We arrive once more at the middle of the season when one should hope for peace and happiness, not just for themselves, but to be shared with all.
This must be Santa’s Planet
Enjoy your time with friends and family and if you’re traveling, may your journey be warm and safe. We will be taking our regular drive to visit family we only see once or twice a year. May the roads be dry and the drive be safe for all of us.
As I mentioned last week, ArenaNet popped up on Thursday with some new stuff, including the ability to declare yourself as a “reforged” character.
Guild Wars Reforged
This sudden rule change gives you some special benefits, especially in the Prophecies campaign, which I gather is a place where most new players land. It is certainly the route we chose. Here is what you get:
.Sounds good. I want all of that. The key is that you have to CHECK THE BOX on the screen where you name your character.
The checkboxes
And, of course, you cannot go back and check the box once the character is in the world… which means every character created before the Thursday update cannot have the option. So none of our group had the option. And we wanted the option. Lots of people wanted the option.
So I went ahead to test it out, rolling up a new warrior, and I selected Reforged Mode.
I did not select Dhumm’s Covenant, which is a pseudo-lite hardcore mode, where you keep the badge until you die… and then no more badge. But a lot of people did select both, and when I landed back in pre-searing Ascalon City, the place was overrun by new characters with both badges.
I know, this is actually Ashford Abby
And reforged mode seemed to deliver. I am not sure I could really spot a 5% increase in gold or xp at these low levels, where the payouts were small enough for 5% to not make a different… you can’t get a percentage of two gold coins, you just get the same two gold coins as before… but the promise of getting far enough along for these things to matter was a draw.
But we ALL had to be reforged for it to work if we were all going to group up.
Fortunately we had not gotten very far along. Holden had already been talking about trying a new profession and Potshot and I had already made a couple of experimental reforged characters by the time Saturday rolled around and we were all able to get on together.
We all created new characters. I had already gotten pretty far down the road with my warrior so I rolled up an elementalist in order to try that out. However, I will probably stick with the warrior, it being the only melee class in Prophecies. I don’t mind the ranger, but everything else makes you a caster, and outside of a monk as a healer, that doesn’t appeal to me. I like to go toe to toe.
We ended up with my elementalist, a monk, and two rangers. Then we got everybody through the first quests to get to the one about joining up with a group. This was hampered a bit by each profession having its own unique first quest along with Gwen standing there and when I couldn’t remember the name of Lana the Healer people getting the lost flute quest but not having the grouping quest… but we persisted and eventually got everybody in town, in the same instance of Asclalon City, and into a group.
At that point I could just yoink the lot of us into Lakeside County, a sometimes startling but also useful feature of the game. Have you fallen behind? Don’t worry, I’ll catch you right up here at the zone line!
Op success! Not only had we gotten four reforged characters made and in the same point in the quest chain, but thanks to the reforged changes, we were all able to group up.
Our reforged group
There we were, all four of us together, all level one, each of us having had to pick a new name once more.
Then we were off.
We couldn’t stand still long enough for a screen shot!
By that point Potshot and I had done the pre-searing kick-off quests enough times that we had opinions as to order and how to most efficiently get through them. There are, for example, two Denova quests that you want to hold onto until you get the bear cloak quest so you can bring all three along in one run.
And there are specific checkpoints… like everybody getting enough Skale fins to get the belt pouch for that critical five additional inventory slots. This was doubly critical with Wintersday having landed on Friday, which means we were all getting eggnog and fruitcake drops… and occasional useful or interesting items… that take up just that much more bag space.
River Skale are a priority target early on… also Gwen
Somebody also had Gwen in follow mode… but I am told that everything she says ends up being relevant post-searing, so we let her babble on.
Being out with four people brought up a few questions… or observations.
First up, Ula was the only one with the lost flute quest still to do. And we found the lost flute, as we always do, but all of us could see it and Holden actually picked it up, because he couldn’t remember if he had done it or not. He had, to then trade it to Ula, so we learned how to do trades.
That was actually pretty easy once somebody spotted the trade button. And it came in handy when we had to balance out the Skale fins so we all had five.
This being an alpha feature, not all aspects of the game were up on the latest changes.
The same tip as before the update
Also on our agenda; get the hunters their pets. Having done that a few times now… my warriors all have ranger as the second profession… that was not a tough task. We got that done and then, once the naming command was understood (both “/namepet” and “/petname” work, but you have to have the name in there too) we had a pretty feisty group rolling around pre-searing.
Pets acquired and named
We rolled on for a bit more, got everybody to level 4, then broke up for a while.
There was still the matter of second professions. Potshot went Monk/Ele and, just to turn that around, I went Ele/Monk. Holden went Ranger/Necro. And Ula still has to pick. But we have some time for that as people will likely be busy for the holidays.
Meanwhile, after tiring a bit of pre-searing, I rolled my warrior through the event to check on the henchman situation. Sure enough, they do seem better… or at least they are level 6 versus level 3 now.
Henchmen post searing
Well, at least the default henchmen are. The Wintersday Enchanted Snowman are still level 3. But I guess that is to be expected.
Anyway, we have reformed our group with reforged characters. Now to get on to business I guess. Also, it might be time to strip and delete the characters I rolled up before Thursday. I am not sure there is any advantage to keeping them.
As I mentioned in the post when this expedition kicked off, I had not planned to run it as part of the whole holiday expedition thing.
The holiday expeditions are running
I had just done three expeditions as part of the holiday run already. I did Beachhead, then Titan, and then Relics all in a row, which started to feel like work… to the point that I just wanted to burn through that last one as fast as possible.
So not on my list for sure.
And then I logged in to see the expedition on the anomaly… and then I thought it wouldn’t kill me to start it and take a look… and soon enough I was into it.
Now, at the far end of the expedition once more… I will say that it is one of the better expeditions.
I know, I say that only having done five of the 20, but out of those five, it is the most chill… and all the more so using what I had learned from my recent expedition runs, the first rule of which is to get as much done on the first planet as possible.
The first time out I was all over the place trying to solve every task in order. This time I got a lot of tasks done before I even got off the first planet. As noted back in the previous post, the expedition changed a bit from the initial run in that you no longer had to get your Radiant Pillar up and running, but rather just make a teleport device that would get you to the first station, and which point you were handed a bunch of corvette parts and set to building that.
You do not get a lot of parts and you’ll likely end up with some variation on the dual landing pad, single had unit corvette.
My early corvette on a toxic planet
Also, don’t forget to install the mission console in that first corvette. You do that outside of the editor, but it is one of the required pieces to get that first corvette task completed.
The mission console in place
Then you’re off and running, headed to the first rendezvous point… and after the first jump you can summon the anomaly to grab any supplies you might have set aside. At this point I have a pile of items I bring along for various refueling tasks. Sure, ferrite is pretty common, but I don’t want to spend time mining it, so I include a stack of that, a stack of carbon, a stack of oxygen, and so on.
The expedition is all about learning about things you can do with your corvette, where to find corvette parts, and then having to add some additional parts to your build for a task.
Doing a spacewalk is on the list
I have also learned, as I advance along an expedition, to maybe not go to the path the map tells you to follow. Dropping in on stars off the main path works for me, if only because for a popular expedition… and this was one… the game starts to mis-behave or you get into odd collision situations with the corvette’s of others.
That said, such a collision worked out for me at one point. I was in an over crowded station and stuck in my corvette because it was sharing a pad with one with a different layout, when suddenly it took off, dragging me with it. But that was enough to get me the option Hitchhiking task, worth a tidy bit of quicksilver.
I was kidnapped!
I just rode along until the achievement popped then opened the loading ramp and jumped into space to summon my own corvette out to pick me up. Then I did the falling routine, always fun.
Once more falling towards a planet
Another reason for going off the beaten track is that Hello Games seems to favor planets with high sentinel activity. Sometimes you just want to be able to stand on the shore and get in some fishing time.
Fishing in a space suit, as one does in NMS
Fishing was, of course, one of the tasks. But all you have to do is catch three fish. It was peaceful enough there that I carried on catching for a while longer. Initially I wasn’t big on fishing as it aggravates the usual inventory management problem on expeditions. But once I found out you could throw fish back in the watch for nanites, it became a better deal in my eyes.
As part of my staying off the beaten path plan, I did get to the final rendezvous pretty early on, then from there just jumped further on down the road to some empty systems. I didn’t discover any new systems. I wasn’t far enough off the path for sure. But I did get to name a few planets.
I ended up my time on a cold, airless dissonant planet.
Peacefully alone in the game
It has a bunch of things I needed to wrap up the expedition. Also, being dissonant, it had things to help me finish cleaning up the S-class multi-tool that I picked up in the first system. You had best believe I went and grabbed that.
The S-Class multi-tool
Out of the gate that thing had an ultra powerful mining laser and once I put the scatter blaster on it with a few upgrades, I was knocking sentinels out of the air in one or two shots.
Maybe not the best multi-tool in the game, but the best one I have held.
You can also see that my corvette grew into possibly my worst such creation so far as I tried to lump on all the things you needed to add for various tasks without going back and removing excess or anything.
I wrapped things up there, got the final task and phase done, then went back to the anomaly for the final accounting.
Expedition 19 Redux payout
That wasn’t so bad for a fairly chill expedition that I wandered through pretty easily over a few days. No stress. All tasks done. Enjoyable game play. 10/10, would do again, no notes.
Then I pulled out all the stuff I wanted to carry off, much of which was the supplies I carried over in the first place.
Supplies from the return
All the upgrades I did not use I pulled back to sell them for nanites. Also, got myself a walker brain along the way, which I need for a conflict scanner for my exploration vessel.
And, of course, I copied over the S-class multi-tool.
Once I got all that settled, it was back to my main save corvette. Not a beauty by any measure, but handy and carries all my stuff.
Back to Smooth Operator, my main save corvette
That leaves us with one holiday expedition to go, the rerun of expedition 20, Breach, which lands on December 31st and runs to January 13th.
We’ll see if I am ready for another expedition by then.
Related:
We are back once again for the Monthly Economic Report for EVE Online. Sort of.
EVE Online nerds harder
As always, others write and comment about the MER, so if you want different views or the raw data, you can start with this list.
CCP highlights
This month CCP has only one small item they chose to bring up.
I don’t really look at mining, so that did not affect me.
Completely not commented upon by CCP was a major reformat of the killdump.csv file, from which I draw most of my data for these monthly posts. That change broke all of my reports.
On the plus side of the change, they did add ZKillboard valuations to losses. I do like that and that could have been interesting to play with.
However, on the negative they removed all human readable labels from all of the data. Everything from alliances to ships to regions now just has their numerical ID. This broke literally every single report I had created and had been using in PowerBI over the last five years.
It certainly seems like a big enough change that maybe it should have gotten a mention. But CCP will be CCP. They have a long history of breaking third party stuff and not caring one whit… unless a streamer complains. Maybe if The Oz says something. But me? Hah! Not going to happen.
In order to get past this I would need to find/make lookup tables for all of the things now only represented numerically and then figure out how to integrate those tables with PowerBI. I do not have those tables and I would not know how to do that integration if I did. I am entirely self-taught with PowerBI so my approach has been simple by necessity.
This all probably works fine if you use CCP’s Microsoft Excel integration, but that requires you to use Office 365. It certainly doesn’t work with my copy of Microsoft Office 2021.
I even get why they did it. Why make the file bigger with what they see as redundant data? But if you don’t know how to get that missing data, too bad for you.
So that was disheartening. And it was a special punch in the gut as November was a huge month for destruction and I was actually looking forward to breaking out some details on that. Nope, not going to happen.
Then again, this has never been anything like a popular monthly feature on my site, so this might be a sign that I should just give it up. I went to the killdump.csv to try and add a dimension to the numbers rather than just using CCP’s charts, which you can view and interpret without my help.
I will wrap up the year to get a total for destruction. I can at least extract those number pretty easily.
But any visuals or details are out the door. Won’t be missed I am sure.
Destruction
As expected, with the glassing of the Drone Regions, destruction was up a huge amount.
November saw almost 730K hulls, capsules, and structures destroyed, eclipsing May’s peak for the year at 538K.
Likewise, the ISK value of losses in November hit 74.85 trillion according to CCP (and 119 trillion using the zKillboard numbers), again eclipsing the year to date high in June of 51 trillion ISK, so almost a 50% boost.
Here are the numbers for 2025 so far:
Other items of note include the ISK sink Asset Safety Recovery, which hit 19.5 trillion according to CCP. As Brisc Rubal points out in the Reddit thread, this number was around 2.5 trillion ISK over the preceding three months. I am sure it will be big again for the December total.
So big things happened in November. CCP has some charts. Go check them out.
Here we are, very close to the end of the year and I figured this might be the last post of the season. And then things happened.
Fantasy Critic League – Like Fantasy Football, but for Video Games
I was probably being a bit optimistic to think I would have the final results this week. Certainly the top two spots have been pretty clearly decided. Those were laid out in last week’s scoreboard.
Week 49 Scores
Bhagpuss will remain the winner unless there is some radical change in reviews.
But third place, the final spot on the Gold, Silver, Bronze podium… came into play this week.
As you will see on that scoreboard, not only were Shintar and Cyanbane very close in score… less than one point apart… but the leagues own projections, as dubious as they tend to be… was still insisting that Cyanbane would take third place.
Pish posh, I thought, what does the league projections algorithm know about reality?
And then during the week an update landed, the bot reported a score change large enough to take notice of.
That was a 1.1 point change in score, enough to yoink Shintar out of third place and propel Cyanbane onto the podium in the Bronze medal slot.
Would that be the final lineup?
No!
More reviews must have come in, but not in enough mass to get the bot to ping me about it. But Octopath Traveler 0 eked out enough forward momentum to climb to a score of 82.1, just enough to change the rankings one more.
That put Shintar back into third place with just about a quarter of a point sitting between her and Cyanbane. So I feel like I cannot declare the final standings without letting this run out another week. Will Octopath Traveler 0 vary enough before next Sunday to make a difference?
Octopath Traveler 0
Also, that means I can put off the final 2025 league post, with best and worst stats, until next weekend… though I wish scores would stop changing at this point. Shilgrod got a score boost as well this week.
That wasn’t enough to change the rankings, but it means now I have to go update my spreadsheet where I have been compiling all the final scores to facilitate my best/worst picks summary.
Meanwhile, totally NOT in play this week was Ultimate Sheep Raccoon, which persists in having no reviews.
Ultimate Sheep Raccoon
Well, it would have to do pretty damn good to lift me out of seventh position.
So the scores at the end of week fifty looked like this.
Week 50 Scores
The projection still calls third place for Cyanbane… and the score is so close it could still happen.
Next week, Saturday at 17:00, will be the cut off. I swear. There isn’t much of 2025 left.
Meanwhile, let’s talk 2026 League.
We have eight people who have signed up and who have created their publishers.
We have three more who were rolled over from 2025 but who still need to create their publisher and probably work on their watchlist:
If you’re in for 2026… and I’ll go pester Potshot in person… go setup your publisher. Go to the league and change the year in the upper right hand corner and do the things.
It looks like this in the upper rightThat just means picking a name.
[Update: Everybody has created their publisher!]
Then work on your watchlist for 2026 titles. Your 2025 watchlist does not count.
The draft is slated for Saturday, January 3, 2026, at 11:00 Pacific time, which is 19:00 UTC.
You do not have to be there for the draft. But if you are not there and you have a watchlist of picks, you should turn on the Auto Draft option which is located under Player Actions on the left side of the league window.
Here is the Auto Draft
If you do not have a watchlist set, you can still turn on Auto Draft and the league will draft the the title with the highest hype rating available when it is your turn.
If you forget to do both, I as the league manager, will have the league auto pick for you.
The plan is to pick 4 of the 9 slots on January 3rd, leaving the rest to bidding during the season.
Meanwhile, there are still open slots if you want to play in the 2026 season.
I wrote a whole post last year about how to join and what to do that goes into greater detail. But the summary was:
Go check it out.
Related:
The Ancient Gaming Noob