Friday, March 31, 2017

March in Review

The Site

It can be a bit of an issue, writing a gaming blog focused on MMORPGs when you are not playing very many such games.  Or only one such game, which in my case is EVE Online, and all the more so when you’re off doing something you’re not supposed to blab about.

MMORPGs just feel more conducive to daily posts than single player games like Pokemon or even shared world games like Minecraft.  Those are good for one post a week if I feel like I have actually done something worth posting about.

Also, I have to take Pokemon screen shots with my phone, and they look like crap

That led to me simply not writing as many posts this month, and many of them were focused on game news and updates and wider industry items.  Those are solid posts, things I like to go back to in a year to see how things really turned out.  But they don’t tell my own story, which is the focus of the blog.

One Year Ago

Daybreak announced that they were giving up on EverQuest Next.  That left me wondering what the future looked like for Landmark.  It wasn’t going to have PvP.

I also wrote up a post about all of the SOE/Daybreak MMOs and their current (mostly closed) status.  Things still looked pretty good for EverQuest at 17, though I wasn’t sure how experience injectors were going to play out in EverQuest II.

Also in EverQuest II the PvP version of their retro nostalgia server, Deathtoll, was getting folded into the PvE version, Stormhold, due to lack of interest, thus ending open world PvP in the game outside of that Russian server.  I was looking for nostalgia on the Stormhold side of things again.

Voting kicked off for CSM 11 with Xenuria on the official Imperium ballot.  How things change.

The monthly EVE Online update introduced Project Discovery and made it so you had to be mutual friends in order to track somebody’s online status in your contact list.  The month’s blog banter wanted people to imagine other games based off of the EVE Online IP, so I went with something akin to Diplomacy.

There were a bunch of little EVE Online things, like server upgrades, downtime compensation, and skill injector fun that I put into one bullet points post.  I like those posts when I do them, I hate them a year later when I want to do my summary.  It is easier when each topic has its own post!

Fighting was going on as the Casino War widened.  Some of the coalition was staged in Saranen, which meant flying quite a ways to defend territory on the far side of Tribute, including an unfortunate event with a Higgs anchor rig on my Guardian.  There were things going on in several regions, including a really good brawl in Fade.

Then the weight in numbers began to tell as we had to fight fires on several fronts.  I wondered if we were going to have a last stand at VFK-IV.  The plan, however, was not to waste ships against the superior numbers arrayed against us.  Instead we gave up territory, announcing the abandonment of the Vale of the Silent region, occupied by Lawn and Bastion, with one constellation owned by Circle-of-Two.  CO2 decided to leave the Imperium over this in order to save their territory, which would soon be the front line in the war, betraying us even as the fight was still going on in M-OEE8.  Once the war was over their new friends turned on them and took their territory anyway.  Who says there are no happy endings?

The M-OEE8 fight was still a big one and got CCP some press.  That is one thing null sec is good for, bringing attention to the game.

Black Desert Online went live and much bitching about the cash shop ensued, so I couldn’t resist jumping on that bandwagon yet again.  The cash shop is a necessary evil at this point.

I was poking fun at VR, which is still struggling for relevance.  Meanwhile EVE Valkyrie and Gunjack went live with the official Occulus Rift launch.

Minecraft 1.9, the Combat Upgrade landed, giving us shields.  I stopped wearing one of those ages ago, as you can’t read maps, among other things, if you have one on.

In Minecraft Aaron’s zombie pig farm was causing MC Pro Hosting to lag out on us.  But we made the switch to the much more reasonably priced Minecraft Realms hosting option, which solved that issue.  Premium pricing was not getting us premium service.

In Diablo III I was chasing the Season 5 set dungeon.

And, finally, things looked grim for WildStar, with China cancelled, layoffs, and dwindling revenue.

Five Years Ago

The family and I went and visited the USS Iowa while it was docked up in Richmond.

April Fools spirit hit Wargaming.net a little early.

It only seemed like Zynga was desperate back then.

I took a quick peek back into Need for Speed: World.

Raptr said I could be the top WoW player they tracked… if I just played another 18,999 hours.

I also rolled a new character on a new server in LOTRO because… why not?

In EVE Online voting commenced and The Mittani won the chairmanship of the CSM 7 by a large margin.  And then he named names during his alliance talk and was removed from CSM 7 and banned from EVE for 30 days.

And if that wasn’t bad enough, we were being taunted by a LEGO Rifter that we were doomed never to see and Derek Smart was telling everybody DUST 514 was doomed to fail.  Well, he got that one right I guess.

Meanwhile, the war in the north was heating up again even without The Mittani.  The CFC was picking up systems in Tenal as bases of operation for the upcoming offensive.  Then there was the bloodbath at C-J6MT.

In Rift, we had a couple of runs at the Foul Cascade.

EverQuest turned 13 and went free to play.  That saw more than a few of us run in to give it a try.  Fall nostalgia in the Spring.  We ran the tutorial, tried out mercenaries, and created a guild.  I am not sure what became of our little group.  Nostalgia is like that.

It was also announced that Vanguard would be going free to play as well.  While on the Fippy Darkpaw server, LDON and LoY went live… I think.

Then I was trying to find another blog name that used the TAGN acronym as a setup for an April Fools joke.  That totally fell flat.

And, finally, I attempted to bring together as many memories from the early days of Air Warrior as I could.

Ten Years Ago

In EverQuest II, my swashbuckler Blintz became my highest level MMO character at the time, hitting the level 50 mark.  I was also going on about the pain of the alchemist trade and offline selling in the game.

Meanwhile, I was still griping about the rise in the cost of Station Access, but at least I got something of an answer as to how my Station Access dollars were allocated.  SOE was having problems with their email marketing though.

In World of Warcraft the instance group, after a couple attempts finally finished up Uldaman in one of the more memorable fights of our time as a team, was then coming to a temporary stopping point at Zul’Farrak. Work would keep Earl too busy to play with us for the next few months. Meanwhile, a load of my other friends in WoW disappeared due to server splits.

Proving that random grouping has been a problem for a long time, there was a discussion going around about being able to rate people with whom you have grouped.  That option doesn’t seem to have come to pass.

CCP was whispering in my ear about resubscribing for their Revelations expansion.

EverQuest turned 8 years old and the blog itself hit the six month mark.

And, finally, I had a comically large arrow stuck in my head.

Most Viewed Posts in March

  1. Quote of the Day – CCP Picks Winners
  2. Pokemon Go Account Hacked and Recovered
  3. YC119.3 Update Brings Rorqual Nerfs and Bubble Decay to New Eden
  4. Burn Jita Returns for 2017
  5. PLEX Shattering Proposal for New Eden
  6. The Ongoing Tension Between Solo and Grouping
  7. Oscar at Peace
  8. Pondering That Legion Level 100 Boost
  9. Nostalgia for a Virtual Spaceship
  10. Minecraft and Coming to the End of My Road
  11. The Coming of Refineries in New Eden
  12. Reflections and Postcards from Burn Jita 2017

Search Terms of the Month

cleric spell syntax torilmud
[c ‘full heal’ meclin]

twitter vanhemlock
[Not as amusing as the blogging or podcasting vanhemlock]

how to make a charged creeper farm survival
[Aaron did that already]

eve how to get places faster
[Jump clones? Interceptors?]

hussein althumani buffalo
[I don’t even know how that string got you here]

EVE Online

The first half of the month was fairly quiet.  We got the monthly update, I did some ratting, but not much exciting happened.  For the second half I have been on a deployment, but I do not write about deployments until they are over.  A post about that will come as soon as we are home.  I did do my first combat probe scanning, though if you look at my kill board, I only had simple targets in mind.

Minecraft

I continue to work on the long road.  With less than 2km left to go, I should be able to wrap the project up.  Then I will have to ride it end to end to see just how long it takes to go 20+ km on a horse.  Meanwhile, a couple of people from my corp in EVE Online have joined our server, so more people are building things in our world.

Pokemon

I went to town with Pokemon Sun, wrapping up the main story line and the post story activities and finishing the Alola Pokedex.  However, that really hasn’t sated my Pokemon playing binge, so I am wondering what to do next.

Pokemon Go

The rainy weather abated in California in time for the Water festival in Pokemon Go.  That actually let me catch a number of new Pokemon, though I did not get nearly enough Magikarp in order to evolve a Gyrados.  Playing it gets me to take a walk every day to pick up a few of the nearby Pokestops.  My basic stats this moneth:

  • Level: 27 (+1)
  • Pokedex status: 149 (+21) caught, 172 (+19) seen
  • Pokemon I want: Final evolution of any of the starter Pokemon
  • Current buddy: Hoothoot, who earns a candy every kilometer.

Coming Up

It is April Fools tomorrow, so prepare for the few funny, and the many unfunny, attempts to play on the theme of the day.  There are already some items out there, like the Reddit post about Brave Newbies disbanding.  Be more skeptical than usual through the weekend.

We should be getting a lot more EVE Online news next week, as Fan Fest runs April 6-8.  We will also learn who will be sitting on CSM XII.  And we should get the usual monthly update as well at some point.

Our deployment in New Eden seems likely to wrap up soon-ish, so I will post about those adventures, such that they were.

I will likely finish the long road.  Then it will be a matter of what to do next.

We will also hit the 10 year anniversary for Lord of the Rings Online.  I have to imagine they will have somethings planned for that.

And I have to our income taxes and make our property tax payment.  The joys of adulting.

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