The Site
The only thing I have about the site is a brand new error that comes up from time to time in my side bar feed. It looked to be a pretty big issue at the beginning of the month.
Missing link IFTTT
It calmed down some after that. I still haven’t figured out the pattern that causes it. if it is specific blogs or not. But the feed fails to load far more often than it shows that error, so one problem at a time. Of course, I don’t know why it fails to load either, especially when a second feed of game company news, which uses the exact same process, seems to load almost without fail. Welcome to the internet.
Meanwhile, in news from elsewhere my other site, EVE Online Pictures, turned 8 years old this month. No big analysis post about it, though if you want to know its traffic numbers, here are the page view stats.
EVE Online Pictures – Eight Years of Page Views
One Year Ago
There was another Newbie Blogger Initiative, for which I wrote a post.
The whole World of Warcraft “flying in Draenor” explosion started when Blizzard announced that they probably wouldn’t allow flying in that, or any future, expansion. Lots of people spoke up. I linked to a bunch of them.
It was not a good month for World of Warcraft. Subscriptions were down to 7.1 million… and then they banned 100K accounts, so make that an even 7 million.
In the Warlords of Draenor expansion itself I was mostly going garrison stuff and pet battles.
Carbine announced that WildStar would be going free to play after continuing poor financial performance.
EVE Online turned 12 years old. CCP was offering fan site the option of a free account OR receiving a PLEX every month. I actually attempted to opt-in for the PLEX, but never heard back. Was that option ever really a thing?
The war in Fountain and Delve was over, NCDot had been crushed yet again, and we were moving back north as our empire contracted. Entosis stuff was looming. Black Legion caught us taking a badly planned convoy through KVN-36. Meanwhile, down in Querious, the Reavers were playing with Ravens. Up in the north, TNT was moving out of Deklein and into Tribute as part of our Fozzie Sov plans. And I hit 140 million skill points.
Then Daybreak went for a crowd pleaser by launching a new time locked expansion server named Ragefire. It was such a crowd pleaser that it couldn’t handle the crowd. In addition to some first night problems, you simply couldn’t log in most of the time. They worked on a login queue and some zone instancing technology from EverQuest II and eventually opened up another server named Lockjaw to take care of the crowding.
TorilMUD, the MUD on which EverQuest was largely based, softened its death penalty. A sign of the times.
There was word of a Warhammer Online private/pirate server for those who missed the departed game.
And I was playing LEGO Star Wars on the PlayStation 3 while the freshly minted Imperium was going to try and play H1Z1.
Five Years Ago
May 2011 was the time of the great Sony outage, with the PlayStation Network down for 24 days and Sony Online Entertainment down for 13 days. It was a communication fiasco from start to finish, with bad updates almost daily. About all they could do was promise us all goodies for when they finally came back up.
CCP was starting the build up to the Incarna fiasco with the introduction of Aurum.
On the Fippy Darkpaw time locked progression server, there was agitation to vote NO on unlocking the Kunark expansion. Such agitation shows up with every unlock vote. But no vote failed until Gates of Discord came along.
The instance group was in EverQuest II… when it was up… and trying to get the hell out of the starter area. We managed it, but it took a lot more time than I would have thought. We started in on some dungeons and got ourselves a guild hall.
World of Warcraft subscriptions started to decline, down to 11.4 million (oh noes!) while Trion started offering free server transfers in Rift.
My daughter was asking me about Dungeons & Dragons. There was a thread going about making better MMO players. There were clearly some bad players about.
And finally, as hot as things seemed to be around here, there was no rapture. You just couldn’t buy a break that month.
Ten Years Ago
World of Warcraft lead designer Rob Pardo was named as one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people for 2006.
The Wii “steals the show” when it comes to the 2006 Electronic Entertainment Expo, or E3. Despite a drop in attendees, there are long lines to try out Nintendo’s new console. This was the last E3 before the “new format” of 2007 and 2008.
The ESRB changed the rating for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion from “Teen” to “Mature” in part due to topless female art assets in the game that could be accessed by mods. Former California Assemblyman Leland Yee (and now Federal Bureau of Prisons inmate number 19629-111) took time out of his organized crime activities to slam the ESRB for missing these hidden art assets.
Featured Sites of the Month
For this month’s featured MMO Blog I want to bring your attention to:
Eri/Jewel is still in her blogging prime, tackling new games, writing about old favorites, linking out to the blogesphere, and a regular podcaster as well.
Then of the “other” site of the month, I want to point you at is:
As pets in WoW eventually transformed into a Pokemon-like mini-game, the “gotta catch ’em all” aspect needed a guide book. Warcraft pets is the place to go to find out what pets you are missing and how to obtain them.
Most Viewed Posts in May
- WoW and the Case for Subscription Numbers
- The Pokemon 20th Anniversary Continues with a Darkrai Event and More
- There is no 85%
- Industrial Revolution
- Blizzard and the MAU Reality
- What is Vanilla WoW in Any Case?
- The Warcraft Movie Approaches
- A Murder of Fax Machines
- Google Tells Me Nearly All Games are Dead
- The People You See in Space
- Citadels in Saranen
- Chasing Asher’s Phantasm
Search Terms of the Month
everquest falling off the boat
[Haven’t we all]
neverwinter paranoid delusions review
[I think mine are more delusions of grandeur]
eve online gsf test reset fountain
[You must be looking for the Fountain War]
in the wheel of time audiobook why do the readers change how they pronounce moghedien
[Noticed that too, did you?]
Spam Comments of the Month
free animal sex pics
[Why pay for animal sex pics?]
I will right away clutch your rss feed
[I am not sure I like the sound of that]
Hello. I am a inexperienced Bank Teller and was planning to better be well prepared for my job at ChevronTexaco Corporation.
[Sounds like an good plan]
Diablo III
I thought about Season 6 for a bit. I even started a new character. Well, an old character really, as I used the rebirth option to restart my barbarian from back at launch. His gear was so bad that he was unplayable anyways, so why not restart him. I played him for about an hour, logged off, and haven’t been back since. Maybe I’ll be up for Season 7.
EVE Online
Of course, for me, the war has been going on in New Eden. We have been evicted from the last of our sovereignty. We retook a couple of systems, and even still hold one, but that is a token effort at best. Yet we still form up and fight our foes when they don’t heavily outnumber us and still hunt their ratters and reinforce their systems. It is a battle of wills and we shall see who tires of it first.
EverQuest II
I have continued meandering around in Norrath. After writing about my slow progress, I actually played some more and am up to level 25. At least I haven’t been distracted by a host of alts, which is my usual problem in MMOs.
Minecraft
The rail loop project continues. I have chosen my path and built a bridge already (a post on that later) and am looking for a site about midway to the mesa biome for one final production camp.
Pokemon
I did not play much Pokemon in May. I made a little progress in Pokemon Blue, essentially finishing up the Silph Co. HQ building. I spent most of my time just downloading the various special Pokemon that Nintendo made available this month, with a side journey to FanimeCon this past weekend in order to collect Street Passes.
Coming Up
There are ongoing reports that there will indeed be a Newbie Blogger Initiative for 2016. However, the forums at NBI HQ appear to be untouched so far.
There was a patch to EVE Online today, YC118.5, which would normally get a blog post out of me. However, aside from new integrated analyzers that are good for both Relic and Data sites, the patch is mostly just fixes. (And some music.) Plus, I already had a regularly scheduled blog post for today, this one. I guess that wasn’t really a “coming up” item, but I didn’t know where else to put it.
The war in the north will carry on into June. Everybody is moving into Saranen, but we’ll get to that in a post later this week I am sure.
The Warcraft movie is a week and a half away here in the US. The reviews have been mediocre, which likely won’t influence fans, but may mean the difference between success and failure at the box office. Word of mouth can influence that, but it will have to spread beyond those who are already fans.
We are also in the run to the WoW Legion expansion, which will hit at the end of August. The expansion is now in closed beta, but the date I am waiting for is when the WoW 7.0 patch will hit. That will be the time to start thinking about resubscribing for me.
As mentioned over the weekend, Daybreak is going to take Landmark live on the same day that the Warcraft movie hits in the US. Not that I think one will have any impact on the other. Meanwhile, the company has some more special servers planned for both EverQuest and EverQuest II. Subscribers only, please.
And then there the possibility that a Steam Summer Sale might be showing up this month. We shall see.
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