The Redundant Ancient Gaming Noob: Anniversary

Showing posts with label Anniversary. Show all posts

Monday, September 13, 2021

My Blogging Quinceanera

Here we are again at another blog anniversary. It has been 15 years since I set out on this writing journey.

Think of it as a space quinceanera

As always, I spent a good few minutes fishing around for a theme for this post and quinceanera popped up as something related to the number 15. Here in California quinceanera refers to the party given for a young woman on her 15th birthday, though the usage of the word varies. But my wife has a friend who is a party planner for these events, which can be huge, and she uses the word to refer to the event, so I will do the same.

Were this the blog of a decade back I would have gone to some effort to dress up the post to go along with the theme. Look at what I did for the fifth and sixth anniversaries. These days I am a less invested in the whole thing, so I am going to declare the theme and the almost immediately walk away from it. If you want to imagine me in a satin party dress with a tiara, that’s all on you. My wife isn’t sharing those pictures.

If I were feeling motivated I might have tried to work in some key elements of a quinceanera, things like the pinatas, a cake, the dance partner, the first bouquet as a woman, and the last doll of childhood. But I think I’ll just let you imagine me in the dress. that is less work and I am starting late this year.

Past Anniversaries

In case you want to revisit the evolution of these annual posts. As noted above, years five and six are probably peak effort on my part, then like life, it is all down hill from there.

Base Statistics

I was trying to figure out if statistics were the cake or the pinatas. Pinatas I think, since there are a bunch of them.

Beyond that, we have the same opening set of numbers every year, looking at how the various needled moved over the last dozen months. The current count is listed below with the change since last year noted in parenthesis.

Days since launch: 5,480 (+366)
Posts total: 6,028 (+419)
Total Words: 4,839,356 (+460,599 words, not including this post)
Average words per post: 803 (+22)
Post Likes: 15,164 (+2,578)
Average posts per day: 1.1 (+0.03)
Comments: 35,108 (+1,328)
Average comments per post: 5.82 (-0.21)
Average comments per day: 6.41 (-0.20)
Spam comments: 1,718,916 (+236,368)
Average spam comments per day: 313.67 (+43.1)
Comment signal to noise ratio: 1 to 48.9 +5.9)
Comments written by me: 7,079 or 20.2%
Images uploaded: 18,054 (+1,844)
Space used by images: 2.1 GB of my 13 GB allocation
Blog Followers: 2,073 (+185)
Twitter Followers: 785 (+10)
Tumblr Followers: 36 (+2)
US Presidents since launch: 4
British Monarchs since launch: 1
Prime Ministers of Italy since launch: 8

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

Demographics

As usual, I will kick off with the countries that visit the blog. These stats are from the Flag Counter widget in the side bar and are based off of the last 250,000 visitors, so they are more reflective of the last year than the life of the blog.

This year’s sample sliced up

Surprising nobody, countries with large English speaking populations and modern economies dominate the list. The biggest surprise is likely that the US fell below 50%, though just barely.

As for what browsers and operating systems, Flag Counter says the following:

Browsers and operating systems

Microsoft Edge disappeared from the browser chart because it now uses the Chromium engine and reports as Google Chrome to sites. That was enough to push KHTML onto the list, which hasn’t been a thing really for about five years.

The surprise on operating systems is the amount of Android traffic. The Android WordPress.com app generates a decent amount of traffic for me most days… well, it is in the top ten most days. As we’ve seen there is Google, and then there is everything else.

Who Wants to Dance With Me?

I guess I am going with that theme. These are the sites who send me traffic.

Over the last year:

I am not sure what Chromo Science was, aside from a site that was somehow sending me traffic for about two months. I was never able to spot a link to my site there and the traffic stopped as abruptly as it started.

Over the life of the blog:

Fifteen years of weight makes it hard to shake sites from that list, especially since the heyday of the blog was eight years in the past. And really, the next 20 on the list are are old as well, save for Feedly I suppose.

The Search Engine Pinata of Page Views

I pick out search engines on their own, just to give Google its own list to dominate I guess. According to the WP.com stats, here were the top search engines for me over the last year:

Google Search – 155,360
Bing – 2,716
duckduckgo.com – 2,384
Yahoo Search- 347
Yandex – 213
Ask.com – 26
Google Image Search – 23
Baidu – 14

There are not even ten on that list now. AOL and Dogpile fell out of love with me.

As for Google, here is their affair with me for the last year.

TAGN Google Stats for Year 15

As you can see, internet stats remain garbage as the total clicks on that chart is nearly 20K shy of what WP.com tells me, though the chart might be for just US Google, which nearly lines up… not quite, but much closer. But I can find Google telling me different numbers on the same page at times… so, garbage. But it they are the only accounting I have for now.

As for what search terms bring people to the site, here is the top of the list for the last year.

Top search terms for year 15

That doesn’t add up to much, but the list carries on, often with minor variations of those search terms, and it isn’t until you get past the 700 mark that you finally find a search term that received fewer than ten clicks.

Who Do I Dance With?

Or where do I send traffic. Over the last year:

Wikipedia
EVE Online (various dev and news blogs)
Reddit
Imperium News
zKillboard (EVE Online ship kills)
Inventory Full
SuperData Research (now defunct)
The Nosy Gamer
Massively OP
Twitter

Wikipedia is the perennial top of this chart as I tend to link out to concepts or other items I don’t care to explain… and Apple ][ games from that one post. Those get the most clicks. And then 2-5 are likely explained by there being a war going on in New Eden for the last year or so.

Over the life of the blog:

Nick Yee (the old guild name generator)
Wikipedia
Various Pokemon sites
Civ Fanatics
Various Blizzard WoW Sites
Hardcore Casual
Keen and Graev
Blessing of Kings
EVE Online Pictures
Inventory Full

That list is pretty solid. Again, the weight of 15 years makes it hard for a new site to break into that top ten.

Most Viewed Posts

Over the last year:

Posts marked with an asterisk were actually posted in the last year. You can no doubt see some correlation between the search terms for the last year up in the search engines section and the posts that were popular over the last year.

Over the life of the blog:

Meanwhile again we see the weight of years hold a list fairly static. I did a couple of posts two years about my most viewed posts over the life of the blog, both cumulatively and year by year. In the end though, the absolute count this late in the life of the blog meant that only spots nine and ten changed, and they only swapped places. Still, 11th place could make the list next year, it being that post about Minecraft and finding a warm ocean.

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 98 tags, up one from last year, though I demoted a few categories to tags and created a few new ones for games like Valheim.

The top categories for the blog, and how many posts have used them:

EVE Online 1,915
World of Warcraft 1,480
EverQuest II 749
EverQuest 614
Lord of the Rings Online 448
Blizzard 447
Instance Group 357
Sony Online Entertainment 343
CCP 249
Pokemon 242
Humor 238
WoW Classic 238
blog thing 212
Misc MMOs 195
Month in Review 181
YouTube 180
Rift 162
Other PC Games 153
Daybreak Game Company 151
Nintendo DS Hardware 142

Categories are not mutually exclusive. You only have to total up the top half of that list to get more uses that there are posts on the blog. Month in Review posts… which have their own category… include summaries of various games and so get the categories or tags related to those games. But it is still an indicator of what I write about and what I play… more the former than the latter I think. I haven’t seriously played EverQuest since the Fippy Darkpaw server launched a decade back, but I seem to write about it a lot all the same.

Tags though, tags are a crazy town at times. I throw out fresh tags on a whim and they can often be read as a “flavor” indicator when it comes to a post. I have 4,072 tags for the blog, up from 3,851 last year. Still, some get used more than others. Here are the top most used tags for the blog so far:

Delve 127
Progression Server 124
World War Bee 123
Asher Elias 104
Reavers 95
Meaningless Milestones 93
Fippy Darkpaw 85
Nostalgia 81
EVE Updates 69
Warlords of Draenor 66
MMO Expansions 66
Free-to-Play 63
Council of Stellar Management 58
WWB Weekly Updates 57
EVE Monthly Economic Report 54
RMT 52
Skill Points 52
Casino War 52
Imperium 50
BlizzCon 49

Again, a year long war in EVE Online, World War Bee, had some influence on those tags.

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. Unfortunately, the nice clear detailed chart that I used to post got the axe with a WP.com stats update earlier this year, so now you get round numbers… but the chart has colors!

Colors or not, you’ll probably have to click on them in order to read the numbers. I know I do.

Total Page Views by Month/Year

Average Daily Page Views by Month/Year

Once more you can see the peak of the blog was in 2012, with a burst in 2013. More recently the numbers have been sagging, with this month being quite low. Without a war in New Eden and much interest in the other titles I write about Google isn’t sending people my way.

A Word or Two about Words

And for those who like some really obscure data, here is the chart that lists out total posts, words per year, comments, likes, and all of that detail. At least that chart hasn’t changed recently.

Words and posts and much illegible detail

The usual summary applies, which is that over time my words per post has gone up as have “likes” per post, while comments have gone down.

Forward Looking Statements

I fell off my theme about halfway through, didn’t I? And I was barely invested even before that. Oh well. Keeps me away from any unfortunate “now I am a woman” metaphors I guess.

So here we are, 15 years in which, as I may have noted in the past, is about 10 years longer than I figured I would last, my hobbies tending to be 5 year affairs, usually consisting of a bumbling first year, a peak at about the three year mark, then pottering around more out of habit than anything else for the final two.

Still, I wonder if I can spot those sorts of patterns within the blog itself. My various interests had started, peaked, tapered off, and then disappeared, sometimes for good, other times to be revived at a later date and re-explored. The blog is both an archeological treasure and an unwieldy collection of randomness, the latter not being helped by my own inability to be consistent in tagging or categorizing posts. Going back to find things can be a chore, and once I am there I tend to spend as much time fixing dead links (usually re-pointing to the Internet Archive if possible), correcting typos and like errors, some of which have eluded me for more than a decade, and trying to normalize tags and categories.

I think the biggest effort for that last was when I decided Month in Review should be a category a few years back, so went and edited every single related post to add that.

Anyway, none of that is very forward looking, is it? I am supposed to prognosticate, not ruminate. So what does the future hold for the blog?

More of the same I guess?

Some combo of habit and obsession and self-reflection will keep me going, and there isn’t a real reason to stop. What am I going to do, actually play video games? Hrmm.

I will probably stop with the post every day thing as I said I would last month once I hit the 500 days in a row achievement. I thought vacation would end that, but somehow I scraped together just enough words to keep the streak alive. With this post it will be 534 consecutive daily posts. For whatever reason, 550 seems like a good number… though it could very well become 600. We’ll see. I won’t get to 1,000 though, as I am sure something will happen.

As for the blog itself, traffic continues to slide. I imagine, like an old MMO, my former readers probably outnumber my current readership. How does one farm that installed base? But most of the fall off has been search engine related, which is made up of mostly one time visitors I would guess. I mean, a few of you refuse to bookmark the site and just Google “tagn” to find me. The stats don’t lie on that. But many more arrive here looking for advice on finding a warm ocean in Minecraft, only to leave disappointed, never to return.

The questions are can I do something about improving traffic and should I?

Most certainly I could do something. I recently revived the blog connection to Facebook, so it has a page there now with a single follower. I could certainly get out the credit card and pay Facebook to feature posts from that page more generally. It works for crazy people and racists, why can’t it work for me?

The should is a little less obvious. As I have said before, so far as I can tell, my regular readership remains about constant. It is certainly down from 2012, but it does not ebb and flow with the whims of Google search results. Quality over quantity is an argument that could be made, though it might sound odd coming from somebody chasing a consecutive days posting achievement for more than 18 months.

But it still might be nice to have some new regulars. I am deploying some new tools, something for a later post, to look into who visits here in greater detail. That may give me further ideas.

Otherwise, the main forwards looking statement is really just “expect more of the same.”

Thank you for coming by. We will see what the next year brings.

Monday, July 5, 2021

52 Weeks of World War Bee

This week saw the non-aligned AUTZ null sec alliance Tactical Supremacy give up on its free range lifestyle of the last five years and joined The Initiative.

Put on ice for now

The stated reason was a lack of content for its members. The move shores up The Initiative’s AUTZ presence, allowing them to work more effectively around the clock.

There were also town hall meetings for NCDot and Pandemic Horde, with the former being pretty down to earth and the latter trying to find something to keep the war going. In furtherance of keeping the war going, PAPI has formed a high sec SIG to gank Goons and anybody suspected of being Goons, including the new player training group KarmaFleet University. Gobbins also told his members to stop using the term “contained” when referring to the Imperium’s situation in 1DQ because it becomes a propaganda victory for Goons every time they kill something outside of that constellation.

One Year Ago

It has been a year. One year ago today the non-invasion pact between the Imperium and Legacy coalition officially lapsed and the war began.

Two days before the start I was still fiddling with stuff in my hangar and wondering what was to come.

When the day hit there were moves/counter moves including the rushed PAPI Keepstar drop in FAT-6P.

And the first of my Monday summary posts went up about the events of day one of the war. I did not intend for them to be a regular thing, but here we are a year later.

Delve Front

For another week this map fragment, first posted on May 2nd, accurately describes the state of the war in Delve.

O-EIMK Constellation – July 4, 2021

Otherwise is was a week of skirmishes, shenanigans, and avoidance. One of the highlights of the week is summed up in this video from John Hartley, and Imperium FC.

Still, despite the situation in the constellation remaining unchanged, looking at the Delve campaign stats for the week the level of skirmishing saw more than twice as many ships and capsules destroyed when it came to total numbers and almost twice in ISK value.

Delve Campaign – Week 52

If you go to the report and change the view to show by ship types you can see the dreads that PAPI lost before that video above along with a few other expensive assets they lost.

Other Theaters

Esoteria is done for the Imperium now while Legacy and FI.RE are pushing on the Imperium holdings in Feythabolis.

I had wondered last week if Red Alliance would come to some sort of agreement with their fellow Russians, and perhaps they did, but Legacy still wants them out it seems. Red Alliance is down two ihubs and their other four are at risk, along with their holdings in Impass.

Feythabolis – July 4, 2021

It also looks like there is some TCU cleanup going on in the region (orange highlighted systems that otherwise have no ihub in this view.)

In Catch Legacy pushed further into the region from Querious, taking eight more ihubs from Imperium member Dracarys.

Catch – July 4,2021

Looking at the ADMs, Dracarys has been active in these systems. We will see if Legacy keeps pushing into the region.

My Participation

As with the past few weeks I went on a few small ops, but nothing very exciting. The biggest op was probably a Cormorant fleet called by Tom Flood to escort Jirai Grepher on his birthday op. For their birthday, Jirai decided to gate a Naglfar dreadnought into T5ZI, PAPI’s staging system, to see how long he would last. We went along to give him a bit of cover.

Into T5ZI

Jirai got a few kills before a PAPI Ragnarok hit him with a doomsday… PAPI undocked a titan… blotting him out. I got on a few kills as well before my Cormorant got splashed. That added one more to my list of losses, though the op qualified for SRP so I got the ISK to buy a new Corm.

My war losses so far:

Ares interceptor – 18
Malediction interceptor – 7
Drake battle cruiser – 7
Atron entosis frigate – 6
Cormorant destroyer – 5
Purifier stealth bomber – 5
Crusader interceptor – 5
Rokh battleship – 5
Scimitar T2 logi – 5
Ferox battle cruiser – 4
Jackdaw destroyer – 4
Guardian T2 logi – 2
Scalpel T2 logi frigate – 2
Scythe T1 logi – 1
Raven battleship – 1
Crucifier ECM frigate – 1
Gnosis battlecruiser – 1
Bifrost command destroyer – 1
Hurricane battle cruiser – 1
Sigil entosis industrial – 1
Mobile Small Warp Disruptor I – 1

Other Items

CCP announced some graphic updates that are available on the test server that are supposed to make space bright and more colorful. I’ve been around long enough to remember the graphic updates that were aimed at making some areas of space darker and less colorful.

Then there is the PCU. I have been tracking the top weekly player count during the war, which usually occurs on Sunday. (I note when it is a different day.) The decline in the PCU has been noted by many and seems to be something of a perfect storm of conditions. First, there is the coming of summer, which people always say heralds a decline, except when it doesn’t. Then there is the end of pandemic restrictions many places, which has led to a surge of people eager go somewhere, anywhere, the hell away from home. My wife noticed over the last week or so that luggage sections at various stores were almost completely shopped out.

Need a bag? Not going to find one here!

The war is not helping. Stalemate and stagnation hasn’t given people a reason to log in. CCP’s economic starvation plan is piled on top of that. It has made things more expensive so far, and capitals almost irreplaceable for some, so people are becoming more risk adverse.

And then there is the outrage at the pop-up ad that CCP has introduced to the game to encourage people to buy PLEX has encouraged a pile of people to say they are quitting.

Use your credit card to finance your revenge!

Add in a holiday week… yesterday was US Independence day… and this past week had the lowest weekly peak concurrent user count of the war so far. The Blackout was a big worry back in the day because daily PCUs were down around 25K. That is up from where we are now most days of the week. The question is, when will this bottom out and begin to recover?

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)
Week 25 – 31,611
Week 26 – 39,667 (Saturday)
Week 27 – 34,989 (Saturday)
Week 28 – 34,713
Week 29 – 35,996
Week 30 – 38,323
Week 31 – 38,167
Week 32 – 37,259
Week 33 – 35,886 (Saturday)
Week 34 – 35,626
Week 35 – 35,379
Week 36 – 35,085
Week 37 – 34,394
Week 38 – 36,319
Week 39 – 35,597 (Saturday)
Week 40 – 35,384 (Saturday)
Week 41 – 33,708
Week 42 – 33,521
Week 43 – 33,731
Week 44 – 33,742 (Saturday)
Week 45 – 33,758
Week 46 – 31,768
Week 47 – 29,898
Week 48 – 31,462 (Monday)
Week 49 – 27,914
Week 50 – 26,045
Week 51 – 25,661
Week 52 – 24,262

Related

INN – World War Bee: Week 52
INN – Horde’s Town Hall – June 27
INN – Containment Breach: Grand Theft Astra
INN – Booshed in the Blender
INN – TIKLE Merged into The Initiative
INN – World War Bee: One Year of War
Reddit – Ongoing activity metrics for WWB #11
Reddit – Comparing EVE and Steam player activity

Sunday, November 1, 2020

Sunday WoW Items Before Shadowlands

We’re into November, and a bunch of stuff is coming up in World of Warcraft, not the least being the Shadowlands expansion. But that is out on the 23rd, and a few things are in between then and now.

The November 1 calendar entries

Darkmoon Faire

It is the start of the last Darkmoon Faire before the expansion, and the first one since the big level squish. You can get a final five points in any of your Kul Tiran or Zandalarian professions before Shadowlands profession updates arrive. My main is just 3 points shy of finishing engineering, so I’ll be in there with him. You have until Saturday night to get that done.

I’m also going to see if I can figure out the deal with heirloom gear. Most of mine seems to be useful only through level 34 now, which isn’t so useful in a 10-50 alt leveling context.

Day of the Dead

It is also your chance to run the Day of the Dead event. Get on this right away though, as it is a single day event.

Anniversary Event

World of Warcraft turns 16 this year, and the anniversary of the initial launch coincides with the launch date for Shadowlands. I guess they did not want the two events interfering with each other or confusing anybody, so the anniversary event starts today and ends on November 22nd. The 23rd is reserved for Shadowlands.

End Date

The event itself is a modest example of the genre. You get a package in your mail box with some time warped tokens, a quest starter for a time walking event, a firework, and the usual xp boost token.

16 years means 16% boost

I am going to guess that Blizz doesn’t want to go into Shadowlands while giving people an xp boost. They’ll save that for later.

The Headless Horseman’s Mount

Once again I queued up for the Headless Horseman. I was half-hearted when Hallow’s End started, but was motivated by Belghast’s post about going all out for it. Having done an audit of all of my characters, I knew that I had 18 characters who were level 20 or higher after the squish, the minimum level to run the Headless Horseman’s instance.

The first couple of the days I just ran with the dozen eligible characters on the paired servers, Eldre’Thalas and Korialstrasz, that I think of as home. At the end though I dug out some old characters, spec’d them up, and ran with anybody I could get in the queue.

But, after the final run this morning as the event wound down, I found myself once again without the mount.

Not mine

Lots of masks, a lot of candy, a few rings, one sword, but no mounts.

On the bright side, I didn’t do horribly with the rando alts. I’d probably go back and spec a couple of them to tank specs just to shorten the wait in the queue, but I didn’t do too bad. I only had one bad group along the way, which wiped on the event three times before I bailed. I was tanking that one with a level 50 pally and was putting out more DPS than the rest of the group combined.

Next year in Scarlet Monastery I guess.

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.