Portal Submissions – Suspended ?

Tags

Ingress, war-worlds

I heard about Ingress when it first started, and I predicted at the time it would go nowhere because it was relying on the community to submit portals.   I was completely wrong, but I was surprised once I started playing – they actually reviewed each submission and approved or rejected them, not in a timely fashion, but that was the process.   The quality of them, all things considered, is pretty high.

Then, a couple of things have happened recently.

• Niantic gets spun off from Google.    Part of some corporate restructuring.   Rumors swirl that it’s because whatever “Greater Google” wanted to get out of Ingress, it didn’t happen.
• Layoffs happen at the now-separate Niantic, as well as new people being hired.    Translation : Get rid of the higher salary people, and rehire cheaper ones.
• Today, new portal submissions have been suspended.

When I read the tea leaves, I get that Niantic is in a bit of trouble.    They have some serious staffing costs here, what with the events they put on globally, whoever keeps their back end systems working, that girl that does the Ingress reports that I never watch – and paying the portal monkeys to sift through portal submissions.    You can cut costs if you cease to process new portals.

Anyone want to argue there are not enough portals in their area ?    I sure don’t.   Everywhere I’ve gone there are portals, from campgrounds to little hamlets and to roadside stands.   So it’s not that I see a gameplay problem, rather I wonder if the game will last long enough for me to…. I don’t know.   Get to Level 16 ?   Get bored and quit ?    Get all Onyx badges ?

Will I manage to reach the point where I’ve finished the game ?    Or is it going to get shut down; or be a zombie like War Worlds.   The game was supposed to shut down last year, it’s apparently limping along still.

 

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Returning to War Worlds

Tags

war-worlds, World of Tanks

I was out of ability to play more City Domination, not being able to drive around and having exhausted the area I was sitting in.    And for no particular reason, I reloaded up War Worlds to see if it still existed.

Turns out developer Dean decided to keep the game going, and he’s made some absolutely critical improvements.

I never understood what the use of this screen was. But look at that new checkbox !

Now, you can actually see what star systems aren’t “doing anything” and can get to work on building ships or whatnot.

My To-Do list

It’s only 99.9% perfect – those first five stars are “10 food” systems where nothing can be built without starving the populace.     So now I’m working on the “J’s” and giving all my systems orders again.

And they fixed my number one complaint with the game.

No more 5,000 queue limit!

The limit is now 50,000.     Trying to time each system to complete in around 90 days, I am only hitting a few that I might want to try two sets of 50,000.    So you can get the housekeeping out of the way a lot quicker, versus adding 12 5,000 ship items to the queues.

It seems Dean listened to me and my request.   Cool.

There’s not much changed in the greater game, I’m still #6 worldwide and part of the Dominion alliance.    I have a new neighbor with a wormhole at my southwest corner, but it’s hard to be worried about it.    Instead, the only question I really have is how long I’ll keep playing this, and will I reach 10 million population.

The new bug is with the starmap.     Big chunks of it might be missing when you scroll in and out, requiring a restart which should bring you the area of interest.

I have some fun things going on in World of Tanks as well.

Do you see them ?

Two things of note here.     #1, is I am now a Chinese Tank Master, having killed a 121 at long last.     And #2 is I blew all my credits again, currently holding a mere 110k.    Tanks on sale and equipment sales meant it was time to go on a buying spree.   I’m still hoping to finish equipping my SU-152 with Vents and a Rammer (550,000 credits on sale), which will give all my tanks all the equipment I could desire.    Sale ends on Sunday so it’s not too likely, but you have to shoot for something.

Tonight continues the 3x crew XP event, as I continue to run my tanks for grinding matches.    My M6 is becoming a fearsome beast with the crew’s skills increasing so much; the Easy 8 is an excellent support tank; and the Tetrarch is great for seal clubbing.    They’re all three approaching the 370 matches desired which would finally complete that goal – pushing the 4502B off my most played list.

I’m looking forward to just playing elited tanks more because I’m in the mood, or whatever, rather than grinding them.   Grinding should really fall to the many tanks I am playing for XP (E-75, The Toaster, PZ III/IV, MT-25, et cetera ad naseum)

Something for every interest

Tags

City Domination, Minecraft, PC Tech, war-worlds

I did find a nether fortress, and fought my first blazes.    A bit hard, and a bit difficult – it was hard to just get one at a time.      But I got tired of the nether, collected up all the loot and went back to the overworld.    All I really need to do is collect netherrack anyway, and smelt it into nether bricks.   Then I can make nether blocks.    I do also need to harvest quartz.    I have a fair amount of all of that.

Next activity – cutting a road through more mesa, on towards the roofed forest.    This gave me a pretty good collection of various clays and sands.     And when I reached the border with the forest, I created a new bolt hole.     Nothing takes longer than cutting paths through roofed forest – with the exception of paths through jungle, or clear cutting either one.

New Bolt Hole. I like the dark oak doors, pretty cool.

Cutting through the forest.

There’s a plains fairly close past the forest, so I’m trying to finish the path through there and then head back with the loot.    My Dark Oak chest is pretty empty.

I found out that War Worlds is still going – the developer Dean has backtracked on shutting it down.     But I’d rather play a game with very little bugs like City Domination.    I am *this close* to the top 25 for individual players, a mere 6k points, which I can probably acquire by Monday.

And this is a pretty high rank in the game.

Moving in on the Warner Brothers studios. I’ll try to take Disney next.

Having finally ordered a GTX 970 and other required computer parts, I’m now waiting for the stuff to get here and create a new monster for me.     So plenty of things going on, even if it’s all very short notes and not my more enjoyed long-form blogging.

Mobile Gaming update, August 2014

Tags

City Domination, war-worlds

War Worlds is coming to an end.

War Worlds is coming to an end.

Or is it ?    After hue and cry from the community, the fate of the game is now up in the air.   At post time, the game is still working to a certain degree.

I’m done.   I can hardly believe I put up with the bugs and slowness as long as I did.    I would certainly love another space game of this type, but this particular one is not optimized well enough to handle large empires.   The answer to the question “What if MoO never ended ?” is “The game would choke under its own programming”.

I would like to be around to see “the end”, if it’s going to happen.   If someone gets the code and optimizes it that would be even better, since the game just locks up pretty quick when I try to play.

City Domination, on the other hand, is a mobile addiction.   The game performs snappy as hell, unlike War Worlds.

Some of my conquests.   Green has been “Rallyed”, white belongs to me.   Red is available to be rallied.

Doc Burbank’s Crew is solidly #2 in LA County, with a large presence in both Burbank where I work, and Santa Clarita where I live.    The I-5 is a major freeway which runs between the two, and is 3/4 my gang’s territory.

It’s good that the gameplay is fun, as far as it goes – there are few players to interact with.    Most interaction consists of the big nationwide gangs sending out various blind invites and begging you to join their gang.    They do this because your areas do not belong to you, they belong to the gang.

When you start, you are your own little gang and you take over a few territories.    Then you get an invite to join a gang.   Bam, all your territory is transferred to the other gang.   Given the large number of squares I control, they’ve all asked me to join them and I don’t see the need.    Nobody is threatening me.   It would be hard to do so.    And I’d rather see my own accomplishments.

The players near me include :

• Don Corndog, the newer guy who is probably the 2nd guy playing in Santa Clarita, and who also has presence in Lancaster.
• Amahoser, who is probably 8 years old and attends an elementary school in Burbank.   Does not respond to messages which annoys me for no good reason.
• Pezzonovante, the leader of LA’s #1 gang and based in Pasadena.    Chill guy who I like, but not enough to join his gang, Harvesters of Sorrow.
• Monolicious, a newer player in Burbank and part of HoS.    He popped up right in the area I wanted to expand into.    Well, I can go around him.
• El Sureno, expanding across North Hollywood and only able to respond to messages with grunts.

After going to war with Amahoser, I was soundly thrashed.   I had hoped to keep the entire I-5 to myself and just muscle this guy to death, but he’s defending his area with strength.     I gave up and am just working around him, and hoping his absence today means he’s uninstalled the game.    You can’t defeat someone who turtles up near his home, he’ll have too many opportunities to attack you, and ride the limits established to victory.

There are clearly many other “gangs” in these areas, but these are all bots – automated setups to give a little spice to the game.   Defend your areas well enough and you are safe from them.

Points in the game correspond to income.   Income is capped at a ridiculous 3000/hr for some reason, leaving your points only useful as a way to climb leaderboards – which I love, of course.    And points in the long term correspond to men in defense in your areas.    You get a lot more based on the amount of conflict that has happened for a certain square, but it decays at 7.5% per day.    This means the long term strategy is to populate your squares with as many men as possible for both defense and points.

So I continue to work on a solid line of squares between Santa Clarita and Burbank on the I-5, and adding 200 men to each square.    This should take perhaps 3 months at the current rate.   The line I’ve established is pretty broken up, but you have to defend each square in strength or the bots will take it back from you.   I’ve bought the upgrades to 120 men and 12,000 in the bank, and if I continue to enjoy the game I might blow some more money on it.

Statistics today.   #2 gang in LA County.    #87 gang in the USA.    #61 player in the USA.   So I’m doing well in every category, and this reinforces just how empty the game is and how likely you are to dominate if you just keep playing.   Keep playing is my strength.

Mobile Gaming, July 2014 edition

Tags

City Domination, war-worlds

City Domination is a new entrant in the geo-located category of games.     The game gets a GPS fix (or from Wifi or Cell towers in its absence) and places you in the world where it finds you.     The world has a grid superimposed on it of territories, and you (and your gang) take them over for income, territory, fame and fortune.

Hanging out in Santa Clarita CA

The gameplay is dead simple, with a number of limiting features.    #1, you can only have $10,000 at any one time.    #2, you can only have 100 men in your “inventory” at any time.      Your men enable you to either defend your existing territories, or attack and conquer new ones, and can be purchased for the low price of $100 each, corresponding with the $10k in your bank.

Start off by spying on a new territory within your circle of activity.     The game will report how many enemy players are there, and attack with a few more than that to take possession of the square.    Then defend.

It would probably be thoroughly boring except for the addition of the “rally” mechanic.     Once per day, you are able to steal a certain number of men from a territory by being in it and rallying.     The reward is 1-3 men, not much, but when you are a passenger in a car this gives you a new way to be antisocial on your phone take over additional areas.     You can ignore the game for awhile and let your money build up, then attack, if you choose as well; or if you’re not driving about.

Doc Burbank and his gang – oh, wait, I’ve not recruited anyone – are in 7th place in Los Angeles County,with a presence in many other states after my recent vacation.      This is turning out to be a much better mobile game than War Worlds for multiple reasons.

Of course, blow real life money on powerups to really take over.

War Worlds continues to crash often if I scroll the map, which has fed frustration and leads me to pretty much give up the game.    I do have 9 million people in my empire, but the killer mechanics are very simple.

5000 ship limit.    The game only lets you build 5000 at a time.    I am now at the stage of the game where I want a 120 day queue for each planet, and have some systems which can finish 5000 ships in 4 days.     To input that many 5000 queues is just boring drudgery.     Combining so many into one stack from 5000 ships groups sucks too.     I was already questioning my sanity in sitting on my phone playing it constantly, but vacation and a new game really brought it into focus.    So I am barely keeping up with the game drama, and trying to keep starting new queues when I have a few minutes.    And that’s about it for War Worlds.

So many ships. No movement on population in quite a while.

 

Still gaming. For life.

Tags

Criminal case, Sparta, war-worlds, World of Tanks

When you’re not really deeply playing a rich game – it’s hard to blog regularly.    Nevertheless, plenty of gaming is going on.

I have reached the 9 million person mark in War Worlds, and continue to prosecute the war against Germania.    Bugs and memory leaks are on the developers mind but not yet fixed as of post time.    This is making it harder to fight Germania but not impossible, fighters continue to sweep northward and crush stars, but my last reserves are ready to come out sometime on Sunday.   We’ll see how it all comes out – will I make it, and drive a wedge clean through Germania, or will other alliance members ?

Facebook games got a new lease on life for me.    Currently playing Criminal Case; this is in the genre of I-Spy, where you need to find items and the quicker you do it, the more you score.    The pacing is well done, and it’s more of a story telling game, with you being a police detective investigating murders.

Poking around on the docks, looking for murder evidence.

Having analyzed some evidence, I’m going to find out what it means.

The story unfolds at a good pace, since you only get a certain amount of energy per day, and offering perfectionists and competitive types the chance to be better than your friends.    Try it out – I’m enjoying this.

Then there’s Sparta, which is an Evony-like game where you are a Spartan resisting the Persian empire’s invasion.    This one is interesting at the moment, as I build up my city with various improvements, but if I find myself getting an Evony-style stomping I’m sure I’ll drop it.

My City. Under construction.

Also, the Steam sale is also ongoing.    I am making a lot of cheap purchases, but playing few of them.   I did pick up Banished and Papers, Please, and will probably write about them if I manage to play them for awhile.    Why, exactly, I’m blowing money on games I’m not playing is not something I feel like analyzing.     What I can say is, if it’s still on sale, buy the Stanley Parable.    It’s silly, but completely original.

I’ve begun once again to play World of Tanks.    Much, much fewer matches than I have in the past – maybe 4 or 5 a night.   Completed the goal of getting the Jagdtiger the magic 371 matches to pass my hated VK4502B, and working on a bunch of lower tier tanks at the moment.     There are new maps which I don’t play well; edited maps which trip me up unexpectedly; and the usual fun 15-minutes-a-time gaming.

What is very unwelcome are the HD graphics now expanding outwards for all tanks – this means that all my beautiful skins are GONE !    The process of making everything HD compatible required the file structure to change, so the old skins don’t work.   To skin a tank is still possible, but nobody seems to be doing it, and I’m no artist to be able to do so myself.    I have maybe 5 of them in HD versions, but I’m discouraged that the others may never get anything cool.

Playing my Tier 9’s all the way down the line, I still find myself most enjoying the Tier 1 matches in my Loltracker, which is maybe 50 matches away from 371.    Maybe I should just grind that up to 1000 matches like my MS-1.

Soldiering onward

Tags

war-worlds

Here is your latest War Worlds update.

So close to 9 million

The Coricyn front continues to get rolled up.    Managed to get a bunch of ships together and finally link the northern and southern parts of the front.

Smashing that thin little line then it’s eastward only.

And Germania continues to get eaten.

Maybe 1/3 of the way through his empire, straight up.

Clearly, this is a game of patient accumulation.   In the face of bugs.    A situation I’m uniquely suited for.

Bug Fixes Galore

Tags

war-worlds

Many bugs have been fixed in War Worlds, and the game is running smooth as butter for me, at least.    And the most important bug is fixed – Leaderboards are back.

No Ranking Change

I’m getting closer to the 9 million population mark, which is my next goal.    Expansion continues along a few fronts :

Coricyn Front.     As ships get built they are pressed into service to work on and wreck the enormous navy that Coricyn has.   No rush, because he’s inactive, but it’s good practice as it turns out.

Still trying to link up the two areas. Won’t be long now.

Filling in the box – this is boring, it turns out.    Instead, I am making lines of systems across it and subdividing it, which will eventually fill in all the area.

Drew a line across. Now going northwards.

South of Worst – I began establishing systems here to deter possible aggression and help out neighbor “Worst Empire Ever”.   I plan to continue and move southward in this area because it’s fun.    As long as I go south, I shouldn’t be causing any problems boxing in my neighbor.

Worst is in green. The dark blue is an inactive empire.

Oh – I almost forgot – the “war”.    More of an extermination plan against an inactive empire, which I have plenty of experience with now.

Pushing on north, establishing colonies, and spending a small fortune.

And with the game running even smoother, it’s much more fun to expand and expand and expand.

Your weekend war update

Tags

war-worlds

The war against Germania is going well.

First off, the combined blitz of three large and active alliances, all hitting him and his alt empires, at the same time – seems to have killed his fighting spirit.    At least at his main empire, absolutely no resistance is being offered, so that’s very good news for me as I attack and expand.    It’s tough enough to deal with the fighters all parked on his many worlds.

I took Omaha beachhead / wormhole.   In honor of the recent D-Day anniversary, each wormhole got named after either a D-Day beach or a similarly WW II – ish name.    And with no opposition my victory was assured.

After the wormhole landed, my fleet started flying.

Initially I took two of his stars in a V , north of the wormhole.    Once conquered, I went after four more stars north and east/west.    These were taken this morning, and I now have fleets on the way to an additional four stars in a roughly northerly direction.

State of the fighting at the moment

Gold Beachhead featured a fighter/troopship blitz by Rice Cracker across Germania, wiping out his colonies, with subsequent colonization for a Forward Operating Base, or a “FOB” in alliancespeak.

Omaha Beachhead features my slow and thorough elimination of Germans, at the speed of colony ships.    I was kind of hoping for some counterattack, but nothing has materialized so far.

Utah Beachhead features the guy who was threatened with extinction in the past, S-10 Fury, moving fleets in with lesser strength and taking out plenty of enemy strongholds.

My goal is to go northward, seeing how things go on either side.    I am pretty confident Gold is completely OK and will be dealt with thoroughly.   Utah may be a bit slow, and so we’ll see if I continue to have the strength to move forward and perhaps branch out easterly to continue the destruction.

Detail of flights in progress over Omaha

So far, the only limiting factor is fuel.    I’m spending millions moving all these fighters around.   But with my income rarely being exceeded in the past, why worry ?    At the moment I am trying to burn through funds received from the alliance with limited success; not a bad thing at all !

The crunch will come when I don’t have enough fighters to continue to fight, which will probably happen at some point.     I have alternate wormholes which can be connected to others and send through more fighters, so that is a limited problem.

In the meantime, there are also interesting developments.   Maybe two, three weeks ago I began to submit constant bug reports.   Previously, I had just gotten the crash reports and clicked OK.    I began to wonder, is the information reaching Dean the developer about just how crashy his game is ?

I think I know the answer now.   Nope.   He wasn’t aware, or didn’t have the right information to deal with it.    As of yesterday we received the second bug fix patch which has improved performance a fair amount and has removed some crashes.   Yay !

Still waiting on the leaderboard fix however.

How about a little War over Father’s Day weekend ?

Tags

war-worlds

War Worlds has had an update, a non-game one, which moved the database from one type to another.     And an awesome bug fix – shields do not disappear once you’ve moved a fleet.

However, it’s also gotten another really nasty problem.    The Leaderboard is broken.    Talk about sapping the interest of us players, running up and down the leaderboard is a big part of the fun.     Everyone is begging for that to be fixed, along with the usual requests for crashes as the game does that a lot.

Thankfully, an event got organized which keeps me in game and progressing.     There is a racist pottymouth guy with a lot of “German” empires.    Germania, Austria, Prussia, etc.    He’s apparently created a ton of alt accounts and made quite a big empire, with his main one not too far away from me.    A drawing is in order.

The Nearby Universe

The Worst Empire borders Germania.   He has created a ton of wormholes which the entire Dominion is going through and attacking Germania with the intent of wiping him out.

Black spots on border are future wormholes

I’m going to participate and create what colonies I can in this area, since it’s close to me, and will break up the monotony of killing native empires.

The early attack comes from the top player Cakies from the North side.

The Hammer is falling.

Germania got wind of the attack – or some of Cakies fleet has already hit him.    He responded with his usual lack of grace.

Pottymouth.

It should be a good, interesting fight.

In the meantime, Burbankanova moves forward on a few different fronts.    Coricyn’s easy to conquer stars are all mine, and I’m waiting for large enough fleets to be built near him to continue the crawl forward.     So many stars with 5-20k fighters on them.     It’s just a matter  of time however.

The box is almost complete

When I saw that little green empire (inactive, of course) called themselves the Stoners I knew I had to wipe them out.   And that should finish the final linkup.

No updates for about a week. I really miss it.