidates.  And guess what?  He got the most votes.  Money talks.  This was not a difficult guess.

Evan Low, “The Party Ladder Climber,” was second on my list and, hey presto, he made it to November.

Joe Simitian, on the other hand, was in my “Non-Starter” category because I hadn’t seen any campaign material from him when I wrote my original post and he is on the Santa Clara Board of Supervisors, a group of such low profile that I couldn’t tell you who else was on the board or if I voted for any of them.  County politics generally focuses on who is elected Sheriff.  He spent less than half of what Liccardo did on the election and made it past the first round.  He must have a constituency somewhere… though he was a CA state senator for two terms, so I may have underestimated his attachment to the Democratic machine here.

Peter Ohtaki was one of the two Republicans on the ballot and there are enough from that party in the valley that will vote strictly based on part affiliation that he came in fourth.  If he had been the only Repulican on the ballot he would have come in second because he probably would have gotten most of the votes that went to Karl “spent no money” Ryan, though Peter spent very little compared to other candidates for a fourth place finish.

Peter “The Marine” Dixon, who heavily played up his service in his ads and who spent nearly as much money as Liccardo proved that maybe it isn’t all about the cash, but how you spend it.  His campaign message seemed to be very “I support all the things!” without a lot of specifics and no track record to back any of it up.

Rishi Kumar, the “eternal challenger” used to make the November ballot against the old incumbent, only to get thrashed in the general election.  As I suspected, this time he couldn’t depend on any protest votes or to stand in for his Republican neighbors in his rich suburb.

Karl Ryan, the other Republic, got his name on the ballot and then spent zero reported dollars on the campaign, and still came in ahead of people who put in some effort.  Again, I think his votes were primarily due to party affiliation and lack of campaigning by the people who might have otherwise gotten those voters.

Everybody else.  The last four are Democrats who hadn’t bothered to campaign much or didn’t have the budget or who didn’t use their budget very well or simply didn’t have a constituency.  Joby B Bernstein, the 28 year old Stanford grad student with zero political experience came in last, blowing $146,660 of campaign money on 1,651 votes, meaning he spent about $90 per vote.  Not a good return on investment.

As for November… that is a more difficult call.  Sam Liccardo came out on top, but 46% of ballots cast were for somebody besides the top three, so one has to guess where those voters might fall… plus, it being a presidential election year, a lot more voters will show up in November in the district.

I think Liccardo still has the advantage.  I suspect, given he leans more center conservative than the other two, that he will pick up much of the Republican votes.  We’ll also have to see how the fundraising goes.

If the state Democratic party comes out for one of the candidates, that will tilt the balance as well, though the party has been reluctant to do that when two members of its own inner circle, Low and Simitian, are in the running.  So I suspect they will stay clear.

Meanwhile, I have kept reading the primary results out to my wife as her mail-in ballot is still sitting on the counter, uncast.  She could have changed the results of the election, and she would have likely voted for Evan Low.  Our daughter would be non-stop roasting my wife for this, but she too failed to vote in the March 5 election.  A lesson in how every vote can count.

Related:

• CA.gov – District 16 Election Results
• Ballotpedia – District 16 Primary Election Coverage
• Cal Matters – Two Candidates Ties

Addendum:

I wrote this earlier in the week and hadn’t seen any news, but apparently at the last minute a group connected to candidate Sam Liccardo requested a recount to be funded by a newly formed political action committee. (This did not show up on the state election result site that I had been watching.)  The county of Santa Clara has filed a federal complaint that saying that the Liccardo campaign is coordinating unlawfully with this PAC.

My wife saw this come up in the news feed for one of our local television channels and I was following it up this afternoon.  So there may not be a three way race in November and it may be that the Liccardo campaign worries about having to fend off and out spend two contenders.

Related:

• KTVU News – Federal complaint filed against San Jose Congress candidate Sam Liccardo
• NBC Bay Area – More questions surround recount for District 16 congressional race
• SJ Mercury News – More than 20 previously uncounted ballots discovered during Congressional District 16 recount
• ABC 7 News – Here’s how much a recount costs in tied District 16 congressional race and who requested it
• San Jose Spotlight – Silicon Valley Congressional District 16 re-examines uncounted ballots
• LA Times – Two congressional candidates tied. Now a recount is complicating the results even further
• KQED – Requests for Recount Could Upend Silicon Valley Race for Congress
• KQED – Silicon Valley Readies for Low-Simitian House Race Recount

So I will probably have another follow up post on this next weekend if the recount finishes up this week as expected, and there isn’t any sort of injunction against it based on the complaint that has been filed.

Just out in front of all of this I am going to say if Peter Dinklage doesn’t get cast as Bijaz I am going to be extremely disappointed.  I mean, he can’t get ALL the dwarf roles, I know.  But I also think his body of work shows him to be well suited for this particular part.

So yeah, it has been confirmed that Denis Villeneuve will be bringing us a third film in the Dune saga based off of the second book in the original series (or the 14th book in the expanded Dune-verse if you’re into that) Dune Messiah.  I mentioned that in my look at Dune Part 2, and that set me on a path.

The thought of Dune Messiah being made into a film prompted me go back and re-read it to see just how strange it was going to have to be.  I hadn’t looked at it since the late 80s, so it was clearly time for a refresh.

But before I did that I went and skimmed Dune first.  I couldn’t bring myself to read it fully through… I’ve read it a few of times and both films and the mini-series were so true to so much of the start of the book that I felt like I had just read it even though it has been a few years.

Still, I jumped through enough to get a good refresher, remind myself of the timeline from the books, which as I noted in my post about Dune Part 2, were considerably different than the latest film, and a few other key items.  I had forgotten how early on in the tale Paul knows who his grandfather really is, how Paul brings a fighting technique… the “weirding way” so-called… which is what gives the Fremen mastery over the emperor’s Sardaukar, and the fact that Paul has been trained as a mentat, a human computer.

That last omitted from the film kind of annoys me if only because it is set up by a scene that could have been played for a laugh.  It could have gone something like this:

Leto: Oh, and we’re going to start training you as a mentat.

Paul: I thought you couldn’t tell somebody they were being trained until they reached the right age as they needed to be conditioned for it without their knowledge.

Leto: …

Paul: …

Leto: …

Paul: Oh, right… I guess I am that age now…

Also, the fact that Paul is a mentat… and mentats in general… make kind of a critical plot point going into the next book.  But they can probably gloss over that a bit.

Anyway, I was grounded enough to dig into Dune Messiah, which takes place years later with Paul as emperor, Princess Irulan, the old emperor’s daughter as his wife, Chani as his lover, and Alia, Paul’s sister, now the teenage high priestess of the cult of Paul.

Oh, and the Fremen jihad has cleansed the life from dozens of planets, brought hundreds under the rule of Paul, and have caused the death of something like 60 billion people along the way.  Paul isn’t all that happy about his lot or being used as the justification for such mass slaughter.  But he wasn’t happy with the old order either and he can see the future in a vague way and is trying to thread the needle to find the best path forward.

Meanwhile, the old order isn’t too happy with him either.  The Bene Gesserit, the Spacing Guild, and the Tleilaxu have teamed up to try and, if not overthrow Paul, to at least gain control of him to make him do their bidding.

And here we’ll get into some deep water with the next film.

We got a bit about the Bene Gesserit in the first film, though not as much foundation as they deserve.  They have been working to shape humanity for centuries, Paul as the Kwisatz Haderach being their ultimate goal, and they are more than a bit salty that they can’t control him after all the effort they put in to bring him into being.  (Yes, technically he wasn’t supposed to be the chosen one, but his mom decided to throw the dice and came up double six.)

But I guess we can get away with what we’ve learned about them so far.  Shady female organization, referred to as “witches” by resentful men, and wearing sinister costumes… though again, I think there was some comedy missed in not going somewhere with strange women with boxes administering painful tests being no basis for a system of government or something.

Then there is the Spacing Guild, which figures at least somewhat in the conspiracy against Paul.  I will say again, I want to see this sort of thing.

And the story pretty much demands it.  The Spacing Guild ambassador, in his zero-grav mobile spice huffing tank, is the conduit of the conspiracy, at least initially.  But I guess we could pass them over yet again, not get bound up in their weirdness, if the script is getting out of hand.  But if you want to know where David Lynch got his vision of the guild navigators as in the image above, Dune Messiah was the place. (He was also sizing up a second film based on the second book.)

Which leaves us with the Tleilaxu, or the Bene Tleilax, to contend with. (I didn’t casually know those two names for the same thing, I had to look that up even after reading Dune Messiah.)  They and their abilities and their skill with genetic manipulation and their ability to bring people back from the dead… kind of a big effing plot point in Dune Messiah.  You don’t dig into that, you might as well just admit you’re throwing Frank Herbert overboard and just doing your own thing.

Unlike the Spacing Guild, it is okay that they didn’t get a mention in the first two films.  In the books they get a passing mention in Dune, being the provider of specially horrible mentats.  Baron Harkonnen’s mentat, Piter De Vries, was a Tleilaxu special, and the baron mentioned that he needed to put in an order for a fresh on as De Vries seemed to be about done.

But with Dune Messiah they are out front and demand attention.  I will be very interested to see how they translate the aspects of the Tleilaxu onto the big screen.  Some of it will lend itself to a visual medium.  The metal Tleilaxu eyes and the face dancers should make for interesting sights.  But how to get across what the Tleilaxu do without having it all intoned by some character telling you what is up will be an issue.

And, like I said, Peter Dinklage better get the Bijaz role.

We have a couple of years before it will be released.

Meanwhile, now that I have wrapped up Dune Messiah, do I carry on into Children of Dune?  Again, I haven’t touched any of the Frank Herbert work besides the first book since the late 80s.  As I recall, this is where things start getting really strange.  Dune Messiah though, it was short and wrapped up the main story line pretty well.  Not the worst title you could pick up and read.

It is going to be one of those Fridays where I am going to uncork a bottle of frustration and rant a bit about various business deals and statements, each of which has managed to make me progressively more annoyed.  When I started this post I thought I might have to divert to Twitter to add in some of the more recent screw ups Elon has made.  But no, the video game industry continues to provide, and the main problem was limiting myself to a few stories and ranking them in the order of how likely they were to make my head explode.

• EG7 Sold PlanetSide and then What Happened?
  

Back in the EG7 Q4 2023 financials it was stated that the PlanteSide IP had been sold.  The actual mention was:

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

Closed a deal!  Sold the IP!  That must mean something, right?  A publicly held company can’t just straight up lie about this sort of thing, can they?

It came out later that PlanetSide was the IP in question and that the trademarks had been transferred to Bay Tower, a private equity firm, but that there was some sort of Jason Epstein connection in that and what the hell was that even about and what did it mean to the actual game, PlanetSide 2?  Let me just repost all the links from that point in time in case you are interested.

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

And I guess we don’t know the answer to a lot of that, but apparently PlanetSide 2 has been moved within Enad Global 7 to fall under Toadman, the smallest of the EG7 studios, which posted a net loss of $5 million SEK in Q4 2023.

So now they had PlanetSide 2, in contention for the worst performing title in the Daybreak stable, has been moved to the worst performing studio in EG7’s stable.

Yay?

Some coverage:

• • Massively OP – EG7 transfers PlanetSide 2 development from Daybreak to Toadman
  • MMO Bomb – Remember How Daybreak Sold the Planetside IP?

Still, I should not be too hard on Toadman as, on their site they say they have done work for hire for a range of Daybreak titles including PlanetSide 2 and might have been responsible for the console port.  Maybe them taking over PlanetSide 2 will mean a PlayStation 5 native client for the title?  Who knows?

Meanwhile, that still doesn’t answer the question about the IP being sold, who really owns it, why they bought it, what they plan to do with it, or what it means to EG7, though I suspect part of the sale must had included the right to keep using the IP for PlanetSide 2 because to do otherwise would have been insane.

• UbiSoft Says Screw You to fans of The Crew

Back on the first of the year I made a prediction that UbiSoft would do something that would piss me off, and thus help sustain me in my beyond two decades grudge against the studio.  And, of course, they obliged almost right away by declaring their Skull & Bones title a AAAA game.

But, just in case that wasn’t enough, we have how they are handling The Crew, their 2014 racing title, which they are pulling the plug on and removing from player libraries.  If you try to find the copy of The Crew you paid $60 for, UbiSoft will suggest maybe you should buy something new rather than playing that raggedy old title.  They managed to come across so badly that the whole thing is driving a call for game preservation.  Some coverage:

• Massively OP – Ubisoft pulls The Crew 1 from player libraries, encourages them to ‘check the store to pursue your adventures’
• Massively OP – Stop Killing Games is a modern games preservation initiative prompted by The Crew’s cynical sunset
• MMO Bomb – Ubisoft’s “The Crew” Fiasco Is Just One Example Of Why We Need Games Preservation And Physical Media

Now, live service games are always going to be problematic in this arena.  At some point the game will stop earning enough money to pay to keep the servers running… and keeping the servers running costs more than you probably imagine.

On the other hand, a title that charges full price up front better have a plan for when the servers go down.  The servers to support the back end portions of Pokemon Diamond & Pearl were taken down years ago, but I can dig out my old cobalt blue Nintendo DS Lite and STILL PLAY the core portion of those titles.

Saying “Screw you, buy another game!” and yoinking purchases out of player libraries is not a plan, it is a way to bring the wrath of fans down on you.

This is UbiSoft management just being their usual shitty selves.  Business as usual.  I vowed not to give them another nickel when they made it clear they hated their customers more than 20 years ago, and they continue to keep proving it every year for me.

• Mike Ybarra say Let Them Eat Tips!

I was vacillating between making this its own Quote of the Day post or just ignoring it completely because it was so dumb, then hit a middle ground an decided it fit into this piece.  Mike Ybarra, former head of Blizzard, thinks we should be able to tip devs if they make a good game.

That is pretty innocuous in and of itself.  A charmingly naive desire to reward somebody for making a good game would earn a pat on the head from many sources.

However, a former President of Blizzard who demonstrated no issue with paying women less than men for the same job, only giving a mild bleat when Jen Oneal resigned because she was being paid less as Co-President of Blizzard in partnership with Ybarra, and who was blatantly trying to gaslight employees by pleading poverty while cutting bonuses for those outside the executive management boys club, coming out with that sort of statement against the background of mass layoffs in the video game industry just proves he is either completely unaware of reality or a complete shitheel… though, as always, I have to add “why not both?”

People rightfully dogpiled on his since edited tweet to point out the many problems with his sentiment.  Leaving aside the whole “everybody wants tips these days” and the fact that any such mechanism would likely go to the publisher who would extract their cut before passing anything on to the people who did the actual work, the whole thing would encourage publishers and executives to keep industry salaries low by pointing out that tips were now considered part of the compensation package.

If you want to help somebody out, but another copy of an indie dev title you played the hell out of.  That will probably help somebody.  But tips… those will go into somebody elses’ pocket without a doubt.

Coverage:

• Massively OP – Former Blizzard boss Mike Ybarra thinks players should be able to tip developers for their work
• Rock Paper Shotgun – Former Blizzard boss reckons you should be able to tip developers ‘another $10 or $20’ on top of $70 games

Also, here’s to hoping Mike Ybarra fades into even greater irrelevance so I won’t feel the need to ever mention him again.

• The Strains of Im-Possibility Space

We got something of a two-fer from Jeff and Annie Delisi Strain, the husband and wife duo who run/ran Prytania Media which funded several game studios.

The first up was the abrupt closure of Crop Circle Games, which was shut down in late March with little notice and no severance for employees.  A publisher treating game devs as disposable trash?  Must be a day that ends in “Y” I guess.  Crop Circle’s site was replaced by a terse statement about being able to secure funding after two years.  Normal industry stuff, callous but no surprise.

The weird bit is that on April 4th Annie Delisi Strain appended a long rambling statement making the whole situation about herself and the fact that Kotaku reporter Ethan Gach was going to bring her health issues into a story (something that never happened and Kotaku denies was ever planned) that was so strange that even an AI wouldn’t be that incoherent.

Once that bizarre addition got some attention, the site was shut down completely, but not before I went and made sure the Internet Archive had backed it up.  When gaming execs show you who they really are, don’t let them memory hole it later.

Then, a week or so later, Jeff Strain announced another sudden studio shut down (images of his statement), Possibility Space, this time because he alleges that employees were leaking information about their project to the press.  The common thread here is again Kotaku, which was implicated as the reason, with their reporter Ethan Gach being named once more.

“Somebody leaked something so let’s burn the place down!” isn’t a normal business take.

Sure, the games industry isn’t doing well right now, contracting as it is from the pandemic highs when we all stayed home and added to our Steam library in search of distraction, so there are lots of reasons studios shut down.  But when your funding publisher shuts down two studios while attempting to blame one reporter at Kotaku… well, it feels more like the Strains live in some sort of paranoid bubble where Kotaku is out to get them.

• Pity Poor Naive Lars who Blew Up Embracer Group!  Oops!
  

Then we’re back to the Embracer Group, which has been struggling to survive by shutting down projects and laying of developers, all due to some extremely poor and dubious even at first glance business decisions made by CEO Lars Wingefors… who still has his job.

But in an interview over at IGN about Embracer Group Matthew Karch, who is CEO of Sabre Interactive, which managed to break free of the disaster that is Embracer, paints a picture of Lars merely being naive and feels that people are being unfair.  While the interview covers other topics, other sites like Game Developer immediately picked up apologist nature of Karch’s statements.  Incredulity was a common response.

The only things I can come up with for Karch’s narrative is that there is a non-disparagement aspect to his contract taking Sabre out of Embracer’s grip, that he doesn’t want to say anything that will come back to haunt him if/when he too turns out to be an incompetent boob and lays off a bunch of staff, or just solidarity among the capitalist class and feeling the need to protect themselves from all those greedy workers demanding to be paid, as they really eat into CEO bonus potential.

Anyway, back here on planet earth Lars Wingefors, whose compensation package no doubt dwarfs any of the people who actually make the things that Embracer sells, is paid based on the clearly flawed assumption that he is SO SMART AT BUSINESS.   Yet he foolishly bet on the line always going up despite obvious signs there was going to be a reduction in demand, negatively impacted the lives of thousands of people.   And in doing that, the only consequence he has suffered is being publicly called out for it… and dammit, Matthew Karch says that is going way too far!  CEO’s have feelings too man!

It is clearly too much to ask that a CEO be at all responsible for their decisions.  Accountability is for suckers.  Get a job where other people have to pay for your mistakes.

Maybe CEO should get tips.

• Random Rant about Private Equity

Then, not really on the topic of video games, I saw a nice article over at Vox about how private equity firms… also known as equity management and other innocuous terms… have been simply destroying everything they touch in the name of milking every last cent out of companies and then casting them aside to let them fail.

• Vox – What is private equity, and why is it killing everything you love?

They kick off with the example of Toys R Us and how it was bought stripped, and left to die as a deliberate business plan, but you can find many more examples.  The plan is to find the victim target for the same tactic, where a private equity firms buys it out, brings it private, loots it of all value, saddles it with debt, then had a final cash grab by going public with it again in the hope that a familiar name would fool people.

It happens over and over again and the firms that do it set everything up so they get the cash but bear none of the responsibility for what they have done.  Anyway, if you want to get mad, you can read that and how even Taylor Swift has had to fight the vultures of private equity.

There is the constrain refrain from the boss class in the US about “nobody wants to work anymore” that one can trace back over 100 years that is mostly a lament that people kind of expect to be able to live on their wages.

The irony in that is today it feels like nobody on Wall Street wants to run a business, they just want to get paid, either by demanding companies deliver all profits directly to them or through these private equity looting frenzies that destroy a company in the long term in order to get paid today.

We need more regulation in the market.  That’s it.  That’s the message.

The sandbox nature of Conan Exiles… figuratively speaking, though there is also a lot of actual sand in the virtual world of Conan and the map is a big rectangle, which lends itself to the metaphor as well… means that there really isn’t a story or anything to point you towards a particular goal.

You can hang about doing things like base building or crafting or whatever… at least on a PvE server like ours… and the game won’t get impatient or start sending NPCs your way to intone meaningfully about how great it would be if only you would go take a look down some dark dungeon down the road and look into whatever it is that has been plaguing the local populace.

That said, there are, in fact dungeons.  I am not sure how Potshot found out about The Dregs, one of the early dungeons in the game… he does things like read up about the titles we are playing rather than just embracing ignorance like I do… but he mentioned last week that he had found The Dregs and that it was said to be soloable, so the two of us with followers might be able to manage it.

The Dregs can be found at the west end of the river that runs by our main base.  Potshot had scouted it out, so we picked a pair of followers and rode off down the shore of the river to get there.  There is a whole settlement just outside of the citadel where the entrance is, so we had to chop our way in, but that wasn’t so bad with the two of us and two followers.

We made it there and I got the location update because it was my first visit.

Then we had to get in.  Apparently you don’t just walk into The Dregs.  The door requires blood to be spilled on it, something communicated by what looked like a holoreel on the sealed way in.

Unfortunately, as one of the first of many mistakes, we had killed all the baddies close by, so there wasn’t anybody to pull and bring onto the location.  CE mobs, like modern MMORPG mobs, will only chase you so far before giving up.  Eventually we had to settle for an alternate plan, one of us dying.  We set some bedrolls up the hill from the building, then back inside Potshot did the “remove the bracelet” thing, which kills you dead.

That was just what the doctor ordered and, as his blood ran onto the stone, it opened up, revealing stairs down to the dungeon.

Potshot ran back from the bedroll, there being no real penalty beside inconvenience in dying, and we headed down into the dungeon.

There was a question about what to do with the horses.  We decided to have them stop following us.  That meant they ran back home on their own and we ended up having to walk back when we got to the other end, but we’ll get to that.

Like the rest of the map, The Dregs looks good and is a well done environment.  There is a lot going on, so much so that we missed a lot of it on the first pass.

We fought with the mobs in the initial water area, then headed deeper in.  The whole thing seemed pretty linear and we just kept heading deeper in.  There are some puzzles to solve to get past obstacles, but the hints of how to proceed were obvious enough that even we caught on after exhausting attempts to climb.

The puzzles all involve water which, when you unlock it, rises and falls, allowing you to swim up to high points to carry on through the instance.  That meant sometimes getting to the rise in time and sometimes having to wait for high tide to show up again.

There were some skeletons and a couple other mobs to fight, but honestly we found ourselves at the boss in fairly short order.

And the boss fight went pretty well.  He is in a pool of acid, so you don’t want to get in with him.  But followers are apparently unaffected by that, so they dove in and did most of the heavy lifting.  We banged away on the boss when he decided to beach himself now and then, and peppered him with some arrows when he was in the middle of his acidic hot tub.

Soon we had prevailed.  The boss was dead.  We got the achievement and whatever.

When he died the pool drained.  I ran in and skinned him, which yielded a couple of things.  But the main focused seemed to be three chests in the bottom of the now empty hot tub.

They were locked.  We looked around the room and in our inventory.  Had we picked up any keys?  No we had not.  Well, that was bunk.  Some online research indicated that one needs skeleton keys to get into boss treasures like this.  Those come from skinning overland world bosses as well as skinning the two bosses earlier in the instance.

Two bosses?  Did we miss two bosses?  I guess we had.

So we started to work our way back, only to find that dungeons in CE respawn with the day/night cycle, just like the main map.  Still, we found a boss we had missed, a giant spider called The Devourer , and went in to assault it, only to come out worse for wear.  We had slain the spider, and skinning it had yielded a skeleton key, but both of our followers had gone down in the fight.

And, working our way back through the respawns we quickly got in over our heads.  The followers were out main firepower it seems, and a batch of skeletons killed Potshot and sent me fleeing back towards where the main boss fight had gone down.

At least when you die in a dungeon you revive back at the start.  Difficult if there are respawns to get through, but at least it didn’t require opening the door with the taste for blood again.

After some more comedy and fleeing from mobs, we ended up leaving through the back door and walking back home to our base, making plans to re-arm.

There was a crocodile boss at an oasis not far from our base that we went after once we had some fresh followers with us.  We have to keep a recruiting drive going pretty much all the time to sustain our losses.

The fight with him… well, I think we won in the end, but both Potshot and I went down along with another follower.

We couldn’t find the follower’s corpse… not the first time this has happened… which was a pain because we like to recover the equipment, clean it up, and re-use it… kind of like the opening of Netflix version of All Quiet on the Western Front.

We went back to base, stowed they key, then went for the spider, where we had a bit more luck.

We had tuned up out follower a bit, going with some hardened steel weapons that we had obtained elsewhere.  We didn’t bother to use them because when they wear out, as all gear does, we couldn’t repair them fully.  But follower gear never wears out fully.  So the spider went down without loss and skinning it yielded another skeleton key.  We took that back to base and did some repair and updates and then decided to head back to The Dregs with the morning sun.

We got on our mounts, which had returned home without us last time, made sure we and our followers had food and supplied, then headed back up the river to the dungeon.

This time we managed to use the blood of one of the locals to open the door and headed in, this time with horses in tow.

We had looked up the instance and found a map on the wiki, where we found we had totally walked by the first boss, the raging albino komodo.  He was not too tough to slay, though when we skinned him and got a skeleton key, we realized we had left the other three back at base.

We’re just not that good at this.

Still, we pressed on, clearing our way through, followers protecting us, horses in tow.

The horses, like followers, would just materialize by us to catch up if they ever got stuck behind.  We pressed on, and found the side passage where the second boss, the spider lay.  We did better on this run, losing no followers.

Then it was down the final stretch, through the big water room to get to the boss again.

That brought us back to the main boss, the Abyssal Remnant, who we took on in the same way we had the first time.  It didn’t seem to go as quickly or as smoothly… perhaps our damage types were better the first time as we had focused more on blunt to smash skeletons than stabby stuff… but we won in the end.

When the acid hot tub drained we went down, read the scroll on the floor, which taught us some recipes, and had to pick two of the three locked boxes to open.  I don’t know if we chose poorly or not, but we ended up with a legendary dagger set and some other items.

Done, we posed for a shot… screen shots are a bit tougher in CE than some other titles, and the followers were not cooperating, but we managed.

So we managed our first dungeon run in Conan Exiles.  Granted, I think we were both in our high 40s in levels when we did it, so we had some benefits that fresh characters might have lacked, but we sort of needed that to make up for our lack of skill.