The Site
Well, the MMO Bloggers Feed in my side bar got a last minute reprieve when IFTTT decided not to cut off Pinboard support on April 4th.
Pretty much the synopsis…
That was probably a good thing as my experiments with Delicious created RSS feeds have been a complete flop. Not only do they have ads injected into the feed… which I get, they have to make money somehow… but something between Delicious and WordPress.com isn’t picking up the feed as it updates. So while I look at the raw RSS and see new things being added, the feed just sits with the first couple of items. Bleh.
Meanwhile, nobody has suggested anything about the Google+ syndication issue I mentioned last month, which I am going to take as a sign that either nobody really cares about Google+ syndication or nobody noticed that my posts stopped appearing there. Probably the latter.
In addition, because I have a Google login that I use to comment on Blogger sites, I made a blog over there to point to this one since my Google profile only likes blogs they host. But as I was tinkering with various RSS and feed options, I thought I figured out how to get anything that posted here to also post straight to that site as well. I put that in place but never actually tested it.
Imagine my surprise when I passed by the blog half way into the month and found that it worked. So I renamed the site The Redundant Ancient Gaming Noob. The only problem is that it takes the post as published and never picks up any revisions, so all my original typos are there. (And I am too lazy to go fix them… though it takes a while to poll, so if I fix them right after I hit the “Publish” button… which, due to some lesser known physical property of the universe, is the only time I can actually see my own typos… then I can catch them in time.) Still, it seems to work. Not sure it is much use and I figured the whole thing our about nine and a half years too late for me to jump ship to the Blogger platform.
And, finally, I thought I might not have anything to complain about when it came to WordPress.com this month, and then they decided to change the interface for doing inline links in such a way that they are more annoying AND you can easily delete them by accident. Since that is a feature I use constantly… just look at them all in this post… that bit of nonsense has had me fuming for days. It is like they never think things through.
One Year Ago
As ever, it was April Fools at Blizzard and elsewhere.
Elsewhere, EA was still selling lots of Sims titles, but were cutting online games like Need for Speed: World.
In what I thought must be an April Fools joke, Daybreak said they were not going to do any more expansions for EverQuest II. Instead it was going to be DLC like the Rum Cellar. A rum idea if ever there was one. Likewise, though EverQuest was getting a new progression server, it seemed like it was the end of the road for expansions in old Norrath. Also, that logo, totally not stolen.
Of course, why would you even need an official progression server, since Daybreak declared Project 1999 totally legit.
And speaking of rum ideas from Daybreak, they were also pushing people off of their forums and on to Reddit. How were they going to lock threads and delete posts there?
CCP was talking about ship skins in EVE Online, in hopes of finally finding the right formula for the Mosaic expansion.
In New Eden the war was still going in Delve, including a big fight at ZXB-VC, while the Reavers were doing their work in Querious. Not only that, but we were also decked out in our spiffy new jackets… well, some of us were. I was trying to be in both fronts of the war. The Reavers front was the place to be though.
The Imperium was declared, with Max Singularity VI as our spiritual leader. Also, Karma Fleet was launched and Xenuria got in and was a Goon for like ten minutes! How crazy was that? I’m sure that will never happen again. Right?
Blizzard’s WoW Token idea went live, and the US regional version immediately dropped below the opening price. They also had a beta for the Legacy of the Void expansion for which I was not prepared.
The instance group was doing Auchindoun and Skyreach in Draenor… after which we were fresh out of dungeons until we all hit 100. After that I was leveling up some characters and complaining about little things in WoW.
Meanwhile, the war of the rings in Lord of the Rings Online was dragging out into its eighth year. Is this Mordor or Afghanistan?
While we’re there, Guild Wars turned ten.
And there was this Liebster thing, which feels like it happened a lot longer than just a year ago.
Five Years Ago
Of course, there was some April foolery both here and at Blizzard.
I also wrote something about magic quadrants.
Sanya Weathers had one of the best quotes about MMO gamers ever, made all the more amusing by its truth.
Battlefront.com released a completely new version of their original WWII Combat Mission series.
Wargaming.net released World of Tanks.
SOE’s spy themed MMO, The Agency, was officially cancelled.
We got a PlayStation 3. And then the PlayStation Network got hacked. At least I could still play Blu-Ray disks and stream Netflix.
The instance group got together and decided to try out EverQuest II Extended, the one-time separate free to play version of EverQuest II. However, the game immediately began to kick us in the teeth for daring to do solo content as a group.
Being there in EQIIx also meant looking at what the cash store had to offer. Some of this stuff is gone now in the post merger era of EQII. Flying mounts are still around. And some idea, like selling max-level characters, would have to wait a while to come back.
And Potshot and I were still playing EverQuest. We moved on from Unrest to Lake Rathetear and spent an evening there. Then it was on to Kerra Island and finally we made it to Runnyeye, at which point SOE also went down due to the PSN hacking. That pretty much ended our EverQuest adventures for 2011.
I did have to explain EverQuest to my daughter. Her foundation in MMOs is World of Warcraft.
Ten Years Ago
ANet releases its first post-launch Guild Wars expansion, Guild Wars: Factions. It only took them a year, too. Right, Blizzard? See?
Auto Assault went live, perhaps the first “troubled at launch” MMO I am personally aware of that fails to get past its issues. The game ends up being shuttered by NCsoft 19 months down the road. It is, for a while, the poster child for MMO launch failures.
Nintendo announced the name of their new console, slated to replace the GameCube. Known up to that point only by its code name “Revolution,” Nintendo said it was going to call it the “Wii.”
Viacom spent $102 million to purchase Xfire. According to Viacom: “Xfire and its users fit squarely into the Company’s multiplatform strategy to build an engaging universe of music, gaming, entertainment, news, networking and interactivity for focused audiences.” They also thought NeoPets were worth splurging on as well.
Featured Sites of the Month
For this month’s featured MMO Blog I want to bring your attention to:
Kirith Kodachi has been plugging away for more than a decade at his blog. While not initially about MMOs, he fell into EVE Online at about the same time I did (I beat him by 10 days), at which point it began to take over his blog, a situation that persists through to today. EVE is just a crazy game that is fun to write about, and it has been interesting to watch our parallel, yet very different, trajectories through New Eden.
Then of the “other” site of the month, I want to point you at is:
While zKillboard now gives you something of a battle report with its related kills option, I much prefer the output from the Battle Report Tool. It draws data from zKillboard to piece together the raw details about who shot whom and which ships got blown up and how much ISK it was all worth. While I am not all about the kill mails, I do like looking at battle reports this site generates in order to understand what happened. I often have a sense in a battle if we’re doing well or not, but this helps quantify what just happened.
Most Viewed Posts in April
Well, I can write every day of the week about EVE Online, but nothing brings in traffic like a World of Warcraft post.
- April Fools at Blizzard – 2016
- Blizzard, Nostalrius, and the Classic Server Question
- Will Nostalrius Drama Shift the Sleeping WoW Giant?
- War Footing, War Fever
- FCON Leaves The Imperium
- SMA Leaves The Imperium
- World War Bee – What’s in a Name?
- WoW and the Case for Subscription Numbers
- Google Tells Me Nearly All Games are Dead
- The Russian Complication
- FCON Shows Up in Immensea
- CSM 11 Announced – Xenuria Wins at Last
Search Terms of the Month
Claude Ring
[Once I saw that, I made an alt with that name]
origin unifies your gaming life
[The way your mom organizes your trading cards]
legion gonna suck
[And haters gonna hate]
if you change world of warcraft payment plan do you get a refund
[no]
lotro level store
[I don’t think the cash shop is quite there yet]
what do you get after you complete the national pokedex
[Your life back?]
Diablo III
I haven’t really played much Diablo III this past month, except to go in once Season 5 ended to clean up my storage situation. It is nice to have everything combined into the common storage, but the fact that the game mails you all of your seasonal stuff was kind of a pain. Okay, maybe I should have recycled some of those legendary items I held onto, because it took a while to collect all the items and then sort them out into different boxes.
EVE Online
The war goes on. On the down side, we’ve lost almost all our sovereignty. On the up side, we don’t have to go very far to find fun. There has been an almost continuous supply of fleet ops from Saranen for the last few weeks. I am starting to think the war effort depends mostly on Boat holding out. He has been running fleets every day for hours at a stretch. Best fleets to be on though.
Oh, and there was the Citadel expansion that has the potential to change everything in New Eden.
EverQuest II
I have pottered around on the Stormhold nostalgia server off and on this month. EQII is less of a solo game for me than others. I don’t think I have ever played for more than a week or so without ending up in a guild with at least a few people I know. But it is fun. The pace is slow and it is relaxing if I have a couple of free hours. My shadow knight is level 22 and fumbling around between Nek forest and Butcherblock.
Minecraft
I swear I meant to do a Minecraft post this month. Actually I have a few. But I never quite got there. News of the moment from the war in New Eden and Blizzard managed to preempt tales of building. Still, if I look at Raptr, I spent more time in Minecraft than any other game in April… though that might be because Raptr stopped tracking EVE Online when I upgraded to the new launcher. Doh! I have to remember to manually enter that time, and I forget more often than I remember.
Pokemon
I have been carrying on with Pokemon Blue. Another gym badge down. Progress has been slow in part because it remains the fourth item on my list of things to play of late, and because it is a game I don’t play sitting at my desk in front of my computer. As such, I never launch Pokemon by default, I have to actively want to play it. Still, I have time to finish. Pokemon Sun & Moon are not due until winter.
World of Warcraft
I did not actually PLAY WoW in April, aside from logging in to check something out on a level 20 character. But I did write about it. I didn’t even write that much, but if you look at the top posts for the month, WoW was definitely a big topic. The whole vanilla/classic/special server thing opened up a lot of emotions and I am sure we are not done with it yet. I know I am not.
Coming Up
Summer is coming, and May is its harbinger… at least out here in Silicon Valley where despite what the calendar says it can feel like Summer from some point in April through until November. Not sure that means much for the blog, aside from the fact that I might write more with the window open in the evenings.
The war in New Eden will carry on and we shall see who has the greater endurance. CCP though, I am going to bet we are going to see a lot of post-Citadel patches in May.
The Warcraft movie is just a month and ten days away, so I expect to see Blizzard ramping up on that pretty strongly while trying to go back to ignoring the whole vanilla server drama it stirred up by shutting down Nostalrius.
Speaking of Blizzard, their latest title, Overwatch, will go live this month. I am not really interested in playing myself… and my daughter, who wants to play, is fuming about the lack of MacOS support… but another game from Anaheim means that much less focus on WoW. It isn’t a zero sum thing, but a company can only put out so much PR before it is trying to talk over itself.
Also, isn’t Daybreak supposed to ship Landmark this spring? May is the last full month of spring left this year… well, that and 20 days of June. That will be a thing.
I will write something… or finish writing something… about Minecraft.
And… what else is coming up in May?
No comments:
Post a Comment