Pokemon Gold and Silver Available on 3DS Today

Meanwhile, on the retro-nostalgia front, Nintendo is bringing more old school Pokemon games to the 3DS today in the for of Pokemon Gold & Silver.

For the GameBoy Color

Back in 2016 Nintendo re-released Pokemon Red, Blue, & Yellow for the 3DS Virtual Console as part of the Pokemon 20th Anniversary celebration.  I went in on Pokemon Blue to discover how things went way back in the day, and I was surprised by how nearly fully formed the first generation of Pokemon games really were.

Now we have the second generation available, and with that comes some rounding out of the Pokemon standard features including:

• Pokemon breeding
• Held items for Pokemon
• Dual-type Pokemon
• Steel and Dark type Pokemon
• Shiny Pokemon
• Pokemon experience tracking

In addition the games are in full on color, no longer having to support the original monochromatic GameBoy hardware.

Virtual cartridges for the Virtual Console

As with the first generation releases, Pokemon Bank will be getting an update to allow players to move their Pokemon from these titles to Pokemon Sun & Moon, or to Pokemon UltraSun & UltraMoon when the latter ship this coming November.

So I am much more likely to spend time this weekend playing retro Pokemon than anything else, and all the more so since the 2009 remakes of these titles, Pokemon HeartGold & SoulSilver rank very highly on my list of favorite Pokemon titles.

The only quest is, do I go with Gold or Silver?

MegaWars Dawn of the Third Age

In order to talk about MegaWars – Dawn of the Third Age I feel I need to delve into the well of ancient games from which I drew the title of this blog.  It is been a while since I’ve gone here, so a refresher might be due.

Back in the early-to-mid 1980s personal computers were becoming common, modems were increasingly becoming an option for the, and online services like CompuServe and GEnie began to flourish.  This was the pre-web era, when even having a GUI beyond a command prompt was considered.  (There is a whole “pre-web online services” category on Wikipedia.)

And while special interest forums, online encyclopedias, and services were often bullet points used to get people to sign up, it wasn’t long before online games came into being.  Kesmai was an early leader in online games and its Island of Kesmai on CompuServe was very much a precursor to today’s fantasy MMORPGs.

Also on CompuServe was a game called MegaWars III.  If Island of Kesmai foretold the fantasy side of the MMORPG genre, then MegaWars III was very much a hint as to what the future might bring when it came to internet spaceships in EVE Online.  Launched on CompuServe in January 1984, it gained a following even at the expensive hourly connect rates that online services charged back in the day.  $15 a month seems like a bargain compared to $6 an hour.

MegaWars III did not feature a long term persistent universe.  Instead games were four week long affairs that saw everybody logging on to scout on the first night to find and colonize planets.  There was a fixed amount of numbered star systems, but the planets around them, and the quality thereof, changed with each game.

Players would colonize and manage their planets, build up defenses, try to take planets from each other, and attempt to blow up each other’s ships.  At the end of the four weeks scores were tallied up and winners declared.  The leader of the highest scoring team was declared Emperor while the highest individual score was named President of the Imperial Senate.  The top 20 scoring players were made senators.

When GEnie arrived on the scene, they wanted online games too and got Kesmai to make a simplified version of MegaWars III which was called Stellar Warrior.  A fun game in its own right, and following the four week campaign model, it did not have the depth of MegaWars III with its planetary management module.  GEnie eventually got a straight up copy of MegaWars III a bit later in the form of Stellar Emperor.

And that is where I came in.  During the fourth four week Stellar Emperor campaign during the summer of 1986 I logged into GEnie via the modem I bought from Potshot for my Apple //e and started fumbling around with online games.

It was then that I first used the handle Wilhelm Arcturus.  I had been recruited by a team called the Arcturan Empire (-AE-) and learned the ways of the game sufficiently to become both Emperor of the Galaxy and President of the Imperial Senate.  You actually got physical trophies for that back then.

Pewter Cups Awarded for Emperor and President titles

The names are probably easier to read on the paper certificates that were also mailed out to winners, including those senators in the top 20.

Wilhelm d’Arcturus Emperor of the Galaxy

Wilhelm d’Arcturus – President on the Imperial Senate

Later I dropped the “d” from the last name to become simply Wilhelm Arcturus.  My tales from those days can be found here:

• Stellar Emperor – 1986
• Stellar Emperor – Winning the Game
• Stellar Warrior – 1986

And so it went.  For most of the balance of the 1980s MegaWars III and Stellar Emperor ran along as identical twins.  As the 90s approached GEnie and Kesmai began to work on improving Stellar Emperor, giving it a GUI eventually, while MegaWars III remained as it was.  If you played them both after 1989 or so you’ll probably say they were different, but before then they were essentially identical.

Into the 90s the internet and the web became a thing and online services started to fade away.  CompuServe was bought by AOL in 1997 and faded away into the background while GEnie shut down in 1999.  Kesmai ran its own online service, GameStorm, through the 90s until the company was sold to EA.  EA did what it always does with studios it buys; shut it down, never to be seen again.  And so all of the Kesmai titles, including MegaWars III, disappeared.

Like all closed online games, somebody out there decided to go ahead and recreate the originals.  I have written previously about Crimson Leaf Games and their resurrection of the original MegaWars III as well as Cosmic Ray Games and their recreation of a 90s version of Stellar Emperor.

But some time has passed since then; seven years in the case of the former and four years for the latter.

Crimson Leaf Games has been hard at work and has produced a new version of MegaWars III, MegaWars: Dawn of the Third Age.  The site for the game is here, and includes a history of MegaWars III worth reading.

The new version has a client and graphics and all sorts of things we associate with more modern online games.

The MegaWars III universe has also expanded from a couple hundred stars to over five million systems to explore.  Space has also changed in a way that might sound a bit familiar to EVE Online players.  Rather than the game being open season for PvP, there are three regions of space.  They are:

• Empire – no combat and planets cannot be taken
• Frontier – full combat and planet industries can be bombed but not taken
• Open – full combat and planets can be taken

The penalty for Empire and Frontier is that you pay taxes that sap your planetary economy, and a hit in score, relative to the wild west of open space.  But in exchange for that you get complete safety in Empire space and some amount of safety in Frontier space.

The game is currently in open Alpha… which seems to be what we would call Early Access if it were on Steam… so you can try it out if you are interested.

So we now have a new take on a game that has its origins in the nearly 40 year old DECWAR, which was, in turn, an attempt to make a multiplayer version of the Star Trek terminal game from the early 70s.

And the beat goes on.

Elf

No, I am not trying to trigger Syp.  Well, not just that anyway.

Any elf will do for our purposes…

Back in high school, a distance through time more easily measured in decades than years at this point, I took German as my foreign language.  I think the primary outcome of three years of the language is that my writing in English improved greatly.  One of those side-effects, you have to examine your own language in order to learn another one.

I think my greatest achievement in German was reading Catch-22 in the language, something that took me most of a summer, a copy in English, and my German-English dictionary.  Other than that, I retain very little of the language.  Enough to annoy my mother-in-law (who is German), catch the occasional bit of dialog in a movie, appreciate The Germans episode of Fawlty Towers slightly more, get that joke about the German novel where the last two chapters are nothing but verbs, and make a poor joke from a post title.

Anyway, the German word for “eleven” is “elf,” something endlessly amusing to a 13 year old boy, an age I have never fully ceased to be.  The title is a joke because I write about fantasy MMORPGs now and again… less lately than before… where the elf is a staple, and yet relevant because this is one of those anniversary posts… my eleventh.

The Annual WP.com achievement

I am clearly out of clever titles and amusing intros at this point.  Remember that anniversary post that was full of Soviet propaganda?  Or the one grounded in Winnie the Pooh?  Now I am hanging my hat on the fact that the German word for eleven is a mythical creature in English.  It’s all I’ve got, and I’m not even going to run with it.  I’m going to just break in the usual statistics for a bit and hope I can come up with something new to say before we get to the end of the post.

For those interested in some of my better attempts at anniversary posts, here is the list:

• A Year of Living Noobishly
• Two Years Below the Masthead
• Three Years We Grew in Virtual Sun and Shower
• Four Years In, No Further From Noobdom
• Heroic Results of the First Five Year Plan
• But Now I am Six, I’m as Clever as Clever
• The Seven Year Kvetch
• Eight Years of Link Rot
• Nine is a Magic Number
• A Decade Under the Influence of Online Games

And from that we might as well get stuck into this.

Base Statistics

In which I attempt to quantify what I have done here in the last twelve months.  The change over last year’s totals are noted in parentheses.

Days since launch: 4,018 (+365)
Posts total: 4,416 (+341)
Average posts per day: 1.097 (-0.013)
Comments: 29,415 (+1,456)
Average comments per post: 6.66  (-0.2)
Average comments per day: 7.32  (-0.33)
Spam comments: 1,376,145 (+63,980)
Comments Rescued from the Spam Filter: 424
Average spam comments per day: 342.5 (-16.7)
Comment signal to noise ratio: 1 to 47.2 (+0.2)
Comments written by me: 3,873 or 13.1%
Images uploaded:  10,416 11,764 (+1,348)
Space used by images: 270MB of my 3 GB allocation (9%, down 69%)
Blog Followers: 1,340
Twitter Followers: 722
US Presidents since launch: 3
British Monarchs since launch: 1
Prime Ministers of Italy since launch: 6 (one twice)

This is the first year of the blog where I wrote less than one post per day, hitting the publish button 24 fewer times in the last year than the year before.  That is about a month of weekday posts I did not do.  See the effect of MMO malaise?  Because, seriously, I didn’t take any long vacations or suffering from debilitating illness over the previous twelve months.  I just wrote less, something that generally happens when I am just not interested in a given topic, which in this case is my MMO hobby.

Still, the average over the full life of the blog is over a post a day.  And even 333 is more than a post every weekday, the goal for which I strive.  That would only net me about 260 posts so, while no Stakhanovite, I have exceeded my posting norm.  Not bad for an eleven year long streak.

With posts down, comments were also down, both overall… simply fewer comments than last year… and as a percentage of posts… people commented less per post.  My comments, as a percentage of the total, was up.  Probably me talking to myself.

One oddity in the stats above is the amount of space used by my uploaded images, which dropped precipitously since last year’s post.  For some reason WordPress.com reset my allocation last year.  Maybe it was a happy anniversary gesture.  Maybe it was a bug.  I suspect that nothing good will come of it and that some day I will log in and find every screen shot from 2006 through 2016 missing, having been deleted by some automated process.  But for now they survive.

Anyway, that is the basic gist of what happened here over the last year.  The remainder of the post is after the cut to keep the long list of mostly meaningless words and statistics from overwhelming the from page.  See you on the other side, should you choose to go there… or if you are looking at this in an RSS reader.

Demographics

Yawn.  Nothing much here has changed.  A video game blog in English unsurprisingly gets most of its traffic from countries where English is commonly spoken, with the United States dominating the map as it accounts for half the traffic that shows up.

The darker the color, the more visitors

The countries providing the most visitors to the site remain pretty constant, being:

1. United States
2. United Kingdom
3. Canada
4. Germany
5. Australia
6. France
7. Netherlands
8. Sweden
9. Brazil
10. Poland
11. Spain
12. Russia
13. Denmark
14. Norway
15. Belgium
16. New Zealand
17. Finland
18. Italy
19. Czech Republic
20. Romania

Brazil dropped off the top 20 last year, then somehow rebounded to 9th place.  I am not sure why.  Countries that are not primarily English speaking that high on the list tend to have a lot of people who speak either English as a second language or or EVE Online.  Brazil doesn’t really fit there, so I am not sure what brought them here.

Meanwhile, the list of countries that have sent visitors to the site exactly once remains a collection of likely suspects.

1. North Korea
2. Eritrea
3. Equatorial Guinea
4. Central African Republic
5. Kirbati
6. Gambia
7. Montserrat
8. Somalia
9. Timor-Leste

I do wonder who in North Korea ended up here, given the heavy government restrictions on internet access.

Incoming!

Time to look at the sources of traffic to the site.  This year I am going to break this out into two categories, bloggers and blogger sites for one list and commercial sites such as search engines and social media for the other.

-Referring Bloggers over the Last Year

1. Total EVE
2. EVE Bloggers
3. Low Sec Lifestyle
4. Blessing of Kings
5. Greedy Goblin
6. Inventory Full
7. Keen & Graev
8. The Nosy Gamer
9. EVEOGANDA
10. Hardcore Casual

There is definitely a pattern there.  8 out of 10 on the list dynamically update links to other sites based on new content being posted, most of them through the ever awesome Blogger side bar blogroll widget.  Keen & Graev just have a short blogroll, while SynCaine at Hardcore Casual links to me and I comment on his blog.  I expect that Gevlon will drop off this list next year as he recently changed from Blogger to WordPress.com and so will no longer have the dynamic blogroll.

-Referring Commercial Sites over the Last Year

1. Google Search
2. Reddit
3. Twitter
4. WP.com Reader
5. EVE Online Forums
6. Bing
7. Facebook
8. Yahoo
9. Yandex
10. Duck Duck Go

Google search is the monster in the room, referral from it dwarfing all other sources combined.  Google sends me more than 22 times more traffic than Total EVE, the second place referrer.  So you can see why people get cranky when Google changes their algorithms and they drop off the first page of results.

Reddit and Twitter are almost tied.  Twitter tends to be more regular as the blog puts a link there automatically with every post, while Reddit is very burst-y.  Somebody will post a link here every so often leading to a short spike, then traffic will go away.

Likewise, the EVE Online forums hits in bursts, usually if CCP Phantom links something of mine in his This Week in EVE Online post.

Facebook is an odd one.  WP.com puts a link there for every post, but that accounts for almost no traffic.  Wilhelm Arcturus has very few friends on Facebook.  Traffic there usually comes from somebody popular linking to one of my posts on their own.

Then there are the other search engines, Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, and Duck Duck Go.  Bing only tops that list because Microsoft shoves it down everybody’s throat with IE11 and Edge until they figure out how to turn it off.

Despite auto-posting there as well, something that was finally fixed earlier this year, Google+ generates almost no traffic at all.  Again, Wilhelm Arcturus isn’t exactly bursting with friends there added to the fact that I think the only people who still use Google+ are myself, Belghast, and Richard Bartle, and all three of us only auto-post stuff from our blogs there.

Now to look at some slightly different referrer numbers

-Referring Bloggers over the Life of the Blog

1. VirginWorlds
2. Blessing of Kings
3. Low Sec Lifestyle
4. EVE News 24
5. Keen & Graev
6. EVE Bloggers
7. Total EVE
8. Hardcore Casual
9. Jester’s Trek
10. Popehat

This list is, in its way, more a reflection of inertia and longevity.  VirginWorlds hasn’t linked to me in years at this point, but it was a referral powerhouse for the first five years of the blog.  Blessing of Kings is popular and has had me in the sidebar for years.  Likewise, Hardcore Casual and Keen & Graev.   Being on the blogroll of a current/former CSM member is a good source of traffic even after they stop blogging.

EN24 and Popehat are the outliers.  My posts used to be syndicated on EN24, which accounted for traffic for about a year.  Otherwise the site would sooner cut off their right hand as link to me, so that is all legacy traffic.

Meanwhile, Popehat has me on their blogroll and, through alphabetical advantage, I appear at the top. (They omitted “the” from the name.)  When it was on the side of their main page it was a very steady trickle of traffic.  Then they moved it off the main page and all traffic dried up completely.  There is a lesson in that for all of us.

-Referring Commercial Sites over the Life of the Blog

1. Google
2. WP.com Reader
3. Google Reader
4. Reddit
5. Twitter
6. Bing
7. Feedly
8. Facebook
9. Netvibes
10. Yahoo

Again, no surprise that Google rules the roost, still providing 22 times more traffic as the next leading contender.

WP.com reader always surprises me a bit, but I guess some people use it and it doesn’t suck nearly as badly as it once did.

Ah, then there is the dearly departed Google Reader.  Where’s your Google+ Messiah now?

After that it is sort of the commercial also rans.  Bing is the second place search engine where that means first place delivers 97 times as much traffic.  Feedly shows up now and again as a steady, if weak, trickle of traffic.  But since I put full posts in the RSS feed, there is no need to visit my site from there.  And then there is Yahoo which provides nearly half the traffic of Bing.

Outgoing!

Now on to where I send traffic.  Again, I will break this out between bloggers and commercial(-ish) sites, just because.

-Click Destinations over the Last Year – Bloggers

1. The Nosy Gamer
2. Hardcore Casual
3. Inventory Full
4. Greedy Goblin
5. EVE Online Pictures
6. Bio Break
7. Neville Smit
8. EQ2 Wire
9. Imperium News
10. Blessing of Kings

-Click Destinations over the Last Year – Commercial(-ish) Sites

1. Various Blizzard sites
2. Wikipedia (the Ultima I article being the most popular)
3. Various CCP pages related to EVE Online
4. zKillboard
5. Civ Fanatics (for that Civ II 64-bit patch)
6. Massively OP
7. Reddit
8. Daybreak Games (for their server status page mostly)
9. YouTube
10. Various Pokemon sites

-Click Destinations over the Life of the Blog – Bloggers

1. Hardcore Casual
2. Keen & Graev
3. Blessing of Kings
4. Kill Ten Rats
5. EVE Online Pictures
6. Bio Break
7. Tobold
8. Inventory Full
9. Player vs. Developer
10. West Karana

Definitely both some inertia and ascendance due to longevity on that list.

-Click Destinations over the Life of the Blog – Commercial(-ish) Sites

1. Nick Yee Guild Name Generator
2. Various Pokemon.com pages
3. Wikipedia (Castle Wolfenstein being the most popular click)
4. Civ Fanatics (for that Civ II 64-bit patch)
5. Various Blizzard sites
6. Various CCP pages related to EVE Online
7. Star Wars Galaxies: A New Hope
8. Kickstarter
9. Daybreak Games (for their server status page mostly)
10. SWG Emu

Breaking things out like that was interesting.  It certainly bubbled Star Wars Galaxies emulation projects to the surface.

Most Viewed Posts

What posts are popular here?

-Most Viewed over the Last Year

1. April Fools at Blizzard 2017 – Not Much to Talk About
2. Pokemon Go Account Hacked and Recovered
3. From Alola Pokedex to National Pokedex in Pokemon Sun
4. Where the Hell is that EverQuest Successor Already?
5. Pondering That Legion Level 100 Boost
6. Alamo teechs u 2 play DURID!
7. Make My Alpha Clone
8. WoW Legion Sales Numbers Stacked Up Against Past Launches
9. Running Civilization II on Windows 7 64-bit
10. 20 Games that Defined the Apple II

World of Warcraft and Pokemon seem to have dominated, with some nostalgia thrown in.

-Most Viewed over the Life of the Blog

1. Play On: Guild Name Generator
2. Running Civilization II on Windows 7 64-bit
3. How To Find An Agent in EVE Online
4. How to Catch Zorua and Zoroark
5. April Fools at Blizzard – 2013
6. Considering Star Wars Galaxies Emulation? Better Grab a Disk!
7. Diablo III vs. Torchlight II – A Matter of Details
8. The Mighty Insta-90 Question – Which Class to Boost?
9. EVE Online – The Tutorial
10. Alamo teechs u 2 play DURID!

As with other “all time” lists, inertia keeps some out of date posts near the top.  The list mostly re-ordered itself.  Alamo fell down a bit while post #4 on the blog about the 2006 EVE Online tutorial displaced a post about the official World of Warcraft Magazine.

Categories and Tags

Categories are the stable staple of the blog filing system here at TAGN, at least one being assigned to every post.  Leaving out the generic “entertainment” category, a legacy of the early days of WP.com, there are 90 categories on the site.  That is the same number as last year, so I haven’t seen fit to add any games to that list. The top ten most used are:

1. EVE Online (1084, +173)
2. World of Warcraft  (1034, +51)
3. EverQuest II (629, +46)
4. EverQuest (496, +24)
5. Lord of the Rings Online (361, +11)
6. Sony Online Entertainment (336, +1)
7. Blizzard (309, +22)
8. Instance Group (273, +0)
9. Humor (227, +3)
10. Misc MMOs (181, new to list)

So we’re starting to get to the point where people who call this an “EVE Online blog” are more correct than people trying to call it a “WoW blog” or some other game.  Still, even with more focus on EVE and less on other MMOs, fewer than a third of the posts on the blog are about New Eden.

Tags, as I have noted in the past, are the more whimsical part of the system here, being subject to immediate mood or fancy.  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 3,204 tags used over the last 11 years, up 198 from last year.  I must make up a new tag for two out of every three posts.  The top ten tags I have used are:

1. Progression Server (105, +7)
2. CCP  (94, +23)
3. Fippy Darkpaw (82, +1)
4. Nostalgia (72, +8)
5. Meaningless Milestones (60, +11)
6. Free-to-Play (60, +1)
7. Warlords of Draenor (58, +1)
8. MMO Expansions (53, +2)
9. Asher Elias (51, new to list)
10. Reavers (48, new to list)

I suspect that I write enough about CCP that it should be moved to a category.  At least the list isn’t completely static.  I used each of those tags at least once in the last year and two new items appeared on the list.  But it does also point out some rather inconsistent usage as well.  I am pretty sure I should have used the “MMO Expansions” tag about a dozen more times to cover things like expansion announcements.  Such is the way of life on the blog.

I’ve Been Down this Path Before

Some days I feel as though there is nothing new under the sun.  If you’re an MMO blogger and you haven’t at some point thrown down on RMT, achievements, cheating, immersion, lockboxes, free to play, aggressive monetization, gear, story, drop rates, Steam sales, events, expansions, PvE vs. PvP, soloing, progression, forced grouping, dungeon finder, difficulty, how much better things used to be back in the day, and why nine out of ten MMORPGs are locked into the swords and sorcery fantasy model, you just haven’t been upholding your blogger oath.

The problem with blogging for this long isn’t that you really start to notice how often you repeat yourself so much as how much you feel you need to repeat yourself.  Old arguments never die, they only hibernate for a while so as to re-emerge more powerful and divisive than before.

Of course, part of the reason so many of these topics recur is that they have no definitive answer.  Some of them are just abstract; free to play is just a business model, and has been implemented well in some places and badly in others.  Some of them hinge on a definition on which people cannot agree; I have had comments here saying that there is no such thing as immersion in a game, that it is impossible.  Even cheating, a seemingly cut and dried topic, has its shades of gray.  A poll I ran about eight years back indicated that some people see some very benign things as cheats.

Sometimes a topic comes back around again and I jump back in to the discussion if I think I have something new to add or my view has changed a bit.  More often than not however, I am able to link back to some older post on the subject, usually with the line “I’ve been down this path before.”

Going Wayback

The Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine feature of it is one of the saviors of the internet.  So many things disappear over time as web sites get revamped, moved, taken, bought and re-purposed, or otherwise just go missing.

And even for sites that don’t go missing, it can be fun to go back and see what they were up to in the past.  And so it is that you can go visit the Wayback Machine to see how TAGN used to look over the history of the blog.  So, for example, if you go back nine years ago today you can see the old theme I used for the site, my two year anniversary post, and all the stuff in the side bar relevant to the time.

A screen from nine years ago

Back then EverQuest II was my most posted about game… and WP.com only had tags as opposed to the tags and categories scheme they have now.  No wonder my older posts are all over the place.  It couldn’t be me being careless!

I still sort of miss the original theme for the blog, even if it was too narrow and WP.com started breaking it every few months.  Looking at it gives me a similar sense of nostalgia as looking at old MMO screen shots does.  Anyway, the blog has been preserved for future generations I guess.  Good luck to them.

Blogroll Evolution

Blogroll blogroll blogroll… I used to obsess a bit… or more than a bit… over the blogroll on the sidebar of the blog.

Having observed blogroll behavior elsewhere I set myself a goal back when I started the blog.  I wanted to have a blogroll that linked out to a few regularly updated blogs.  I was going to limit it to ten blogs, then a dozen, then twenty, then no more than twenty five.

I wanted to keep the list small under the theory that a shorter list is more likely to get clicks, but I wasn’t able to keep it down to my original plan.  Still, I was determined to curate the list, to keep it up to date, make sure it was a quality list.  The difficulty really lay in keeping it short.  Back in the day there were so many new blogs popping up.

Flash forward eleven years.  I now know that almost nobody clicks on the blogroll in the side bar.  I haven’t really gone through it in months as I have supplanted it with a Rube Goldberg approximation of the Blogger dynamic blogroll, which does get clicks.  I have pondered with simply removing the static blogroll, but I occasionally use to go to a blog and it is nice to just have the link handy there.

And, of course, it has been at least a year, if not more, since somebody dropped me a note to ask if I would put them on my blogroll.  I am not sure if there are enough blogrolls out there to even play blogroll breadcrumbs any more.

A Peek into Page Views

As always, the yearly peek into page view statistics for the site.  As with the past few years, page views are down yet again.  Some of that is no doubt due to blogs just not being much of a thing any more, and some it due to how Google works… 2012’s numbers were only so high due to Google… but some of the downward trend also tracks what I have been posting about.  WoW gets page views (see most popular posts), as does controversy.  And if you have something controversial to say about WoW, well, you’re in there.  I haven’t had much in either category over the last year.  Anyway, eleven years in, this is where the blog stands.

Total Page Views by Month/Year

Average Daily Page Views by Month/Year

New this year is a color version of the chart.  WP.com added a new stats page, which has its ups and downs, but it has a color coded version of the above charts, which I will post as well in case the color blue speaks to you.

Total Page Views by Month/Year – New Version

Average Daily Page Views by Month/Year – new version

That puts the sum total of page views over the last 11 years at just past 4.6 million.  As I’ve said before, not a number that will impress anybody running a commercial site, but a lot more than I ever expected to get.

Other bits of page view trivia; the most active day over the life of the blog is Thursday, which gets 16% of the views.  Not exactly a stand out, since if page views fell evenly on days, each would have about 14% of the views.  Still, Thursday seems to be slightly special for some reason.

Meanwhile, the most popular time of the day for page views is 19:00 UTC, which gets 6% of views.  Since I tend to post at 17:15 UTC, I guess that means there is about a two hour delay before people start reading.

And then there is the Feedly statistic that I cannot explain.

What Feedly says about the site

Somehow Feedly thinks 11,000 people follow this site on their service.  And that is up from a count of 9,000 last year.  If every alleged Feedly follower clicking on the link to view the site directly, my stats would blow up.

That is it for stats.  If you have any questions, feel free to ask in the comments.

That Forward Looking Statement

So here is the part at the end of the anniversary post where I generally make a statement about writing less and playing more.

It has always been my assumption that I would eventually tire of writing and just go back to playing video games without feeling the need to blog about them.

Imagine my surprise over the last year or so as I began to tire of video games in general, and fantasy MMORPGs in particular, the staple of my interest, and yet feel no desire to stop blogging.

Then end of the blog might come due to lack of material to write about due to my not actually playing very many games.  Look at how many automatic posts I get in every month that don’t require me to actually play anything.

• Month in Review
• SuperData Monthly Top Tens
• EVE Online monthly update
• EVE Online monthly economic report
• Fantasy Movie League weekly updates

That is nine or ten posts right there when your typical month has about 20 weekdays.  Half a month of posts is mostly just writing without playing anything.  Add in announcements about expansions and such or Kickstarter news or the occasional rant or reminiscence and how much time do I spend on posts that I categorize as “I did a thing!” in a video game?

August was a bit hectic for me when it came to writing.  Not because I wanted to do my own Blaugust and write every day… I came up with a list of topics to explore that could have filled the month… but because there was a deployment in EVE Online to write about.  I had to move around all the semi-regular posts to fit in the posts about doing something in a game.

I will write about playing video games, when I am actually playing them.  But it looks like I’ll carry on writing even when I am not playing them.  Odd that.  I wonder how long I would carry on if I stopped out or habit, routine, and sheer momentum.

Routine is the key word I suppose.  In part I have a routine for a lot of the standard posts.  For example, I generally have the one year/five years/ten years ago portion of the month in review post written out a month or two in advance. Likewise, there is a formula to the EVE Online monthly economic reports and the SuperData posts and even the Fantasy Movie League posts.  The follow the same path just about every time.

So, in a change up here in at the end of year eleven, my warning isn’t that I expect to blog fade in the next twelve month so much as I expect that I might completely grow bored of video games.

How in the hell did I get here?

Anyway, we will see if I make it to twelve.  But first I have to do one of those automatic posts tomorrow.

EVE Online Lifeblood Expansion coming October 24th

CCP put up a trailer for the upcoming Lifeblood expansion that will see the new refineries that will be the moon mining platform going forward.

There are a few more details on the Updates page for the Lifeblood expansion, along with some other items that will be coming up, including a rebalance of ships popular with Alpha clones and updates to the event framework we know as The Agency.

July in Review

The Site

I got another mighty blog achievement this month.

Seventeen in one day… oooooh

I think the lesson here is “kitten posts mean more likes” since that is where most of the likes showed up.

One Year Ago

Pokemon Go was everywhere after it launched.  Everywhere.

I listed out the NBI Class of 2016.  I haven’t gone to check how many survived the year.

Daybreak turned off the last PlanetSide server and the game was gone… though it lingered on the server status page for a while.

Daybreak did launch a pair of special event servers for EverQuest and EverQuest II.  I was keen enough to go earn the special mount on the EQII server.

There was strange news for Turbine as their parent company, Warner Brothers, announced that they were transitioning into a mobile app development studio.  We wondered what that meant for Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons & Dragons Online.

In Minecraft I was tinkering with maps and night renders while Aaron created a huge map room in game.

In World of Warcraft I managed to unlock flying in Draenor.  Just in time too, as the 7.0 patch was already pre-loading.  Soon the garrison gold mine would be turned off.  And then it hit, bringing new features.

In EVE Online the Casino War was winding down.  There was a Keepstar to chase, the alleged hellcamp, and some sovereignty exchanges in Pure Blind.  That wasn’t really going anywhere though.  We killed four titans in Okagaiken and blew up a CSAA just to show we were still fighting.  But in the end we admitted defeat and began packing for our trek to greener pastures.

Our destination was Delve, ever the region that calls to Goons.  I mean, look down at the “five year ago” section below. We were attacking the region then as well.  But first we had to get through Rakapas.  I was there for a bit before I ended up soloing my carrier down to our staging in Sakht, accruing the maximum about of jump fatigue possible.

I also hit 160 million skill points while the Blog Banter spoke of malaise.

Five Years Ago

In New Eden my hear went “Boum!”

Elligium took its pandas and went home.

Blizzard set the date for Mists of Pandaria.

There was a Steam Summer Sale.

I was wondering if Torchlight II could live up to its potential.

Ultima Forever!  A shot across Lord British’s bow.

Rift decides to sell mounts for cash.  It wasn’t like they were going free to play though.

Let it be noted that not all Kickstarters fail.  There was the Defense Grid expansion Kickstarter.  I kicked in, they built it, I played it.  Simple as that, and much better than any 99 cent app I have purchased.  And I still get a free copy of their next Defense Grid game when it comes out.

I wondered aloud if nostalgia servers… official ones… would remain the sole domain of EverQuest.

Meanwhile SOE was talking about Vanguard’s free to play plan.

I was underwhelmed at the so-called “reskin” of Qeynos in EverQuest II.  The sorrow of Qeynos knows no end.

In EVE Online, there was war in Delve… again… if only I could get there.  There were battles in 49-U6U, C3N-3S, and DSS-EZ, a conga line in 319-3D (where we also watched the alliance tournament), and a flying titan in F2OY-X.  The tiny Wallpapers Alliance held out longer than Nulli Secunda, before being crushed.

Then having done the heavy lifting for TEST, the CFC was asked to go home.  TEST was going to be its own alliance, but we would all remain the best of friends in the big blue donut of love.  Anyway, it was time for a convoy back to Deklein.  Somewhere along the way I got a warning from CCP for causing lag.

And there was also a link to a list of things to do in EVE Online.

Ten Years Ago

Hey, it was the Revelations expansion in EVE Online that was news a year back, and I was running through the updated new player tutorial. It was a huge improvement, though I ran into a glitch or two.

The instance group was still off in Lord of the Rings Online for the Summer, though we were having issues at The Great Barrow when we weren’t playing Truth or Dare.

Vanguard was already planning server merges. 13 servers were being reduced down to 4.

EverQuest II got its own magazine… again (okay, it was an SOE magazine for Station Access subscribers the first time around, but it had an EQ2 scantily clad dark elf on the cover!)… in the form of EQuinox. And they were offering Rise of Kunark beta access to subscribers!

Dr. Richard Bartle, keeping to his strict regime of “one controversial fanboi enraging quote every summer” said he would like to improve the MMORPG species by turning off World of Warcraft.  Seemed kind of mild after the next year’s entry and reaction!

Perpetual was making crazy-insane statements about Star Trek Online… like no Galaxy-class starships for you! Ships that size were planned to be “space cities” and quest hubs. Cryptic take note: If I cannot aspire to be Captain Kirk, I am not sure I want to play! Or just go read Tipa’s post on the subject.

The end of Auto Assault was announced by NCsoft and I took note and pondered a (silly) solution.

I stopped in front of SOE headquarters for a picture. (Mirror universe Wilhelm, with goatee.)

Microsoft finally announced a warranty extension due to the “red ring of death” problem with the XBox 360.

And Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw did his fist Zero Punctuation video.

Most Viewed Posts in July

1. From Alola Pokedex to National Pokedex in Pokemon Sun
2. Where the Hell is that EverQuest Successor Already?
3. The Corrupt Developer Career Path
4. Delve – We Mine Things and We Rat a Little Less
5. Dual Monitor
6. We’re on the Road to Mordor
7. Alamo teechs u 2 play DURID!
8. Given the Boot in Fallen Gate
9. Producing Mechanical Parts
10. Kitten Time
11. Two Days to Delve
12. The July 2017 Update Brings Revamped Strategic Cruisers to EVE Online

Search Terms of the Month

casino wars eve
[No longer a thing since casinos were banned]

wow insider
[Also no longer a thing since AOL canned it]

candy crush users hate update june 2017
[Not according to SuperData Research]

les informations sur la xl actinet
[I am not sure what an “actinet” is, XL or otherwise]

wii little big planet
[Sorry, that is a PlayStation exclusive]

EVE Online

The Reavers deployment ended.  Fun was had, but it is over.  Then there was mucking about in Delve, a capital op, and the usual bout of trying to figure out what I should train next.

EverQuest II

Well, as seems to be the pattern so far this year, my MMORPG flavor of the month seems to be exactly that, a month-long venture at most.  I started off on the Fallen Gate server, got to level ten in time to get the special mount, added a couple more levels, and then stopped playing.  Good thing I only subscribed for a 30 days.

Lord of the Rings Online

The promise of the Mordor expansion and the end of the War of the Ring after more than ten years of fighting and grinding grabbed my attention, and suddenly I was patching up LOTRO… as if you can use “sudden,” “patching,” and “LOTRO” in the same sentence… and trying to get reacquainted with the ins and outs of Middle-earth.  So I guess we have the next flavor of the month.  Will it last any longer?

Minecraft

I haven’t done anything in Minecraft this month.  Part of that was just having other games to play while lacking in any real project to focus on in our world.  The other part was that the latest version requires an update to the Overviewer application I use to make maps of the world in order to plan.  I really depend on that app a lot.  Unfortunately, the person who has done that in the past has moved on so the Windows part of that project is effectively dead.  Such is life with open source.

Pokemon

Pretty much the same situation as Minecraft, I ran out of things to do and stopped playing.  I keep an eye on the game and grab Pokemon when there are download events, but otherwise I am on a break from the game.  That probably isn’t a bad thing.  A new version is coming out later this year so maybe a break now will mean I’ll be refreshed and ready to go when that lands.

Pokemon Go

The recent update to gyms has gone pretty well for me.  I am earning a lot more coins thanks to the fact that there is a gym next to my office that trades hands during the day, but if you’re the last one in you are safe overnight and will get the full 50 coins.  So I went from earning maybe 10 coins a week getting into the old style gym to 100 or more with little change in effort.  Of course, this makes me wonder if Niantic is being too generous.  Are remote gyms unintentional gold mines?  Otherwise, I made it to level 29 and, thanks to the experience boost during the one year anniversary, made some good progress towards level 30.

My basic stats this month:

• Level: 29 (+1)
• Pokedex status: 185 (+11) caught, 214 (+17) seen
• Pokemon I want: Gyrados
• Current buddy: Magikarp… only 147km more to get enough candies for a Gyrados

Coming Up

Will there be a Blaugust this year?  If there is one, it won’t be Belghast driving it.

ANet will be announcing the next Guild Wars 2 expansion tomorrow.

In LOTRO the Mordor expansion looms.  I plan to simply boost into Mordor.  However, I won’t be doing that today.  The expansion has been delayed for the moment.  Can we blame Daybreak yet?

In a break with tradition there will be an game update for EVE Online in August.  The only item on the list for it so far is killing of the Captain’s Quarters to help clear the way for a 64-bit client.  While I won’t miss the quarters, I should probably go for one last visit before they’re gone.

In the Imperium, there is word that we will be deploying somewhere looking for a fight.  We’ve been given lists of doctrines and ships to bring, but no destination or time frame yet.

The Blogger Fantasy Movie League is getting into its final weeks, with the 13 weeks finishing up at the end of this month.  We shall see who the winner will be… actually, it will be Liore… maybe somebody will take second place from me.  Given how I did this week it seems possible.

Return of the Shang Rush

There is a correlation between some of my past jobs and certain video games.  For a long stretch of time there was usually a video game, or a series of video games over time, that whatever team I was on would play at the office after hours.

Games like NetTrek or Marathon or Diablo or Warcraft II or StarCraft took their turns at various companies as the game to play after hours.

That all ended late in the last decade when HR reached a point of ascendancy in Silicon Valley in companies above a certain size and decreed that people enjoying themselves on company property was bad unless they were doing so in company organized and controlled events.

Before that we were able to find support against IT for our after hours fun.  After that IT was cleared to keep our machines free from anything not specifically mandated by them.  And so ended after hours bonding.  Now we just talk about video games that we play ourselves.  Nobody sticks around late to hang out any more, we all just go home.  Life in enterprise software, where everything is super serious.

There is probably a correlation between the wind down of games after hours or work and finding time at home to blog about games.

The funny thing is how certain games were popular at one company but not another.  In 1998 I moved to a new company.  The previous one had been very much Warcraft II and early Total Annihilation.  The new company was just getting into StarCraft.  The timing was just about perfect, as I was in for the early learning curve of StarCraft, which had just been released.

StarCraft supplanted the previous dev team champion, Age of Empires.  There were still some people who played it, but the new game supplanted the old pretty firmly.

(Side note: As somebody who has played the same MMOs for years at a stretch, it now seems odd that such games had such a short shelf life and how keen we could be to move on to new ones.)

Some people on the team missed the game while others found the balance of the game to be off and much preferred the fine edge balance of the StarCraft races.  The Rise of Rome expansion for Age of Empires came along, but it wasn’t enough to get the game back in play.

Then of course Age of Empires II – The Age of Kings came along and eclipsed the game completely with its improved controls and balance of civilizations that gave each one their special niche.  There was no looking back at that point.

Somewhere along the line I grabbed a copy of Age of Empires just to try it out, but it never really stuck with me.  Ensemble Studios even rolled back some of the UI and control changes that came with Age of Kings to try and improve the game, but it remained in the shadow of its successor.  People have kept playing and modding and expanding Age of Kings while Age of Empires has languished.

I’ve been playing Age of Kings off and on ever since it came out.  The game still (mostly) ran through the last decade until it got an HD upgrade/revamp a few years back that brought it into the age of higher resolution monitors.

Soon though, almost 20 years since it launched, we will all have a chance to take another look at Age of Empires.  One of the tidbits to come out of E3 was news of an Age of Empires: Definitive Edition, featuring 4K graphics, remastered sound track, and improved game play.

Age of Empires

Microsoft has spruced up the long neglected Age of Empires site so you can sort of get a handle on what they are doing.  Information is sparse and the site seems pretty slow, but you can see they have something planned.   I don’t know who is actually doing the work.  The site proudly talks about somebody on the “About Us” page, but Ensemble Studios that did the original game has been gone for eight years, while Hidden Path Entertainment did the Age of Kings HD update and they aren’t mentioned anywhere.

Also, I am pretty sure this statement from the “About Us” page is laughably wrong:

Considered by many as the top selling PC game of all time

If you’re one of the alleged “many,” maybe you had better check that chart again.

Anyway, I’ll hold out for more information before I make an actual purchase decision, but I am leaning towards picking this up when it goes live.  We’ll see if the Shang rush is still a thing.

A Short Lived Cerberus and a Sabre

Asher has brought the Reavers out on a new deployment, one where we will be working out of a familiar station in Reavers history.

Having a station, rather than living out of mobile depots in safe spots as we did in Impass, means having the option to field multiple doctrines during the deployment.

I barely made it into the deployment fleet and did not have time to arrange to have somebody carry a ship for me in a capital ship.  I just grabbed one of the doctrine ships I had handy and undocked to catch up with the fleet, which was already on the move.  I made it, but I I was locked into the single doctrine.

Fortunately, from where we are staging, it is possible to fly a ship out without an undue amount of risk.  Returning to an old stomping ground means that perches and safe spots are bookmarked already, making the journey more viable.  I jump cloned back and empty clone I hold in Jita, bought and fit a Cerberus, and flew it on out to our staging system.

Bright red Cerb headed into harms way…

The route through high sec was easy enough, but I waited until the evening had turned into night and the online user count had dropped down before heading into low sec and then null sec and the end of my journey.  I had arrived, safely docked up, and logged off when Asher sent out a ping for a Reavers fleet.

The doctrine called for was the first ship I flew out.  That doctrine requires implants and, having just cloned jumped a few hours earlier, I could not jump back into that clone in time for the fleet.  I remained logged off and started tinkering with Minecraft.  I noticed after a bit that another ping had gone out and that the doctrine had been changed to the Cerberus fleet.  I logged back in, got on coms, and joined the fleet.

The fleet was already undocked and in combat, following Asher around and kiting the enemy in his usual fashion.  The problem for me was being able to warp in and join up.  The Cerb doctrine is built to move fast, so warping carries risk.  By the time one comes out of warp the fleet will have moved quite some ways.  When you warp, you go to the point your target was at that moment.

So I tried warping in, found myself way off from both friend and foe, then warped off to a safe.  I did this a few times when Asher cleared people to try and warp in, however on my fourth attempt I managed to land right in the midst of the enemy fleet, also flying Cerbs, and was pointed before I could warp off again.  My brand new Cerberus exploded before I could even overheat my hardener.  I owned it for barely three hours total.

Loss keeps the New Eden economy thriving.

I was able to warp out in my pod and dock up, but that left me out of the fight.  The only other ship I had was not appropriate for what we were doing, so I was sitting in my pod in one of the stations listening to the fight continue.

There were additional losses and Asher eventually rounded everybody up and docked to asses how things stood.  We posted our losses in fleet and Asher tried to sort out getting people re-shipped.  I didn’t have anything else I could fly… and couldn’t get in the clone for the ship anyway, once you have clone swapping in citadels you start to miss it in stations… so he asked who had something for me.  There wasn’t a spare Cerb or logi to be had, but old school Reaver Norrec Lafisques had a Sabre sitting his hangar.

I was asked if I could fly it and said that of course I could.  And it was true, I had trained up the skills for all things interdictor related ages ago.  So Norrec traded me the ship and I threw some money at him hoping that it was enough in case I lost it, got in the Sabre and prepared to undock.

Of course, the question nobody asked was whether or not I knew what to do with a Sabre, or any other interdictor, once I was strapped in.  I had trained up the skills, but I had never actually flown one.  Interdictors are ships that require some individual skill and initiative.  They are tech II destroyers that can put up warp disruption bubbles, an action that can save the day when done at the right moment or get us in deep shit done at the wrong.  I’ve watched some masters of the art in Reavers use them to great effect, so I felt a little bit of pressure not to screw up.

Still, hostiles were in system, we were set to undock, so I figured one more ship even ineptly handled would be better than no ship at all, so long as I didn’t screw us by bubbling.  I had the ship insured and given that interdictors are generally high priority targets I wasn’t sure I would last long in any case, so when the command came I left the station with everybody else.

And then I set about trying to figure out what buttons to press.

I was in a panic for a moment as I couldn’t find the module for bubble deployment.  I wasn’t even sure what it would look like, but knew it had to be there somewhere.  Norrec had put it at the far end of the hot keys so it was under the fleet window, the traditional place to hide modules you don’t want to set off by accident. (e.g. cynos, bomb launchers, smart bombs)

I also had a little 125mm Gatling AutoCannon to let me whore on kills… shells down range to the target get you listed even if they do not hit… as well as what I took to be a light missile launcher loaded with EM missiles.  That seemed a bit redundant until I went to use it mid-fight and found it was loaded with Defender missiles, the new hotness for destroying incoming bombs.

Meanwhile the fleet was on the move and I was going with it.

Sabre in space

There were other interdictors in the fleet, so I was pretty sure I would be the last choice when Asher was looking for somebody who knew what they were doing, but part of the job of an interdictor in the fast moving Cerb fleet is to drop bubbles regularly when told to in order to shield us from people warping in on us.

When the time came I just sort of watched to see when the other interdictors were bubbling and when there was a gap I launched by own bubble.  Nobody said anything so I am going to guess I didn’t mess that up.

Flying back around one of our bubbles

The fight itself had been a running series of engagements with a Ferox fleet and a Cerberus fleet.  Then the Feroxes moved off, only to have a Machariel fleet show up.  We moved and shot and occasionally knocked down a foe.  While the Sabre doesn’t have the range of the Cerb, a few targets fell within range so I was able to get rounds in their direction and get on the kill.

The fight had us in the next system over and we were headed back towards base when the Machs were reported on their way.  We ended up with us on one side of the gate and them on the other.  We jumped through and attempted to zip away, but a couple people got caught, including Norrec, who lost his Cerb of many kill marks due to being in a bad spot.

We zoomed around some more, though the Machs were fit for speed as well, so we couldn’t engage at will.

Just another picture of us zooming around

The battle report shows us coming out on the short end when it comes to ISK… Cerbs are not cheap… but the odds were generally against us at each step, so not getting trapped and slaughtered meant some measure of success.

After we docked up again I asked Norrec if he wanted the Sabre back, seeing as he was now down a ship as well.  But he said I had bought it, so I suppose I threw enough money at him.  Now I have a Sabre there for future use.  In the mean time though I got my alt out in Jita and bought up a few more ships and some supplies to send out to our staging.

There was some talk about getting doctrine ships up on contract out where we are staging, however they have to be alliance contracts, since people will mess with you if you’re not paying attention with public contracts.  And being one of the few people not in the main alliance, well, it might be better to have my own stuff to hand in case things are popping again and nobody has time to find something for me.  Another one of those times where I think my life might be easier if I just joined KarmaFleet.

Scanning Skills

With over 170 million skill points on my main character in EVE Online, I have mostly gotten used to be able to just do what I want to do without worrying about training something.

Not that there isn’t always something to train.  And my skills are sub-cap focused.  I still can’t run out and fly a super carrier or a titan.  But then I don’t have the ISK to play in that league anyway.  But these days when a new doctrine comes up or Asher has some new fit to try out on us, I am generally good to go.  The joy of having 185 skills at level V.

My alt, on the other hand, is about 50 million skill points behind and it feels like he needs to train something new every time a new doctrine comes up.  He is perennially a skill short… which is the way I felt with my main 50 million or so skill points back as well.

But my alt is ahead in a few categories, one being scanning.  At some point I put him on track to train up all the skills under scanning to V.

Going all the way to V isn’t always a good use of your time.  Sometimes you need it to unlock tech II modules or ships.  You have to have the racial frigate to V to fly the racial cov ops frigate and you need the racial battleship skill to V to fly the racial black ops variant.  But going to level V for the actual cov ops or black ops skill, maybe not so useful.

Anyway, since he was all the way to V I sent him out on the last deployment, the camping trip to Impass, in a Buzzard with a fit I borrowed and changed a bit.

[Buzzard, Combat Scanner w/ cov cyno]
Co-Processor II
Micro Auxiliary Power Core II

5MN Y-T8 Compact Microwarpdrive
Scan Acquisition Array II
Scan Pinpointing Array II
Scan Rangefinding Array II
Scan Rangefinding Array II

Covert Ops Cloaking Device II
Sisters Expanded Probe Launcher
Covert Cynosural Field Generator I

Small Gravity Capacitor Upgrade I
Small Processor Overclocking Unit I

Liquid Ozone x400
Nanite Repair Paste x100
Sisters Combat Scanner Probe x16
Sisters Core Scanner Probe x8

Not brilliant, but it worked.  The idea was just to scan and be a warp-in or a cyno target.  I chose the Buzzard mostly because I had a couple of the hulls on hand (so of which I have had since probing looked like this), but the extra mid-slots didn’t hurt.

The Buzzard in space

I am a bit bummed he never got to light the covert cyno, but combat scanning turned out to be fun.  While the sight of combat probes on directional scan caused most solo ratters to warp for safety (mission accomplished), I was able to scan down mobile depots, mobile tractor units, and even abandoned drones to shoot.  I became the bane of MTUs in Impass, with my alt scanning them down quite easily and my main warping in for the kill.

MTU whore

I was pretty pleased with the whole combat scanning thing when we returned home from the deployment.

A few days later back in what I consider my home system we had a few trespassers.  I was on my main and had another Buzzard to hand.  It was a similar fit, but tech I, since Wilhelm isn’t all trained up on scanning.  So I undocked, launched combat probes, and set about to see if I could find the bad guys.

Unsurprisingly, I didn’t see them.  They were cloaked up somewhere.  But I wondered if I could find something they might gravitate to, so I fished about some more until I found a deployable.  As I tightened the scan in I saw it was a mobile depot.  So I honed in on that, getting the probes tighter and tighter around it, until they were on top of it in with the tightest setting possible… and I couldn’t get the result to 100%, so I couldn’t warp to it.

That was disappointing.

Later I flew my alt over just to give it a try in his Buzzard, fit as above, and he scanned it down without a problem.

See, it’s right there

All of which made me decide that I needed to get Wilhelm trained up in scanning, just in case, something that illustrates the ongoing problem with my alt plans.

Back in the day when I created my alt, it was to train up complementary skills.  At the time he was the hauler for my mining main.  As time has gone on however I have come to use him for parallel tasks, handing ships back and forth so if I cannot get my main to the right location for whatever reason my alt can take over.  My alt, for example, is now trained up to fly my Apostle for capital ops, should the need arise.

But with a 50 million skill point differential, there are still quite a few gaps.  And, as noted here, the gaps aren’t always in the direction one would expect.