The Site
I started getting ready for Blaugust, but I am probably still behind on things. I do tend to write things in my own good time. This is why I can never write for anybody else.
A picture of one of our cats because I don’t have a relevant image
July was sort of an odd traffic month. The actual volume of traffic was about normal for these days, even a little bit better than the last couple of months. The number of referrals from search engines was about on par, almost exactly the same as May, which meant I was getting a little more direct traffic I guess.
The odd bit was the posts that were popular this month. If you look down at the “most viewed” posts section you will see that not a single post that I wrote during the month of July made it into the top dozen, the closest being in 17th place. I do not think I have ever had that happen before.
Also, the selection of posts on that list… again, odd. I mean, the top one is normal, but some of the others are strange. I guess Burn Jita 2018 came up somewhere, but otherwise I cannot explain it.
Maybe that post about masks was relevant after one EVE blogger turned completely toxic and got himself banned, only to claim it was all an project for a class and expecting all his bad behavior to be forgiven. (That didn’t work out well and, unsurprisingly, he went right back to toxic, leaving his excuse more than a bit threadbare.)
But the two FML posts from past seasons? I am not sure what got them all that traffic.
One Year Ago
We adopted a new kitten. He’s much bigger now.
The Steam Summer Sale wrapped up and I went over what I bought and what I considered buying, but then passed on.
Amazon Prime Day came and went and I realized I had been buying things from Amazon for 20 years.
I started using a dual monitor setup at home. It took me a while to get used to it… I would turn off the second monitor a lot early on… but it seems natural enough now.
Gevlon was telling us about the corrupt game developer career path. I bet you wish you knew it was just that easy to get rich.
The call of nostalgia got me to subscribe to EverQuest II for a bit to try the Fallen Gate progression server. I got far enough to get the crazy mount.
In EVE Online Reavers were deployed in the east of New Eden where we helped blow up a Fortizar in the Great Wildlands. CCP has used a picture from that fight a couple of times. It then took us two days to get back to Delve, during which we argued about BBQ sauce.
Back in Delve we covered the deployment of another Keepstar in the region. I was also producing mechanical parts via PI. And I tinkered around with one of my Alpha clones, running some of the profession quests and mining in a Vulture… I mean a Venture.
The July update for EVE Online brought us revamped Strategic Cruisers… the start of the current reign of Loki supremacy… as well as an update to Project Discovery.
It was also announced that the captain’s quarters would soon be removed from the game.
We also got our first taste of The Agency in New Eden. It was just an event at the time, though it would grow to be all things PvE soon enough.
And CSM member Jin’taan was advocating for cat ears in space.
I found that Combat Mission: Barbarossa to Berlin still ran on my system. A great old war game.
Albion Online launched. I didn’t play it.
And, finally, Lord of the Rings Online got us to Mordor. It only took ten years. I bought in, but then there was the question of how to proceed… and with whom… and how to get back into the swing of a game I hadn’t played for ages. I returned to one of my favorite places in the game, Annuminas
Five Years Ago
I was looking for gold in the MMO blogging community, which became the topic of the moment. I think that post marks the final time Tobold deigned to leave a comment here.
It was summer, so there was a Steam Summer Sale.
Activision-Blizzard was moving away from Vivendi… and WoW dropped 600K subscribers. Heh, remember when that seemed like a big drop?
There was a promise of some news about EverQuest Next, so I started speculating about what we might hear. The word “sandbox” got mentioned a lot.
In New Eden the battle at 6VDT-H ended any hope left for TEST and heralded the end of the war in Fountain. The war made up most of my posts for the month, which I will list out here:
- S2N Alliance Brought Down by an Insider – July 1
- A Bit of Quiet in Fountain – July 4
- My Guns Jam at Z9PP-H – July 4
- TEST Stands Down on the 4-EP12 Timer – July 5
- Remember the Lazamo – Bloodbath at 3WE-KY – July 6
- Forty Days in Fountain – July 16
- And Quiet Flows the ‘Thron – July 19
- 4-EP12 – Moving To Fountain Proper – July 20
- A Prophecy of Murder in G95F-H – July 21
- The War in Fountain While I Slept – July 24
- Flying Cover in Kraken – July 25
- 6VDT-H – The Biggest Battle in EVE History Ends the War – July 29
- Fountain – The Fighting Goes On – July 30
There is a summer reruns post that rolls all of my Fountain War writing together into a single post if you are interested. It includes propaganda and the defining video of the way.
On the iPad, DragonVale and Candy Crush Saga were my current games of choice.
My summer vacation in Middle-earth got me to Moria.
The instance group got together just long enough to defeat the Storm Queen… and that was about it for us and Rift.
The Civilization V expansion Brave New World changed up the game again.
I starting musing about the inventory management aspect of games.
And we said goodbye to Google Reader. While I am used to Feedly at this point, I still think this was a mistake by Google. It certainly didn’t push enough people to Google+.
Ten Years Ago
BioWare finally let loose the least well kept secret in the MMO-verse at the time. They confirmed they were making a Knights of the Old Replublic type MMO.
The mention of Diablo III seemed to spur a revival of Diablo II with the Diablo II Battle Chest taking the #1 sales spot for a time. Not bad for a game that has not had an expansion since 2001.
Meanwhile, on the SOE front, it was time to say farewell to the EverQuest side of the Living Legacy program. I also griped a bit about how SOE was advertising the completely out of date EverQuest Platinum on the EQ Players site and had been doing so for a long time. That ad disappeared before the month was out though. Such a coincidence!
In Azeroth the instance group went back to the Slave Pens as we edged ever closer the Burning Crusade level cap of 70. We were also out in the Blade’s Edge Mountains. Then there was an off night where we visited Norrath for a bit.
Meanwhile people were selling Wrath of the Lich King beta keys on eBay for $500.
Blizzard also seemed to have a default web site for their games.
In New Eden I was pondering the economics of building and flying a marauder and comparing the benefits of a Raven Navy Issue and the Caldari marauder, the Golem. It was laggy in Lonetrek, which later turned out to be some GoonSwarm op going on in the region. Our little corp was on the move again. And some of us were taking the EVE personality test while I compared ships styles of the different factions to cars from my youth.
And speaking of EVE Online, I also joined in with CrazyKinux on some crazy EVE Blog Pack idea. I was kicked out later for not being an exclusively EVE Online blog, then weaseled my way back in. Not many of the original 20 blogs are still up and running.
Warhammer Online was on the horizon. I had pre-ordered the collectors edition, but then came the content removal, some classes and four cities. And while Mythic posted the minimum system requirements, I was wondering what the recommended… often thought to be the true minimum for many games… might end up being.
And, finally, I was done with GameFly and damn glad to have escaped from Atlanta.
Most Viewed Posts in July
- From Alola Pokedex to National Pokedex in Pokemon Sun
- Burn Jita 2018 Aftermath
- Honest Game Trailers – Animal Crossing
- Burn Jita Back for 2018
- Extra Credits – Picking at the Lockbox Thing Some More
- Winter Movie League – Denouement
- SuperData and the Rise of Fortnite
- Spring Movie League – Cats and Birds and Bruce
- Rumors of Future Daybreak Projects and the End of EverQuest
- Rift Prime Time
- Do You Wear the Mask or does the Mask Wear You?
- The Road to CSM13
Search Terms of the Month
test keepstar killed
[Which one?]
are wow chats dead azuremysy
[WoW was having all sorts of issues, and don’t call me azuemysy]
cqbb8zuazauxymjot9dt6bvyvbscpniymcjjpeybo8kjeym_uqv0kjsr2nbysvcb1vnasmaoaf_p0p_d1rzp-tcwo4ytelyaok8s1ku8srgyi-qrubxmwzyq5bhzwaeybej5kgat8khjlezt0ujmzvhpwpqtixf12ecugegsdu9vv3svigbrtxelv0qgz__cazueezhb6f6a-bq2fzibx_7hdxhsfmsifawtrwsjq4i8tz8ziiecbuhekhnpmoayubht2bfjxafr5cmkoppont3z6p-dk7yiygkms80osfwbxshf2eowlvv8d9744dg5tlf3oc3wgdttm3zw4j-fma
[Must have been a hit on a Friday post]
EVE Online
It has certainly been an active month in null sec, with battles happening in the north and south end of 0.0 space as the whole place split into two teams to fight. Keepstars were a focus, and for a while TEST has a bunch of northern capitals bubbled up and camped, until they broke out. All of that is going to make for a bullet point list a year from now when I do the month in review.
Minecraft
The Aquatic Update finally landed. There were some problems initially, but it settled down a bit and mostly worked. I had actually been putting off looking into Minecraft until the update was finally released. Now I am out looking for the new stuff it delivered… and trying to figure out what to do with it once I do find it.
Pokemon Go
I actually made it up a level in July, hitting level 33. To get to level 34 however is now a million xp, so that will likely be a while. I have kept on with the friend thing, exchanging daily gifts pretty regularly. Because of that I now have nothing save 7km eggs in my inventory.
One thing that changed with the last update has ended up being a bit irksome; the journal no longer logs when you get kicked out of a gym and how many coins you earned. That is actually kind of important information to go missing, since you can only earn 50 coins per day. It matters if I got kicked out of a gym before or after midnight. Ah well.
Level: 33 (+1)
Pokedex status: 333 (+2) caught, 351 (+1) seen
Pokemon I want: Still Lapras, still don’t have one
Current buddy: Slakoth
World of Warcraft
We hit the end of the Legion expansion and started warming up for Battle for Azeroth. That warm up has been… slow. But not as slow as waiting for my addons to get updated. WoW seems to need to pitch a fit when addons are askew. Why can’t I just unselect “load out of date addons” and get on with my life? Instead I have to affirm my addon choices with every visit to the character select screen, and woe be to me if I forget to one again uncheck that box about out of date addons.
Coming Up
Battle for Azeroth will launch simultaneously world wide in the middle of August. I’ll be good to go at 3pm local time on August 13th… unless there are problems. But there are never problems when launching an expansion, are there? Anyway, this launch will no doubt dominate a lot of the MMO related blogging.
As noted above, Blaugust is also upon us. That will mean trying to get myself on track to write something related to the suggested weekly topics for the event. Also, I am going to try to post something every day over the course of the month, as task that always seems daunting at the start of the month. Then I go into overdrive and end up with excess posts by the end of the month.
In EVE Online the brewing null sec war will likely continue with each side taking on targets of opportunity. Will it lead to another huge supercap killing battle? Somehow I think not. EVE Online‘s ability to handle such battles is still dubious, reinforced nodes or not. If a node goes down mid-battle the losing side just declines to log back in when the node is restored and that is the end of that. So both sides will probably just keep scorching whatever regions of space they can manage.
Finally, if you follow TAGN on Facebook, you won’t be come tomorrow. Pressured to fight the boogeyman that is “fake news,” Facebook is cutting off the ability for people to post automatically to their timeline from other applications. Oh well.
Still, if it reduces even a bit of the stupidity I see on Facebook I won’t complain too much. The note I got said I could make a “page” and things would still work, but I don’t know/care what that is really, so I am not sure if it is worth the effort. As a source of traffic Facebook ranks well behind Bing at the trivial end of the commercial sites and, as a rule, almost none of that meager amount comes from my own feed but from when somebody links me independently in their own feed. You can still do that.
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