The Redundant Ancient Gaming Noob: 2020 at 12:15PM

Showing posts with label 2020 at 12:15PM. Show all posts

Tuesday, November 24, 2020

The Explosive Velocity Update Lands in EVE Online

Here in the shadow of the Shadowlands launch CCP dropped an update of their own. The Explosive Velocity update takes aim at torpedoes and a few neglected hulls.

Is this the work of Team Talos?

Torpedoes will see the following changes that will make them more effective.

All XL Torpedoes:
- Explosion Velocity increased by 20%
- Missile Velocity increased by 20%
- Damage increased by 10%
All Torpedoes:
- Explosion Radius reduced by 10%
- Explosion Velocity increased by 10%
- Missile Velocity increased by 20%
- Maximum Flight Time increased by 20%
Torpedo Launcher:
- CPU usage and Powergrid usage reduced by 7%

That will make ships that can use torpedoes a little more effective and give them a little more power grid to play with when launchers are mounted.

One set of torpedo using hulls did get a bit of a nerf. Stealth bombers were already pretty powerful out in the wild and remain quite popular, so they took a hit to keep them from being too OP.

Bonus to Torpedo Maximum Velocity lowered from 20% to 15% per level
Racial Frigate Bonus to Explosion Velocity / Explosion Radius was removed

That offsets some of the torpedo buffs, but still leaves them better post-patch.

Two dreadnoughts also got changes today to help them be more competitive.

Phoenix:
- CPU increased from 965 to 990
- Power Grid increased from 500000 to 550000
Moros:
- Low slots increased from 7 to 8
- Mid slots decreased from 5 to 4

The Phoenix, the platform for XL torpedoes, also benefits from the above changes, which might help break it out of its very specialized applications. We shall see if the slot changes helps the currently unloved Moros.

Then there is the Griffin Navy Issue, which is neither a dread nor a torpedo platform. It just needed some help in its role as a short range ECM drone boat it seems, as CCP made the following changes:

Caldari Frigate bonuses (per skill level):
- 10% bonus to ECM Drone jam duration
- 20% bonus to Small Hybrid Turret damage
Misc. Bonus:
- 85% penalty to drone damage
- 50% penalty to drone hitpoints and drone control range
Attribute changes:
- Drone Bandwidth increased from 5 to 25
- Drone Capacity increased from 5 to 35

It got a bigger drone bay and the ability to launch more drones, but that 85% nerf to drone damage clearly means CCP doesn’t want people running it with combat drones. ECM only please. We’ll see if anybody ends up using the hull now.

And, finally, today’s patch slips in what I will call the “YZ9-F6 boson fix.” Back in October the Imperium set a trap to slaughter PAPI caps and supers, and executed it correctly… only to have CCP’s code fail to deliver the damage it should have. CCP acknowledged the issue, though there was little they could do after the fact. But this line in the patch notes seems to indicate they have tried to remedy the issue for future fights.

Improved the stability of damage-over-time superweapons to make them more reliable at applying their full damage under heavy server loads.

Of course, somebody will have to trust CCP enough to try it before we’ll know if the fix was effective. Who is going to gamble some titans on that?

Anyway, the patch notes are available and the update has been deployed.

Saturday, September 12, 2020

Condition Report for the Fourteenth Interval

Conditions were superior during that interval

-Corr, speaking of some past period of time

It is that time again. Another blog anniversary has rolled around. I have now been doing this for fourteen years.

WordPress.com says hi

Fourteen seems like a long time. It is about a quarter of my life at this point. But, then again, beyond a certain age you find a lot of things that have hung around for significant fractions of your life. I’ve been driving my current car for 17 years, I’ve been married for 21 years, I have shirts in my closet that still fit that pre-date the blog even. And don’t get me started on the little things that collect around the house, items that do not have any real value but which I hang on to for whatever reason, like the front license plate to my first car, which was towed off to the junk yard back in 1986.

So, in a way, fourteen years doesn’t seem like all that long ago. Also, the number fourteen doesn’t strike me with much in the way of inspiration. Sure, it is the sum of two prime numbers and the age I was when I started high school. I’ve also had a job pretty much continuously since I was 14. But nothing really struck me for a post title besides Wilson’s fourteen points. Me and history.

I’m also a bit lost for a graphic representing that number. Thirteen had the whole bad luck superstition around it, and fifteen at least has a Taylor Swift song going for it, but fourteen… I suppose there is a state highway 14. Whatever.

California State Highway 14

Past efforts, with better titles, if you are interested.

Like so many things on this site, there is now a set pattern of items I share annually, so we might as well get on with it.

Base Statistics

The same thing every year, looking at how the various needled moved over the last dozen months.

Days since launch: 5,114 (+366)
Posts total: 5,609 (+394)
Total Words: 4,378,757 (+411,478 words, not including this post)
Average words per post: 781 (+20)
Post Likes: 12,090 (+2,578)
Average posts per day: 1.097 (-0.01)
Comments: 33,780 (+1,329)
Average comments per post: 6.03 (-0.19)
Average comments per day: 6.61 (-0.23)
Spam comments: 1,482,548 (+18,381)
Average spam comments per day: 289.90 (-23.1)
Comment signal to noise ratio: 1 to 43.8 (-1.8)
Comments written by me: 6,857 or 20.3%
Images uploaded: 16,210 (+1,635)
Space used by images: 1.5 GB of my 3 GB allocation (49%)
Blog Followers: 1,888 (-40)
Twitter Followers: 775 (-1)
Tumblr Followers: 34 (+0)
US Presidents since launch: 3
British Monarchs since launch: 1
Prime Ministers of Italy since launch: 7

For some of you that will be enough stats. Others will want to dive deeper, which you can do after the cut.

Demographics

According to the Flag Counter, down near the bottom of the side bar, individuals from 228 different countries have visited the blog since I added that widget. But just over half of the visitors are from the United States.

This year’s sample sliced up

The WordPress.com

And the rest of the top ten sources of traffic are places where English is spoken by a significant portion of the population. As I have noted in the past, and English language gaming blog appeals mostly in countries where English is commonly spoken. Go figure.

The WordPress.com calculated top ten aligns with Flag Counter, though they disagree on 11, 12, and 13, where Flag Counter has them as Denmark, Spain, and Russia, while WP.com says it is Spain, Russia, and Denmark. But the numbers are close enough that a surge from any one of those three could change the lineup on one or both lists.

Meanwhile, what people are driving when they arrive here looks like this:

Browsers and operating systems

These numbers are based on the last 90 days, with a maximum of 250,000 records in the sample. The Browser count stacks up about the same as last year, with Chrome down just a bit.

When it comes to operating systems, Windows 7 is finally dropping off, though it remains surprisingly high for a decade old OS that is officially out of support.

Incoming!

Where does all this traffic come from. Some of it comes from other blogs and social media sites and the like. For those, here are the top contributors.

Over the Last Year

The blogs on the list… as well as EVE Bloggers and Total EVE… all have dynamic, updating lists that show the most recent posts from blogs, something that attracts almost infinitely more clicks than the static blogroll that WP.com offers. I have tried to simulate that with varying degrees of success.

Greedy Goblin amuses me the most. It is all from his idle Blogger.com blog, which he left because Google wasn’t living up to his Arrow Cross fantasies, though he never fully gave up on Blogger and used to post a link to his other blog every time he wrote something there. That reflects the truth that once you get known in one location, moving is death to traffic.

All Time List

Referrers by all time is plagued by inertia, but let’s look at that list again.

Some of the more recent contenders are moving up, but VirginWorld, whose heyday is a decade past, is still at the top of the list. Likewise, the long gone Google Reader remains on the list. EN24 is still around, but they haven’t linked to me in a good seven years either. There was a time when blogging was a lot more active. It isn’t just my site that is seeing less traffic.

Search Engines

Blogs and similar sites are fun and all, but search engines are where 90% of the traffic comes from. According to WP.com, here are the raw numbers for search engine referrals over the last year.

Google Search – 106,119
Bing – 2,361
duckduckgo.com – 1,501
Yahoo Search- 408
Yandex – 381
Ask.com – 62
Google Image Search – 16
myway.com – 16
Baidu – 12
Yahoo Image Search – 5
t-online.de – 4
earthlink.net – 3
Google Mobile – 3
metacrawler.com – 3
dogpile.com – 2
AOL – 2

Google is, of course, number one by a long shot. If Google forgets you, your traffic dies. Then again, when Google sends people, they are most likely to just bounce off your site, never to return. People coming from blogs are more likely to be return visitors.

But if you want to know the top search terms that sent people here from Google, here are the first dozen on the list.

Google search terms for the last 12 months

The list goes pretty deep. I can only see the top 1000, but even the last one sent me five clicks.

I am always surprised that “tagn” is at the top of the list. I guess people don’t have me bookmarked or something. And, as I said in the Blaugust Discord a month back, if you want to pull some traffic out of Google, write posts that use the words “WoW Subscription Numbers” in the title. Everybody wants to know what they are it seems, and nobody has an answer.

And, as I mentioned a while back, something happened in May and Google was suddenly a bit more interested in my site. You can see the climb after the April Fool’s spike.

Google search engine report for the last 12 months

Of course, not everything lines up. Web stats are garbage when you start to examine them.

Google says they only sent me 82K clicks, which is pretty far from the 106K number WP.com is telling me. That is 24K missing referrals. But 10K of the WP.com number is from non-US versions of Google, which brings the missing number down to 14K. And that missing amount might just be how things are counted. If you search twice for the same thing and click on the same link, that might be one search referral to Google but two for WP.com’s stats.

So it goes.

Outgoing!

I get traffic coming here, but I occasionally send some out to other sites.

Over the Last Year

Wikipedia
Inventory Full
EVE Online (various dev and news blogs)
Massively OP
zKillboard (EVE Online ship kills)
Reddit
The Nosy Gamer
Imperium News
Blizzard Forums
WoW Wiki

Wikipedia remains my top out destination, usually because I link things I don’t want to explain. The whole list is more a reflection of whom I link to in posts rather than anything on my side bar. My attempt to create a dynamic blog list is not so successful I guess.

All Time

Wikipedia
Various Pokemon sites
Civ Fanatics
Various Blizzard WoW Sites
Hardcore Casual
Keen and Graev
Blessing of Kings
EVE Online Pictures
Inventory Full
Kill Ten Rats

Wikipedia is the all time champ as well, with a the link to the entry for the 1981 game Castle Wolfenstein being the top destination there, both this year and all time. People love a classic I guess.

Most Viewed Posts

Over the Last Year

Kind of surprised to see a fairly recent post sneak in at number 10 there, it being less than a month old now, but the whole Niarja thing was quite a change for high sec. There are actually four posts from the past year on that lists, and all of them are there because Google favored them in some way. For a bit I was the top result for searches related to “Niarja,” so that explains a bit of that.

All Time

I did a couple of posts last year about my most viewed posts over the life of the blog, both cumulatively and year by year. I over-explained things in such detail there that you should read those, because otherwise I’m just going to say something about Google and inertia and Reddit and Pokemon here.

Categories and Tags

Categories, as I have said in the past, represent the larger scale topics I write about. There are a limited number of those, though I add a couple every year… or convert a tag or two to a category if they get used a lot. I currently have 97 tags, up one from last year. The top topics for the blog are:

EVE Online 1,729
World of Warcraft 1,361
EverQuest II 734
EverQuest 592
Lord of the Rings Online 429
Blizzard 408
Sony Online Entertainment 342
Instance Group 330
Humor 237
Pokemon 231
blog thing 201
Misc MMOs 193
Rift 162
Month in Review 168
YouTube 159
WoW Classic 152
Nintendo DS Hardware 141
Other PC Games 146
Diablo III 140
Vanguard SOH 135

EVE Online remains the king, having supplanted World of Warcraft some years back.. The new kid on the block, or on the list, is WoW Classic. I wrote a lot about it over the last year. Minecraft fell off the top 20.

Tags

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 3,851 tags used over the last 14 years, up 206 from last year. I continue to make up a new tag for a lot of posts it seems.

The top ten tags I’ve used are:

CCP 215
Progression Server 122
Asher Elias 94
Reavers 90
Fippy Darkpaw 85
Meaningless Milestones 82
Nostalgia 81
Delve 74
MMO Expansions 66
Warlords of Draenor 65
Free-To-Play 63

Last year I did a list of the tags I had used exactly 13 times, so this year I can do the ones I have used exactly 14 times I guess.

Deadmines
Age of Kings
Cash Shop
EverQuest II Extended
NBI
Delve War
Pandemic Legion
Honest Trailers
Delve 2016
Spring Movie League

That last one is a bit of a kick in the gut, as it doesn’t seem likely we will see any FML movie leagues for some time to come.

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 chart to see them in a more legible size.

This is the bit where I talk about whether traffic, page views, or whatever really matter. To certain extent, what I say most of the time is true, that it doesn’t matter so much. If it mattered a lot you would notice some change in my pattern of posting. I might post less frequently, or at less length, or in some way adjust myself to a patter of fewer views. But clearly I haven’t. Call that exhibit A.

On the flip side, resigned as I was to the ongoing decline of traffic, I was actually kind of happy when page views started to perk up a bit after the Google change I mentioned above, which kicked in around early May. For ages page views never dipped below 20K in a month, which started to become something of a psychological line, a point above which everything was good and below which things were… not? And then, last year, traffic started dipping below that line, but I kept on going as before. But now it is up again and, at some level, more attention makes me feel better. I can pretend that maybe sometimes I write something that matters to people, or informs them. Something. As I noted above, I was surprised to see a post I made less than a month ago make it into the top ten most viewed posts for the last year.

So maybe it matters some.

So Very Many Words

The most amusing chart for me, the one with the word count.

Sept 2020 – Word count, comments, liked, and so on

As usual, you can click on the chart to see it full size. I still write a lot of posts. We’re at day 256 for the year and I am already 267 posts into things. And I am still averaging a bit over a thousand words a post. So many words.

The total word count, so you don’t have to tally it up yourself, is 4,378,757. That puts me within striking range of the number of words in Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series, including the three bloated volumes that Brandon Sanderson wrote to finish off the tale. I’ll pass it next year, and I think I overuse stock phrases only slightly more often.

Forward Looking Statements

Here is where I say some things that may or may not be true over time. It is also far enough down the page that I’ll have lost most people, so Bhagpuss, Shintar, and a few regulars are my only audience at this point. And you know I am not a reliable narrator when it comes to writing about my own motivations. Or perhaps they just ebb and flow. Maybe that whole biorhythm thing they were trying to sell us on back in the 70s had something to it.

But when it comes down to it, I feel really tired right now. My motivation is ebbing.

And it isn’t due to the fact that I am writing about the same games I was back in 2006, or that we’re running the exact same content we were fourteen years ago or that we’re fighting over the same region of space we were back in 2012. I think I have proven I can write about the same thing over and over.

After all, it is only the same at a macro level. Every dungeon looks a like, every space battle feels the same, every sporting event totals up to a final score if you get enough distance. You killed the boss and they dropped some loot, the space objective was won or lost, a numerical value sums up the state of play.

But at the ground level each dungeon run is different, each space battle flows in its own way, and every sporting event has its moments that make it special. And I live in the little details with my writing, because that is what sparks memory for me when I got back and read my posts a year or five years or ten years later.

So it isn’t that. At times in the past, when I have felt myself slipping a bit, I have been hard pressed to identify the problem. But now, in the year of our lord 2020, I am pretty sure I can spot the problem. The problem is I have been sitting at my desk at home too damn much.

Seriously. I have mentioned this a bit in month in review posts, but now that were about six month into COVID-19 and isolation and masks and work from home, I am pretty sure this is taking a toll on me.

Since mid-March I have been working from home, which means spending 9 or 10 hours most weekdays sitting in my home office, at the end of which I am not always inclined to remain in the very same chair to pick up and start playing a game or go on a fleet op.

This has been somewhat aggravated by the company for which I labor as the CEO has been out with a message at the start of every month that we’ll be back in the office by the 15th of the next month. April, May, June, July, August, September, and now October have all come up as return dates. That has left me in a state of feeling like this is all temporary, so I haven’t felt the need to change up my work space at home.

Then the bomb dropped late last month. I work in a satellite office, 2,000 miles from HQ, which is a place of work for a dwindling number of people. After having been away from the office for so long and yet still staying productive, the company decided we didn’t really need an office at all. So we’re all working from home for good.

Which is kind of a bummer. I won’t miss the commute, though it wasn’t all that bad, and was often a nice quiet time to listen to an audio book… so maybe I will miss it a bit. But I will miss the office, which was quiet and air conditioned, the latter weighing particularly when it has been getting up to 108 degrees here. And I will miss the campus where it was located, which was pretty and green, nestled in the mountains above Santa Cruz… though a large part of that area has been on fire lately, to the point that when I cleared out my stuff from the office there was ash falling out of the sky and a strong scent of something burning.

In a way, being at work and away from home charged up the batteries that got me to play video games. Now that is all gone. And the pandemic means going out to eat or a movie or much else is out of the question. I know we introverts were all “we got this” back in April and May, but Jesus Christ I would be happy to go to a crowded mall on a Saturday afternoon once more just to change the scenery. But the state is on fire and there is smoke and ash falling from the sky most places these days, which kind of takes outdoor dining, the only eating out option we have, off the table, so to speak.

And this has been driving my wife even more crazy. She is a sales rep, a gregarious outgoing person, so staying home has been even more of a burden… and all the more so since she needs to meet people to find customers and get paid, which just isn’t happening these days.

So we have been spending a lot of time watching TV, since at least we can sit on the couch rather than our office chairs. That has spawned the ongoing series of posts about pandemic binge watching. Or we drive around and play Pokemon Go from the safety of my car… which also has air conditioning, which is a factor when it is 108 out and you don’t have central air at home because you keep saying it is a waste of money because you only really need it two weeks or so out of the year and you like some fresh air now and then.

Oddly, while my PC gaming time has been in decline, I have been spending about the same amount of time writing, which is why posts are still going up daily… I’m still on an unbroken streak since late March… and they’re still running out to a thousand words or more on a regular basis.

But the grist for that mill, the game play time that stimulates the posts, that has been tapering off pretty sharply of late. There are a bunch of things I’d like to play. My cup runneth over on Steam and what not. But my back hurts and I am sick of sitting in my office chair and I feel like I am watching too much TV and it seems like this is never going to end. Oh, and my state is on fire, the economy is tanking so hard that it is making the “great recession” of the last decade look paltry (the PPP stuff is ending, so expect huge layoffs soon), and the President is actively trying to destroy the country to feed his ego and make a few bucks. So there is some sense of helplessness and existential dread mixed in there I am sure.

I can’t fix the world, but I am working on setting up my work stuff in another room so that I can have a work area and a recreation area. Maybe that will help, though I have some work to do before that is ready. And it remains to be seen if working out in the living area of the house will be viable. It is not always quiet out there.

All of which, as I said about 800 words ago, is making me feel very tired. I don’t want to get off the couch, even if it means watching another episode of Billions. As I have said before, the structure of my post schedule, built up around a few regular items, has helped me keep going. But if the game play well runs dry I might be back to writing opinion pieces about esoteric bits of MMORPG design, and I’m not sure any of us want that. We’ll end up with things like “Five Table Top RPGs that should be MMORPGs” or “Why Table Top RPGs should Never become MMORPGs” or how I haven’t played a table top RPG game since the mid-90s or retreading why EverQuest II never did as well as EverQuest, much less World of Warcraft or why everybody is mean to DPS players.

So I guess the forward looking statement this year is that I am hoping to get to year fifteen. At least then I can add a regular “Fifteen Years Ago” section to my month in review posts.

My plan is to carry on as before. My backup plan is to just do month in review posts until the end of time. It might be difficult to keep up with either.

Conditions were superior during that interval, the one before the pandemic and the fires and the being at home all the time. Also, it is well past midnight and I might be rambling a bit.

We will see what tomorrow brings.

Sunday, May 31, 2020

May in Review

The Site

I managed to break the blogger feed on the side bar. It actually stopped working on its own and as I dug around I noticed that Pinboard said I had 32,768 entries there, which is exactly 2^15, which I suspected meant that I might have hit an upper limit on entries. So I cleared all entries and… then nothing there has worked reliably since.

So I have an alternate feed now in the side bar which was, honestly, much easier to setup and get going, and seems more reliable. However, I have less control over the feed so I cannot, for example, inject the blog name into the feed, so it is just post title, date, and author. There will no doubt be a blog post about this when I get it settled.

Meanwhile, the blog has seen a bit of a traffic boom this month. As usual, this traffic bump appears to be completely based on the whims of Google search, which suddenly doubled in impressions and clicks for my site.

Google’s own graph

Things were about normal in March, then there is the usual big April 1st spike, after which traffic and impressions taper off. And then, suddenly, on May 6, they about double and I couldn’t tell you why. It might be related to the Activision Blizzard financials. There are a bunch of searches for “wow subscription numbers.” But that should have tapered off after a few days. Instead things appear to have kept going.

Also, in the usual post-Blaugust tradition, I have carried on after Blapril and posted every single day in May as well. I am not sure that has an effect, but historically the September after Blaugust is usually a pretty good month for traffic as well, so maybe that plays into it. Mysteries of the internet.

One Year Ago

Back in May of 2018 there was a rumor leak about Daybreak, so a year later I went back over them to see what came to pass.

Blizzard revenue margins dropped considerably. As if to prove the point, WoW dropped off of SuperData’s digital revenue chart.

To hide that in the news cycle Blizzard gave us a date for WoW Classic. I wondered if the Cataclysm expansion was a necessary prerequisite for WoW Classic. I also was speculating as to what would happen with WoW Classic as it aged.

The beta for WoW Classic had been up for a while, but they decided to do a stress test, so they let everybody in for a bit. Of course I went! And I did the following week as well.

In what we now call retail WoW I was off collecting the Children’s Week pets.

Blizzard also gave us a peek at their 15th Anniversary Collector’s Edition.

The Mittani uttered the words, “Gevlon was right” in a public forum.

EVE Online celebrated its sixteen year anniversary with a sixteen day login campaign. The Invasion expansion was slated for the end of the month. Its arrival brought more Triglavian fun to the game as well as the big revamp of The Agency interface and some war dec changes.

CCP Peligro Tweeted out a chart about who gets banned for botting in New Eden. CCP had also been trying to nerf ratting and mining, so that was the focus of my MER review that month.

The CSM14 election was coming up and Jester did a Reddit AMA about his time on the CSM as his NDA had finally expired. I also had a bullet points post about CSM14 candidates and rewards and a coming war and such.

Out in Delve I got to undock my dreadnought.

With Liberty Squad I went on ops to Amamake and into Etherium reach that resulted in explosions. I also got to drop on some Rorquals with Black Ops.

But people were focused on the coming Imperium attack on the north and where it would land. Even as we formed up and moved vast fleets to the north of null sec, our target was still speculation, though once we set up shop in the east of Pure Blind it looked like Tribute was the target. There was a rush to see if we could kill the PanFam staging Keepstar, but when that failed we settled in to burn down the region.

In Minecraft I was growing bamboo and looking for the new village types that came in with the Village & Pillage update. The I went looking for pillagers.

Connor at MMO Fallout announced that the site was winding down… and then he changed his mind.

And I watched the Catch-22 miniseries on Hulu. I liked some of it, but there were issues for me. There always are.

Five Years Ago

A bucket list item achieved.

There was another Newbie Blogger Initiative, for which I wrote a post.

The whole World of Warcraft “flying in Draenor” explosion started when Blizzard announced that they probably wouldn’t allow flying in that, or any future, expansion. Lots of people spoke up. I linked to a bunch of them.

It was not a good month for World of Warcraft. Subscriptions were down to 7.1 million… and then they banned 100K accounts, so make that an even 7 million.

In the Warlords of Draenor expansion itself I was mostly going garrison stuff and pet battles.

Carbine announced that WildStar would be going free to play after continuing poor financial performance.

EVE Online turned 12 years old. CCP was offering fan site the option of a free account OR receiving a PLEX every month. I actually attempted to opt-in for the PLEX, but never heard back. Was that option ever really a thing? Did anybody get PLEX? Is the fan site program still around?

The war in Fountain and Delve was over, NCDot had been pushed back yet again, and we were moving back north as our empire contracted. Entosis stuff was looming. Black Legion caught us taking a badly planned convoy through KVN-36.

Meanwhile, down in Querious, the Reavers were playing with Ravens. Up in the north, TNT was moving out of Deklein and into Tribute as part of our Fozzie Sov plans. And I hit 140 million skill points.

Then Daybreak went for a crowd pleaser by launching a new time locked expansion server named Ragefire. It was such a crowd pleaser that it couldn’t handle the crowd. In addition to some first night problems, you simply couldn’t log in most of the time. They worked on a login queue and some zone instancing technology from EverQuest II and eventually opened up another server named Lockjaw to take care of the crowding.

TorilMUD, the MUD on which EverQuest was largely based, softened its death penalty. A sign of the times.

There was word of a Warhammer Online private/pirate server for those who missed the departed game.

And I was playing LEGO Star Wars on the PlayStation 3 while the freshly minted Imperium was going to try and play H1Z1.

Ten Years Ago

I was unemployed thanks to the great mortgage meltdown, which you would think would leave me a lot more time for gaming and blogging. But the anxiety of looking for a job for the first time in 12 years… and the first time in 20 years where there wasn’t just one out there waiting for me… made for a quiet gaming and blogging month.

Yes, I did start to poke my nose back into LOTRO. A game where I didn’t have to pay a subscription seemed about right. (I have a lifetime subscription.) That meant getting back into the swing of the game and figuring out what had changed.

We actually got THE DATE for the release of StarCraft II. How did that turn out for everybody? I skipped the whole thing. Maybe when the StarCraft II warchest version comes out with all the expansions I’ll look into it.

The Agency came to Facebook, in the form of The Agency: Covert Ops. A Mafia Wars-like game, without the multi-level marketing aspect, it had its good and its bad. I liked the puzzles. The dogs with guns… and the submarine fight… not so much. Who knew that would be all of The Agency we would ever get?

Meanwhile SOE was transcending bad taste with their EQII PWNZ marketing campaign.

EVE Online got the Tyrannis expansion, though I wasn’t paying much attention there. Something called EVE Gate was introduced… later closed and now being proposed again I think… as well as integration with DUST 514… also later closed and effectively proposed again with Project: Nova. Pattern here?

There was some Pokemon fun going. I was twinking the Pokewalker while our cats worked against me. The cats won in the end.

We also went to see the Pokemon Video Game Championships in our area.

And the Horde remix of the instance group was wrapping up Dire Maul and Stratholme. Then, having hit 60, we let the Dungeon Finder guide our way into the Outland.

Fifteen Years Ago

Sony unveiled the PlayStation 3 in a pre-E3 announcement while Microsoft announced the XBox 360 on MTV.

Pokemon Emerald, the final third generation Pokemon game and the last GameBoy Advance Pokemon release, arrives in North America.

Twenty Years Ago

Diablo II launched. It enlarged on its predecessor with more classes and a four act storyline that played out over different environments. A pre-digital distribution title, it was awarded a Guinness Book record as the fastest selling video game ever, having shipped and sold one million boxes over the course of the first month. For comparison its 2012 successor, Diablo III, sold 3.5 million copies in the first 24 hours, also setting a Guinness Book record.

Shogun: Total War launched, setting down a template that would become the Total War series that is still getting new titles.

Forty Years Ago

The Empire Strikes back, arguably the best movie in the whole series, debuts. Or, as I sometimes think of it, the last great Star Wars movie.

Most Viewed Posts in May

Search Terms of the Month

iowa wooden deck
[You’re far from Iowa friend]

robert jordan wheel of.time repetitive writing
[Clip that and you’d lose a book worth of text]

eve online auction house no more undercut
[Well, no more .01 ISK undercut]

how to make bamboo grow faster in minecraft
[You’re kidding, right?]

wve onlune mist active cirporations
[Your fingers are on the wrong keys]

mmo when you can play as kobold
[Uhh… I don’t know]

where’d holly windstalker go?
[Blizzard]

Gaming Time from ManicTime

A bit of a surprise for times this month. If you had asked me on the first I would have probably guessed that EVE Online would be at the top, with WoW Classic maybe not too far behind. And then I launched Minecraft.

Minecraft – 43.20%
EVE Online – 32.22%
WoW Classic – 16.58%
EverQuest – 6.65%
World of Warcraft – 0.69%
RimWorld – 0.66%

It is really easy to put on a podcast or an audio book and while away the hours with Minecraft. Meanwhile, WoW Classic has languished a bit as the group has been busy so hasn’t had a chance to get back to Zul’Farrak.

EVE Online

With the Goon Expeditionary Force deployed, there has been some opportunity for fun in space. I am definitely in a mood where I only log in for fleets and not much else. I have gone on some fleets, but perhaps not as many as I thought I would. But we’re still out there in Cloud Ring.

EverQuest

I have been mostly poking along with the Overseer feature here, though I did log in and make a character on one of the new progression servers. The Overseer got some updates, and there is a post about it in the making. It remains, to my mind, superior to the EverQuest II version of the feature. As for the progression servers, I am likely going to give this round a pass. I poked my nose in for a first day glimpse, but without a group already stood up and ready to go it is more than I care to take on.

Minecraft

I mentioned Minecraft and a new world appeared. My post about exploring our old world inspired Skronk to roll up a fresh on on Minecraft Realms, so we’ve been playing with that for about a week or so now. I guess I had best move it up into the “games I play” list again.

Pokemon Go

Having hit level 39 at the end of last month I am still in the midst of the long climb to level 40. Niantic’s quality of life changes to support pandemic play, like remote raid passes, have helped out. I caught my first raid legendary, the Terrakion. However, for every legendary I catch, four more seem to get away. Oh well.

Level: 39 (19% of the way to level 40)
Pokedex status: 541 (+10) caught, 569 (+9) seen
Pokemon I want: Some of these Unova Pokemon where I only have one
Current buddy: Axew

Pokemon Sword

I made no progress this month. I didn’t even pick up the Switch Lite except to move it when it was in the way of something. I think it is a nice little unit, but I haven’t worked in where it fits in my play time. I used to sit on the couch when nobody was home, turn on a TV show I had seen before (reruns of The Wire FTW) and play, but now there is never a time when nobody is home.

World of Warcraft

I thought at the start of the month that I would totally get my Horde alt out and to level cap now that I have unlocked flying and there is double XP available until the next expansion. It should be easy mode, a quick tour of the Horde story. And then all I did was a bit of Darkmoon Faire. I guess I can recycle that plan. Maybe next month.

WoW Classic

Things slowed down some in WoW Classic, mostly due to the group being busy with other things in life. We managed to get started in Zul’Farrak, but haven’t managed to get back for a return trip. It is still on our agenda though. Maybe next month.

Coming Up

A preview of June’s month in review: I will no doubt be complaining about the new editor WordPress will be forcing on us. I’ve been using the old editor for over a decade and have heard little good about the new one. But the old one may be dead tomorrow, so expect some curse words. (They say it will still be there, but in the past they have broken things like that on purpose to force people to change.)

It seems likely that, should I be able to still write posts, there will be some updates about the deployment in EVE Online, something about the instance group in WoW Classic when we get back to ZF, and maybe a further thought or two about Minecraft.

The CSM15 elections start tomorrow for EVE Online. I bet you can already foresee that post coming.

I did buy a copy of the new Minecraft Dungeons, which I will probably try out later today, so perhaps something about that will pop up in June.

Otherwise, summer is coming, my daughter is graduating from high school, the weather is warm, and we’re coming up on three months of “stay at home” and even I am feeling like I need to go to the mall or something. We shall see how we manage.