December in Review

The Site

Here we are at the last day of 2019, which is also the last day of the “teens” of the twenty-first century.  Tomorrow we’ll be in the Twenties, so I can use this graphic for one more post.

The jury is still out if the twenties will be roaring or not, or if I’ll be able to retire by the time the Thirties roll around.  The last run at that decade didn’t turn out so well.

Those dates and decades all seem so odd to me.  As a kid I was fixated on what the year 2000 would bring and how old I would be then, but I never really considered what would come after.  Now we’re well past that point and, as it turns out, time doesn’t just stand still.  It was 20 years ago when I was on the Y2K emergency response team, on call to work on any issues related to that monumental calendar date change.  Nothing happened.  But I still have the shirt they gave us.

As for the site, this will be post 412 of the year.  That puts 2019 in 4th place for most posts, beating out 2018 by just eight and 2010 by six.  2007 remains the champion, with 490 posts, though I wrote less than half as many words per post back then, so 2019 was more work.

One Year Ago

Epic Games set out to challenge Steam with their own digital games store front.  That didn’t stop Steam from going on with its usual Winter Sale.

Somebody was trying to crowd fund yet another gamer social network which got me on a tear about gamers not being a unified demographic.  The Kickstarter failed, as I expected.  It was a dumb idea.

Blizzard stepped back a bit from their MOBA, Heroes of the Storm.

In a season of MMO offers, Dungeons & Dragons Online had a $299 season pass offer, Lord of the Rings Online had a $199 legacy bundle, and Daybreak had a limited $299 lifetime subscription offer, though when buyers hit the limit, the limit was extended.

Daybreak launched The Burning Lands expansion for EverQuest as they were laying off staff.  The layoff was alleged to be focused in their Austin office, where PlanetSide stuff happens.

Daybreak, which had been hinting about a new game coming, then announced PlanetSide Arena, which didn’t feel like a new game at all.  And didn’t they just lay people off from that team?  It was slated to be available by February 2019.

On the LOTRO Legendary server I made a side trip to Esteldin.  I also made a side trip to the fall festival to get drunk.  LOTRO does a very nice drunk simulation.  Then it was off to Evendim, where I made it through Tinnudir and Annuminas.  After that I was in the Trollshaws.  I even made it into the Misty Mountains.  I was on a roll in Middle-earth.

CCP put out their December update for EVE Online, which included changes to high sec war decs, as well as the assets for the holiday login rewards and the Operation Permafrost event.  I wasn’t happy with that event.  It didn’t measure up to the Halloween event in my mind.  I did have some better luck with it eventually.

I was also carping about the dearth of ship SKINs in the New Eden Store.  How do you run a space cash shop where I cannot buy something for my ship?

CCP also announced the final destinations for the Invasion World Tour, in which they would change things up by bringing EVE Fanfest to eight locations around the world.

Actually in EVE Online Asher brought the Reavers SIG on a wormhole adventure to help blow up a Keepstar, which I recorded in a series of posts:

• Waiting for a Hole – Dec 9, 2018
• Fort Knocks Way Down in the Hole – Dec 12, 2018
• Sotiyo Boom – Dec 13, 2018
• A Keepstar Waits in the Hole – Dec 14, 2018
• The Other Keepstar Falls in Rage – Dec 15, 2018
• Out of the Hole and Back to Delve – Dec 19, 2018

The Reavers also went out and did one of our null sec space races for fun.

In my usual year end posts, I reviewed my predictions for 2018, wrote about my five books of the year, went over the highs and lows of the last dozen months, reviewed the games I played, and ranted a bit about the state of MMORPGs.

Also, I had something about how the core player base will always optimize their behavior to match game mechanics.  Then there was a throw away post about various game studios.

Finally, I told the story of the two chocolate pies.

Five Years Ago

After my hardware woes the month before, I had to figure out which games to install again.

My MMO Outlook for 2015 was bleak.  But not as bleak as the reality ended up.  And then there were the highs and lows of 2014.

Syp was on about “real” MMO studios, strongly suggesting that you had to have more than one MMO to be legit.  I questioned whether that was really the case or not.  Examples were discussed.

It was the 10 year anniversary of the Nintendo DS handheld system.

Warlords of Draenor having launched at the end of November, the instance group was getting together in Azeroth and building garrisons… so we could be apart.  Of course, my first character into Draenor was already level 100 shortly thereafter.  We engaged in some jumping puzzles and then had to ride across country to the Bloodmaul Slag Mines.

Coming back to WoW also got me to post five seemingly simple things I wanted to see fixed.  I think they’re all still unchanged at this point.

I also spent a bit of time in EverQuest II over the holidays, figuring out where to go, getting some AA points handed to me, and rolling out into the Kylong Plains.  I also tried to recall the events around the great downtime of December 2004.

In New Eden, NCDot’s invasion of Fountain was pushed back.  Reavers were operating in their backfield in Querious, where Asher managed to setup a trap that lead to us killing four supers.  Then it was back to our home in the north.

We also got the Rhea expansion from CCP, which gave us graphical updates, the Bowhead freighter, the removal of clone costs, and Thera, a new kind of wormhole system.  There was also a blog banter about what to tell new players about EVE Online.

I was also wondering if PLEX-like currency items were working out well in any games besides EVE Online.  That was before the WoW Token came on the scene.

And I posted about three science fiction series I had started reading.

Ten Years Ago

Let’s see… a random reader wrote in to tell me that the social aspects of MMOs were insignificant.  It wasn’t even Gevlon.  Still, I don’t think he understood what he was talking about.

People seemed to be getting worked up as to how you define content in an MMO.  Can you compare sandbox and amusement park content fairly?  Taking some of this to its logical extreme, I demonstrated something that trumped all MMO content.

Also getting people worked up was the catch in the whole free to play model, brought up by changes to the store in Battlefield Heroes.  That actually got responses all over the place.

The US release date for Pokemon HeartGold and SoulSilver was announced.

People were warming up for Star Trek Online.  There was a confusing array of pre-order options.  But it was missing some items I really wanted. (I think the awful early movie uniforms eventually appeared recently in the C-Store.)

In World of Warcraft we were busy wrapping up the holiday achievements, including Pilgrim’s Bounty.

We were also playing with this new Dungeon Finder thing that showed up with WoW patch 3.3.  Automated cross-server instance group matching with random strangers?  It will never work.

The instance group, in its horde RP-PvP server form, was hitting Gnomeregan and Shadowfang Keep, both of which seemed… much easier.

And I was officially epic… proven by the achievement.  Of course by that time, somebody already had all the possible WoW achievements.  Too epic to be believed.

Meanwhile, this horrible image was keeping me up at nights.  You just cannot unsee some things once you have seen them.

In EVE Online the Dominion expansion went live, changing how players captured and held.  Out was POS based sovereignty and in was territorial claim units (TCUs), infrastructure hubs (ihubs), sovereignty blockade units (SBUs), and all the fun times they brought.  I wasn’t in null sec at the time, but would learn all about these things later on.

Finally, there was an actual podcast interview with Erik “WoW isn’t easy enough” Estavillo.  He was a surprisingly good sport about being the subject of mockery.

Fifteen Years Ago

In EverQuest II there was the great December downtime, where the game was offline for more than a day when the servers wouldn’t come up after an update.  I wrote up a bit about that a decade later, but you can find some contemporary commentary over at Terra Nova.

Anarchy Online introduced a Free to Play program, five years before Dungeons & Dragons Online made a splash with that idea, replacing trial subscriptions for new players.  It gave players access to the original content for free.  Free players were shown ads on in-game billboards to help fund this new program.  Started as a one year experiment, free is still an option within the game.

Garry’s Mod, one of the oddest early “games” to take advantage of Steam and Valve’s Source Engine, was launched.  A best selling package on Steam, it is a sandbox that lets people tinker with assets from Valve’s games such as Half-Life 2.  It was used as the basis for a number of web comics, such as the famed Concerned, as well as videos and other creations.

Twenty Five Years Ago

Sony launched the original PlayStation console.  Sony’s aggressive courting of third party developers, something the then market giants Nintendo and Sega did in a half-hearted fashion at best, led to a software library that allowed Sony to dominate.  This eventually drove Sega and the second tier competitors out of the console market and led Nintendo to double down on its insular franchise pattern that often goes for years pretending no other consoles even exist.

Maxis released SimCity 2000, the sequel to the original SimCity.  It was a huge leap over the original in many way.  And it came from a time when we felt adding “2000” to a name made it more modern.  That faded a bit about 20 years back.

Most Viewed Posts in December

1. The Holidays Come to EVE Online with Login Rewards and More
2. Alamo teechs u 2 play DURID!
3. How Many People Play EVE Online?
4. Getting Upper Blackrock Spire Access
5. Minecraft and the Search for a Warm Ocean
6. My Five Books of 2019
7. The Test of Righteousness
8. Reviewing my 2019 Predictions
9. WoW Classic gets Battlegrounds and Key Rings Today
10. Top Five Rejected WoW Squish Ideas
11. Gnomeregan Again but Backwards
12. Return to the Crowd Pummeler

Search Terms of the Month

flattering dominix outfit
[Go with the Hyperion outfit, trust me]

myrmidon or ishtar
[Myrmidon. Is this Gallente “hot or not” now?]

fozzie sov mechanics
[They suxor]

nantworks just survive
[It did not]

what do i get extra if i pre order torment of velious?
[Nothing if you’re asking after it launched]

daybreak all access lifetime
[That was last year]

Game Time from ManicTime

The update for WoW Classic this month changed the name of the executable, so now ManicTime will report WoW and WoW Classic separately.  However, the change was during the month so I cannot break them out yet, but I will be able to do so for next year.  Anyway, I clearly spent most of my gaming time in two places.

• World of Warcraft – 47.75%
• EverQuest II – 45.39%
• EVE Online – 6.12%
• EverQuest – 0.73%

At some point in the new year I will look at all  the time combined and what it meant and what affect measurement had on my play time.

EVE Online

I dipped into the game for a few ops, but wasn’t out on any deployments.  I also logged into the game for the 13 days of Christmas to collect my free goodies.  And there was a Reavers space scavenger hunt that Ranger Gama set up, which I did exceedingly poorly at.  But otherwise a quiet month in New Eden for me.

EverQuest II

I started off slow in Norrath this month, having hit the pre-expansion level cap with my main.  I wasn’t sure if I was going to play Blood of Luclin all that much, even though I had pre-ordered it.  But then it came out and I did dive in and I did play quiet a bit.  There are posts in store about all of that.

Pokemon Go

My wife and I finally made it to level 38.  I crossed over first, which got her to do a binge evolve session with a lucky egg to catch up.  Now, however, we face the climb to 39 and 40.  40 requires 20 million experience points, which getting to 38 pushed us past 12 million, so we’ve got about 40% of the journey to level cap ahead of us.   I figure if I just get about 100 new friends and get them all up to max friendship level I should be close.  Too bad you can only have 10 gifts in your inventory at one time.

Level: 38 (+1)
Pokedex status: 481 (+11) caught, 505 (+10) seen
Pokemon I want: Lucario, which is tough because I never any in the wild.
Current buddy: Tepig

World of Warcraft

Retail WoW is not at all my main focus and I spent very little time there.  I did log in with my main to go do Darkmoon Faire, since that is pretty much the only way I am going to make any trade skill progress at this point.  I almost forgot to log back in for the Winter Veil gifts.  There was a nice present under the tree, something new for the toy box.  I am glad I logged in to grab that.

WoW Classic

I started off the month getting back into old Azeroth.  The instance group ran some dungeons and I worked on my alts, most of whom are now into their 30s.  But the holidays were busy and getting together became a bit more dicey.  And then Blood of Luclin came along to occupy my solo time.  Still, it hasn’t faded yet.

Coming Up

A new year and a new decade.  Or have I mentioned that enough already?

Tomorrow will be the usual predictions post.  In the completely unchanged way of things, I thought that maybe I would skip it or change it up… maybe do a few predictions for the decade… largely because I was coming up short on predictions.  But over time they accumulated like a snowball rolling down hill and now you get the same old new year’s prediction posts you always get.

I still might do something looking forward a decade.  But then I think about what I might have predicted back on January 1, 2010 for the last decade.  At least it will likely be comedy in hindsight.  Maybe I’ll go with what I want to see as opposed to what I think will come to pass.  What does optimism look like again?

Otherwise the change of the year won’t see much change in reality.  We all still have to keep going no matter what the calendar says.

The October MER and the Return of NPC Bounties

CCP has the Monthly Economic Report for October out, so it is our chance to see if things have continued to rebound since the end of the Blackout.  For that I will open with the same chart I did in September.

October 2019 – Top Sinks and Faucets over time

With the September MER we saw bounties begin a sharp climb.  This climb continued through October, tapering off a bit, but putting the NPC bounty numbers very close to their June pre-Blackout plateau.  That continued increase in bounties was more than enough to allow them to reclaim their past position at the top of the sinks and faucets chart.

October 2019 – Sinks and Faucets

Last month NPC bounties sat at just over 20 trillion ISK, so it doubled for October, hitting 41.5 trillion ISK, easily surpassing commodities.  Oddly, commodities spiked up a bit as well, jumping from 21.6 trillion to 28.4 trillion ISK in value.  But that was not enough to fend off the return of NPC bounties.

The top ten regions for NPC bounties in October were:

1. Delve – 4.7 trillion
2. Deklein – 4.0 trillion
3. Outer Passage – 3.7 trillion
4. Esoteria – 2.7 trillion
5. Branch – 2.6 trillion
6. Cobalt Edge – 2.4 trillion
7. Fountain – 2.2 trillion
8. Tenerifis – 1.9 trillion
9. Oasa – 1.5 trillion
10. Omist – 1.5 trillion

That is up noticeably from the September list, combined the end of the blackout and the cyno changes that took supers out of ratting for a short time.

1. Delve – 2.2 trillion
2. Deklein – 1.5 trillion
3. Cobalt Edge – 1 trillion
4. Esoteria – 975 billion
5. Fountain – 957 billion
6. Branch – 699 billion
7. Oasa – 686 billion
8. Detorid – 528 billion
9. Tenerifis – 496 billion
10. Insmother – 454 billion

However, the August numbers, which were just blackout influenced, were actually not as far off in Delve as in some regions.  The perks of organization.

1. Delve – 4.39 trillion
2. Insmother – 1.30 trillion
3. Detorid – 1.23 trillion
4. Esoteria – 1.05 trillion
5. Querious – 753 billion
6. Cobalt Edge – 705 billion
7. Metropolis – 543 billion
8. Omist – 526 billion
9. Fountain – 515 billion
10. Malpais – 514 billion

Overall NPC bounties remain well down from their peak at the start of the year, even if they are moving back up again.  The monthly NPC bounty totals for 2019 so far:

• January – 83.8 trillion
• February – 69.8 trillion
• March – 71.4 trillion
• April – 57.2 trillion
• May – 55.5 trillion
• June – 48.2 trillion
• July – 29.1 trillion
• August – 21.1 trillion
• September – 20.6 trillion
• October – 41.5 trillion

For those interested in what happened during the blackout period, CCP Larrikin did a lessons learned segment of his Data & Botting presentation at EVE Vegas.  CCP has posted that presentation as a stand alone video, so you can watch the relevant section which starts at about the eight minute mark:

 

Then there is mining.  I heard on The Meta Show a statement that mining was lagging behind, but I am not sure the numbers support that.

October 2019 – Mining value by region

The top ten regions by value mine for October were:

1. Delve – 3.7 trillion
2. Esoteria – 2.2 trillion
3. Querious – 1.19 trillion
4. Domain – 1.19 trillion
5. Fountain – 1.16
6. The Forge – 1.1 trillion
7. Malpais – 900 billion
8. Lonetrek – 805 billion
9. Cobalt Edge – 801 billion
10. Metropolis – 795 billion

Compare that to the top ten for September:

1. Delve – 3 trillion
2. Domain – 1.3 trillion
3. The Forge – 1.2 trillion
4. Esoteria – 1.1 trillion
5. Querious – 879 billion
6. Lonetrek – 876 billion
7. Sinq Laison – 848 billion
8. Metropolis – 847 billion
9. Fountain – 768 billion
10. Genesis – 705 billion

The numbers are not up dramatically, but what did change is where the mining was being done.  During the blackout high sec regions around the major trade hubs climbed up the rankings as null sec mining was suppressed.  With October null sec regions began appearing higher on the list.

But what also happened was that mineral prices were down again in October, putting them near the recent all time low.

October 2019 – Economic Indices

Mining is measures in the ISK value of the ore mined, not by the physical volume, so if the amount of ore mined stayed the same but prices when down, the amount listed in the MER would be down as well.  If prices are down but the MER shows amounts up for regions like Delve and Esoteria, it seems likely that mining has already seen a resurgence and we are now seeing too many minerals chasing too few buy orders.

And so it goes.  It looks like people are back to the ISK generation routines in null sec.  But the things that go along with that to drive the economy like production (108 trillion to 119 trillion ISK value from September to October) and destruction (31 trillion to 32 trillion ISK value from September to October) are not up sufficiently to absorb the influx of minerals.  We shall see if that improves in November.

Five Years of Reavers

Here we are on Reaver’s founding day.  I’ve always pegged the date as around the middle of October, but somebody said on an op that October 15th was the date and that is good enough for me.  So happy fifth birthday to the Reavers SIG.

Reavers forum bee

I have a special affinity for Reavers.  I happened to wander in and join right as it was formed from the remnants of Freedom Squad.  I flew ops with Freedom Squad, but never joined officially, so Reavers was the first Imperium (or CFC back then) group I became a member of.

Also, being there from the start I feel like I know a lot of the story of the SIG.  While I have not been on every op, I believe I have gone on every deployment.

Finally, being a member of Reavers has let me experience a lot of things that you don’t always get to do on main fleet or homeland defense or during big war operations.  There have been a few points where I have felt tired of New Eden, but a new Reavers deployment has refreshed my interest and kept me going.

So, as I do every year, I will try to summarize what the SIG has been up to over the last twelve months.  You can find past summaries here:

• A Year of Reavers
• Two Years of Reavers
• Three Years of Reavers
• Four Years of Reavers

To go along with the now established tradition of these posts, I’ll start with a look at the null sec influence map, comparing the current state of null sec with what it looked like last year.

October 2018 and 2019 compared

Delve and surrounding regions stayed largely the same, with Red Alliance disappearing from Period Basis.  The region fell to the Imperium to hold, lest somebody else try to move in.  The north and east saw quite a bit more change.  Dead Coalition (formerly GotG) shook up its membership, with Slyce leaving, while Pandemic Legion and Northern Coalition were driven out of the north due to the “Glass Tribute” campaign this past spring, sending them to reform in Malpais, which was their rental space.  Further south, new names have popped up around Fraternity, which remains at war with TEST and its Legacy Coalition.

As for Reavers operations, it was a fairly quiet year for a number of reasons.

To start with, the shape of war has changed.  Back in the day Reavers would go off behind enemy lines during a war to act as a distraction.  We did peace time operations as well, but those were more to keep us busy and annoy some of our traditional foes than part of any grand strategic plan.

Circumstances have flipped Imperium doctrine on its head.  SIGs and squads are now the harbingers of war, going out to camp in hostile space and stir up trouble until a war sees possible, at which point the fleets mass to come join us and our operations are folded into main fleet.  And all the more so with Reavers, as Asher is the war time sky marshal, running all the big strategic ops.  So, things like the “Glass Tribute” campaign Reavers end up in main fleet rather than having their own deployment.

And then there is Liberty Squad, new US time zone group that formed up about a year or so ago.  There is a lot of overlap between the Reavers and Liberty Squad rosters.  Being on a Liberty Squad op is almost like being on a Reavers op, as almost all the voices on coms are the same.

Because of this, Asher put off doing deployments for a while to let Liberty Squad come together.  So my posts for this year cover more Liberty ops than Reavers.

Still, it was not a year without operations.  So I will run down the list I have based on the last twelve months of posts.

In December we went to wormhole J115405, otherwise known a Rage, to help evict Hard Knocks.  This was setup by The Initiative, who deserves all the credit.

The Initiative logo in spaceships

However, they invited other groups to come participate, and Reavers went as a group.

• Waiting for a Hole – Dec 9, 2018
• Fort Knocks Way Down in the Hole – Dec 12, 2018
• Sotiyo Boom – – Dec 13, 2018
• A Keepstar Waits in the Hole – Dec 14, 2018
• The Other Keepstar Falls in Rage – Dec 15, 2018
• Out of the Hole and Back to Delve – Dec 19, 2018

After that there was a long dry spell for Reavers as Liberty Squad deployed out to harass Pandemic Horde in Geminate.

We did have a couple of Reavers races, set up by Ranger Gamma.

• The Reavers Drake Race – Dec 30, 2018
• Reavers Gnosis Racing – Apr 22, 2019

After that there was the war in Tribute, which ran up to the Drifter invasion of null sec and the launch of the Chaos Era.  Liberty Squad did a bit during that, and I spent some time on Zungen Ops, which I get pings for by being in Reavers, but there were no Reavers deployments until recently.  With things quiet elsewhere, Asher formed us up and we went out to Insmother, passing through Legacy Coalition space to join in against Winter Coalition, moving to Cache there after.

• On The Road Again in New Eden – Sep 16, 2019
• A Tower Bash in Cache – Oct 7, 2019
• Further Structure Bashing in Cache – Oct 8, 2019
• A Wormhole Home from Cache – Oct 13, 2019

That was an old school Reavers deployment, with us living in space without a station or structure to base from.  Mobile depots for everybody.

Swapping out my cloak

However, that also put a bit of a crimp on the numbers.  People who missed the move op out had to find their way out into the middle of hostile space, some opting not to bother.  Numbers were low for ops at times and we ended up coming home this past weekend.

And that is where we stand currently at the the end of five years, back home from a venture out in the wilds of Cache, where we were living in space, shooting at structures, and looking for fights.

My posts do not cover all the Reavers ops.  I know I missed a few out in Cache, and some good ones too from what I hear.  But I believe that covers the deployments the SIG has done over the last year.

Further Structure Bashing in Cache

Asher got us together again for another structure, this time an Astrahus timer, the timer that TEST had set while we were out bashing that tower a couple days before.  Being a final timer that might see the structure destroyed, the thought was that the locals might form up and defend leading to a fight.  And if they didn’t fight… well.. structure kill mail.

We logged in, once again totaling less that 30 ships, swapped out our cloaks and formed up to travel to M-MCP8, where we sat on the P7-45V gate.  The latter is Vindictive’s staging, so we hoped to catch some people passing through.

On the gate, bubble up

We did catch a Fraternity Dominix on the gate, and a couple other minor target.  The Domi seemed like a good sign, that maybe Vindictive would be getting some support from their Winter Coalition allies, since they were not leaving the coalition until the end of the month.

They would need some help and somebody else we caught in our bubble was Seddow, the FC of the Legacy Coalition Loki fleet that mauled the Vindictive Machariel fleet while we were shooting that POS tower.  We were asked not to shoot him.

So it seemed like they would be coming back to finish off the Astrahus.  They set the timer, so why wouldn’t they?

Our eyes on the Vindictive staging Keepstar was reporting various activity and even a titan up and perhaps ready to bridge a defense fleet in on the Astrahus.  They had a couple of force recons, the only viable cyno ships these days, hanging about.  Asher even had us drop our mobile depots in safe spots in the system in case things went against us and we had to either reload drones from cargo or get our cloaks on and hide.

However, for all the activity, not much happened.  When the timer ran down on the Astrahus we started shooting it, waiting for something to drop.  But nothing did.  Instead, a gunner in the Astrahus took shots at us, neuted us, hit us with tracking disruptors, and generally tried to make our time hitting the structure as taxing as possible.

Another bomb from the Astrahus goes off

The gunner did manage to kill off some drones, something of an annoyance to a group with a long supply line back to Delve, but did not slow down the inevitable all that much.  Legacy showed up with their Lokis again as expected.

Legacy Lokis join the shoot

Then final outcome was determined, the Astrahus exploded.

Another Upwell structure destroyed

We scooped our mobile depots and formed back up.

Then it was over to P7-45V, where an Athanor was also in its final timer.  There was no defense put up there either, so another structure kill mail was shared between us and the Legacy Loki fleet.

Athanor brews up

After that it was back to our staging system and our safe spots, cloaks once again fitted and running, waiting for our safe log off timers to run down so we could leave space safely.  Another night in Cache.

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.

• 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
• Elf
• The Dozens

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

1. https://totaleve.com
2. https://evebloggers.com
3. https://bhagpuss.blogspot.com
4. https://swtorcommando.blogspot.com
5. https://blessingofkings.blogspot.com
6. https://lowseclifestyle.com
7. https://nosygamer.blogspot.com
8. https://greedygoblin.blogspot.com
9. https://parallelcontext.blogspot.com
10. https://nilsmmoblog.blogspot.com

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

1. https://virginworlds.com
2. https://blessingofkings.blogspot.com
3. https://evenews24.com
4. https://totaleve.com
5. https://lowseclifestyle.com
6. https://evebloggers.com
7. https://syncaine.com
8. https://keenandgraev.com
9. https://jestertrek.blogspot.com
10. https://popehat.com

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

1. WordPress.com Reader
2. Reddit
3. Twitter
4. Facebook
5. forums-archive.eveonline.com
6. tagn-wordpress-com.cdn.ampproject.org
7. WordPress Android App
8. forums.daybreakgames.com
9. old.reddit.com
10. 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

1. WordPress.com Reader
2. Google Reader
3. Reddit
4. Twitter
5. Facebook
6. feedly.com
7. Netvibes
8. massiveblips.dailyradar.com
9. WordPress Android App
10. 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

1. Google Search
2. Bing
3. duckduckgo.com
4. Yahoo Search
5. Yandex
6. Baidu
7. Ask.com
8. MSN
9. myway.com
10. 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

1. Google Search
2. Google Image Search
3. Bing
4. Yahoo Search
5. Google Mobile
6. Ask.com
7. Yahoo Image Search
8. Yandex
9. duckduckgo.com
10. 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:

1. bhagpuss.blogspot.com
2. nosygamer.blogspot.com
3. syncaine.wordpress.com
4. blessingofkings.blogspot.com
5. mmofallout.com
6. biobreak.wordpress.com
7. evehermit.wordpress.com
8. http://www.keenandgraev.com
9. evepics.wordpress.com
10. 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:

1. en.wikipedia.org
2. imperium.news
3. massivelyop.com
4. http://www.reddit.com
5. zkillboard.com
6. eve-offline.net
7. http://www.eveonline.com
8. http://www.wowwiki.com
9. us.forums.blizzard.com
10. 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:

1. syncaine.wordpress.com
2. http://www.keenandgraev.com
3. blessingofkings.blogspot.com
4. evepics.wordpress.com
5. http://www.killtenrats.com
6. bhagpuss.blogspot.com
7. biobreak.wordpress.com
8. tobolds.blogspot.com
9. playervsdeveloper.blogspot.com
10. 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:

1. nickyee.com/python/guildname/generator.py
2. en.wikipedia.org
3. http://www.pokemon.com
4. forums.civfanatics.com
5. us.battle.net
6. http://www.pokemongoldsilver.com
7. myeve.eve-online.com
8. us.blizzard.com
9. http://www.eve-online.com
10. 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

1. Alamo teechs u 2 play DURID!
2. How Many People Play EVE Online?
3. Rumors of Future Daybreak Projects and the End of EverQuest
4. Minecraft and the Search for a Warm Ocean
5. From Alola Pokedex to National Pokedex in Pokemon Sun
6. April Fools at Blizzard 2019 is Pretty Much No Fools
7. What Should EverQuest 3 Even Look Like?
8. Burn Jita 2018 Aftermath
9. Finding Evendim
10. Who is My Middle-earth Main Anyway?

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

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. Alamo teechs u 2 play DURID!
5. How to Catch Zorua and Zoroark
6. First Pokemon Black and White Download Event – Victini
7. April Fools at Blizzard – 2013
8. Considering Star Wars Galaxies Emulation? Better Grab a Disk!
9. From Alola Pokedex to National Pokedex in Pokemon Sun
10. Diablo III vs. Torchlight II – A Matter of Details

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:

1. EVE Online 1,563
2. World of Warcraft 1,233
3. EverQuest II 695
4. EverQuest 562
5. Lord of the Rings Online 416
6. Blizzard 366
7. Sony Online Entertainment 339
8. Instance Group 282
9. Humor 236
10. Pokemon 222
11. Misc MMOs 193
12. blog thing 185
13. Rift 161
14. Month in Review 156
15. YouTube 146
16. Nintendo DS Hardware 141
17. Other PC Games 137
18. Diablo III 135
19. Vanguard SOH 134
20. 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:

1. Progression Server 117
2. Reavers 84
3. Select Fippy Darkpaw 83
4. Select Nostalgia 80
5. Select Asher Elias 80
6. Select Meaningless Milestones 75
7. Select Pokemon Go 73
8. Select MMO Expansions 65
9. Select Warlords of Draenor 64
10. 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:

1. Scarlet Monastery
2. PvP
3. Cats
4. Leuthilspar Tales
5. World of Warcraft Magazine
6. Toys R Us
7. West Karana
8. Newbie Blogger Initiative
9. Steam Summer Sale
10. DBRB
11. Meandering
12. Pandemic Legion
13. Loremaster
14. Guardians of the Galaxy
15. Fall Movie League
16. CSM13
17. 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.