Premium Expired

Tags

World of Tanks

All good things come to an end, and my premium World of Tanks expired.   This time, I’m not renewing it right away.    Roughly in order of interest in “unlocking”, my progress is below.

• S-51 : 46k.   One hundred to go.
• GW Panther : 67k of 162k.
• Tiger II : 65k of 154k.
• T32 : 69k of 169K.
• VK 30.02 : 75k of 81K.    Just a little bit more.
• M5 Stuart : 47k of 56k.
• VK 45.02 P : 171k of 196k.    Dear God, let it unlock already please.

So the broad front of unlocking tanks continues.     I plan to continue my gaming after this group by continuing down German paths, and the French TD’s.    In relative terms, I am close to being a technical engineer for Germany, and why not go for that ?    Except French TD’s intrigue me.

French Master Tanker continues to be elusive.   I target the AMX 50 Foch with reckless abandon to personal safety or winning the match, but it never seems to die by my hand.

On Google Glass

Tags

Glass, Life is crime

After I saw how big the last post got, I decided to split it up.

The new phone plan will include tethering without any cost (Finally !   Like they should have done in the first place !), thus clearing the way to using Google Glass.  I’ve been following the news about Google Glass with interest.     You’ve seen this stuff if you pay any attention to technology.

I’ve decided to be an early adopter of Glass.    I love the idea of a HUD for real life, which is close to what we’re dealing with here.    A little screen that you can review simply by looking up and to the left, while you’re walking around doing daily activities.    Get your GPS directions when walking, and take a picture with minimal effort of whatever you’re looking at.

But the focus of this blog is gaming.    Glass has some neat potential for gaming.    What would Red Robot Labs, for example, be able to do with Glass ?     Something like Life is Crime.   As you walk into a business, the GPS coordinates let a game server know you’re in there.    And you can do a game action, such as a drug deal or beating up a rival.     Perhaps a mechanic based on “capping out” a particular place; whoever stays at Starbucks the longest earns its money for that day.

Technology in the car is dangerous, and the current thinking seems to be it’s a hands-free problem.    Is someone going to come up with a Glass game I can play in the car ?    That would be a godsend.    Eyes on the road, but a little attention paid to my heads up device, would certainly make my 1.5 hour morning commute much more pleasant.    Even the attempt would certainly start an interesting conversation about safety.

For us as the MMO crowd, it might work to have brokers and other item sales interfaces running as apps.     Log off at night, with your loot unsorted, and run an app to vendor trash items and determine how much to sell that Vorpal Sword for.   My desktop computer time is at a premium; can they find a way to deal with all that boring-but-unnecessary stuff as I do my daily commute, or have a break during a Saturday shopping trip ?

The phenomenon of “checking in” is pretty big online – my facebook feed loves to tell me that Bob Smith just showed up in Starbucks nearby.     Might someone make an achievement/check in system with a set of points to be earned ?    I could have more check-in points than my friends, and unlock some kind of virtual boosts that let me do more.    Going to the auto mechanic might never be the same…..

I found very little via Google search about the potential future of Glass gaming, but I thought this guy was on the right track, up until the end of his piece.    No, Hangman is not going to interest me long term, but something for the serious gamer would.

Postscript

While reading what other people’s ideas are about Glass games I came across The Urinal Game, which made me snicker like a 14 year old boy thinking about boobs.

8.6 Changes

Tags

World of Tanks

Wargaming published a news article about the changes coming in 8.6.

Gun accuracy is getting a buff.    For the longest time, shells have hit within whatever the aiming circle is – and it seems about random.    In other words, while your shell might hit the edge of the aiming circle, it also might hit the bullseye, but every point was roughly equal chance.    Now, it’s less so.   More shells should hit in the center of the circle, and less against the edges.    I like this graphic which illustrates :

Pictures. Worth a thousand words.

This should be pretty good news for all guns with a lousy aiming circle.   Derp KV-2 comes to mind, along with everything Russian, and any sniping with American tanks.

Camo mechanics are now changing too.    Instead of adding percentages to a base camo level, it will instead add certain values.     No longer is it supposed to be pointless to add camo to the gigantic Jagdtiger, for instance.    I sure hope we get a refund on skills to go along with this change, as this could drastically impact the desired use of crew skills.    I seriously wonder if it will be worth it, for example, to add to the camo of the MS-1 depending on the fixed values they give; and it might be best to prioritize it on the aforementioned Jagdtiger.

Bushes will now provide less camo.   Why ?   To reduce the “invisible TD” effect, which is also scary considering how difficult it is already to stay hidden for a few shots.     And perma-tracking an enemy will give bonuses to XP for the guy doing the tracking, which will be a welcome change.   It’s great to help the team win, by perma-tracking an enemy; it’s even better to be recognized for it with XP and credits.

And in something that is really exciting for this TD player, TD’s and SPG’s are set to get an XP/Credit buff.   No longer are they going to get penalties to XP.   I didn’t even know that happened.

Lots of good ideas and good changes incoming, which are probably going along with nerfs to arty.    The devs are a bit less charitable about it, claiming it’s just rebalancing, but I have my doubts.     I’m expecting everything to feel like a nerf, and a big one, never mind that my formerly Tier 6 arty is now a (I think) Tier 5, with damage to match.    We’ll just have to see how that impacts the enjoyment of the few arty pieces I own.

Now, if they’ll just clarify this matchmaker patent thing and reconcile their skill-based claims against it, I’ll be much happier.    The fact that I cannot come up with a reason for them to lie, and tell us skill isn’t a factor when it is in fact, doesn’t mean that there’s a reason I hadn’t considered.

In which I try out Feedly

Tags

Feedly

Wilhelm makes the occasional post about feeds, and readers, and these methods for reading blogs and keeping up on them.     I’m a luddite on that score – I vaguely remember looking at one years back and asking “Why would I use this ?”.    It didn’t help that it had push notifications on by default, and the VERY LAST THING I will ever use are things with push.    Don’t fucking bug me, please !

But as we wait for the demise of Google reader (being cancelled on July 1st) the question begins to become what will replace it ?     Those heavy into social media probably have a lot of options, but I’m holding onto my dual online life.    I have the accounts with my real name, real identity, etc.    And I have my online pseudonym which is, if not prohibited, downright frowned upon in the Web 2.0 world.

(As a sidenote : I have heard the rumor that some image formats preserve the original image inside of them, so that the image you post can be “uncropped”.    Is this true and what format is this ?   My google-fu is lacking, if this really exists.)

With all of that, here I am accessing blogs the same way you would at the beginning of the World Wide Web : Bookmarks and links.    Type an address in the address bar.   It works for me, and yet I am a technology guy.   So with a real desire not to be an unthinking luddite, I took a look at Feedly, the highest-rated blog reader on Wilhelm’s poll.

This is Feedly

I can get behind something like this.     There’s a list of stories in the center of the screen, and they have some fun categorizing them.     How do they make their money from me ?    There’s an ad, and a list of stuff for me to buy from Amazon.com.     No large, blinking ads screaming at me.    And I mark items read, or not, and get the content when I open up Feedly.   As of the first 30 minutes, no push notifications have shown up in my gmail.

I don’t know how some of the sites got into this thing.   Raph Koster’s website, which had a cool video about Will Wright’s first game.     And someone we lost too soon, Jeff Freeman, gets listed out in here too.     His mythicalblog.com is gone as you’d expect for someone who has passed away, and yet Feedly somehow has summary information about it.

Some blogs don’t want to get added in.    If I recall, that’s simply the option to add an RSS feed or not, which each blog owner allows.   That’s fine.   But For The Record does have feeds on and yet I can’t seem to add it.    The search will show it for a bare second, then it disappears.   Strange.

Perhaps it’s time to use a reader.   Or, way past time.    Either way I suppose I’ll give this a shot and see how it goes.

On Smartphones and Carriers

Tags

Smartphones

I’ve decided what to do about my phone plan and purchase.    My last post noted the excruciating difficulty about getting this stuff taken care of, and listed a wide open set of choices I needed to deal with.    I’ve since narrowed it down significantly.

First up, I’m too scared of bad connections to take a chance on a different carrier.    Sprint leaves something to be desired on connectivity, and the ability to explain this stuff.    They always claim to have a super duper faster connection coming up Real Soon Now.    When I went into the Sprint store and tried out smartphones, well, you can’t actually connect to the network where the store is.    It’s out of range of the new LTE technology.   I live deep in the suburban fringe, not in a “burb that became a City” like I used to.   So I gave up on switching carriers and instead will stick with Verizon.

This moves the analysis to keep-or-dump my current plan, with phones for “The Wife”, “Granny” and myself.   Despite my philosophical commitment to unlimited data plans, everything has a cost.    The total cost for a two year period of buying full price phones and paying for the plan is hundreds more if I keep the unlimited ($4,220).    Cost of sucking it up and using a skimpy 4GB plan is much less ($3,600).       Contracts are a two way street (supposedly at least!), and without one Verizon could simply tell me to get lost.   The rumor is, they do that, for any data hogs.    And the reality is, between my wife and I, we always use less than 2GB anyway.    So we’ll get a new plan, and Granny is on her own as far as phone plans, since she objects to the new cost ($30/mo versus $18 today).

The final decision to make is about phones.    Just this month, I’ve become resigned to not being able to keep Apple out of my life.    I have a lot of family members who are less concerned with cost than I am – they like Apple stuff.   They don’t care about what they’re paying for, or technology in general, or any of the lifetime experience that I have.   They just care that it “just works” for them.     And Apple does work well, unless it doesn’t.   My experience is once something doesn’t work….. you are hosed.    Especially since I’m not equipped to support this stuff.

But none of that matters, my daughter says Apple is the best, and I can’t convince the wife to get an Android phone, so she’s getting an Iphone 5.     My daughter gets the old Iphone and will use it like an Itouch.   And I’m taking, by default, the only real choice for an Android smartphone with a keyboard, the Motorola Droid 4.

The only part of the plan that’s less than optimal is the phone choice, but I am determined to get a phone with a keyboard – and not a Blackberry either.   Jelly Bean will be nice compared with 2.4.    And hopefully, a phone that always works unlike the current one, where the screen got scrambled.

None of the cool phones have a keyboard, sadly.

Advice from readers would still be appreciated, if anyone has wisdom to share.   And if not, I’ll be committing to this perhaps this weekend, when I get some time (other than having the Blog Posting bug).

Post part two, will show thoughts on Google Glass – which needs the critical component of a smartphone plan.   See what I did there  ?

Edit : Every post deserves a title

Tags

Plague Inc, World of Tanks

Could not put down the Plague last night.     Normal games introduced a bit of extra difficulty that resulted in frustration no matter which way I took the game, it seemed.      Step hard on the cure ?     Then the infection doesn’t spread everywhere.     Step hard on the lethality of the disease ?    The world figures out its problem too soon, and researches the cure.     Or everyone dies leaving some frustrating survivors.  Canada was the new world superpower once after I wiped out most countries, leaving them with Greenland and a few collapsed, anarchic middle-east countries.

So of course I went onto the web looking for a strategy, and I found one.     The key was not that complex – a question of tactics and not strategy.   Its important to transmit the disease, but keeping it low key and using planes and ships at first, all the way up to Extreme Bioaerosol, hit most of the world.    After that, it was about using infectious symptoms and some additional transmission to infect every country in the world.   Notably, ignore blood and insect vectors.

What’s nice about finding this game is, at last, a deep strategic experience on a smartphone.     Talk about a good platform – I can make a few moves between daily tasks, or just veg out for 20 minutes in the middle of the workday.     This beats Zynga wordgames, for sure.     Every time I’ve searched for such things I found no useful website, and searching in the market ?   It is to laugh.

I’ve now unlocked the next harder disease – a virus.    I think it’s harder – only makes sense.     And presumably winning with the virus will unlock the next one.    For the moment I’m going to continue winning games on normal, and unlocking more of the “bonus abilities” that you can start the game with.

I did several daily doubles, so the grind continues for Tanks.    There’s a week left for my premium account, and we’ll see when it expires if I feel like blowing another 2500 gold on another month.    It’s not like I don’t have other games I’d like to play – Plague Inc, Minecraft (the great Mooshroom drive must be finished), something on Steam, Carmageddon.     With about 15m credits banked, I continue to be well-credit-funded and not stress about the VK4502P games, so premium doesn’t feel like a requirement.

The weekend special, with multiple +X% credits and double training, leads me to believe it’ll be more of a low tier time, which is fine with me.    At least, until I recharge the mobile and resume trying to wipe out the world.

Destroying the world

Tags

Plague Inc

Sometime back I remember playing a free web game about a disease that kills everyone on the planet.    It was fun, with the annoying bug that you couldn’t kill anyone in Madagascar.    Then I heard yesterday about it’s spiritual successor, called Plague inc.    I downloaded and found myself playing a lot of it overnight.

The plot is a bit of a twist – you are the disease.    You want to kill every human being on the planet; or perhaps just everyone in Madagascar.       As time goes on, you infect more and more people, start to kill, and will know the victory of destroying all human life, or failing by not doing so.

What makes the game fun are the decisions you make regarding how to mutate your virus.     You select various attributes focused around deadliness, infection rate, disability, and special abilities.    Evolve your virus the right way, and it could kill everyone.

My first game, I had experience with Pandemic, but not this specific game.    I simply played without thinking much – use up all the DNA points that you gain, quickly, and see if it works on Casual Mode.     I started in India and while I managed to kill around 80% of the worlds population, they found a cure and eliminated me.

Second game, I focused on being better at getting people sick.    The infection spread faster but was still deadly – too deadly.    I managed to kill off everyone who was sick, before the disease could spread to all humans.    Fail.

Third game, I thought about the difference between wealthy and poor countries.   The game warns you that you won’t spread very fast in a wealthy country with good healthcare.    Well I said, screw it, let’s start in Japan anyway, focused on being an annoying virus that doesn’t kill anyone, and infected the whole world.    Then I made it deadly, and all of humanity was destroyed.    Win game.

It’s a lot of fun, and the minor grinding elements they’ve added are smart.     You start as a bacteria only, but if you can beat the game on Normal mode, you get to try various other bugs.    You can also unlock various buffs to your base virus.     Well worth the $1 I had to spend to buy it.

Next time, I’ll try again to win on Normal mode.    Hopefully I’ll do better than last time on Normal, where I wiped out the population except for Angola (!??), which defeated me by finding the cure..

Matchmaking by Win Rate ?

Tags

Wargaming.net, World of Tanks, XVM

Hat tip to Z, as is often the case.

Any patent attorneys out there ?     A patent applied for by Wargaming shows them patenting the idea of a matchmaker system – “Dynamic battle session matchmaking in a multiplayer game” with skill based components.    If a player has a 60% win rate, they could expect to be put into a harder match; and conversely, if they had a 40% win rate, they could be put into an easier match.

I am not going to overanalyze this patent – they pay people to do that.    My initial reactions include being annoyed as usual at software patents on obvious processes.     Really?    The matchmaker does a lot of obvious things.

I also note the dates involved – applied for on 5/16/12, well after WoT had already launched, and granted recently 4/23/13.     Via XVM’s website, this mod was first created 2/10/12.

What does any of this have to do with XVM ?    Well, it’s a natural extension of looking at the data provided by XVM, to start thinking about skill based matchmaking.  It gives you a suggested chance to win, along with the win rate for each player.    People have clamored for/against it ever since the mod came out.

My thinking is the narrative probably went something like this – XVM comes out, created by dedicated fans.    Questions are raised about skill based matchmaking.    The big guy, Victor Kislyi head of Wargaming, makes the decision to investigate the idea which probably resulted in the patent application and eventual approval.

Another idea occurs to me – does the fact this patent exists, simply codify the existing matchmaker as a patent, with some extra ideas thrown in which may/may not be present ?    Yep, sure could be.    Just look at the win/loss text of the patent :

According to another aspect, the matchmaking server may store a win/loss percentage for each user (or vehicle) at a given battle level. As the player’s win/loss ratio decreases, the player becomes more likely to be placed in battles having battle levels at the lower end of the allowable range, whereas as the player’s win/loss ration increases, the player becomes more likely to be placed in battles having battle levels at the upper end of the allowable range.

The very next paragraph describes the “not too many games being at the bottom” component of the matchmaker.

According to yet another aspect, with reference back to FIG. 8, a variable may be defined (here, referred to as range variable N) that defines a number of battle sessions that a vehicle must participate in before the vehicle may be assigned to the highest possible battle level within its allowable range of battle levels. Range variable N is used to define a sub-range within the otherwise permissible range of battle levels for a given vehicle. In one variant, a vehicle may be placed in any battle level except the highest allowable battle level, based on any placement algorithm described herein or otherwise, until the player plays at least N battle sessions with a particular vehicle.

Does this patents existence mean, skill based matchmaking is present in the game ?     I believe the Dev’s have said, no, it’s not.    Feel free to find posts that contradict me, I’d be interested, but I’m not going to search out anything supporting my statement – I think it’s well known.

For the Record declines to believe this is implemented.    I’m inclined to believe them.   What would be the reason to lie to the playerbase ?     That doesn’t mean there’s no cause for concern – the real question, is *will* a skill based matchmaker be implemented at some point ?

I hope not.   I like the way it’s done fine – assuming equal skill and trying to match tanks by capabilities.    You can (and should) question whether they achieve that, but the concept seems solid to me.   Skill based can be seen as coddling bad players, and penalizing good players.     Not that it should have much effect on me with my current 49.97% win rate.

Wargaming should clarify the whole thing, given their pretty darn good record of communicating with the players.

Of Tanks and Peds

Tags

Carmageddon, World of Tanks

Posting is light, because interesting milestones in World of Tanks are light.

Thanks to the 5X weekend I ultimately have unlocked a Tier 6 American TD.

Ready to buy the T25 AT

Which removes the Jackson from my primary list, hopefully making grinding a bit faster for the rest of the tanks.   Am I buying the TD ?   Heck no !

And the VK4502P grind from hell continues, but now with 3/4 of the way completed (150k of 196k).    The double weekend crew XP was certainly welcome, but not really noticed among the frantic rush to grab quintuples.    And the Stuart has 37k of the 56k needed to unlock the Chaffee.      The VK 30.02 now has 61k of the 81k it needs as well.    So there was progress made.

One thing I did also do over the weekend – was bolster my stable of premium, training tanks.

Now with four tanks for training an MS-1 crew

I bought my Valentine II which gives the immediate impression of “Haha !    You shall bounce every shot sent my way!”, and while I got a mere 3 matches in it, I think I like it.

The T-127 I was looking forward to.    It’s supposed to be the tank everything pings off of, but vulnerable to flanking.    And then, in my first battle, I find myself on the road in Prohorovka, driving north as a high tier tank.     And I get one shotted from the front.    First hit – no pings off the armor.   Ammo rack explosion.   Ugh.

The bad taste from that lingers, but thanks to the 50% off equipment special (again) I bought the wet ammo rack for it, hoping that is a good idea and not just the RNG being especially cruel to me.

My MS-1 crew moves up a bit and takes 57% on their third skill, which might get to 100% someday if I stop playing anything other than Russian lights.   Well, one can hope.    What I notice most about grinding those two guys, is watching their compatriots needed to fill out the crew on other tanks – still trying to get all of their Brothers in Arms up to 100%.

For the French TD’s I also picked up the FCM36Pak40.    (Did I get that name right from memory ?    Yes, I did)

Ungainly little beast

Big, slow, and awkward to handle, but it does seem to pack a wallop and added several quintuples to my two French crews.

What is really standing out is just how hard it is to grind crew skills.    I think Wargaming ought to lighten that up some.     Getting a good tank takes much less time than it does to move a crew up to multiple 100%’s, unless you move them between tanks.    I never do that – well, unless the tank is awful (Looking at the 4502P) and I think that was a design decision they made.    Collecting is discouraged; keep a few slots and tanks only, and move your crew forward for gold.

If I could manage to grind my way through the T32, I could get an M103 at a 30% discount, but for the moment I’m not going to concern myself with that.    I am nowhere near high enough to reach for the IS-3, which ends tomorrow anyway.

In other news, the Carmageddon Kickstarter campaign that I contributed to has borne some fruit, with my getting a free download of the original Carmageddon, ported to the Android platform.    It’s certainly not a casual phone game, but I enjoyed playing around with it once over the weekend.   No screenshots, as I am waiting for my new phone to be purchased and figure out that whole “rooting it so you can take screenshots” thing.

Still looking forward, someday, to the new Carmageddon version available for the PC.    They clearly blew the Feb 2013 promised deadline.    So much for delivering what you promise.    I think my decision to wait on ever funding another kickstarter, until seeing how this one played out, was very wise.

One of those emails that Stainless sent out (and I which I deleted) apparently spelled out that the game is now expected to take until 2014 to complete.     Let’s hope that they do just that.

A Tale of Russian Corporations

Tags

War Thunder, Wargaming.net

Gaijin Entertainment, the Russian developers of War Thunder, have resorted to the lowest of internet lows – they’ve decided that gaijin.com should belong to them, and have made the appropriate legal threats to back up this claim.

It came to our attention that you registered and maintain a website http://www.gaijin.com (“Infringing Website”) that infringes Gaijin Mark. By maintaining and offering to public your content via the website, i.e., Infringing Website, having the same domain as Gaijin Mark, you create consumer confusion and mistake as to the source, sponsorship and/or affiliation of the
Infringing Website and Gaijin, thereby infringing Gaijin Mark. Consequently, the main purpose of this letter is to demand that you immediately cease and desist from maintaining and offering your content via the Infringing Website or any other site having the domain substantially similar to Gaijin Mark. Gaijin also demands that you immediately transfer the Infringing Domain to Gaijin.

 

A quick perusal of the site shows there’s nothing confusing about gaijin.com which would make you think, you know, a Russian game developer must be running the site.

A couple of years back I wrote a review of a movie that had been the biggest box office smash that year and had won zillions of awards.

I hated it. I hated every moment of it with a passion and fury that outmatched the heat of a thousand fiery suns.

The rest is similar.    The site is simply some guy’s personal blog at this point, with articles (as I scroll down) about Roger Ebert, Tomato sauce, New Years resolutions, and my favorite albums.

This is apparently of no interest to Gaijin Entertainment.    After deciding they wanted the domain, they simply stoop to legal thuggery to attempt to get it, by sending frightening legal letters that would simply stop a non-lawyer in their tracks.

But apparently the guy running the blog has his own lawyer.   Not just anyone – Mike Godwin.    Have you ever heard of Godwin’s law on internet argumentation ?   Yeah, that Godwin.

Please be advised that my client, Brandon Harris, disputes your trademark-infringement claim in every particular.

That is the most polite way to state how vigorously we dispute your attempt to assert flat ownership of the word “gaijin,” a word so well-established in English that it is an entry in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Currently, I’m advising my client to publicize your demand letter, so that the entire game-consuming public will be made aware of your client’s overreaching trademark assertions.

Now set your wayback machine to perhaps 1994.   Well before the time of personal blogs, back when I was still figuring out how this whole Internet Tube works, I ran across a similar little guy story – the bank Chevy Chase demanding a computer consultant release his website chevychase.com to them.     They sent nearly the verbatim letter to this guy, who flailed around for awhile until he managed to get legal help.      I always remember the final outcome for this one – he kept his domain.

They apparently kept after him for awhile, he negotiated, and simply requested that if they wanted the domain so bad, just pay him some fee.    And they disappeared and never came back to haunt him again.

I’ve been sued before, not having the resources to have a lawyer on speedial.   It sucks.    You are the equivalent of the 98 lb weakling getting picked on by the 300 lb hulk.     Getting one of these letters it’s tempting to just give in.    The fact that they have limited bases in law doesn’t seem to matter much – just try and strongarm the guy, and see what happens.    Copy, paste, send – what could go wrong ?

Bad publicity perhaps.     Remember the Streisand effect.

Nowadays it appears that chevychase.com is also a blog page.   Funny how that works.    But no bank owns it.    I certainly hope the same happens for Gaijin. com.    And my respect for Gaijin Entertainment has sunk massively.     You guys have hit an issue that I am intimately familiar with; and you couldn’t be more wrong if you had tried.    And you think I’m going to give you money ?    Not likely.

Coincidentally, today is also the day I get a badly worded translation of a Russian story about how much Wargaming is making.

Revenues – 218 million euros.

Profits – 6.1 million euros.

I couldn’t be happier for Wargaming, providing such an entertaining game and doing the entire software development process right in the process.     If your revenue is so high like that, with profit much lower, it makes me think they could be positioning themselves to be an even bigger gaming company – and given how they treat their star property, that is fantastic news.    That sure dovetails with the upcoming World of Warplanes and the in development World of Battleships.

It could also mean that Wargaming is less business focused and more on providing the right experience for gamers.   This can happen with companies that have success, sometimes.      If so I hope they continue to prosper, and it’s still good news.

PS – I know Wargaming is from Belarus, but it just sounds better calling them Russian and it’s not far off; the country was part of the Soviet Union back in the day.