September in Review

The Site

Well, the big news here this month was probably that the place turned fourteen.

Just like California State Highway 14… sort of

Perhaps a lesser achievement, with this post I will have posted every single day for the last six months.

While I have posted more than once a day cumulatively in 9 of the last 14 years, I think my previous “post every day” streak was about four months in duration.  Every day for six months took a bit of planning at times.  News and my own game activity do not come in a nice steady flow, and I was out of town for a week when we drove our daughter off to college.

That this streak corresponds with me having worked from home for the last six months straight is probably not a coincidence.  While I wrote about feeling some gaming malaise due to being at my home desk all day, for some reason that does not seem apply to writing.  Or maybe not to the same degree.

One Year Ago

There was the usual anniversary post, this time for thirteen years.

I summed up the labors of Blaugust 2019, linking out to everybody.

It was September and there were five MMO news items I was still waiting for.

Daybreak put PlanetSide Arena into early access.

Standing Stone announced the Minas Morgul expansion for Lord of the Rings Online.

In Pokemon Go, Niantic added Pokemon from the Unova region.

In EVE Online we were coming to the end of the blackout in null sec.  The monthly economic report for August showed that it has a big impact on ratting and mining.  I followed up with a post showing the changes since January.

On top of the blackout, CCP changed cynos, only allowing normal cynos to be lit by force recon ships, which immediately shot up in price.

All of this generated a lot of discussion about how CCP should “fix” the game, which I felt was expecting too much from the company at this point.  There is no going back to the 2013 peak numbers.

Amid all that, Asher called the Reavers together for a deployment to the east.  We passed through Legacy space, where we were allowed to use their jump bridges, because they wanted us out there to help them with their own war.

In WoW Classic the instance group scraped together enough silver to create a guild.  After some begging for signatures, Crag Boar Rebellion was born.

I looked at our progress a week into WoW Classic.  Ula had found the white kitten already.  Then we were off to Westfall.  I also had a druid running through the night elf starter area.

We leveled up enough to head towards the first instance, Ragefire Chasm.  That mean getting to Orgrimmar.  We got in and to the instance, only to find out that the meeting stones did not summon back in vanilla, wrecking our first plan.  We made another plan and managed to get everybody in for our first dungeon run.  Ula even made a video of the run.

Then we started preparing for the Deadmines while doing some more running around Azeroth.

Blizzard was offering free realm transfers already to try and shift people off of crowded servers.  Then there was a DDoS attack that made things even worse, and a layering exploit… maybe.  More servers were added, arrests were made, and Blizz put out some videos about making WoW back in the day, which I put together in a single post.  By the end of the month things were starting to calm down a bit.

I seemed to be enjoying the whole WoW Classic experience, so far as I could measure.  And so did a lot of people.  SuperData said it was driving subscription growth.  I tried to compare the experience to the EverQuest progression server ride.

And, finally, I did a bullet point post about the LOTRO Legendary server, Homeworld 3, how Google Stadia will fail, and the EVE Echoes alpha.

Five Years Ago

The blog turned nine years old.

Some survey said it could guess my age based on my video game preferences.

World of Warships officially went live after its open beta.

As part of the Heart of Thorns expansion, the Guild Wars 2 base game went completely free.

Also on the free front, WildStar went free to play, bowing to the realities of the MMORPG market.

In World of Warcraft, the ability to fly was finally unlocked in Warlords of Draenor… provided you had all the achievements.

In Diablo III I was looking at the whole season thing.

Lord British was on again with some quotes, allowing that Blizzard could do some things well… like Diablo.  But he was more on about sandbox games, like his upcoming Shroud of the Avatar, because sandbox games generate news headlines.  His example was EVE Online, though it wasn’t clear to me that SotA was going to get the same sort of coverage.

In Minecraft I was making friends with the zombie pigmen and using a utility to see a map of our world.  I needed that map as we were all out exploring.  Aaron was kicking of our transit hub in the roof of the nether and I was ruining Xydd’s neighborhood.  Meanwhile, our hosting service was going out of business.

On the Daybreak front I was reflecting on the status of EverQuest Next five years after it had been announced.  The status moved to “cancelled” eventually.

There were expansion plans for EverQuest and EverQuest II.  The Ruins of Kunark expansion was unlocked on the Ragefire progression server while the vote for the Desert of Flames expansion was up on the Stormhold server.  Daybreak also killed off enforced raid rotation on Ragefire, having “fixed” the underlying issue finally. There was talk of the new server names for the coming server consolidation in EverQuest II.  I am not sure I liked the results.

In EVE Online I was happy, in the age of Fozzie sov, that POS towers still gave kill mails.  Even CCP seemed to think that maybe blowing things up was better than sov wands.  They were also considering going back to bigger expansions, putting less emphasis on the monthly updates.  The monthly updates still had names for the moment… the Vanguard monthly update for example… but that would go by the end of the year.

Asher Elias started off his podcast and led us off to a fight with Ron Mexxico, who was one of his early guests, and brought us to Cloud Ring in Fozzie Claws.

The monthly EVE Online blog banter… which seems to have died off recently… wanted to know what we would do were we put in charge of the development of New Eden.

Finally, I was reflecting a bit on lifetime subscriptions and noting Asheron’s Call downtime, Lord of the Rings Online server transfers, the Drunder server in EverQuest II, and Windows 10 in one of my Friday bullet point posts.

Ten Years Ago

Well, there was that whole four year anniversary thing.

Planet Michael, the Michael Jackson virtual world, was announced.  How is that coming along?  The Twitter account have been pretty quiet since… 2011.

The whole David Allen, Derek Smart, Quest Online public blame and shame fest ended when Quest Online gave David Allen some money and he went away.  Derek Smart could not help but throw in a couple final comments.  Good thing he’s been quiet since then… *cough*

CCP was talking about Public Fleets and such that were planned for their Incursions expansion.  We wouldn’t actually see them until December, but there was talk.

More interesting was a guide to suicide ganking in EVE Online put up by TooNuRacoon.

Meanwhile, I was kicking off my EVE Online screen shot contest.  All of the entries have since been posted on my other site.

I tried turning an old joke into an MMO joke.  Some people got it.  Some did not.  Some got angry, because this is the internet and that is what people do on the internet.

I looked at cloaks in MMOs, and how little they resemble what we would call a cloak in the real world.

In World of Warcraft I finally got that Brewmaster achievement.

Lord of the Rings Online flipped the switch and went free to play.  We were truly among the free (to play) peoples Middle-earth then.  There were some issues with Turbine Points, though I did get my 5,000 point pay-off.

The instance group was still summering in Middle-earth.  The group was finally into the meat of the Lone Lands.  We also tried some skirmishes and talked about Anderson Cooper.

In LOTRO I also ran into somebody who was looking for a social environment similar to old EverQuest.  I wonder if he ended up on Fippy Darkpaw which, for a short time, had all the best aspects of early EverQuest.

Fifteen Years Ago

Over in EverQuest II the Desert of Flames expansion launched, the first full expansion for the alleged EverQuest successor.  (There were a couple of adventure packs, The Bloodline Chronicles and The Splitpaw Saga, that were released before.)  While it was a quite stunning new place in Norrath, I was really against those flying carpet mounts.  They just were not very “EverQuest” to my mind.  I have since softened on that opinion, SOE and Daybreak having added so many more hideous mounts to the game since then.

Meanwhile, in EverQuest, where two expansions a year was still the norm, the Depths of Darkhollow, the tenth expansion for that game… only six and a half years old at that point… went live.

Twenty Five Years Ago

Sony jumped into the console wars in the US as the PlayStation finally arrived in the here.  It had already been available in Japan for almost nine months, so quite a bit of anticipation had built up.

Thirty Years Ago

Wing Commander, the first entry in the series, and the root of Chris Roberts’ fame, launched.

Most Viewed Posts in September

1. SuperData and Wavering WoW Subscriptions
2. The Fall of Niarja and the Shape of High Sec
3. CCP is Just Going to Keep Selling Skill Points for Cash
4. Alamo teechs u 2 play DURID!
5. Top 25 EVE Online Corporations Graph – The End Number
6. Minecraft and the Search for a Warm Ocean
7. WoW Tokens Five Years Later
8. Getting Upper Blackrock Spire Access
9. Time to Earn some ISK
10. EverQuest II at Fifteen and the Memories of What Could Have Been
11. The September EVE Online Update brings Quantum Cores to Upwell Structures
12. The 49-U6U Fight Foreshadows Battles to Come

Search Terms of the Month

eve what amkes delve so valuable
[The bees]

how to kill marksp
[The mark needs to be skinned first]

eve online can you transfer skill poikts
[With skill extractors/injectors]

any public keepstars in eve?
[There is one in Perimeter]

Game Time by ManicTime

Total time tracked playing was down a bit from last month, which itself was the lowest month for time played up to this point, so I hit a new low.  And I wasn’t even away for a week like I was last month.

• EVE Online – 59.86%
• WoW Classic – 25.99%
• Diablo II – 10.70%
• Crusader Kings 3 – 3.13%
• World of Warcraft – 0.32%

Crusader Kings 3

I bought, against my better judgement, everybody’s favorite medieval reality TV simulator based entirely on some many people in my various feeds going on about it.  Peer pressure.  I will say that it is not as incomprehensible as its predecessors, both of which I own.  Hell, I own all the Paradox strategy catalog, so my buying this was inevitable.  I just thought I could hold out until it was on sale.

Diablo II

I finished my play through of Diablo II, completing the main game and the expansion.  I am not sure how much further I will go with this.  The cow level is still there, waiting for me.  But there is an issue that might make that difficult, which I will get to in a post next month.

EVE Online

World War Bee continues to occupy my time in New Eden.  There are plenty of small skirmishes and what not to join in on.  We also had our first real battle that escalated to supers.  The server situation kept it from going all the way to titans, but both sides seem ready enough to go there.  The invasion itself still remains at the gates of Delve.

Pokemon Go

Another good month for Pokemon Go.  Our informal raid group has managed to catch anything new that pops up and I only need one more Mega Charizard raid to have enough tokens to get the second mega evolve registered in the Pokedex.  The Mega evolutions with their limited duration, remain less than useful overall however.

Level: 39 (94% of the way to level 40)
Pokedex status: 577 (+5) caught, 602 (+1) seen
Pokemon I want: Need some Unova Pokemon to fill in the gaps
Current buddy: Fraxure

World of Warcraft

I once again squandered that sweet, sweet double XP bonus and spent very little time in modern Azeroth.  I am sure I will regret that some day, but not today.  All I did was the usual Darkmoon Faire routine and a bit of poking about.  I am sure I will spend more time there next month though.

WoW Classic

The instance group finished up Sunken Temple at the start of the month, then went on a bit of a hiatus as Skronk and Ula moved in real life.  That echoes back to the early days of the instance group when, during the first year, I think most of us ended up moving.  So it is almost a tradition when we’re doing vanilla content I suppose.  Somewhere along the line Ula found the time to make a video about our Sunken Temple runs.  Otherwise I poked around with a couple of alts and made some progress there.

Coming Up

The big thing next month will be the launch of the new World of Warcraft expansion, Shadowlands.

The question is whether or not it will launch on the 26th as planned.  This comes up because we haven’t gotten the pre-expansion patch yet.  Bets were on it landing yesterday, but then Blizzard pulled the candidate back from the test server and now… now I give it even odds that Blizz will push the expansion launch into November. (Look for titles launching in November that will now accused Blizzard of moving the launch date specifically to target them.)

Having a few weeks with the pre-expansion patch is kind of important because that includes all the expansion story build up, usually spread out over some time.  I suppose they could condense it, or just punt on it altogether to make the ship date.  But since either would be in Q4 2020, I suspect that the revenue recognition aspect of it won’t make a difference.

So we have that to look forward to.

Then there is EVE Online, where World War Bee will move into its fourth month.  I am sure that will keep me busy and continue to provide me with fodder for a weekly post.

But CCP also plans to drop their latest mining nerf on New Eden as they attempt to “fix” the economy on the backs of the players.  CCP won’t explain their plan beyond a “trust us” level of response, but given their track record, trusting them seems a bit of a mug’s game.  They do not exactly have a Paul Volcker level of stature when it comes to economics.  After all, who created the mechanics that caused the problems they are now trying to fix?  But there isn’t a lot the player base can do but go along for the ride or walk away.  I’m in for the ride.

Then there is also that rumored LOTRO mini-expansion.  And it is about the season where Daybreak starts talking about expansions for EverQuest and EverQuest II, so that may develop as well.

Pandemic Binge Watching and the Big Three Channels

Let me just get out the obligatory “TV was a lot different when I was young” before we move on.  I tell my daughter about the days before DVRs or VCRs, when you had to be there and ready to watch at a specific time in order to see a show or movie.  A whole weekly magazine was devoted to the TV schedule, which was kind of amazing logistically because the channels were different in every major media market.  The LA TV Guide was useless in Chicago or New York.

And don’t even get me started on the pre-cable days and fiddling with an antenna to get the TV signal.  And I am just old enough to remember pre-solid state TVs, where you had to turn them on and allow a couple of minutes for them to warm up before a clear picture would resolve itself on the screen.  Or a fuzzy picture, if the antenna wasn’t just right.  It was a different time.

Today we have a Roku Stick that juts out from the side of our 46″ LCD TV.  I bought that back in December because there was demand in our house for the Disney+ channel and the PlayStation 3, our streaming device up until that moment, was just seconds from being completely out of support, so no new apps were being made for it.  And, when I looked at it a couple month later, all the old apps were dead too.  So it was just in time.

And, as the pandemic has gone on, we have spent more and more time streaming content over the Roku and very little time watching traditional commercial television.  I’d cancel the cable TV service, but Comcast would raise my monthly charge to just have internet.  So we just leave it there, idle, though I may go in and trim some features, like the extra we pay for HD channels.  The Comcast Xfinity HD compression algorithm was changed a couple years back and what you get now looks pretty bad.  If it even qualified as 720p I’d be surprised.  Maybe sports will come back and we’ll want to watch something like that.

Anyway, this will be a few posts running down of the channels in order of length and depth of investment in each, and I will start with the big three staples of our house currently.

HBO, or Home Box Office back in the day, is probably the first premium channel I ever ran into.  Our friend Gary had a bootleg HBO receiver on their antenna mast back in the day when it was broadcast via line-of-sight transmission from Mount Umunhum into the valley.  It was just movies back then, and the occasional filler 30 minutes of Video Jukebox, which might have pre-dated MTV.

I have subscribed to HBO as part of cable or satellite or streaming a number of times over the years, and I always end up cancelling it after a while.  They never have many movies that interest me, and for a long time they only had a few shows, and none of this was on demand.  But that has changed.

Upside:

Usually has a couple of recent release movies we might want to watch.

Has a deep field of good TV series that they have produced on which to binge like The Wire, Band of Brothers, The Pacific, Succession, Generation Kill, and a few others.  I could watch the first two seasons of The Wire on repeat.

Downside:

Priced at a premium tier.

Like a lot of movie channels, there are a bunch of movies you’ll skip right past because you’ve seen them or know you’ll never watch them.  Oh, and they come and go monthly, so you have to keep an eye on that.

Has some series that are decent but which got cancelled quickly, so you have a few episodes and a longing for more.

The UI of the app is not very sophisticated, though I will admit that the UI of none of the streaming apps are ideal.  We are once again up against the limitations of screen real estate and exactly how big things need to be to be able to see/read them from the couch.  But HBO, for all its prestige of being one of the elder services, is behind the pack when it comes to features, at least when compared to the two services below.

Has clung to the old school “episode every week” format for new show content.  This works for topical shows, like Last Week Tonight, and worked during Game of Thrones, when everybody was talking about that at the water cooler on Monday, but that was an exception, not the rule.  Most of the time it feels like they drag shows out week by week because they have nothing else new coming and just want to keep you subscribed.  Our general house rule is to let a series get at least six episodes in so we can watch them in pairs, though it is better still if we just wait until the season is over and watch at our own pace.

I also remain confused as to their branding.  I have HBO Now, or I did, but there is now HBO Max, which I cannot have because they are in a fight with Roku, though I can get HBO Max if I cancel HBO Now and subscribe to HBO via Hulu.  Or something like that.  I am not sure what I am missing by not having HBO Max.  Also, wasn’t there HBO Go for a while?

Current Status: Still subscribed.  Waiting for Lovecraft County to get further along.

Our original stop for binge watching, back when Netflix used to just send disks through the mail.  We burned through seasons of the show 24 three disks at a time.  With no commercials and using the chapter advance to get past the “previously” and the credits, each hour long episode boiled down to under 30 minutes, so we would watch a disk a night.

Eventually Netflix managed to get to the “net” part of its name and started streaming back before that was much of a thing.

Anyway, fast forward to today where Netflix is your prime location for streaming old episodes of Friends, a show we only used to watch because it was adjacent to Seinfeld at one point and the once place where you can watch Tiger King.

Upside:

Overall, lots of stuff available.

Lots of new and original content showing up all the time.  When they drop a new series, it is all episodes on the table, ready to binge.  And they have hit the mark multiple times with shows like Stranger Things and Tiger King.

Top of the class when it comes to features like “skip the ‘previously’ segment” at the start of a series show and “skip credits” so you can get straight into the content.

Tries really hard to flag content you might like based on your viewing, and isn’t that bad at it.  And it allows you to make profiles so when your daughter binges anime on her profile you don’t end up with the weeabo selection on your own recommendations.

Downside:

Has, over time, dramatically decreased the amount of third party content they have licensed.  There are still some good third party items in the mix, and of course Friends, but they are more about their own stuff these days.

A lot of their own content isn’t that great.  Some of it is okay.  I was good with a pass through once on things that otherwise got mixed reviews, but it can be really hit and miss.  A bunch of it is foreign television that has been dubbed in English and branded as “Netflix Original” and dumped into the listings.  Some dubbed stuff is okay, though a dubbed show really has to have a strong underlying plot for that not to become a distraction.

Really wants stuff playing on your screen.  The only service where I will leave something selected, walk away to do something, and come back to find myself starting episode three already.  You can tone that down some in the settings, but they don’t make it easy.

Current Status: Still subscribed, waiting for the next bit of binge fodder to drop while I get through Parks & Recreation.

Amazon Prime is the streaming service we sort of backed into because we had Amazon Prime for free delivery and suddenly it included a video service.

Upside:

Has content for Prime members, which occasionally has a movie I want to watch when I want to watch it.  I caught The Battle of Britain the other day.

Continues to ramp up some decent original content like The Man in the High Castle, The Boys, and Hanna.  If you’re going to dub something, Comrade Detective is how you do it.

Has caught up to Netflix on the “skip this” features without trying to start playing video at you every time you pause the cursor for a moment.  Also, just added profiles.

Can subscribe to a variety of other services like Showtime or Starz in their interface.  Also has a huge library of pay per view titles in its catalog.

Downside:

Not a lot of selection when compared to Netflix when you consider the price differential.  But maybe the free shipping takes a bite out of the content options.

Not as easy to navigate as Netflix.  Not that Netflix is great, but on Prime everything is smaller and less intrusive and feels like they are not trying as hard.  Prime also lists out each season of a show as its own entry, which feels like they are trying to look like they have more content than they actually do.

Searching for titles will lead you to a lot of things that are pay per view.  This sets it apart from the other two where everything you find on the service you can watch without additional payment.

The last time I tried a pay per view movie I had to get up from the TV and go into my office to order it on my computer before I could watch it on the TV.  I guess that keeps down the accidental purchases.

Some spotty or indifferent shows.  Also clings to the “one episode a week” idea of content deliver, except when it gets impatient and suddenly releases half a season, the doles out the rest more slowly.

Status: Still subscribed for free shipping, Twitch games, and other stuff, while finishing up Counterpart and waiting for all the episodes of The Boys season two to become available.

Next time I’ll look at Hulu, Disney+, and Starz.

January in Review

The Site

What can I say about the site this month?  I fell off my streak of more posts than days in the current month, though not by much.  That probably meant I spent more time playing games and less time writing about them, which is something I always say I am going to do. Maybe I actually I did it this month.  Or maybe nothing much worth writing about occurred.

Other than that… well… when I was over at my mother-in-law’s house to fix her WiFi she showed us a lemon she got off the tree in her back yard.

Citrus nightmare fuel… also 80s counter top tile

I don’t think this is related to the WiFi issue, but you never know what is connected to what over on Innsmouth Drive.

Oh, and IFTTT dropped me a note to tell me that my applet that auto-copied posts from here to Google+ had to be shut off.  Google+ has only been gone for 8 months or so now.  Good of them to let me know.

One Year Ago

Yes, there were predictions, because there are always predictions.  There was also the usual rosy “maybe I’ll play something new” post about the upcoming year.  And just to round out the usual start of the year trifecta, another Steam winter sale passed into history.

I was wondering what the EverQuest 20th anniversary might bring.  It did look like expansions might still be on the menu for both EQ and EQII.

But PlanetSide Arena, slated for late January beta, had that date pushed back to March.

Blizzard finally fixed the crafting quests in Darkmoon Faire, which had been broken since the pe-launch update before Battle for Azeroth.

In EVE Online I was wondering if Circle of Two was dead, or just mostly dead.  I also went on a bit about the PAP link economy.

We got some updated asteroid visuals with the January update.  Also, people were sending messages to CCP in Jita.  I’m not sure they allow container spam anymore.

Actually in New Eden I was out in Geminate with Liberty Squad.  We shot a POS and I wondered if it would be my last. (Answer: no) We messed with somebody’s moon chunk and shot structures in TKE.

On the LOTRO Legendary server I went down to Goblin Town before I had heading off to Angmar.  The legendary quest line sent me around Angmar and then told me the truth about Sara Oakheart, though it never explained why she was so damn slow.  Then I was riding down the long roads in Forochel before finally ending up at the ring forges in Eregion.

I was playing a bit of RimWorld, where setbacks can be a thing.

SuperData’s 2018 review report pointed towards a mobile focused future.

And I started using ManicTime to track game play time, listing the first stats in the January in Review post.

Five Years Ago

The Elder Scrolls Online announced they were ditching their mandatory subscription model.

We bid farewell to Massively and WoW Insider as AOL pared down their web content presence yet again.

At long last Runic was poised to deliver the Mac OS version of Torchlight II.  I just didn’t care any more.

Anet surprised exactly nobody and announced a Guild Wars 2 expansion.

Elite: Dangerous was making me feel like an incompetent boob… well, more so that usual.

Smed took the bait and wrote “money grab” in a tweet, which then became a gaming news headline.  Of course, he was also saying things about disgusting carebears and telling us things were not MMOs when they were clearly labeled as such.

Sony players were told they would get as much as 450 Station Cash for the great downtime of 2011, while the lawyers would pocket $2.75 million.

PlanetSide 2 got a record for what I considered a somewhat dubious achievement.

In EverQuest II I was running a paladin through the same content I just ran through with a berserker including the Palace of the Awakened.

The Lord of the Rings Online Producer’s Letter wasn’t impressing me, to the point I was wondering whether anybody else might create an open world Middle-earth game.

In WoW I got in and did the 10th Anniversary Molten Core event at the last minute.  The instance group was discovering that you had to be level 92 to do just about anything in Gorgrond.  I was also opining about garrisons in Draenor.  I had five after all.

In EVE Online it was time to usher in YC117.  There was also a video about the age range of the New Eden player base, the Proteus expansion, Gevlon was making more friends, and the Reavers deployed again, passing though Thera on the way,

I was muttering about paid early access and that sort of thing again.  Even Blizzard seemed to be in on the act.

And we had to say goodbye to our little Trixie cat.

Ten Years Ago

Well, there was the usual set of ill-considered predictions.

Oh, and that Battlestar Galactia/Bohemian Rhapsody video on YouTube.  I liked that.

The first issue of The Official World of Warcraft Magazine shipped.

I was wondering how many people remapped they keys for games.

There was Hulkageddon II, from which I tried to draw lessons.  Always good for some gamer angst… and anger.  There was also the Dominion 1.1 patch.

There was a certain amount of excitement on my part for Pokemon HeartGold and SoulSilver.  January was the ramp up time for Pokemon hype.

Oh, and there was LEGO Rock Band out.

The instance group was still warming up on the Horde side, making it as far as Razorfen Downs.

And the whole forever argument around Tanks and Healers vs. DPS?  We were going on about that back in January 2010 as well.  The Dungeon Finder brought this all into sharp relief.

But the month was primarily about Star Trek Online.

I was making making up polls and contests around that Del Taco shuttle tie-in and silly lists of things to do while waiting for open beta.

And when it finally arrived, I spent a lot of time with the character creator, some of it to make my first character and some of it just in the name of science.  I customized my ship and wondered how I could get rid of the shields in my combat screen shots.  Did they ever change that? And I pondered whether or not it was a good idea to get a lifetime subscription.  The poll results said it wasn’t, but I did it anyway.  The majority was correct it would seem.

Oh, I did do one other thing in January 2010.

Most Viewed Posts in January

1. Alamo teechs u 2 play DURID!
2. How Many People Play EVE Online?
3. EVE Online Gets Heavy Missile Buffs, Shield Slaves, and a New Event
4. Pilgrimage
5. Minecraft and the Search for a Warm Ocean
6. 2020 and Predictions for a New Year
7. California Explores Gaming Power Usage
8. The Daybreak Studio Split Comes to Pass
9. What Would I Like to See in 2020
10. Is Darkpaw Games the New Future of EverQuest?
11. Black Sheep Done
12. Blizzard Wants to Lock You In with a Flying Rat

Search Terms of the Month

dota tft what to buy
[Wait, you can buy something?]

starting off as heroic 85 eq
[Too bad the level cap is 115]

darlpaw games
[so close…]

new eq server for darkpaw
[Soon enough I am sure]

eve online do i collect daily rewards not being online
[No, that is why it is called EVE “ONLINE”]

Game Time from ManicTime

My EverQuest II binge was going strong coming into the month.  I think the measure after the first two weeks would have been more than 80% in favor of Norrath.  But other things picked up as the month went along, especially WoW Classic as the group got past the holidays, so in the end there was a close race for the top spot.

EverQuest II – 48.65%
WoW Classic – 47.64%
EVE Online – 3.36%
World of Warcraft – 0.35%

EVE Online

Kind of a quiet month in New Eden for me.  In part I was playing other games a lot more, but I was also in a bit of limbo in looking for a new home.  The wait for my KF application to get reviewed had me wondering if I ought to just ship everything from Delve to Jita and take a break from the game.  But then I got accepted and a new SIG opened up in the coalition with a promise of deployments, action, and structure shoots, so I’m sticking around.

EverQuest II

I binged quite a bit on Norrath in December and January.  I slowed down some in the back half of the last month, but I am still sitting with four characters at level cap.  That is unprecedented for my in the game and I remain with an odd, heady feeling, like maybe I should use this opportunity to catch up a few more characters.  I haven’t done much of anything with them since they hit level cap, but I could!

Pokemon Go

We continue our trek towards level 40.  I made good progress towards level 39 this past month, mostly due to xp from friendship level boosts.  I also caught a lot of Magikarp.  For lunar new year the game was featuring “red” Pokemon out in the wild, and despite looking more orange than red to me, Magikarp was on the list.  I went from less than 200 candies for them to over 400.  I can evolve another Gyrados, though I want a shiny Magikarp before I do that.

Level: 38 (35% of the way to level 39)
Pokedex status: 495(+14) caught, 525 (+20) seen
Pokemon I want: Lucario, which is tough because I never any in the wild.
Current buddy: Oshawatt

World of Warcraft

I did the usual Darkmoon Faire thing during the first week of the month, but not much else.  The 8.3 patch hit and seemed to bring with it more woe for the retail side of the game.  The game is apparently broken for a lot of MacOS players and a substantial number of Windows players, with the game often crashing out in 20 minutes or less if reports are to be believed.

WoW Classic

I was a bit quiet with Classic at the start of the month, but ramped up as things went along, the holidays ended, and the instance group got back in the saddle.  And it isn’t crashing for us, unlike retail, which is a plus.

Coming Up

Next month is going to be a busy month in real life for me.  Lots of things going on.  So it is likely to be a light month for posts.  We shall see.

Activision-Blizzard should be rolling out their 2019 financials early in the month.  We’ll see if more layoffs ensue.

In EVE Online there is a new SIG that is inviting all and sundry to join up and go deploy to some new location in order to better make things explode.  Making things explode has my interest.  Of course, that depends on the game actually being  up.  It has been mostly down for four of the last seven days.  First there was a DDoS attack, but now things just seem to be broken.  That’ll mess with your new player retention right there.

I still have a level boost in EverQuest II.  I could get another character to level cap.  But which one?  And, with five there, is that enough of an xp boost to try and roll somebody up from the lower levels the old fashioned way?  It is a long way to 120 from anywhere below 80.

And in WoW Classic we ought to finish up Scarlet Monastery and move on to the next thing, which I gather is Razorfen Downs.