The Site
Another month goes by. I hit two minor meaningless milestones in August. In addition to my 6,000th post I also managed to make it to 500 consecutive days of posting.
Quantity has a quality all its own
That was one that was easy up until I got past 400 posts and then it started to weigh on me. But I made it. In fact, today marks 521 days in a row. But I probably won’t keep it going. The pressure of starting over again at 1 is starting to be outweighed by inability to really care about that sort of meaningless milestone after a certain point. 500 felt worth it somehow, but beyond that is just yadda yadda yadda.
Otherwise it was kind of a slow month for traffic here, which was odd because Blaugust usually heralds a bit of a boost in page views and visitors. I appear to have fallen out of favor with Google again, as search engine referrals have tanked over the last three months. Such is life on the web.
One Year Ago
It was Promptapalooza Blaugust a year ago, a bit of a change up since we kind of did Blaugust as Blapril earlier in the year. I wrote something about Quote of the Day and my alleged writing process.
The pandemic was still in full swing with no vaccine in sight. I started writing about the shows we were binge watching around our house. And then I did it again.
Twitter reminded me I had been on their site for a decade.
Facebook said you would need a Facebook account to log into your Oculus VR headset.
Epic broke the rules for the Apple Store and the Google Play store and, when Fortnite was removed due to this, immediately sued, which was their plan. But what did Epic really want?
Daybreak bought Cold Iron Studios. I think. The press release about the acquisition has since been scrubbed… classic Daybreak, though still available at the Internet Archive… and Cold Iron has since gone on to ship Aliens: Fireteam Elite, which was not published by Daybreak or EG7 so far as I can tell. Both Massively OP and MMO Fallout followed up on this for me though.
The pandemic was turning out to be quite lucrative for Activision Blizzard and the Shadowlands expansion was just two months out.
Over at SSG they were in danger of entering J. Allen Brack territory in warning people that they didn’t want “classic” LOTRO. They’re probably right in the case of LOTRO, but it still gets people worked up.
I had returned to Diablo II, writing up my adventures in Act I.
In WoW Classic, which turned one year old, we were getting ready for Sunken Temple. The road there takes some time. Our first run went down stairs.
EVE Echoes, the NetEase mobile game based on EVE Online, launched.
In EVE Online CCP was introducing space weather in the form of metaliminal storms. We got armor plating tiericide, Niarja fell to the Triglavians, and the promised metaliminal storms came out way before the month was out.
I hit my 14th anniversary with the game and wrote something about the spaceship meta.
World War Bee was in full swing. I’ll just list out the posts on that:
- Four Weeks of World War Bee
- Defending Odd Allies in Stain
- Fighting on Keepstars
- Five Weeks of World War Bee
- Fall of the IGE-RI Keepstar
- Defending the Y-2ANO Keepstar
- Six Weeks of World War Bee
- The O-PNSN Keepstar Blows Up
- Node Crash at KVN-36
- Seven Weeks of World War Bee
Finally, Brian Green passed away and the community mourned his passing.
Five Years Ago
It was really Blaugust, so I was posting every… single… day even though it was supposed to be the “super relaxed” version of the event.
After spilling Mr. Yoshida’s delicious sauce over my ancient cell phone, I finally joined the smart phone boom with an iPhone 5S. Of course, that meant playing Pokemon Go, something my wife does better than I do.
I tried to come to grips with the constant whine that every MMORPG should cater to every single play style by asking if any MMORPG had ever managed to find a new audience after launch. I remain unconvinced that it has ever worked.
Blizzard was telling people that World of Warcraft was still the number one subscription MMORPG. But after their vow of silence on subscription numbers, that brag seemed a bit hollow.
In the game though things were looking up as the pre-Legion expansion event , the demon invasions, proved to be a boon to leveling up alts as they built up momentum. And I still had that level 100 boost with the expansion to look forward to.
And then WoW Legion launched and it was on to the Broken Isles and class halls and what not.
I speculated what WoW expansions would look like if they were done like Pokemon games.
The Stormhold server in EverQuest II was facing a unlock voting crisis over the Rise of Kunark expansion. It failed the first two votes, and failing a third would put votes in a moratorium for a while. However, it passed on the third try. I also shared my secret EQII shame. Of course, with the coming of WoW Legion I was out of the game… like Legends of Norrath… just in time to miss some deals.
In EVE Online we had the YC118.7 update. I was wondering if better PvE could save the game, though I remain unsure as to what “better” would really look like.
I was also celebrating my ten year anniversary with EVE Online. Meanwhile CCP had a free to play plan lined up for New Eden. It looked like it had some holes in it though… which we later learned it did.
Down in the southwest of New Eden the Imperium had set up shop in Sakht and was banging on the door of Delve, dropping citadels, blowing up citadels, and fighting LUMPY over sov timers. Despite threats to keep the Imperium down for good, the locals in Delve got very little support in their fight and we were into the region shortly.
Back up north I was able to slip my last belongings out of the newly quiet system of Saranen. Meanwhile, Executive Outcomes, which rode out the struggle as part of the Imperium, parted ways once the Casino War was over.
And somewhere along the line I found the time to get out Half-Life 2 and give it another spin.
Ten Years Ago
Blizzard announced some crazy idea that you would have to be logged on to Battle.net at all times to play Diablo III. Glad that never came up again. Oh, wait…
SOE finally got a comprehensive server status page, and Scars of Velious opened up on Fippy Darkpaw. I was wondering if they had “made good” with customers after the great hacking in April/May of the year.
I hit 70 million skill points in EVE Online and prepared to check out after the summer or rage.
I was back playing LOTRO for a bit. I made it into Moria, then went looking for hoes. I also wrote a post summing up my relationship with LOTRO up to that point. It’s complicated.
Wargaming.net announced World of Battleships. They have since changed the name to World of Warships, because we cannot have enough games we can shorted to WoW yet. This got me musing on battleships and related games.
Meanwhile, World or Warplanes (another WoW) got a web site with cool pictures and stuff.
David Reid was telling people that Rift had ONE MILLION CUSTOMERS. How one actually defines a customer was left as an exercise to the student.
I was still playing some Need for Speed World. I was enjoying destructible terrain, though the weekend the police broke lead to some different destruction.
I mentioned some of the little things I liked in MMOs.
I was wondering about World of Warcraft Magazine issue 5. It seemed to be very late.
And Namaste put out a Very Short History of MMOs video.
Fifteen Years Ago
This is the last month in review where I have to pull things from fifteen years ago without linking back to my own blog posts.
AOL, which is still a thing even today (I strongly suspect my mother-in-law still gives them money every month), bought the GameDaily site which, in a case of foreshadowing, was eventually disappeared into the Joystiq brand.
I started playing EVE Online on August 29, 2006. It was my last “pre-blog” MMO start. It was certainly another stepping stone on the way to the blog, as I felt I have to tell somebody about the horrible new player experience. Some things never change.
Thirty Years Ago
Tim Berners-Lee released to the public the first browser for something he called the World Wide Web. Geocities sites and pop-up ads and massive link rot are on the horizon.
Meanwhile, Linus Torvalds announced the operating system he was working on to the Usenet news group comp.os.minix. While he wanted to call the OS Freax, it would eventually get the name Linux.
Forty Years Ago
IBM launched the IBM Personal Computer, perhaps the most influential and least IBM-like product the company has ever created. After failing to come up with an internal design and feeling the market slipping away, IBM let a team working outside of the normal company hierarchy put together a machine with off the shelf parts and an open architecture that was the essential foundation of the PC market we have today.
IBM, seeing all the clones spawning in its wake, eventually decided to make a more proprietary model, so introduced the IBM Personal System/2 in 1987. The rest of the market said, “No thanks!” and the clones became the standard and IBM no longer makes desktop or laptop PCs. I think the most lasting legacy of that 1987 design is the PS/2 port.
Most Viewed Posts in August
- Minecraft and the Search for a Warm Ocean
- CCP Takes Aim at Cloaky Campers in EVE Online
- CCP Releases the ESS Reserve Bank Keys and Hands Out ISK in EVE Online
- Robbing Some Space Banks
- Alamo teechs u 2 play DURID!
- The Blizzard Name Will Go
- PAPI Begins Pulling Out of Delve
- The Altar of Zul and Jintha’alor
- Activision Blizzard, the Lawsuit, and the Q2 2021 Financials
- CCP is Just Going to Keep Selling Skill Points for Cash
- CCP Rushes Warp Core Stabilizer and Interdiction Nullification Changes into EVE Online
- Tempering Expectations with the Diablo II Resurrected Beta
Search Terms of the Month
Карта страны майнкрафт
[There are some map generators out there]
база майнкрафт
[I have made many]
симулятор секса игры на пк
[I get this search term in English a lot]
test alliance please ignore
[Easier to do these days]
ancient winter poncho
[No Ponchos!]
Game Time from ManicTime
The usual suspects top the list, though I was on EVE Online a lot more in the first couple weeks of the month. Then, once Delve was recovered, that fell off somewhat. The others I mention in their own entries below.
- EVE Online – 45.29%
- WoW Classic – 27.87%
- RimWorld – 15.47%
- Diablo II Resurrected beta – 6.20%
- The Fermi Paradox – 4.96%
Diablo II
The Diablo II Resurrected beta was available for two weekends for some of us, so I was able to get a look at it. It is good, though the team clearly still has some bugs to work out. We’ll get to see if for real come the end of next month.
EVE Online
World War Bee is over. The enemy has retreated from our territory, various parties are still finding new homes, Legacy Coalition is no more, PAPI has effectively been disbanded, and the threat of the dreaded blue donut has been averted once again. There is lots of rebuilding left to be done and lessons to be absorbed. Absent our Ansiblex jump gate network Delve has become a target for neutrals looking for easy kills and gates camps pop up all over, so the Home Defense fleet has been pretty active. The jump gates will be back up again in less than two weeks though. Then there will be a new transit network to learn.
Pokemon Go
My wanted Pokemon, Heracross, showed up in raids in August, so I got my wish and finished off the Johto Pokedex. So what do I wish for next?
Otherwise the month was okay. After the high of Pokemon Go Fest last month I haven’t been too excited about playing, and was all the more turned off when Niantic went back to the 40m radius for gyms and Pokestops. It is nice that it is back to 80m permanently, but I need something to spark my interest. Level 41 is dragging on and every level after is that much more of a grind.
Level: 41 (77% of the way to 42 in xp, 4 of 4 tasks complete)
Pokedex status: 662 (+8) caught, 686 (+9) seen
Mega Evolutions obtained: 12 of 14
Pokemon I want: I need a Torkoal for my Hoenn Pokedex
Current buddy: Noibat
RimWorld
I kept on playing with the Ideology expansion for RimWorld. It is pretty neat. I have been meaning to write up a little review of it, but the dev has been adapting it from player feedback and it has evolved some, so it is probably better that I have waited.
The Fermi Paradox
I wrote a post about this during the month. I played it for a while, but it felt a little light to me. As I noted, it is in early access, and just arrived there in July, so it has plenty of room to grow. I will likely revisit it at a later date because I like the concept, even if the initial execution isn’t quite there yet.
WoW Classic
As I mentioned in a post this month, our group has decided to stick with WoW Classic despite the troubles at Blizzard. It is just the game that brings us together and I am not sure another title would work as well in the long term. We spent the month working on epic mounts and then finally finished up Hellfire Ramparts as a group of four.
Coming Up
It is rumored that we will be getting the Valheim Hearth & Home update mid-month. Our server is still running, so we might have to log in and see what that brings us.
By the end of the month we should also see the launch of Diablo II Resurrected. I’m down for that. It even sounds like mod support might be in place for it. There was a piece about how the Median XL mod would be ready to go for it at launch.
There is also a likelihood that Amazon’s New World will ship next month, though I am in kind of “I’ll believe it when it happens” state of mind there.
In EVE Online it will be a time of rebuilding and homeland defense fleets. In WoW Classic it is time for us to try the Blood Furnace, the second dungeon in Outland.
And, of course, there will be the biggest of my annual meaningless milestones in about two weeks when the blog will turn 15 years old.
No comments:
Post a Comment