We are now entering the era of my blogging.  Not quite this blog yet, but an earlier blog I was writing that was not about video games.  Written under a different pseudonym, it was mostly to annoy some relatives in Nevada county by picking out amusing entries from the police blotter published in the local paper.

In the midst of that I recorded several entries about the big move that our new leader Mitch had been demanding.

I am going to repost what I wrote at the time, trusting my memories that were contemporary with the events more than my vague recollections of things that happened nearly 20 years ago.

In these posts I refer to our new CEO as “Tim” rather than “Mitch” because he was our CEO as I wrote this and I wanted to avoid being fired in the extremely unlikely scenario where these posts were revealed and pinned on me.

Some imagery the evoke feels

I have made some minor edits to correct awkward phrasing, typos, and my usual subject/verb mis-match issue.  Otherwise, this is 2006 me speaking, trying to tell a story that had been in progress for a while.  But at least I was about 18 years closer to events at that time.

• The Company Move – Part I – Posted July 21, 2006

Approximately five years and four month ago my company signed a five year lease on the building in which I work. The bubble had burst on the web frenzy, there was no more frantic Y2K buying to prop up the industry, my remaining stock options were under water and doomed to remain so for all eternity, and our director of facilities, in a move that some speculate lead to his being let go eventually, managed to lock in the sky-high monthly rent on our crappy building for another five years. (With increases incrementally over the five years to be, you know, fair to the landlord.)  [This was demanded by the CEO, who I have covered in a previous post.]

So while 7 of the 10 buildings in our complex ended up empty, we still paid the internet frenzy era going rate for office space in Silicon Valley. We would hear in quarterly result meetings that the mill stone of the rent hanging around our neck was keeping us from being profitable. Occasionally some optimist would approach the land lord of the day (the complex turned over owners 6 times during our lease, although I don’t know if you should really count the bank repossessing the property as an “owner”) to try to negotiate some reduction in our rent, as though the owners could see some advantage in cutting off their minimal revenue stream.

Three years ago we got a new CEO. We will call him Tim. The new CEO, a former Next and Apple Exec and an neighbor of Steve Jobs, hated our building from day one. He had degrees in the “science” of Sociology, so he would bemoan the lack of “warmth” and “energy” in the building. He wanted more “buzz” and a better sense of “collaboration.” However, he was also pretty sharp when it came to business and got us to a point where the quarterly results meetings included a complaint about how much more profitable we would be if it were not for this 60,000 square foot drain on our bottom line, so we cut him some slack on the touchy-feely stuff. After all, not many of us were overly fond of the building at any price, and having the CEO tell us it was a bad building only built up our dislike.

About two years ago, Tim started to talk up his vision of a new building for us. While nobody was keen on his disdain for offices (a view shared by our engineering VP, who likes to sit in his huge office and tell fond stories of working at HP after college where nobody had an office) or his vague quest for more “warmth,” he did also talk about better locations (which, in the end, meant closer to his home), better facilities, exercise rooms, cafeterias, and carpets that did not leave a bad smell on your hand should you accidentally touch them. Basically, he wanted something that we would admit to working in with out duress being involved.

Around February 2005 Tim announced that we were going to begin looking in earnest for our new home. Tim told us how “A” level real estate was available at a fraction of what we were paying per square foot for our, at best, “B-minus” space. We were happy. We got whispers from our CIO, a very competent guy under whom the responsibility for facilities rested, about the places he and Tim visited. Some nice places in in the north county area where we would share a cafeteria and have access to a full gym, one on Moffett (north), one on Charleston (even further north), and another place on Sand Hill Road (cripes, too far north!).

Tim lives in Palo Alto (and is a neighbor of Steve Jobs) and so he concentrated on locations between his home and our current office in Santa Clara. That meant we were moving north. At the time a Dilbert cartoon ran about his company moving and the fact that the new location was close to the CEO’s home was purely coincidence. I still have this cartoon in my office.

About a month and a half later, Tim said at a company meeting that the search for a new building was being postponed. No landlord wanted to commit space to a company that was a year away from moving. At the six month mark, however, landlords would begin to entertain our interests, so the search would begin in earnest in September.

• The Company Move – Part II  – July 24, 2006

September arrived and we begin asking about new buildings again. More whispers about places in locations not far off from the past list, though at least Sand Hill Road was no longer on the agenda.

We were told in October that the hold up on getting ourselves signed up with one of these locations was getting a letter of intent passed through the legal department of our parent company. Still, we had enough time to get things setup, get access to the building, begin the move in early February so that come April 1, 2006, we would be free of our old building.

The legal excuse continued until early November when it was announced that we were being sold by our parent company to one of our biggest competitors. [This will get a post of its own.] This is the real reason nothing has gone on since September.

We are told that we won’t be able to sign a lease until the deal is closed because our parent company doesn’t want to be on the hook for anything and the buyer won’t sign anything until we belong to them.  We are assured that the deal will close by the end of November, first week of December at the latest. After that, we can get on with our moving plans.

January 1, 2006: The deal closes.

During the second week of January, the Director of Facilities for our new company shows up. I will call him Smithers. He comes in and talks to us enthusiastically about moving. He is going to send out a survey for us to take so he can get our input. Some of us go talk to our old CIO. He has been given a nice severance package if he stays for a given duration and has been relegated to an advisory role. He tell us that all of his work has been tossed and that Smithers is here to start from scratch.

Smithers takes his survey and then talks to us about the results. He, at least, does not have a vested interest in moving the building closer to his home and through some very faulty calculations, declares that in our current general area is the best place, commute-wise, for our office to be located. We can see on his chart that he has left off the people in Fremont and a couple in Gilroy who would skew the whole thing south, but at least in the same area means nobody’s commute gets worse.

Smithers says he is going to hire a real estate rep out here (having let go the one we had been working with for five months) and that said rep will meet with the departments to find out their needs. Smithers will be off in the UK finishing up moving the one of the company facilities out there.

Departments without a lot of inherent infrastructure… people who can do their jobs at home on a laptop… remained unconcerned. My boss, who is directly responsible for a lab with 180 servers and the entire infrastructure for our software build system, was starting to get nervous. We got together our space requirements and delivered them to the real estate person who is working with Smithers.

She goes off to do her thing. She comes back and asks if a place that is all offices is okay with us. Well, Tim is gone, our VP isn’t opposed, so we say sure, why not. Despite the fact that I keep hearing different people claim that “such-and-such a group doesn’t like offices” I have yet to find anybody at our location who would choose a cube over an office.

Smithers gets back and tells us that they need to get some stuff together and signed, but we should be ready to move at the end of February. That gives us a month of buffer on the back side. That also doesn’t give us much time to get our crap together for the move.

We get shown the new location, the 7th floor of the Sun building off of Great America Pkwy, right next to Birk’s. [Which is still there!] We got in electrical people, cabling people, moving people, an architect, and started laying out how this was going to happen. We promised extra money to the contractors to get stuff done in time for the move. We cannot have any down time! We put in rush orders on equipment for the new place. We spend lavishly because timing is everything!

January 30th, moving boxes arrive. People begin packing up their cubes and offices. My boss packs up nearly everything in his office the day the boxes show up.  I put together a few boxes in my office and haphazardly toss some stuff into them.  I have collected a lot of junk over the last eight years and I suspect I won’t miss most of it if I just toss it.  Certainly my binder of S1 company rules, including the notorious “how to answer the phone memo” won’t be any loss to me.

We put up a floor map of the new building in an empty office. We let people pick their offices. Only a few of us have been to the new building, but people are getting excited. New stuff, the promise of a better building, something we were told we deserve, and everybody gets their own office makes us feel good.

I am one of the people who has been to the new building. The offices are 7’x9′ and have sliding glass doors with ‘privacy stripes’ on them that look like they are etched into the glass from a distance, but are in fact stickers. If you took out the desk and put in a double bunk and a toilet, it would be about the size of a prison cell. I am asked to stop using phrases like “Orwellian” to describe the new place. My boss wants me to be more positive and I have to admit that yes, the place looks cleaner, nicer, and it lacks the distinct smell our building has had since the second floor men’s room plumbing gave out last May, and that on the 4th of July we can all watch the fireworks at Great America.

About the second week of February we are at the point where we can do no more without regular access to the building. We get the real estate lady to let us in to do some planning, but we need to have the place opened up for us to get electricity in place, air conditioning routed, labs build up, networking done.

Then the word comes down. We are working out some issues in the contract. It will be a little more time before we move.

• The Company Move – Part III – July 26, 2006

Time passes.

Responses to questions about the move are few and far between.

Equipment begins to arrive. We find places to stash it. Routers, switches, a KVM control system for the new lab, 19 enclosed racks, power strips, and huge new servers are now sitting all over our building, waiting for a home.

People start digging through boxes for items they need. Two people who went on long vacations and expected to come back to a new building have to set their computers back up in their old locations.

March blows in. We are told that we will be “GO” to move on March 20th. Access to the building is just waiting on one more signature.

At this point I have to speculate. We are told that the hold up is that the owner of the building has to sign something to let Sun sub-let the 7th floor to us. Sun has no employees at all in this building, the company having pretty much collapsed into a shell of its former self with the end of the dotcom boom, so there is just a big sign on the outside.  But it has managed to sub-let the first six floors.

My theory is that, somehow, Sun screwed over or otherwise pissed off the building owner while sub-letting the first six floor because the owner is dragging his feet big time. The first agreement of intent needs the signature of the building owner, but if the owner ignores it, the agreement will be considered signed after thirty days. The clock on that started running on March 1st.

On March 30, the agreement of intent is considered signed. Now we can move onto the details of the lease.

However, it is now April 1st and our own lease on the building we are in has expired. We are now paying month-to-month which, according to our agreement with the landlord, means paying DOUBLE our current, already way over market rate per square foot.

Smithers goes to “negotiate” with out landlord to try and get that number reduced. Hah. I can’t imagine what a landlord with seven empty buildings can see as the advantage to lowering the income he is getting. Still, through some inducement, he gets them to change it to a day-by-day lease, so we have an incentive to get out sooner, but the price is the same.

And things grind on at the new building. The owner is coming up with all sorts of restrictions and such to add to our lease agreement. We have to change back any construction we do on our floor when we leave. We cannot change the air conditioning. We can change the air condition (because it turns out Sun owns the A/C units) but we have to put back all the ducting as it was when we leave. We have to submit plan and permits for all of the work we want to do (but we don’t have access to the building yet!) We cannot have a floor loading of greater than 50 pounds per square foot. This technically means that I, and some of my co-workers, will not be allowed to stand on the floor in our new office. Others will merely forbidden to stand on one foot.

And these are only the items that made it to me and I was not plugged into the process at all.

Meanwhile the contractors are pissed at us, and justifiably so. We promised them work, made them accommodate our schedules, and now, two months after our proposed start date, we are still stringing them along without paying them a red cent.

On or about April 13th, Smithers, under heavy pressure from his boss and the CEO to finish up this move, decides he needs a plan B.

• The Company Move – Part 4 – August 25, 2006

[I had delayed updating the story because we hadn’t moved yet when I wrote the July posts, but delayed the next installment due to unwarranted optimism that I would be writing the final entry soon.]

Deus Ex Machina?

Our current landlord shows up. He tells Smithers that we can have the top floor of the building behind us, which can be completely refurbished, and he will even throw in some money for custom construction and improvements, all for only twice the price per square foot of the Sun building. though he will lower our day-to-day rent to that price as well, as soon as we sign.

This is a Plan B on a silver platter for Smithers and he jumps at it like a hack writer on a mixed metaphor.

This change of plans will mean:

• The company will save a lot of money on rent in the short term, as the Sun deal shows no sign of being resolved any time soon.
• Rather than an office for everyone, only managers will have offices. Everybody else will be back in cubes.
• The move date will be some time in July. [Remember, I am writing this at the end of August.]
• We have to start from scratch on design and planning
• We will end up in a twin of the building we have been told is crap for the last two years.
• We have to find a new place to watch fireworks on the Fourth of July.

Morale is down on the whole subject as one would expect.

All Smithers has to do to come out of this smelling like a rose is get the deal signed and get us moved in July. The duration of the work to get the building in shape for us is estimated to be about eight weeks. That is the estimate he is giving us, anyway.

April becomes May. Again news is sparse. All we hear is that the Sun deal passed another deadline that allowed us to walk away without losing any money.

May becomes June. A company-wide note goes out to announce that Smithers has decided to pursue other career opportunities, which is what you say when you fire somebody in management.  They don’t get fired or laid off, they go to a farm upstate or some such, like the employees would be sad to hear that incompetence was being justly punished.

June becomes July. A new guy is hired to take over the move. We shall call him Sanders. Sanders talks to all the departments to make sure that everybody is happy with what they will be getting in the new building. Not knowing how Smithers had built up a history of empty promises while ignoring everybody for the most part, he opens a can of worms. Jokes start about not packing any Halloween decorations because we will be hanging them in our current building.

July becomes August. Sanders is busy trying to incorporate suggestions as well as design and color scheme ideas. There is a plan to get better cube material and furniture. A committee is formed to review chairs and partitions. Jokes about Thanksgiving decorations begin to circulate.

August nears its end. There is no hiding that nothing is going on at the new building. We can look out the window and see it. We also learn that the previous eight week estimate was “very aggressive.” Jokes about New Years Eve in our current location start.

• The Company Move – Part 5 – September 7, 2006

We have not heard anything about the move for a while. One can look out the window of our building and into the building we have been told we are moving into and can clearly see that nothing is going on. No work is being done.

Still, we have been spending time picking out cube furniture. Or at least the people who will be sitting in cubes have been participating in that process. There were several different types of chairs to consider and the color and texture of the cube walls and how much desk space people need in cubes.

Managers have picked out or have otherwise been assigned their offices on the big chart that shows how the new building will look when we move in.

We have become used to the idea of the new building. The offices promised to everybody in the last building choice have been mostly forgotten and people are becoming involved with the issues involving the building in our complex.

And then last week an announcement comes out of HQ. They have acquired another company. This company is only a few miles from our location.

The first question in my mind: How will this affect the move?

Details begin to crawl in over the following week. HQ wants all of us in the same building. The new company is small, but not so small that we can all fit in the space allowed by the building behind us. The new company has their own building in a nice location and lots of space because they used to be a much bigger company until they fell on hard times.

They also have tiny cubes with half height walls. This tidbit has not yet made the rounds as it came from a scouting report made by one of the managers. And the cube material is all pretty much new and there is a ton of it, so we won’t be tossing it out to buy new cube walls. We cannot afford to toss it out anyway as this will complicate things with our current landlord which is going to cost us.

And then the question comes around from Sanders, the director of facilities, “How can we get you guys moved into this new building by the end of the month?”

I keep thinking this story is almost over, then some new twist occurs.

Let the wailing begin.

• The Company Move – Side Track I – September 15, 2006

There have been a lot of ripples caused by our ever impending move. At least one was to our benefit.

Back in February when we were planning for the Sun building, when it was thought that everybody would be sitting in a 7×9 office, accommodating people and their belongings was a concern. (It is again, now that we are all going into 6×8 half height cubes, but that is another story.) We gave serious thought on how to cut down on wasted space.

One thing that came up was monitors. All of us in engineering had 20-21″ CRT monitors sitting on our desks. Some people had two or three. They take up a large amount of real estate on your desk, and nobody’s desk was going to get any bigger. There was also some concern about the amount of heat generated by a big CRT in a 7×9 office.

As part of the plan to get us into smaller work areas, we asked for an LCD monitor for everybody in engineering. As it turns out, at HQ, a new standard LCD monitor had just been designated, the Dell 2001FP, a 20″ 1600×1200 native resolution monitor.

A pallet of these monitors arrived in late February. All of engineering got one. There are still empty 2001FP boxes sitting around like it was Christmas last week.

These are nice monitors. They are nicer still if you have a video card that supports DV-I output. The company was not going to pay for that, but a couple of people, including myself, had spare video cards at home with the necessary output.

So for the last seven months or so we have benefited from the move in at least one way. Well, most of us have. One engineer said that 1600×1200 isn’t enough resolution and he stuck with his 21″ CRT running at a very tight resolution indeed. He wears glasses and sits very close to his monitor and I do not wonder why.

• The Company Move – Side Track II – October 4, 2006

It had been a tradition at our old company over the years to have a “yard sale” to get rid of old equipment. The usual suspects in the sale were computer systems that were 3-7 years out of date, lab equipment, some older network gear and the like. Occasionally office chairs and other furniture were included. Mostly it was junk, but there have been some gems including a very nice HP oscilloscope complete with all probes and the manual which I bought then donated to a local high school.

Of course we are now part of bigger company with headquarters in the South. The company is ISO 9000 certified and has a process for everything. Everything it seems, except documenting and publishing processes so that those of us not based at HQ can figure out how to get things done. And even when you can get documentation on a process, it always assumes knowledge you probably do not possess if you need to read the document.

Of course you know, if you have been reading here for a while, that we are going to be moving to a small and less expensive location. Some day soon if we are not careful.

We used the upcoming move as an excuse to clean shop here. In a couple empty areas of our building we collected over three dozen 20″ monitors (because we have all those new LCD monitors I mentioned in a previous entry), five dozen Pentium III 500-850MHz systems, a few early Pentium IV systems, four Sun servers, a dozen giant, rack mount Compaq multi-processor (PII or PIII) servers, a few dubious laptops, and a variety of printers, routers, and other stuff that could only charitably called “junk.”

Nothing terribly exciting, really. I have better junk, or enough junk, at home already, depending on with whom you speak.

My boss ended up in charge of this sale, mostly because nobody else would take the job. He spent some weeks trying to get somebody in HQ to okay the sale. Finally, with the cooperation of other local managers, he set the date for the sale for a Friday in late April. The Thursday before the sale an email went to everybody at our location that the sale would be at 3pm the following day.

The next morning, in response to the many inquires, an email finally arrived. It was from the company controller. Nothing ccould be sold without the express permission of the office of the controller. Before the sale could commence, the controller needed have a complete list of all items in the sale.

An email went out to everybody located out here saying, “Yard Sale Postponed.”

Being very organized, my boss already had such a list, complete with asset tags and serial numbesr, for the items our department contributed. Other departments did not have anything resembling a list. Still, we had segregated the stuff by department, so if we had to sell theirs at another time, so be it.

The controller, when asked about pricing of the items for sale said he did not care about that, but that any money from the sale had to be sent to HQ to be accounted for. (Thus ended or usual plan which has traditionally been “Fund a lunch time BBQ out back with the proceeds.”) He said that facilities would set the prices.

Facilities, of course, had no interest in pricing anything and left that to us. Facilities did say, however, that we would need to collect sales tax.

My boss asked the controller about sales tax. The controller was not interested in sales tax, but directed him to some other accounting group.

My boss sent an email to this other accounting group asking about sales tax and if we could just charge round numbers ($5, $10, and $20) and then take the tax out later rather than having to make complicated change for each transaction.

The OAG (other accounting group) came back and said that charging round numbers sounded like a fine idea and certainly we could take the tax out after the fact. And, by the way, if we chose to sell anything for under its current market value, the purchasing employee’s W2 at the end of the year would have to be adjusted to indicate the financial benefit from such a transaction.

Market value? I guess this keeps companies from selling business jets, homes, and cars to their senior execs for cheap, but what is the market value of a 4 year old Pentium III 700MHz with an 18GB SCSI hard drive and no operating system? (All of the Windows operating systems were licensed under our MSDN agreement, so we had to erase them before we parted with the machines.) It has zero value to the company, we have depreciated it as a capital expense over the last few years. And how attractive does a $20 PIII system look if it might mean that it changes your W2 at the end of the year?

And while we were pondering this gem, an email came in from OAG2 (or is that OOAG?) who had been directed by the controller to account for all of the items on our list in the list of assets they have for our location. OAG2 sent us a spreadsheet with all of the purchase orders for the last six years listed and asked us to please indicate which item from our inventory matched up to which purchase order.

Our local accounting group never bothered to associate an asset tag or serial number when putting together this spreadsheet. But then, all of the local accounting people handed over their data to HQ as they got laid off at the end of March, so we cannot blame them. The list of purchase orders only showed vague items, like “computer systems” or, sometimes, just the vendor in the description field. There was no possible way that these two lists could be reconciled.

So my boss was just about ready to call the whole thing off and call up the computer recycler we had lined up to take away the remains and have him come over and cart off the whole lot. But even that needed to be approved.

I suggested shipping everything to HQ, since we cannot part with the stuff without approval, but he thought I was making a joke.

Silence followed. Not a word more came from HQ. This is not an unusual situation. HQ is frequently unaware of our existence.

Then, a few weeks later, an email showed up from the controller. The sale was approved. My boss just had to hand over any cash to our local HR representative.

Sale on!

In the end, very little of the stuff was sold. The dubious laptops were purchased for the boy scouts. A monitor or two was picked up. There was no mention of market value or W2s. No inventory reconciliation was demanded.

I think somebody did threaten to ship everything to HQ.

A week later the computer recycler came by and carted away all of our left over junk. And one of our coffee makers! Damn them!

• The Company Move – Resolution – May 2024
  

I never did end up posting a final entry about the move, though I can assure we did, in fact, move.  We schelped our stuff from the corner of San Thomas and Walsh, where NVidia now resides, our old building just a memory, to downtown Mountain View and the old PayPal building at 303 Bryant.  It was a nice enough building, certainly better than our wretched old space at 2840 San Thomas.

The series so far:

• Hanging on the Telephone
• Calling the Mall
• Finding Friends with the Popcorn Lady
• Jenny and the FCC
• What Your Area Code Used to Say About Your Location
• I Get a Modem then Start a BBS
• Tech Support at the Village
• Dominating the PowerBook Modem Market
• The Death of eWorld
• The Great Dial Tone Drought of 96
• When the Modem Business Ran Out at the Village
• The Village Attempts to Move Beyond Modems
• Anecdotes from the Village
• Usenet Newsgroups Part I – I find some Usenet Archives on CD-ROM
• Usenet Newsgroups Part II – What is on that CD and Why Your Hard Drive isn’t a Database
• Usenet Newsgroups Part III – Founding, Fame, Influence, and Foreshadowing
• From the Village to the Island
• YoYo Mechanic
• The Great Failure of Residential ISDN in the US Market
• Set Adrift from the Island
• Thinking on Enterprise Software
• Stock Options and the IPO
• Into the Telephony Subsystem
• Rambling about Speech Recognition
• Web Banking, The Acquisition, and the Start of the Great Decline
• The Special Business Unit

We’ve been really releasing some of the science fiction behind the game, which takes place around three black holes that are spinning around each other in a sort of a “three-body problem” with black holes.

-Hilmar Petursson, VentureBeat Interview

This interview had to be over at VentureBeat because I don’t think any serious video game news site takes the idea of blockchain based video games seriously.  But that is what VentureBeat is for, though even they have toned down the crypto puffery, having moved on to framing AI as the future of everything.  That AI is little more than a scam relative to the promises being made is not a coincidence.

Just wake up already

Anyway, we knew that Hilmar was into the blockchain thing because he had been ostentatiously hobnobbing with the crypto bros and shoving NFTs down people’s throats at the Alliance Tournament, to the point that it created such a backlash that he had to promise that blockchain would not be part of EVE Online… for the foreseeable future at least.  From a company that has a history of promises coming with unstated expiration dates, leaving the door open was ominous, but they have at least kept their word so far.

All of which is so much back story, but doesn’t really address the quote.  And, on its own, it doesn’t seem like much of a quote to get me riled up enough to make a post.  I mean, if I wanted wanted to get riled up I need go no further than the regular shitheel Mike Ybarra, who tried to inject himself into relevance again by declaring on Twitter that we should go easy on Microsoft Games/XBox head Phil Spencer after he killed more studios and laid off more staff because executives have feelings too.

Not to get too angry about this, but if you want to be the boss of a big organization that is going to close studios and lay people off, you better be up to the task of taking a bit of well warranted criticism because whatever in the hell else are you doing to earn that bloated compensation package.  Because you don’t actually MAKE anything or do anything on a day to day basis but make high level decisions that other people will implement.

You want to be the boss?  Then harden the fuck up.  Certainly don’t be a whiny bitch like Mike Ybarra.  Can we just put him in a ring with Mark Kern and have them battle over which “resting on extremely dubious laurels” contestant is the least relevant?  I don’t even care who would win, I just want their ignorance to stop showing up in my timeline.

You think I’ve gone off on a tangent here, don’t you?  Suddenly I’m all up about somebody who isn’t associated in any way with the quote at the top.  But you’re wrong!  It all ties together.

Because Hilmar is the head of CCP, so occupies that same role, being the captain who, if he isn’t actually steering the ship, is at least telling the helmsman the course to follow.  And when Hilmar gets a bad idea stuck in his head, he won’t let it go.

Which brings us to Project Awakening, the cryto game that CCP is making, though at least they are spending Marc Andressen’s money to do it, as a16z is in for $40 million to make this blockchain fantasy real.

I have a whole rambling post about Project Awakening and its source and implications, the former being a Hilmar obsession, the latter being a financial disaster, but we’ll let history judge on that should it ship.

What I did NOT expect was that a past Hilmar obsession… at least what I thought was a “past” obsession… would make an appearance in Project Awakening.  But there it is in that quote.  Hilmar was really fascinated by the book Three-Body Problem.

Somewhere I have a quote from him about how that book really inspired him and set him on a course to what became the “chaos era” of New Eden.  There is a whole tag dedicated to that and its effects if you click here and scroll down.

We got Drifters appearing and hitting player owned structures in null sec… mysteriously focusing on Delve at a time when we were burning down PanFam structures in Tribute… funny how that worked out… and then they were camping gates and then Hilmar wanted to stir the chaos era pot even further and initiated the null sec local blackout.

Local was delayed in null sec

That was a huge success… oh wait, I am holding the chart upside down… no, that led to the second lowest level of player logins in recent-ish memory.

Logins Crater with the Blackout Dip of 2019

The only bigger hit to player logins came with the industrial great leap forward when CCP absolutely wrecked the economy… once again, in the middle of a freaking war effectively ending by making capital ships too expensive to risk… leading to what I refer to as the Year of Disappointment, which was only broken when CCP relented a bit on the economy… though the mineral price index is still close to an all time high because their resource allocation program made certain minerals spawn only in low sec where miners are hunted relentlessly.

All of which you would think would be a lesson from which a company might learn.

But no, there is Hilmar up there referencing the Three-Body Problem again and, further on in the interview, talking about how the game takes place on a planet that is under the influence of three nearby black holes… something which he claims they are spending time modeling… which sounds to me like he is going whole hog on chaos again.

So if I wasn’t down enough on Project Awakening already for being blockchain based, which means it will, at a minimum, attract the type of people who like crypto due to the “get rich quick” allure of it, meaning even if it isn’t a scam, it will host scams before collapsing in on itself when it runs out of suckers, there is now the extra added level of Hilmar wanting to set things on fire right from the get-go.

There are currently zero crypto games that have been anything but brief successes before falling to the self-defeating logic of the idea that you can make money playing a video game over time.

But now the whole thing will be hamstrung by chaos.

Between that and EVE Vanguard, the fans of which have to keep saying “it’s only in alpha” as a defense of its lackluster showing so far, I wonder where CCP will be in five years.  I hope they get the upcoming Equinox expansion right and don’t mess up EVE: Galaxy Conquest, the other title they have in development.

I had already been wondering whether Zwift, the app I use to “gamify” my exercise bike usage, was worth the $15 a month fee it was charging.

Ride On?  Screw off!

If I had been more hardcore, a dedicated rider that used many of the features the app offers to keep myself in competitive shape, I might see some real value in the options Zwift offers.  But as a causal 2-3 day a week rider that basically uses two features and just likes the fact that it tracks my totals… well, there are cheaper alternatives out there I am sure.

So when I received the following message from Zwift this week I sprang into action.

We’re writing to inform you of changes to your Zwift Subscription pricing. The monthly Zwift subscription price will be increased to $19.99, plus applicable taxes.

Your first payment at the new price will be on your next billing date after June 6th.

We hope you’re enjoying your time on Zwift. We have worked hard to keep prices locked since 2017 and have made this change to allow us to continue making indoor cycling fun with more content experiences and product innovation.

And by “sprang into action” I mean I went straight to their site and cancelled my subscription.

Just to belabor the point I made above, the value proposition for Zwift relative to other $15 a month options… things that include our Valheim server rental, my WoW subscription, a number of streaming channels we might watch, or even my Daybreak all access subscription where I am doing little more than touring old zones in EverQuest… was dubious to start with.

Add in that I am already feeling quite a bit of subscription fatigue in the current economy where literally everything and everybody online is asking me to fork over a recurring subscription fee for content… and I get it, content costs money to make, but money is also a limited resource so I can’t give everybody money and still pay the mortgage… and I am suddenly pretty price sensitive.  Also, the price of everything is going up a lot faster than my salary since the pandemic.  Thanks to the magic of inflation and a decade of 1% raises, I effectively make less than I did fifteen years ago.

Anyway, Zwift is off the menu.  It was only inertia that kept me from cutting it previously.  The price increase just cemented my feelings about it.

They sent me a survey to ask why I cancelled and I was pretty clear that the price increase was the reason.  I am sure that will go into the bin as I have found that any company that makes a suddenly price increase without any warning it is coming has already convinced themselves that they are making the right decision and any complaints can be brushed away as outliers.

Of course, the funny thing is that if they decided tomorrow that the price hike was a huge mistake and they declared that they were rolling back to $15 a month, I wouldn’t go back.  I was bothered by the old price, but not enough to be moved to action.  But now that the price change has made me reflect on the value of Zwift, I wouldn’t go back, even at the old price.

It is generally a mistake to make users think too hard about the value your service offers.

Anyway, I am now in the market for an exercise app that works with the BlueTooth connection to our Schwinn IC4 exercise bike, preferably something without a recurring subscription model.  And if such a thing doesn’t exist, then I can just peddle away without an app.  I’ll just use the timer on my phone or listen to a podcast that is about the right length and not worry about it.

Blizzard would like to keep the WoW Classic party… and revenue stream… going, lest that team appear next on Phil Spencer’s every increasing list of layoff targets, and they need some help.

Can you re-run a cataclysm?

Having split WoW Classic into four different flavors at this point and facing the peril of the main thread heading into what was once considered one of the worst WoW expansions… at least until Shadowlands came along… with the coming of Cataclysm Classic, they really need some more people playing… and paying.  So they are giving it away for free, at least for the weekend.

Or at least that is my take.  Your mileage may vary.  Either way, WoW Classic is free to play for the weekend… but only the Cataclysm Classic flavor according to the news piece.  So come enjoy the pre-patch!

The instructions are:

• Download the Battle.net® desktop app
• Launch the app and log in to your account.
  • Need to recover your account information?
• Within the app, click on the World of Warcraft tab, then either Install or Update.
  • Latest system requirements
• When the installation or update is complete, click Play.
• Play free through May 13, 2024, at 10:00 am PDT!

Also, Blizzard would very much like you to buy some things and they have a new WoW Classic focused shop as a vehicle for your virtual good needs… again, they want to stay off of Spencer’s list, because the word is that he is far from done on his cutting spree.  But I guess they won’t need developers once they develop an AI that can do more than parlor tricks.

Related:

• Blizzard – Join the Welcome Back Weekend May 9-13

The April Monthly Economic Report for EVE Online landed this week, so it is time to dive into that once more.

EVE Online nerds harder

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

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

Overall Summary

With April we’re back to a 30 day month, so one might expect something of a drop in the total given that EVE Online players had 24 fewer hours to explode things.  But you would be wrong.  They managed to blow up 501,859 ships, structures, and capsules, a nearly 8K uptick from the 493,867 that went up in March.

That comes out to 16,728 losses per day in April, also a noticeable uptick over the 15,931 losses per day in March.  That is nearly 800 more things exploding every single day, though we’ll get to why that might not be as significant as the high level numbers might indicate… ans the come down starts when we get to ISK.

For ISK value a total of 42.48 trillion ISK was recorded as destroyed in April, down from 46.19 trillion in March, with the average ISK loss per day in April running at 1,415 billion ISK per day, down from 1,490 billion ISK per day the previous month.

That sank the average cost per loss, another metric in my spreadsheet, from 93.53 million ISK per loss to 84.64 million ISK per loss.

How did this happen?  I’ll throw a meme out for it and we’ll get into the details later.

It is an old meme, but it checks out

Okay, we’re now four months into the year and we’re now hitting a point where somebody has wrecked my pet theory that losses per day is a reasonable indicator of player activity in New Eden.  Ideally, my chart should correspond in some way to Jester’s daily rolling average chart.

Average Daily EVE Online Players – April 2024 Edition

Compare that to my average losses per day chart.

Average losses per Day – April 2024 Edition

At first glance the 2024 line appears to be following Jester’s 2024 line.  But his chart is a 30 day rolling average so it is still influenced by March numbers.  It won’t turn… or stay flat or dip a bit… until the May chart comes out.

Finally, for this section, there is the losses per day chart, which I usually trot our as a demonstration of the normal ebb and flow of New Eden destruction, peaking on weekends and dipping mid week, with ISK loss and hull count moving together.  But this month that last bit seems set to mock me.

April 2024 – Losses per day

Some very expensive ships were lost around the 5th of the month, as we see ISK losses spiking well above the loss count, while on the 22nd of the month the loss count spikes without a corresponding spike in ISK.  I refer you to the meme above for that, but I’ll have data to follow up on that.

Top 20 Most Frequent Losses by Class and Hull

Once more we kick off with the raw losses for the top categories.

Not for the last time in this post I am going to say something about shuttles.  Generally speaking, shuttles are in third place most months, behind the ever at the top capsules and the perennial second place entry, frigates as a class.  Last month, for example, shuttles rang in at 9.22% of the month’s total losses.  This month they surpassed 15%.

Hulls Lost only Once This Month

Once again I have filtered out all of the POS towers and modules… POS kills continue… and fighter squadrons and other odd and uninteresting… to me at least… kills to get to the more interesting stuff, with links to the kill on zKillboard… when possible.

We have some AT ships on the list this month, starting with the Cybele, an ATXIX reward ship, and only the second one recorded as lost, and the Laelaps, an ATXVI ship, which perished up in Vale of the Silent.

The Miasmos hulls, Amastris and Quafe Ultra editions, are hold overs from the Odyssey expansion.  The Amastris edition did not make it to zKillboard.  Somebody post that kill please.

The others on the list are a bit more commonplace, though the Komodo, the Guristas faction titan, is notable for its expense.  And the Syndicate Mobile Large War Disruptor… I haven’t seen one of those on the list before.  Over at zKillboard it records the last loss back in 2021.

Top 20 Total ISK Lost by Hull Type

Looking into that top hulls that made up the ISK losses in April.

Capsules, as always, top the list through sheer volume, even at a paltry average of 27.79 million ISK per loss.

This is becoming very much a “usual suspects” sort of chart every month.  Fortizar losses were up almost 50% over March, when 40 were blown up.  Dreads don’t make up much of the total, given the clash that happened in Abhazon in April… though I suspect those numbers will pop up a bit next time as there was a return clash there just this past week.

And I suppose it is a good thing that Capsuleer Day has come around again to replenish the Praxis supplies, as they keep blowing up at a substantial rate for a battleship.

Top 20 Regions by ISK and Hull Losses

The regions where losses were happening most.

Pochven continues to blow up the ISK chart.  I wish I had some direct insight into that.

Top 20 Systems by ISK and Hull Losses

Diving a little deeper into losses by location.

On the ISK side of the chart we can see the effects of the struggle over the Imperium Fortizar in Ahbazon, as losses there were 50% above perennial champion Jita.

Meanwhile, at the top of the count side of the chart is Uitra and whatever shuttle exploit has been going on there for months and months.

Once again it tops the total kill in a system list.  Here are the ships lost in Uitra in April.  As usual, shuttles dominate, with 22,626 destroyed in the system, almost one third of all shuttles destroyed in New Eden in April.

However, in Black Rise, the system of Iwisoda emerged as a new locus of shuttle destruction in April.   Is the Uitra scam… or whatever it is… expanding?  Oh no, this is something completely different.

Here are the ship loss totals for Iwisoda in April broken out by hull.

That is a good 15,640 shuttles destroyed, about 20% of the shuttles lost in New Eden in April.  So the two systems together fall just shy of accounting for half the shuttles in April, ringing in at 49.82% of the total.

In Uitra though, the shuttle losses, if you look over at DOTLAN EVE Maps, are spread out pretty evenly across the month.  I Iwisoda, everything happened in a very short span of time, around which there was very little activity.

The destruction chart for Iwisoda – Apr 21 through 24

What apparently happened was that Snuffed Out, making mischief in low sec as usual, decided to fiddle somebody’s kill board by putting up a Raitaru, delivering 15,640 shuttles to that individual, then blowing up the Raitaru while it was in a state where asset safety would not engage.  That deposited all those shuttles out into space where they destroyed them.  The kills count against the person to whom they were delivered.

Now, the killdump.csv file, CCP’s official output of losses that comes with the MER, does not include individual pilot data.  Corps and alliances are all you get.  So with that data I could only tell you that Stay Frosty lost 15,640 shuttles in Iwisoda, eclipsing any of the regulars in Uitra by a fair margin.

However, I observed the goings on over on Twitter where Rixx Javix, CEO of Stay Frosty, spent several days posting cat pictures and telling people he was totally not bothered by some in-game incident.  Then he wrote a blog post about it where he wanted this “loop-hole” addressed.  You can judge for yourself whether it really bothered him or not.  I certainly cannot speak to his state of mind.

But yes, if you go to the Iwisoda page over on zKillboard currently, there are bunch of shuttle losses with his name on them, with Snuffed Out as the killer.  The system is otherwise not very active, so those will be there for a while.

A sample from the Iwisoda kills

They are all flagged as “padding” now, so they do not affect his kill board.  I suspect that this is somehow related to why the corps in Uitra don’t go all in on destruction, though I still haven’t figured out their game and how it benefits them.

Anyway, you can totally see that spike in losses on my kills per day chart up at the top, where losses spike while ISK is actually down.

Meanwhile, that “loop-hole” has been around for ages and I have seen it used before.  I first documented it here with the Fort Knocks Keepstar kill in December 2018, when somebody delivered a ton of Bantam frigates to Doomchincilla which all popped up on his zKillboad totals.

The PL killboard sullied with all those frigates

The “loop-hole” in question was put in place to stop a different sort of abuse.  When citadels came into the game people would create courier contracts that would send people to structures where they had no access, so they could not complete the contracts… and sometimes got ganked for the effort.  So CCP created a delivery mechanic to solve that, which assigned ownership to the recipient of the delivery, something that has been abused now and then ever since.

All of which I guess shows that a few dedicated individuals can mess with the destruction stats by blowing up shuttles… messing up my average kills per day metric by basically exploding about 30K more shuttles than expected (the March total was 45,547 while April saw 76,798 shuttles pop) while other ship class losses, such as capsules and frigate, were actually down for the month.

Systems with Just One Recorded Loss

We got a story out of the data this month, so a less dull post than usual I guess.  But in digging through the system level data I was a bit surprised to see how many systems recorded just ONE LOSS in the month of April.

I mean, there are a lot of systems in New Eden, and 7,486 saw at least something blow up.  I suspect there is a range of systems out there were no ships blew up, but they don’t make the data set.

So just to make this post super extra long, here are the 392 systems where exactly one ship was recorded lost by CCP… though this data does not 100% agree with what appears on zKillboard.

We shall see what the May stats will bring.