The Redundant Ancient Gaming Noob: The Thirteenth Floor

Another year has come and gone and here we are at thirteen.

This car does not stop at that floor

Thirteen is an unlucky number to some, but it has always been a bit of a talisman in our family, something of an attraction rather than an aversion. I went skydiving with a friend on Friday the 13th, picking that day specifically for the unlucky connotation. In the end though, it is just a number, something that passes by fleetingly, unless you’re 13 years old. I’ve never been more miserable in my life than when I was 13, an age that seemed to last forever.

Now my blog is thirteen. I hope it isn’t as bad off as I was at that age.

For those new to the site… how did you end up here… this is an annual tradition. If you’re a glutton for punishment, there are twelve past entries to review.

I used to do cute themes for this post. Years five and six are probably the best efforts for that, while I think eight is where I get the most philosophical. That is where I said I would stop blogging at the ten year mark. But here I am. There are days when I am just so very tired that I can barely crank out the 2,000 words that make up the core of the post like this. Cute pictures and the philosophy of the internet just aren’t in me anymore.

But on we go, as we do every year, for a look behind the curtain at the numbers and such that inform about this blog.

Base Statistics

The same thing every year, looking at how the various needled moved over the last dozen months.

Days since launch: 4,748 (+365)
Posts total: 5,215 (+420)
Total Words: 3,967,279 (not including this post)
Average words per post: 761.18
Post Likes: 9,521
Average posts per day: 1.098 (+0.05)
Comments: 32,451 (+1,670)
Average comments per post: 6.22 (-0.20)
Average comments per day: 6.83 (-0.18)
Spam comments: 1,482,548 (+32,607)
Comments Rescued from the Spam Filter: 438 (+4)
Average spam comments per day: 312.24 (-18.7)
Comment signal to noise ratio: 1 to 45.6 (-1)
Comments written by me: 6,430 or 19.8%
Images uploaded: 14,575 (+1,432)
Space used by images: 603.7MB 1.2 GB of my 3 GB allocation (33%, up 100%)
Blog Followers: 1,701 (+209)
Twitter Followers: 743 (+14)
Tumblr Followers: 33 (+7)
US Presidents since launch: 3
British Monarchs since launch: 1
Prime Ministers of Italy since launch: 7

Much more after the cut, if you feel like looking at a lot of charts, lists, and numbers. Actual page view numbers are available.

Demographics

Some year either something will change in this section or I’ll stop doing it. Either way, the US dominates the numbers every time. English language gaming blog appeals mostly in countries where English is common spoken, film at 11.

Flag Counter Country Chart

I use the Flag Counter sidebar widget stats since, frankly, all web stats are garbage, but I’ve been using the widget longer than WP.com has been keeping track of countries. Also, the widget is better at counting people just once.

As I noted last year, I subscribed to Flag Counter to get some of their marginally deeper stats. So, for example, they tell me these are the browsers and operating systems you all use.

Flag Counter browser and OS stats

Chrome is down a bit over last years abbreviated stats, which is a bit of a surprise, since earlier this year Microsoft Edge started using the Chrome engine, so it identifies as Chrome 58 when queried. But, then, I suspect almost nobody uses Edge. Before the update it constantly crashed when I tried to use it on with my reasonably fresh install of Window 10.

Windows is still the dominate operating system. A lot of you still use Window 7, though I cannot blame you, since we’re still using it at work as well. Mobile are the next two big ones, with Linux, MacOS, and whatever else hidden in the “others” slice.

And so it goes. That is what the stats say about the visitors.

Incoming!

Who sends traffic here? I mean, besides Google. Google, and the other search engines, get their own area. From just normal blogs and gaming sites and the like, the following send me the most user.

Over The Last Year

Total EVE remains the dominant player in sending me traffic. That can’t all be just Dirk MacGirk clicking on links there, can it? It is a nice summary site that has feeds from all over the EVE Online social media universe. EVE Bloggers is in second, but traffic from there has tapered off somewhat. I think Steve needs to prune some of the deadwood from the site, as there are a lot of dead blogs on the main page.

Then we get into prolific and popular bloggers, followed by the less prolific and sometimes completely dead blogs. I am sure Gevlon would be happy to know that his old blog, the one on Blogger he abandoned because he didn’t like Google, still sends me traffic.

Over The Life of the Blog

Over the life of the blog… well, there are 13 years worth of traffic to overcome to climb that list. I think Virgin Worlds hasn’t had me in its front page feed for at least five years at this point, but it still tops the list. It was quite the source of traffic back in the heyday of blogging. Other familiar names are on the list as well.

And then there is social media. Not a lot of traffic comes in daily, but it does add up over time.

Over The Last Year

WordPress.com Reader
Reddit
Twitter
Facebook
forums-archive.eveonline.com
tagn-wordpress-com.cdn.ampproject.org
WordPress Android App
forums.daybreakgames.com
old.reddit.com
Google News

The WordPress.com reader remains something of a wonder. The fact that you can use it to search on categories and tags for all of their hosted blogs makes it an invaluable resource for finding blogs, and some people have clearly found mine that way.

Over The Life of the Blog

WordPress.com Reader
Google Reader
Reddit
Twitter
Facebook
feedly.com
Netvibes
massiveblips.dailyradar.com
WordPress Android App
theoldreader.com

Again, WordPress Reader has taken over first place, but Google Reader, gone more than six years at this point, persists in second place. Also on the gone list was Massive Blips. That was a pretty good aggregator for its time.

Search Engines

And then the search engines, or Google and everybody else. This is a bit more interesting because the site tools that the search engines give you allow you to get a bit more insight into what brings people to click on the link to your site.

Over The Last Year

Google Search
Bing
duckduckgo.com
Yahoo Search
Yandex
Baidu
Ask.com
MSN
myway.com
AOL

That is a fine list, but Google makes up 97% of the search engine traffic that comes to me. I actually signed up for Google, Bing, and Yandex site admin access to more directly feed them updates to my blog, but that made no real difference… to anything really. Overall traffic is down, and that means that search engine traffic is down because Google makes up the lion’s share of my new, random, or drive by traffic. If I get 500 page views in a day, 200 of them will be from Google, and if I get 1,500 page views in a day, 1,200 of them will be from Google.

Over The Life of the Blog

Google Search
Google Image Search
Bing
Yahoo Search
Google Mobile
Ask.com
Yahoo Image Search
Yandex
duckduckgo.com
isearch.avg.com

Likewise, over the life of the blog Google still dominates. Google Image Search is a relic of the pre-2012 way that Google handled image searches. They would send people to your site if they clicked on an image from your blog. Now they cache it and show it in full size and never trouble your site again. As I have noted in the past, this led to the big decline in traffic in 2013. That GIS is still number two tells you how much traffic that was.

Going deeper into search engines, now that I have been signed up with Google site management for over a year, I can share some search data from that. Here are the top dozen search terms that send traffic to the blog.

Google Search Terms – 12 Months

The term “ukdrillas” is from this past weekend and the WoW Classic DDoS attack. People get antsy when their game is interrupted. Variation on how many people play EVE Online is pretty strong, and that has gone up some recently as well, no doubt a side effect of the Chaos Era.

Bing will only grab you six months worth of data, but here are the search terms that they send me. You can compare the impressions and clicks and draw your own conclusion.

Bing Search Terms – Past Six Months

The top term from Google got 2,578 clicks, and the top term from Bing got 14. Even if you double it to make it a full year, that is 28 or about 1% of Google.

Outgoing!

People do occasionally click on links and things in the side bar and are sent off to other places on the internet. The places most clicked are:

Over The Last Year – Bloggers:

bhagpuss.blogspot.com
nosygamer.blogspot.com
syncaine.wordpress.com
blessingofkings.blogspot.com
mmofallout.com
biobreak.wordpress.com
evehermit.wordpress.com
http://www.keenandgraev.com
evepics.wordpress.com
aywren.com

I think there is pretty solid correlation between how often I link out to somebody and where they appear on that list. Otherwise, I think all of them appear somewhere in my feeds on the side bar. My dynamic pseudo Blogger-style feed shows its worth.

Over The Last Year – Commercial-ish sites:

en.wikipedia.org
imperium.news
massivelyop.com
http://www.reddit.com
zkillboard.com
eve-offline.net
http://www.eveonline.com
http://www.wowwiki.com
us.forums.blizzard.com
Twitter

For commercial, and commercial-like sites, It is pretty much a matter of who I link out to. Wikipedia, my go to source for keeping me from getting side-tracked explaining things, tops the list.

Over The Life of the Blog – Bloggers:

syncaine.wordpress.com
http://www.keenandgraev.com
blessingofkings.blogspot.com
evepics.wordpress.com
http://www.killtenrats.com
bhagpuss.blogspot.com
biobreak.wordpress.com
tobolds.blogspot.com
playervsdeveloper.blogspot.com
jestertrek.blogspot.com

SynCaine tops the list for all time. No doubt some Friday blog wars residuals in that. Still, a lot of familiar faces there.

Over The Life of the Blog – Commercial-ish sites:

nickyee.com/python/guildname/generator.py
en.wikipedia.org
http://www.pokemon.com
forums.civfanatics.com
us.battle.net
http://www.pokemongoldsilver.com
myeve.eve-online.com
us.blizzard.com
http://www.eve-online.com
swganh.com

Oh, the Nick Yee guild name generator, it still owns overall, thanks to Google. And for Wikipedia, the most clicked on link leading there is for Castle Wolfenstein, the original Apple II game, not any of the later versions.

Most Viewed Posts

Over The Last Year

A not unexpected result of the coming of WoW Classic has been more people looking for the classic Alamo druid post. Then there are people worried about EVE Online and people worried about Daybreak, followed by more practical searches I guess.

Over The Life of the Blog

Inertia rules again. Alamo continues to climb slowly up that list, but that guild name generator post had a big early lead.

Categories and Tags

Categories and the high level topics that I write about here, and so to look at categories is to look at the games I write about in broad strokes. I currently have 96 categories for the blog. Some of them were optimistic. I made a category for Elite: Dangerous and then wrote only two posts about the game. That could have been a tag. But otherwise categories do reflect what gets posted around here. The top 20 most used categories are:

EVE Online 1,563
World of Warcraft 1,233
EverQuest II 695
EverQuest 562
Lord of the Rings Online 416
Blizzard 366
Sony Online Entertainment 339
Instance Group 282
Humor 236
Pokemon 222
Misc MMOs 193
blog thing 185
Rift 161
Month in Review 156
YouTube 146
Nintendo DS Hardware 141
Other PC Games 137
Diablo III 135
Vanguard SOH 134
Minecraft 122

EVE Online passed World of Warcraft a few years back, but I have to wonder if the coming of WoW Classic (which is also a category) will see WoW regain some ground on New Eden. Also the Instance Group category, dormant for some years now, will be reviving a bit as well.

Tags are the more whimsical part of the system here, being subject to immediate mood or fancy. I throw them out with abandon. They fill in for games that don’t rate a category, details like zones or solar systems or expansions, or sometimes just my general feelings about a post or warnings to the reader. There are 3,645 tags used over the last 13 years, up 252 from last year. I continue to make up a new tag for a lot of posts it seems.

With so many tags it is hard to pick a range. The top ten stay don’t vary much year over year, tag inertia having set in. Here they are and how often they have been used:

Progression Server 117
Reavers 84
Select Fippy Darkpaw 83
Select Nostalgia 80
Select Asher Elias 80
Select Meaningless Milestones 75
Select Pokemon Go 73
Select MMO Expansions 65
Select Warlords of Draenor 64
Select Free-To-Play 63

But to find something for this anniversary, I thought I would also list out the tags that have been used exactly 13 times. They are:

Scarlet Monastery
PvP
Cats
Leuthilspar Tales
World of Warcraft Magazine
Toys R Us
West Karana
Newbie Blogger Initiative
Steam Summer Sale
DBRB
Meandering
Pandemic Legion
Loremaster
Guardians of the Galaxy
Fall Movie League
CSM13
Spring Movie League

That is probably a more interesting cross-section of tags. To start with, if I have used them 13 times, they are solid tags. There are a lot of one off tags in the full list. Over half of them, actually. But these are good, and they are all over the map, from FML seasons that were 13 weeks long to an EverQuest zone to a series of stories about TorilMUD to a WoW instance and so on. I do like that CSM13 got 13 mentions. Seems appropriate.

A Peek Into Page Views

Here we are at the one day a year when I bare the raw page view stats for the world to see.

Total Page Views by Month/Year

Average Daily Page Views by Month/Year

You can click on either of those charts to see them full size, which would make them more legible for sure.

Traffic here continues to decline from its peak in 2012. As I said, and which you can see in the numbers, the first big hit was the Google Image View change of early 2013. And, after that, things have slowly eroded. But it corresponds somewhat with a creeping conservatism on my part when it comes to games I suppose. I am writing about the same few games in 2019 that I was back in 2006, all of which are clearly past their peak and thus their public interest.

I did wonder at one point is the decline in page views would alter my desire to write. I mean, it is easy to say page views don’t matter, but when you’re running at 30% of your past peak, that is the rubber hitting the road. And yet I keep on writing lots of posts, but we’ll get to that in the next section.

So Very Many Words

My favorite table I suppose. I write a lot of words.

September 2019 – Word count, like, and comment numbers – Click on it to make it bigger/readable

While page views seem to be in decline, I remain on track for close to 400 posts again this year. My average words per post is down a bit for 2019, but we haven’t hit the end of the year verbose summary of things that happened season.

Something I Didn’t Mention the Last Dozen Times I Did This Post

I think one of the possible revelations I have had over the last few years in my blogging is a greater desire to write for posterity beyond simply recording what I was playing and what I thought about it at a given time. I wrote a chaotic post addressing this during Blaugust, which is when things became a little more clear to me on that front. I end up writing a lot of blog posts that are not about my playing something, or even myself directly, but rather events and changes around the games I watch and play.

Yes, I have mentioned the desire for having context and dates and what not. But I do at times start to boarder on something akin to a news site for brief stretches of time in order to get there because sometimes the sign posts are as important as the things in between I guess. I make no commitment to covering every bit of, say, Norrath related news coming out of Daybreak, but I will likely continue to hit the high points, the expansions and plans and, perhaps, the eventual landing place for the franchise should dey break up.

Forward Looking Statements

If I am unreliable as a narrator… and I assure you I am… then my ability to forecast falls beyond that into abysmal.

I mean sure, I get some things correct now and then. If I predict that I will play WoW or EVE Online at the beginning of the year it is likely to come to pass. But I am pretty sure any semi-regular reader could have predicted that as well. I don’t think there has been a year during the life of the blog where I have not played them both, at least for a little while.

But more refined or less obvious looks into the future? Have you seen my annual predictions post? The 2019 version is going to be hilariously wrong when I review it come December.

So I will go with the safe view that, barring some major life changing event, things will go on as before. I will keep writing month in review posts and noting the various launches, closures, expansions, updates, changes, and announcements that touch the games that interest me.

I have to say “interest me” now, as the number I actually play seems to grow smaller as time goes on. And, honestly, so does the number that interests me. A few years ago I might have written about SWTOR expansions or major changes, or something going on in GW2. Now I feel too far outside of those orbits to comment except in the most general way.

But I am a person who finds some comfort in routine. That and the sunk cost fallacy will probably keep me writing. I’d hardly be an MMORPG player if I wasn’t a sucker for sunk costs.

Anyway, thank you for stopping by for another year. WordPress.com, my platform (and some times nemesis) has given me my annual achievement.

achievement unlocked

As always, I am sure there is some exciting news coming for the games I play and the companies that make them, and I will likely be here to pummel that to death with an excess of verbiage.

The Redundant Ancient Gaming Noob

Thursday, September 12, 2019

The Thirteenth Floor

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