We are officially in summer, with the summer solstice having passed just yesterday.  Happy Midsommar to all who celebrate.  May your sacrifices protect you and bring a bountiful harvest once more.

I was a bit surprised that the Steam Summer Sale did not kick off yesterday.  Steam has a pretty solid track record of landing summer and winter sales on the first day of each season.  But this year it won’t start until the 27th. [Addendum: Though if I had looked back to 2023, I would have seen it didn’t start until the 29th, so just another issue in my brain.]

So no post about that today, as I had sort of planned.  Instead, some things are launching or announcing dates for launch.  Time for a pass through that I guess!

• Tarisland Launches

Tarisland goes live today, doesn’t it?  Technically it is going live world-wide and will have launched everywhere on the list by the time this post gets published.  At 11am eastern time it was supposed to go live here in North America, the last of its launch regions after Asia, Europe, and South America.

Now here and Free to Play

Derided repeatedly as a WoW-clone in a world where it is tough to be an MMORPG without that comparison, it is available on PC, Android, and iOS as a free to play title.

I have said several times that I wanted to give it a try, if only to see if all this WoW-clone talk had any merit.  But I have I downloaded it yet?  I have not.  Maybe it will strike my fancy this weekend.

Anyway, there is a launch announcement with details on how to join in on your platform of choice.  They have even partnered with an emulator to try and make the game playable on MacOS.  You need an M-series Mac, no Intel models need apply, and there are hoops to jump through, but you could make it happen if you were dying to play.

Finally, looking at that logo, is it Tasisland or Taris Land?

Meh, I’m not going to worry about it.

• Throne & Liberty Launch Date

Amazon Games, fresh off their good times trying to pretend New World isn’t an MMORPG, has announced the launch date for their next venture, Throne & Liberty, which promises to bring online RPG gameplay into a new era.

Throne and Liberty and totally not an MMORPG

Also it is multiplayer.  And a lot of people will be able to play together.  I mean, they literally use the word “massive” later on in the text to describe the PvP and PvPvE experience.  It is almost like it is… I don’t know, another MMORPG?

Amazon, why won’t you say that?  They have literally banished the term from their web site.  They make zero MMORPGs if you believe what they say.

Anyway, a title that I nearly put on the “won’t ship in 2024” list for my new year’s predictions… seriously, it was on there, then I realized I had one too many for the point count, so I removed it, will in fact ship in 2024, landing on September 17th.

So I dodged that bullet.  That and the whole refusal by Amazon to use the term “MMORPG” are the key takeaways from this bullet point.

• Valheim Board Game

Valheim has apparently hit the level of success where somebody felt they needed to make a board game out of the experience.

Please Odin… now in physical form

This will be a crowdfunding campaign and run by another company, which is probably good because Iron Gate has like three devs and they still have a biome to finish some time this decade.   The campaign will be run on Game Found, an off-brand Kickstarter clone for board games which you can find here.

There is a teaser video, but I am not going to bother to embed it because it is 17 seconds and tells you less than I’ve already written.  If you are interested you’ll have to go sign up at Game Found to get alerts as to when the campaign will go live… as they haven’t bothered to tell us yet.

• EVE Online Paragon Store for SKINs

The next stage of the Equinox expansion hit yesterday, which included the launch of the Paragon store in game, which allows you to take those rather pricey SKINs you can make with the new SKINR utility and list them on the market.

Want to buy a lime green Harpy SKIN?

And, of course, it is a mess.  The store front is there and you can do some sorting, but as an online shopping experience it rates ahead of the Pokemon Go in-game cosmetic store, but only just barely, and Niantic at least has the poor excuse of having to work within phone sized devices.

Anyway, you can find it in game… not easily, but you’ll get there if you persist… and read the CCP optimistic take on it here.  Or you can go over to r/eve and see what players think.  It isn’t pretty.

• EVE Vanguard Solstice

CCP’s decades spanning desire to make a successful first person shooter game despite all the signs indicating it is a bad idea carries on with a new round of EVE Vanguard testing which starts… wait, it started yesterday, didn’t it?  Yes.

The Solstice is here… which means it will just get darker from now on

The play test… because it is still in alpha so all two dozen fans will get angry and remind you of this should you criticize any aspect of it… features a second map, weapon SKINs, and… um… well, there is still just one gun, but you can now change its stats with chip sets you can find in game.

The play test runs to July 1st, so there is plenty of time to join in.  You’ll need to download it in the EVE Online launcher because CCP is determined to handcuff this potential corpse to its one viable game.  And, of course, they are offering SKINs to people who join in… which feels kind of odd now that they have blown up the SKIN market with SKINR, but whatever.  That is the bribe they have to offer.

You can read more about it here.

• Hearthstone Perils in Paradise

Finally, over at Blizzard they are cranking out yet another Hearthstone expansion.  It isn’t exactly a “month with a vowel in it” level of phenomena, but they do seem to get two or three out every year.

Maybe the WoW team could learn something from them.

Or maybe not, as Hearthstone goes where it pleases with the lore, with the new expansion being called Perils in Paradise, featuring a lot of perhaps unlikely Azeroth activities on the splash screen.

Perils in paradise

Anyway, among the features of the expansion are tourist cards that act as a conduit to bring in cards unrelated to your class in order to spice up your deck.  Blizz is also introducing catch-up packs, which I think was mentioned back at BlizzCon where I made some joke about ketchup packs… wait, here is the joke… was it worth it?

How this helps you with deck building I don’t know…

Anyway, those are here now.  The whole thing launches on July 23rd and you can read more about it here.

That is what I’ve got for Friday.  Did I miss anything?

Summer is Coming!

I live in California, so I don’t worry too much about winter as even when it is bad… storms and rain… that is generally good for us.  Summer though… it is going to be a hot one.  It was already up in the 90s this week and the first official day of summer, June 20th, hasn’t even arrived yet.

On the good news front, we got a heat pump central forced air system for the house, so after 17 years in our place we will have air conditioning in the summer.  We’ll be getting solar installed at last early next month so we’ll have the electricity to drive the heat pump which, while it is energy efficient, still draws power.

But that is neither here nor there for this post.  I wanted to list out some things coming up in June.  I know, isn’t that what the “Coming Up” section of my month in review post is for?  Sure, but I forgot some things, found out about some new things, and I’ll put pictures and links in this post.  So let’s go!

• WoW: The War Within Beta – June 5th

Yeah, that was Wednesday, but you’re not too late if you want to participate.  There is a whole page dedicated to the beta, what content will be available, and how to join here.

The War Within 30 minutes or it is free

The War Within is, of course, the next expansion due later this year for retail WoW.  Being somewhat divorced from retail since early in Shadowlands, I have some mild interest in the expansion, but going to retail these days is like going to a foreign country… they do all the same stuff as us… or classic… but it is all slightly different and awkward for a naive traveler like myself.  But I’ve been over all of that already, haven’t I?

But a beta… I haven’t done a retail WoW beta since Cataclysm, and we saw how that went.

• Valheim on MacOS – June 10th

2021’s huge indy survival success, Valheim, will be making the move to MacOS as the developers look for new markets to conquer.

Are there apples in Valhalla?

I guess it will be on Steam.  Does Microsoft Games even support MacOS?  Maybe?  I don’t know.

But Iron Gate assures us that it will support cross-play, so if you setup a server for you PC buddies and a friend with a Mac shows up, they can play too.  I don’t have a Mac anymore… I mean, technically there are at least three MacOS computers in the house as I write this, but I do not actively work or play on the Mac these days.

• EVE Online Equinox Expansion – June 11th

I suppose if I am listing things out I need to include this.  The big old Equinox expansion is coming on Tuesday.

Equinox – Seize Control – June 11, 2024

We shall see then who exactly is seizing control and whether or not null sec will be upended or if it is a great big nothing burger.  The ship SKINR should be neat, depending on how they plan to tax people to use it.

• EverQuest II Anashti Sul Origins Server – After June 13th

The jump back to a more authentic 2006 experience with the EverQuest II Anashti Sul Origins Server is slated to land this month.  The beta is slated to end on June 13th… so maybe the following Tuesday, the 18th?  Or maybe the 14th?  We’ll have to see.

Anashti Sul is a mystery in her way

It may seem a bit odd to go back 18 years for a 20th anniversary celebration, but the 2006 experience marks the settling point for the game, where it finally decided what it was for the moment and moved forward with content.  I wrote my views on this decision a while back, and plan to give it a peek when it shows up.

• Pax Dei Early Access – June 18th

Pax Dei is entering Early Access.  What does that mean?  All sorts of things I suppose and they have a whole post about it.

Coming to Early Access

As a title it has been kind of on my watch list… I subscribe to their Discord server news channel so updates there show up in the blog’s Discord server… you can join if you like here… but given all the other stuff I have on my list for June, I feel like Pax Dei might not make the cut… especially since they want $40 to be a founder.  I already have $40 unplayed games in Steam, I am not sure I need another.

Also, there will be pwipes.  I don’t have time for that.  Call me when it ships.

• Steam Summer Sale – June 20th

The first day of summer, the summer solstice, and Steam is usually pretty good about kicking off the Steam Summer Sale on that day.

Will I buy anything?  That is always the question.  As noted above, I have my share of unplayed titles already, and I bought a bunch over the Winter Sale… and then ended up playing Valheim.

My Steam Played Stats

You can see your own Steam stats over at SteamDB.

Also, as it came out last week, when you cannot pass on your Steam titles.  You die, your account is dead… unless your give your kids your password and have family sharing on or something.  I am sure there is a work around, but it is just a reminder that nothing “digital” you buy is actually yours.  (Word is GoG.com might let you pass things on to your heirs, but there is paperwork involved.)

You want to have access to something it needs a physical… though even that isn’t a guarantee.  Sonus loves to brick their older sound systems and Spotify is bricking their car player later this year… though you might get a refund after a lot of outrage at their “fuck you” attitude about the whole thing… and all sorts of “smart” home devices end up getting bricked by Google or whoever buys the company then discontinues them.

Anyway, side rant there.  But for our new heat pump I got a dumb Honeywell thermostat.  No Wi-Fi, no Bluetooth, no other connectivity or ability to host Russian bot nets, and no way for Honeywell to shut it down without showing up at my doorstep.

• Tarisland Launch – June 21st

Tarisland, Tencent’s everybody-says-it-is-a-WoW-knockoff MMORPG title is set to go live on Windows, Android, and iOS on the second day of summer.

Coming soon and Free to Play

Tencent is promising all the things, diverse classes, challenging raids, a flexible talent system, excellent graphics, all in a free to play package with a cash shop that I am sure will have all the usual items in it.

Still, it is the first MMORPG from a big player to hit our market since maybe Lost Ark.

As with everything Tencent has a big post about joining in on the fun.  We’ll see if I can find the time for it come launch day.

• ICQ Shutting Down – June 26th

Children of the 90s… or maybe those of us who were young-ish adults of the 90s… hear me and weep.  What might have been the first instant messenger platform I ever used, ICQ, is going away on June 26th!

ICQ Logo Evolution

This was one of those one-two punch bits of news where I was saddened to find that ICQ was going away, but first I was surprised it was even still around.

What to say?  Way back in the day we used to use it to tell people to log in for a zone in TorilMUD.  I kept the login going well into the 2000s with Trillian.  Somewhere along the line I let it go, forgot the password, couldn’t remember my number, and basically moved on.

Still, it was quite a thing back in the day.  I told somebody I had a 5 digit ICQ number… but it might have been a 6 digit number.  This was like 25 years ago or more, right?  I had it before I had a Yahoo account, and they sent me a 25 year anniversary notice last year. (I noted the 24th anniversary message they sent me, but decided that didn’t have to be an EVERY year thing.)

Anyway, that was all I had for June.  Did I miss anything?  I mean, at least anything there is a chance I might play?  I am not really primed for things like the Elden Ring expansion of whatever is going on in FFXIV.

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.

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.

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.