Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays

May the day bring you peace and joy in the measures you need after such a year.

Peace in Tanaris

 

Enad Global 7 Completes the Deal to Buy Daybreak

At the beginning of the month we learned that the Swedish company Enad Global 7 (EG7) was planning to purchase Daybreak Game Company.  The deal was expected to close by December 31st.

Enad Global 7

Following that announcement, EG7 made a public presentation to its shareholders that disclosed more information about Daybreak and its games than we had previously known, including:

• DC Universe Online has the company’s highest revenue and player count
• EverQuest is the most profitable title
• They still have rights to make a Marvel game
• They own Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons & Dragons Online through Standing Stone Games

There are a lot of spicy details in that post I linked and more in the presentation.

Yesterday EG7 announced that the deal to acquire Daybreak had been completed:

COMPLETION OF THE ACQUISITION OF DAYBREAK GAME COMPANY

The upfront consideration which has been paid for 100 percent of the shares in Daybreak amounts to USD 260 million, equivalent of approximately SEK 2,205 million, on a cash- and debt- free basis (the “Upfront Consideration“). The Upfront Consideration is comprised of the Cash Consideration and the Consideration Shares.

The value of the Consideration Shares amounts to USD 100 million, corresponding to approximately SEK 848 million and 10,079,981 shares in EG7. The price per EG7 share is based on a based on a volume weighted average price of the EG7 share on Nasdaq First North Growth Market for the ten consecutive trading days preceding 1 December 2020 equal to SEK 84.14 per share. The Cash Consideration of approximately USD 160 million, equivalent of approximately SEK 1,357 million, has been paid in cash and is financed through available funds raised via the directed share issue announced on 1 December 2020.

In addition, EG7 will pay the deferred consideration to the sellers of Daybreak of USD 40 million following finalization of Daybreak’s FY 2020 financial statements. The deferred consideration will be paid in cash.

On 2 December 2020, the board of directors resolved to issue the Consideration Shares, subject to the approval from the extra general meeting on 17 December 2020. The extra general meeting approved the share issue and the board of directors has today resolved to allot the Consideration Shares as part of the completion of the Transaction. The issue of the Consideration Shares results in a dilution of approximately 13.2 percent of the number of shares and votes in the Company after the Transaction, through an increase in the number of outstanding shares by 10,079,981, from 66,550,378 to 76,630,359. The share capital will increase by SEK 403,199.40 from SEK 2,662,015.12 to SEK 3,065,214.36.

EG7’s and Daybreak’s financial reporting will be consolidated from 22 December 2020.

For further information about the acquisition of Daybreak, please refer to the previous press release published on 1 December 2020.

As the deal was for both cash and shares in EG7, the Daybreak shareholders will now own some of EG7.

Following the Transaction, Daybreak’s former main owner Jason Epstein will hold approximately 10 percent and the other former shareholders of Daybreak will together hold approximately 3 percent of the total number of outstanding shares and votes in EG7.

So we’re not rid of Jason Epstein yet I suppose.

The EG7 board had approved an increase in the number of outstanding shares in the company, as announced in a press release last week, in order to fund the acquisition.

While the position of EG7 has been quite positive about Daybreak and its titles… or most of them anyway… we will likely have to wait until well into the new year to find out what impact the sale will have.

24 Weeks of World War Bee

We are at week 24 of the war proper, having started officially back on July 5th, but it has been a full six months since the invaders were caught out in their plans and the two week count down to the start began, so I am celebrating six months of writing about World War Bee.  Compare that to the Fountain War back in 2013, which covered just two months, or the Casino War, which started in earnest in February 2016, had us in Saranen by mid April, and in Delve come July.  And we’re not done yet.

This week saw an address by Progodlegend to Legacy and TEST where he both said the war was pretty much a foregone conclusion and that we will all soon begin to abandon the Imperium.  The Initiative attacking in Catch was held up as a prime example of the Imperium collapsing.  Once the war is over Legacy will lay claim to both its old territory, such Esoteria, which they previously said they were abandoning for Delve, as well as Delve, Querious, Period Basis.

Basically, all they need to do is wrap up the Imperium pockets in 1DQ1-A and E3OI-U and they’re done, the war is over.  Those will be the last big fights of the war.  The timeline for that, however, is fairly vague.  Progodlegend says the will come very soon at one point and maybe in  a couple more months elsewhere.  Goons being driven from the game is assumed in there somewhere.

Pandemic Horde had a town hall meeting last week as well, where they distanced themselves from the Vily message of driving Goons from the game.  They are just in it to damage the Imperium economically.  They seem less patient when it comes to assaulting 1DQ1-A and E3OI-U, suggesting if the current strategy wasn’t working in the first few weeks of December that they might try something different.  Also, the second pass on Fountain has been seen to be something of a wasted effort which will likely not continue.

On the comedy front, there was this 5.3 billion ISK Vince Draken pod that got caught trying to slip through Delve in a covert ops frigate.

Delve Front

The Delve front saw quite a bit of action.  Also, that metaliminal storm has found its way into NPC Delve, keeping people from cloaking in the systems marked around it.

Delve – Dec. 20, 2020

The Imperium strategy of retaking ihubs before the 35 timer runs down and allows PAPI to cyno jam the system has not been working out for us.  We were not able to retake the ihub for NOL-M9 as they were able to put many more people on the field to defend it that we would manage.  NOL-M9 now has a cyno jammer setup and the Keepstar there seems likely to be destroyed this week.

PAPI titans at the armor timer shoot

A similar fate seems likely for the Keepstar in D-W7F0, where PAPI also holds the ihub.

The strategy, or that aspect of it which I can see, appears to have moved to preventing enotsis ops on the ihubs that remain in our hands where Keepstars remain.  This had led to a number of fierce skirmishes, like the ones that have happened around 5-CQDA.

Battle Report Header

The other twist that has been coming up more recently is forcing PAPI to choose between objectives.  PAPI can put enough pilots in Delve to force an objective there, but a simultaneous timer elsewhere, like Catch, will be lost because they had to make the choice.

Catch Front

This week I am elevating the Catch region to have its own category as it remains the most active theater outside of Delve and is the place where Legacy is being forced to make choices.

Legacy came back and reinforced the staging Fortizar of The Initiative, but were distracted by a Delve objective that allowed The Initiative to put down a backup Fortizar in their staging in 0SHT-A.  The odd thing was that, when the final timer came up for the original Fortizar, Legacy started to commit to it, lost a bunch of ships to The Initiative, then stood down, losing both the objective and the ISK war.

That left The Initiative with two Fortizars in 0SHT-A after the fight.

Meanwhile, ihubs in Catch, and even next door in Immensea, have been falling.  We took the DY-P7Q ihub and then blew up the no longer operational Ansiblex jump gate and Pharolux cyno beacon on the grid with the Keepstar anchored there.

The Ansiblex blowing up, taking over a billion ISK in fuel with it

The Initiative now holds the ihub and TCU for HED-GP, the gateway system into the region from high sec.

And, as Progodlegend said, Imperium SIGs have been active in Catch as well.  Asher, accused of abandoning the war to hide in Catch, had gathered up the Reavers SIG to deploy out to 0SHT-A along with The Initiative, so I have been out there some myself.  We have been shooting structures… like the two above… as well as doing some of our own entosis work.  Not bad for a “30 man SIG.”  (We have Dawn Rhea of Theta Thursdays with us as well, so add at least one woman to the total.)

Popping a node during an entosis event

Things do not look so bad for Legacy when you look at the map of Catch right now.

Catch – Dec. 20, 2020

They have taken back some ihubs, including the one at 4-07MU, which connects to Querious.  But having lost them, they have to wait 35 days after restoring them before they can install Ansiblex jump gates to restore their easy travel routes.  Instead they either have to gate, use titan bridges, or jump clone between Delve and Catch.

Furthermore, rumor has it that The Watchmen alliance, which holds a large section of Catch for Legacy, is about to fold up shop and disband.  That would set quite a few systems back to the 35 day clock before they can be used for travel infrastructure.

Other Theaters

Despite Progodlegend declaring the Esoteria efforts a failure, citing The Initiative’s move to Catch as evidence, the groups remaining down there, The Bastion, Ferrata Victrix, and the Stain Russians who hate TEST, have continued to make a nuisance of themselves.  They have pushed back on The Army of Mango’s attempt to assert itself in the region and have expanded to hacking new systems.

NW Esoteria – Dec. 20, 2020

Then there is Querious, which is largely a dead zone as both sides have tired of planting new ihubs in the region.

Querious – Dec. 20, 2020

A range of systems remain empty while those still occupied by Brave continue to be assailed, meaning Brave has to deal with entosis events both here and in Catch.

And then in Fountain, as noted above, the PAPI invasion has pretty much ceased, with NCDot left holding a single ihub in LBGI-2 for now.

My Participation

I was able to jump in on a few ops, including two fights in 5-CQDA, including the one mentioned above.  I was also off on a few side missions over in Catch.  I ended up losing a few ships, including two Malediction interceptors that were used for burst jamming in one fight (the hostiles love that), a Scimitar in another fight, an Atron entosis frigate, and a Drake.

Probably the most amusing fight was in Catch on Saturday night when we landed on a gate with a Maller gang fit with smart bombs who were looking for ESS banks to rob.  We murdered them.

Murder report header

The one ship of ours they got was a Griffin ECM frigate.  Otherwise they were tackled and blown up.  In that quick clash I somehow managed to get the final blow on five of them with my sentry drones, which gave me a nice little line of five kill marks on my Ishtar.

5 orange kill marks in the upper left on my Blaze SKIN Ishtar

I do not think I have ever had a hull last long enough to earn five kill marks.

Anyway, my losses for the war so far now are as follows:

• Ares interceptor – 12
• Crusader interceptor – 5
• Atron entosis frigate – 6
• Rokh battleship – 5
• Drake battle cruiser – 4
• Malediction interceptor – 4
• Ferox battle cruiser – 3
• Purifier stealth bomber – 2
• Guardian logi – 2
• Scalpel logi frigate – 2
• Scimitar logi – 2
• Raven battleship – 1
• Crucifier ECM frigate – 1
• Gnosis battlecruiser – 1
• Bifrost command destroyer – 1
• Cormorant destroyer – 1
• Hurricane battle cruiser – 1
• Sigil entosis industrial – 1
• Mobile Small Warp Disruptor I – 1

Other Items

CCP did a Fireside Chat on Twitch with CCP Burger and CCP Hellmar where they mentioned, among other things, that more than 1.9 million new players had logged into EVE Online in 2020, a number greater than the previous three years combined.

That seems like amazing news, though the fact that the online numbers peaked back in April and have been slowly sliding down as the year has begun to fade suggests that CCP has not solved the player retention problem they brought up at EVE North back in 2019.

The CSM 14 summit meeting minutes had a list of priorities that were:

1. Stop the bleeding
2. Fix the stupid
3. Excite and teach
4. Incentivize return

It feels like they haven’t really addressed the first point yet as 1.9 million people have poured into the game this year and apparently right back out again.  This number of new players was so huge that I had to check to see if they were including EVE Echoes in their count, but EVE Echoes has claimed more than 2 million players on its own, so I couldn’t tell you where those 1.9 million went.

And that brings us to this week’s peak concurrent user number, which was down again.

• Day 1 – 38,838
• Week 1 – 37,034
• Week 2 – 34,799
• Week 3 – 34,692
• Week 4 – 35,583
• Week 5 – 35,479
• Week 6 – 34,974
• Week 7 – 38,299
• Week 8 – 35,650
• Week 9 – 35,075
• Week 10 – 35,812
• Week 11 – 35,165
• Week 12 – 36,671
• Week 13 – 35,618
• Week 14 – 39,681
• Week 15 – 40,359
• Week 16 – 36,642
• Week 17 – 37,695
• Week 18 – 36,632
• Week 19 – 35,816 (Saturday)
• Week 20 – 37,628 (Saturday)
• Week 21 – 34,888
• Week 22 – 33,264
• Week 23 – 33,149
• Week 24 – 32,807 (Saturday)

That is now the low water mark for the war, with even the holiday events and the Luminaire snowball fight failing to entice people into the game.

Related

• INN – World War Bee: Week 24
• INN – Legacy Coalition Address by Progodlegend (transcript)
• INN – Analyzing the Legacy War Update (warning: into the Moomin zone)
• INN – Pandemic Horde Town Hall (Moomin again)
• INN – Where’s Asher? Oh, He’s Here!
• INN – Amber Alert! Legacy’s Report Premature
• INN – Personas, Propagandists, and Backstabbers
• INN – HD-JVQ Fight and the Aftermath (other theaters)
• New Eden Post – Keepstar in NOL-M9 Reinforced
• CCP – Twitch Fireside Chat

Ardenweald and the Electric Blue Dream

Having finished up the main story line in Maldraxxus, it was time to move on to the next zone, Ardenweald, which is home to forest dwellers and nature lovers of all kind.  After the mayhem of Maldraxxus I was a bit skeptical of a tree-hugging zone.

This was not helped by the fact that the first couple of fairies you run into are named Moonberry and Featherlight.  How very granola.

But then pretty much the first thing they ask you to do is kill a guy, not because of bad feelings or memories, but because he is simply in the way, and I was appeased.  Murder for hire is the same in Birkenstocks as it in hobnail boots.  So off we went.

Faeries gotta slay too I guess

While I am not a huge fan of the elven forest lifestyle, I am also not set against it either.  Ardenweald isn’t as bright and sunny as Bastion, nor does it scream out at you to have your war face on at all times like Maldraxxus.  There are stretches where the zone presents an inviting open vista.

Out on the open road into the blue

But like the elves, there is always a darkness out there somewhere, and you end up delving into it naturally enough.  Darkness and blue.  So much blue.  Dark blues, medium blues, and the blues you generally encounter in the UI’s of science fiction games.

There is a “blue bear-y” joke in there

After the grotesque intensity of Maldraxxus, Ardenweald was a bit more of a relaxing ride.  There were some intense points, and being in a forest with hills and valleys always means that the path to where you want to go isn’t always straight, but it moved along smoothly.  Maybe a bit too smoothly, as I kind of lost the thread of the story as I went through.  In the end it was all about getting an intro to the Winter Queen, proving your worth, and getting her to make the right decision.

And something about a dragon that has since slipped my brain…

Anyway, I made it through to the end, and got my audience with the Winter Queen.

She is taller in person than in the visions

After that it was back to Oribos to report in and get the achievement for the story line.

Add another one to the list

There wasn’t even a side trip into the Maw this time around.  Not a bad zone, but it didn’t really stick with me.  Bye the time I was done a lot of what had transpired was forgotten.

But finishing up there opened up the next zone for me, Ravendreth and the final faction of the expansion.

In Search of Mesprit

Since we hit level 40 our Pokemon Go our play has largely been about raiding and catching new Pokemon for the Pokedex.  This week seemed like a good time for for raids as three Sinnoh Pokemon were up on the list, Azlef, Mesprit, and Uxie.

The three featured Pokemon

When the raids started on Tuesday afternoon, our regular group lit up my phone with texts when the first one of them was spotted.  We bagged Azlef pretty quickly.  What I didn’t realize until somebody mentioned it in the text stream was that each of the three were only available in specific regions.  According to Pokemon.com:

• Trainers in the Asia-Pacific region may encounter Uxie
• Trainers in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and India may encounter Mesprit
• Trainers in the Americas and Greenland may encounter Azelf

So we were only going to ever get Azlef locally.

As it so happened, one of the friends who had picked up my friend code when I posted it to Twitter happened to be in Japan and sent me an invite for an Uxie raid when I had Pokemon Go up on my phone in front of my face.  I jumped in and managed to catch Uxie, so I had two of the three.  (I’ve posted my friend code here before. It is 3216 2939 2424.)

Getting Mesprit though, expecting to catch a random invite at just the right moment seemed unlikely to happen twice in a week.  I have a few people on my friend’s list in Europe, but what are the odds of lucking out again?

One of the more intrepid members of our local raid team suggested using one of the raid servers on Discord.  That was what she was doing to try and get the two out of region catches.

So I looked up servers and found a likely suspect called Pokemon GO Raids.  You can click on that link to join the server if you have a Discord account.  I am playing under my usual handle, in this case WilhelmArcturus because the game doesn’t allow spaces.

Once I sorted through the instructions and rules, I got myself ready to try and get in on a Mesprit raid… which basically adds up to sitting in the “mesprit-only” channel and waiting for somebody to post a raid.  Then you have to be one of the first five to respond… you can only remote invite five friends… and get acknowledged.  Then the person who posted the raid shares their friend code, you send a friend invite, get accepted, then they go into the raid and invite the five people picked.

All of this means being quick to respond in the channel.  I made it into one raid, though I did not manage to catch Mesprit on the first try, so I have to go again.  It also means being in the channel at the right time of day.  Raids in Pokemon Go only seem to run from about 8am to 10pm locally, which is all EMEA times in this case, which means the mornings into the early afternoon my time are the likely points when I might get a raid.

So I am staring at the channel, waiting for somebody to announce a raid.

Friday Bullet Points Including a Free WoW Weekend and Multi-boxing

It is Friday and I have a few short but timely items to write about, so it is time to go into PowerPoint mode and crank out some bullet points.  I will read them directly off the slide during my presentation just to annoy you.

• Free World of Warcraft Weekend

Blizzard has declared that November 5th through the 8th is “Welcome back Weekend,” which means you can log in and play WoW for free as though you were a subscriber.

Free for a while

This will allow you to check out the new starting zone experience and the level squish.  I am sure a dedicated player could get a fresh character to the level cap in just a weekend.

The one thing this offer does not include is WoW Classic.  See the fine print.

• WoW and Multi-boxing

Blizzard posted a notice this week that has been widely misinterpreted as a ban on multi-boxing.  There are a lot of bad headlines out there that say multi-boxing has been banned.  This is not technically true.

Rather, Blizzard has decided that software like ISBoxer that can be used to broadcast keyboard and mouse inputs to multiple clients will no longer be allowed.  The statement specifically calls out that, and that alone, as what is being banned.

Veterans of EVE Online know what I am talking about, as ISBoxer and like software has been banned there for a while.  Once upon a time there was a player who would fly a fleet of stealth bombers and do exactly timed bombing runs.

In WoW you can spot people using such software that fairly easily.  The classic example from a while back was a full group of shaman moving in unison, dropping the same totems as a group, and casting the same spells at the same time.

Warnings will be issued for those using such software now, ramping to “account actions,” up to and including bans, over time.

But you can still multi-box and long as you are not using input broadcasting software.  There are even some addons out there that will help you out with that.  But no more ISBoxer.

• Shadowlands Beta

I think it is pretty safe to say that if I have now gotten an invite to the Shadowlands beta, then anybody who wants in can probably get in.

Something in my inbox last week

While it is getting close to the launch date there is still time to get in and provide feedback.  Blizz has been posting about areas and items they would like people to try.

• BlizzConline will be Free

While BlizzCon was cancelled this year to the pandemic, Blizzard previously announced they would be doing a virtual BlizzCon, BlizzConline, February 19th and 20th of next year.

BlizzCon Online is the way I always attend anyway

In an eight minute fireside chat video with J. Allen Brack, he confirmed that the online event, which will also mark Blizzard’s 30th year as a company, will be available for free;  no virtual ticket required. (~50 seconds into the video)

 

Into the Level Squished World of Warcraft

It was busy in EVE Online last week, but I still found a bit of time to poke my nose into World of Warcraft to see what the Shadowlands pre-patch and the big level squish did to us.

In preparation I made sure, the night before the patch, to list out all of my characters with their current level and how much xp they had on their bar to see how things changed.  That wasn’t because I expected Blizz to mess things up.  And my characters all aligned with the chart I borrowed from WoW Head for my previous post.  But still, if you don’t record something you can’t tell how much things changes.  So my Eldre’Thalas characters fell out like this:

• Vikund – 120 – 50
• Tistann – 120 – 50
• Alioto -120 – 50
• Tokarev – 116 10% – 48 53%
• Hurmoo – 112 36% – 46 100%
• Makarov -112 25% – 46 100%
• Maloney – 111 26% – 45 100%
• Makawao – 66 1% – 26 3%
• Garnatz – 62 48% – 25 100%
• Blintz – 48 46% – 21 100%
• Honecker – 42 9% – 18 44%
• Hruga – 33 5% – 14 22%

I had three characters at level cap and they ended up at 50 as expected.  And my level 116 mapped right into level 48 with a half a level of xp in his bar, which I guess was about right.  But then a few of the other ones ended up with their xp bar filled up to 100% so that they were effectively one level higher than I expected.

I am not complaining.  I’ll take the level.  I said I was likely to regret squandering the double xp that Blizzard had been offering on retail WoW for months, but a couple of free levels helped mitigate that I suppose.

Also, the level curve in the new 20-50 world is pretty easy.  I have already pushed Tokarev from half way into level 48 to level 50 just by doing some battle pets matches.  (The first week of the squish was also a 200% xp week for battle pets, so I went in and leveled some up.)

I feel like I’ve been here before

I was, however, a bit surprised at the shape of the leveling world post-squish.  For ages I have had this chart in my mind.

The promised shape of the leveling experience

And, since I have been following my usual policy of only watching the high level news about the upcoming expansion so as not to spoil anything, I let my brain draw its own picture of how I expected things to be.  Basically, that chart viewed as a series of parallel vertical paths into Shadowlands.

My vision in Excel format

However, when I got into the game with my first character with 100% xp and figured I would just go kill a mob close by to get the level, I found gray mobs where I happened to be, which was in the Warlords of Draenor content.  (Say what you will about garrisons, I do still hang out in them, largely to make 30-slot bags and do pet battle stuff.)

I then discovered that there still existed a way from the starter areas up to the level cap that ran through the old expansions in something akin to the old way.  Each expansion had a new level range, with a cap on it.

The horizontal stack with level caps on each expansion

That seemed like a ticket to a somewhat unsatisfying ride to 50.  With everything squished down and the xp curve juiced up, it meant that players on that route were very likely to out-level the content before they finished it, a problem the game already suffered from in its level 120 cap form.

Also, I was a bit confused as to how to get to the world I was promised, the realm of parallel paths to the level cap.  Fortunately, somebody quickly mentioned Chromie and I remembered that this was all revolving around her and the time stream in order to explain it in the lore.  So I ran over to the Stormwind Embassy area in Stormwind and found her.  There is a little hourglass on the map that shows you where she is.

Where to get Chromie timed

There, if you are eligible… more on that in another post… she will let you slide into whichever time line you want, so long as it is one of the six she has to offer currently.

The six paths

There is plenty of room on that selection screen to put Shadowlands when they squish that before the next expansion.

I was confused for a moment as to where Battle for Azeroth and the Kalimdor & Eastern Kingdoms content was hiding.  But BFA is on by default, it already scales up to level 50 without visiting Chromie.  Meanwhile, I realized that the content on the old continents was wrapped up into Cataclysm, since that was the point when they changed and updated all of it.  The Cataclysm zones are not off on their own island like Northrend, but blended into the old locations.

So there it is.  And as I even think I figured out why Blizz would bother keeping the old style form of the world with all the expansions stacked in horizontal bands.

So long as the content is stacked that way, players retain the ability to go run old instances and raids solo for transmog gear and pet drops and the like.  That is a surprisingly critical item so far as the community is concerned.

Next up will be my venture into the new starting area, Exile’s Reach.

The Canadian Visitor

Warning: This is a Tales from the Blog sort of story and involves page view stats.  No video games are mentioned.

I like to watch the traffic stats for my blog, less because they are meaningful at any given moment… web stats are a polite lie most of the time… but because I like to see what brings people here and the patterns of interest.  As I have said in the past, even an flawed system of measurement, applied consistently, can reveal patterns that even an accurate single data point cannot show.

So when I noticed a big pop in page views a couple weeks back, I started looking at what might have caused it.  Running a WP.com hosted blog means that I do not get to see raw data, but I have a couple of avenues to check that can be lined up to indicate what was going on.

The first check is usually to see who is referring traffic.  Often a traffic spike is related to the site, or a specific post, being linked somewhere with some visibility.  Every so often, for example, somebody will link the Alamo teechs u 2 play DURID! post gets linked to one of the World of Warcraft sub-reddits and between a dozen and a couple hundred people will click on that link.

This is very easy to spot in the basic stats.  The referrer will be obvious and the post linked will have a bunch of page views which will push it to the top of the daily list.

This time there were no referrers that stood out and no particular post seemed to be getting traffic that could account for the jump in total page views.  In fact, referrer and post stats seemed very much within the recent norm, while page views were exploding.  The second day of this saw the site get just over five thousand page views but Google, always the default top referrer, had only sent me 350 viewers, and the top post of the day only had 30 page views.

Sometimes that means somebody went scrolling through the blog.  I have the theme set up for infinite scroll, so you can just press the page down or arrow key and scroll all the way back to September 2006 if you have the time and patience.

But when you do that, a page view gets counted for every ~20 posts and gets attached to the Home Page view stats.  The Home Page, somebody showing up at the base URL, always has the most page views on any given day because I don’t hide post content and make people click on titles to read a whole post.  I could do that, and I am sure my page views would go up, but I don’t like that on other blogs so I don’t do it here.  As I always say, be the blog you want to read.

And this might have explained all those page view.  The flag counter widget on the side bar did not show anywhere close to the number of page views that WP.com was showing me, which is consistent with somebody doing a long scroll, as the widget only gets loaded once when you do it.

That is one of my checks on the WP.com stats.

Also, the visitor count, WP.com’s attempt to track daily unique visitors, was very low relative to the page views.  The visitor count is very broken, more so than page views I would guess, since I can get referrals from seven different locations, which implies seven different people visiting, and WP.com will tell me I had two visitors so far.  Also, the Flag Counter widget would count a different number, maybe five, maybe seven, just to confuse the issue.  As I said, web stats are a polite lie.  But, again, if I ignore accuracy and look at trends, somebody doing the long scroll tends to widen the gap between page views and visitors.

However, the Home Page only showed about 400 views, leaving a few thousand page views unaccounted for.  So nobody did the long scroll.

Then I noticed that Canada seemed to be way over represented in the demographic stats.  Again, specific count is probably garbage, but trends are likely reflective of reality, and the usual daily trend tends to look something like this.

Typical top five distribution

Those countries tend to be in the top five in that order every single day.  That is the same order displayed in my annual blog wrap up, the fourteenth of which I posted back in September.

On the peak day, however, the country list looked like this.

The big day

Germany was a bit down that day… they tend to trend up with EVE Online posts… while Canada was through the roof.

But where was all that traffic going.  There was no referrer sending me that much traffic, there was no single page that seemed to be receiving it, and the visitor count indicated that it wasn’t a bunch of people in any case.

So I drilled down in the WP.com stats.  It will show you all the pages that got traffic on a given day, with a page view count.  And there I noticed that after the usual fifty or so on a given day that get multiple page views, there was a long, long list of pages that got exactly one page view.  Hundreds and hundreds of pages with a single page view.

At that point I think I figured it out.  This person, from Canada, started with one post, probably the latest one, and began viewing the all one at a time.  At the bottom of each post there are links that let you view the next and previous posts in the chronological order of their appearance.

I think this person sat there and clicked through, page by page, each post using those links.  That explains all the page views, the low user count, the lack of referrals, and the fact that no single page, not even the Home Page, saw a spike in traffic.

And the flag counter widget?  I thought that it would reload with each new page and count a page view there.  But when I tried it myself on my phone, it seemed to ignore the count of views if I went post to post that way.  But it is much more interested in unique visitors than page views.

So this whole post adds up to the fact that one person, from Canada, appears to have paged through nearly every singe post on the site, one at time, over the course of two days.  The page views did not come in a single burst, but took time to accumulate over those two days.

Or, alternatively, somebody in Canada ran a script that scraped all the content from the blog one page at a time.  So if you see another site that features a lot of familiar content, let me know.  I’d like to see where I am being backed up!

Invaders Pass on the SVM-3K ihub Contest

This was a weeks of first for the war.  The invaders dropped their first Keepstars in Delve.  On Monday and Tuesday huge battles broke out that led to the destruction of both structures.

After falling down on that, the hostiles changed gears and achieved another first and managed to reinforce an ihub in Delve.  They went in and got the ihub in SVM-3K, which is one of the boarder systems with Querious.

SVM-3K, not too far from FWST-8

On the other side of the regional gate is 8QT-H4, the current PAPI staging system.  Thus is seems like a reasonable first target, being just one gate from where their forces are marshaled.

The sov contest for the ihub was set to kick off at 00:55 UTC.  The Imperium formed up some forces early, including a Rokh fleet led by Elo Knight, which I joined in with.  We actually jumped into 8QT-H4 a little after the 00:00 because an Imperium Fortizar left behind in 8QT was coming out for its armor timer.  We were bridged in and docked up, undocking when the time came to try and hold back the attackers.

The Rokhs undock

A short, sharp fight ensued.  Being in their staging system, the numbers were stacked against us from the start.

Fight on the Fort

The losses went against us according to the battle report, with us losing nearly 14 billion ISK while they suffered a little over 8 billion ISK in losses, though in the shadow of the fights on Monday and Tuesday, that is barely enough to mentioned.

Battle Report Header

Elo Knight managed to extract most of the fleet from the system, though some stragglers were left behind on the Fortizar, where they were safe for the time being.  We went through the gate and into SVM-3K, where we spread out to wait the impending attack.  They out numbered us sufficiently that it seemed like it would be a hard fight.  So we waited on the gate, ready to hold them off as long as we could.

And we waited

The time came, the sov contest began, and our hackers went out to save the ihub.  Meanwhile, nobody came through the gate.  As we watched, the contest went quickly… for an entosis run… our way.

The contest almost won

The invaders decided that they had better things to do on a Saturday night.  The ihub was saved and we flew back to 1DQ1-A and stood down.  Delve remains secure for the moment, though the invaders seem to be up to something this morning.  More on that later.