The Redundant Ancient Gaming Noob: December 31

Showing posts with label December 31. Show all posts

Thursday, December 31, 2020

December in Review

The Site

Well, I made it to the end of 2020, and I should be happy about just that I suppose, though it isn’t like the world will change dramatically tomorrow, or the next day, or on January 20th, or whenever. The same problems will face us and the same people will block whatever solutions might help people or alleviate problems.

2020 banner by my daughter

One thing that happens today is that Adobe officially stops supporting Flash. You might have seen a few messages like this of late.

The end of Flash is here

This has absolutely nothing to do with the blog, but it is a moment of passing for a bit of code that had a huge influence on the web. It has its roots back in the 90s in tech that powered games like Spaceship Warlock and Myst and was a gateway for many budding game devs to create projects that could be played by others. There was a whole era of crappy Flash games in the early 2000s, some of which were not all that crappy really.

And it was the underlying tech for a lot of web animation of that era as well. Homestar Runner was entirely done in Flash, as were many other greater and lesser known projects. (Shout out to Chris Coutts’ Tales for the L33T: Romeo + Juliette back in the day.) It got into a lot of places.

Some of those bits of the web have been converted, preserved, or moved to other mediums. Homestar Runner is on YouTube if you want to watch Trogdor again. (Also, Chris Coutts)

But a lot of stuff will just fall by the wayside and disappear. Flash got a bad reputation, especially for security issues, but it helped build the web as we know it today. And so we say farewell to it and the games it fostered. This is why Farmville is also going away today. Marc Pinkus went on at length on Twitter about the game, leaving out the bits where he stole it from another company and did a bunch of dodgy stuff for revenue and helped create the aura of Facebook games as “spammy pieces of shit.” So it goes.

Anyway, here we are at the end of the year and post number 405 for 2020. It was going to be post 404 with a cute “not found” joke, but then that titan fight happened last night.

405 puts 2020 behind 2019, which had 412 posts, but one ahead of 2018, which hit the 404 mark. Did I make a joke about it back then?

One Year Ago

After many slipped dates and fan push back, Daybreak decided to shut down PlanetSide Arena, their attempt to re-capture some of that battle royale lightning that H1Z1 held briefly when it launched.

On the bright side, EverQuest launched its 26th expansion, the Torment of Velious.

I also made a pilgrimage of my own in old Norrath.

CCP experimented with a day of no downtime. I heard later that this caused problems and the next downtime had to run long. You just have to reboot New Eden once a day I guess.

CCP also brought in the HyperNet Relay gambling mechanic, the new wallet UI, and the Kicking over Castles update to make blowing up structures a bit easier. We got the Naughty or Nice holiday event which included a station to refurbish melted snowballs.

The holiday season also came to WoW Classic and EverQuest II.

Blizzard introduced battlegrounds to WoW Classic early to stem the completely predictable carnage that came about from the introduction of the honor system. We also got the key chain and paid character transfers.

In WoW Classic we hit our peak group size as six of us ran off to the Scarlet Monastery graveyard. Back in vanilla a bunch of dungeons allowed raid groups of 10 players. Skonk and I also got our paladins out for the Test of Righteousness class quest.

We were also back in Gnomeregan for some quest clean up with Earl. I had to swap to my pally so he could tank. And then we went back with a different group mix. Then we went back in again to get Moronae the Crowd Pummeler 9-60. Finally, we went back to Scarlet Monastery to run through the library.

Then I reviewed my WoW Classic characters four months into the launch.

On the retail WoW front I broke the story of the rejected squish ideas.

I was still running around tuning up my main in EverQuest II until the Blood of Luclin expansion launched. Getting to Luclin was a bit of a chore, at least the first time through. From there the run to level cap was pretty quick.

And, it being December, there were the usual reflection on the year gone by. I looked at my games played, reviewed my 2019 predictions, looked at the books I read, and reviewed highs and lows of the year.

I also did a Decade in Review post about gaming related stuff.

And then 2020 hit. But that is another tale altogether.

Five Years Ago

Thanks to The Force Awakens coming out, George Lucas was in the news and rationalizing his “Han didn’t shoot first” change. I wasn’t buying it. There were certainly other things he could have changed.

It was December, so I had to go over the usual posts, scoring predictions, looking back at the highs and lows of the year gone past, looking forward to what I might play 2016, and something about the inevitable Steam holiday sale. I also made a chart to show what MMOs I was playing in 2015 because everybody else was doing it. I totally forgot to make that chart again this year.

There was the Operation: Frostline expansion in EVE Online.

In New Eden I got blow up trying to slip a Caracal out of Fountain. It happens. On the other hand, I did get my first kill mark on another solo op. I also hit 150 million skill points, an achievement soon to be made trivial by skill injectors.

The much reviled Fountain War Kickstarter was finally cancelled, as it was clearly not going to get anywhere close to its $150K target. But was that going to bank the flames of the brightly burning Goon hate? (hint: no)

The recently rebranded Imperium was taking its plans to low sec, either to generate content or display its arrogance depending on who was describing it. We were also waging a war in Cloud Ring.

Turbine finally got their head screwed on right when it came to insta-levels in Lord of the Rings Online. I was stomping around in the Mirkwood expansion trying to see in the dark.

In Minecraft I was building a prismarine outpost along the great northern road. Aaron and I also killed the End Dragon.

On the EverQuest front, the Phinigel “true box” server opened, a retro progression server that was supposed to keep people from multi-boxing groups.

I summed up five years of Raptr tracking my game play with my top 20 played games. There was LEGO’s somewhat nonsensical online name policy. And I was playing Monument Valley on the iPad.

Ten Years Ago

That December I had one of my all-time most popular posts, Talking Cats Playing Pattycake! You can thank me for not taking the hint and going all talking cats, all the time. Or hate me for not doing that. Take your pick. And We Didn’t Start the Fire? Nothing.

But I still had kitty pictures. Awww.

I still think that if you label a window “Currency” it ought to show all your currency, not just the odd-ball stuff.

I was still feeling the sting of ThinkGeek teasing us with the iCade at April Fools, all the more so because some pretenders were on the scene.

Turbine was giving away 10,000 Turbine Points, which comes out to real, and possibly taxable, value in real world dollars. The comments on the post were obviously not from tax professionals.

I visited EverQuest for long enough to find a house. And then I was out of money.

In EverQuest II they were starting the run up to vampires.

And I summed up what we knew about The Agency to that point… which was bupkiss.

In World of Warcraft, Cataclysm launched. If you weren’t in the beta, there were still scams promising to get you in. There was the digital pre-order, which worked for me. And one final hardware upgrade we needed at our house before the expansion launched. And then there was picking a new character for the re-rolled instance group in Azeroth.

The U.S. release date for Pokemon Black and White was announced at last.

Finally, I wrote something that looked sort of like a review of Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw’s book Mogworld. And then there was something about zombies vs. werewolves vs. vampires vs. unicorns.

Fifteen Years Ago

CCP dropped the Red Moon Rising expansion on EVE Online, introducing a host of new ships including titans and motherships. They also introduced a new tutorial and new player experience, so some things never change.

Asherons Call 2: Fallen Kings, the sequel to Asheron’s Call, was shut down by Turbine. Revived again some years later, it and its predecessor were both shut down when Jeffrey Epstein, Columbus Nova, and/or Daybreak Game Company acquired the MMO portion of Turbine and created Standing Stone Games. The open question remains as to who might own the AC/AC2 IP at this point. Warner? Daybreak? EG7? Jeffrey Epstein? The Russians?

Twenty Years Ago

The second EverQuest expansion, The Scars of Velious, launched. The icy continent of Velious brought frost giants, Coldain Dwarves, and more dragons to Norrath. It also introduced The Sleeper, a once per server event.

Most Viewed Posts in December

Search Terms of the Month

what were brad’s aradune stats in everquest
[All 18s?]

velius porno 69 ano 14
[Make up your mind]

will scaling kill wow boring
[It wasn’t the best feature in BFA certainly]

how to rush through all wow expansions
[You don’t even have to do that any more]

eve dodixie losing status
[I’m not sure it had much to begin with]

can you buy skill points in eve online?
[Yes. Next question.]

eve skill pints per isk comparison
[That’s a bit more difficult]

Game Time from ManicTime

My game play time went in something of a reverse flow in December. I came off the big WoW Shadowlands binge at the start of the month, focused a lot on WoW Classic in the middle, and then World War Bee activity picked up in the back half of the month, culminating in last night’s titan slaughter fest.

EVE Online – 53.14%
WoW Classic – 34.20%
World of Warcraft – 11.78%
About Us – 0.88%

Oh, and I played About Us for about 90 minutes in the middle of all of that.

EVE Online

There was still World War Bee to keep me busy. With the enemy camped on our doorstep fights have been easy to come by. Somebody is always trying to provoke the other side into doing something dumb. I’ve seen fights over anything from bait titans to a bait Raven in T5ZI-S. And then there was the Catch deployment, where Reavers went out to join in with The Initiative to lay siege to Legacy Coalitions backfield… some more. And then there was the battle in M2-XFE yesterday and early this morning. We will have to see how that affects the war.

Pokemon Go

We got released to start working our way to level 50 this month. The xp climb is very steep, but there are also a series of tasks, sort of feats of strength, to accomplish before you can level up, even if you already have the xp. The big one for level 41 is to catch 200 Pokemon in a single day. I managed that sitting in the parking lot at the ER at just after midnight where a couple of Pokestops were close by. (Daughter is fine, but why do these things always happen so late at night?) They don’t let people hang out in the ER due to COVID-19, so I had little else to do while I sat and waited for a few hours.

Niantic also started releasing Pokemon from the Kalos region (Pokemon X & Y) into the game.

Level: 40 (50% of the way to 41 in xp, all but one task complete)
Pokedex status: 611 (+18) caught, 637 (+21) seen
Mega Evolutions obtained: 9 of 9
Pokemon I want: Still need some Unova Pokemon to fill in the gaps
Current buddy: Zwelious

World of Warcraft

What else was there beside the Shadowlands expansion? I made it to level cap, chose a covenant, and have messed around with that some. I am not as taken by the whole thing as some… I don’t feel compelled to log in every night… but I am not unhappy with it either.

WoW Classic

I think “Blacksmithing and Blackrock Depths” sums up much of my time in WoW Classic this month, though I did spend some time with my alts as well. Doing the blacksmithing stuff got me to get my druid out to harvest kingsblood and my pally out for any spare iron, and I ended up playing them as well. I also did a bit of the Winter Veil activities, though not the whole routine.

Coming Up

2021!

But, as noted at the top, a change of arbitrary numbers won’t change the plight we’re in. Tomorrow is just another day and it is quite possible the new year will vie with the old when it comes to total misery caused.

Here you can expect the usual. There will be a post tomorrow looking into the new year. I have a 2020 games post still brewing. Otherwise I will likely play the same games, write about them in the same style, and report and comment on bits of news that are related.

We still need to go back to Blackrock Depths in WoW Classic. Shadowlands is still calling.

There is a rumor that PAPI might try to make a big push against the Imperium come January. I suspect if they can break into 1DQ1-A or Helm’s Deep they will have destroyed enough of our stuff to declare victory and go home to rest for a bit. It has been a long war of sustained combat. And, as mentioned in my earlier post today, there was that big titan battle over a Keepstar timer. Will that change anybody’s plans?

Titan Massacre at M2-XFE

We had been warned to be on hand for possible fleets yesterday. The armor timers for three Imperium Keepstars under PAPI cyno jammers were set to come out and we were going to try to make them pay for the effort this time around.

I was busy during much of the day, but I could see the pings coming up announcing fleets. It looked like the enemy was going to try for the Keepstar in M2-XFE. The other two Keepstars were ignored and repaired while both sides focused on the remaining one.

When I finally had a chance to log in I flew out in an ECM burst Malediction just to take a look. Both sides were grouped up, two masses of titans and supers facing each other, the Imperium fleet on the Keepstar and the PAPI fleet below it, shooting the structure. The timer had been paused at just about the 10 minute mark.

My arrival

As I was scooting around, tethering up, and looking for some way to be annoying, the Imperium titans, which had been tethered, opened up with a doomsday barrage on the PAPI fleet.

Titans open fire with Doomsdays

That was the point that the battle became real. There were over 5,000 names in local, a number that grew past the 5,500 mark as the battle carried on.

Exchange of fire

At that point I flew my Malediction into the midst of the hostiles and set off the ECM burst. I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to commit to the fight. But then my wife and daughter went out together and I decided to join one of the subcap fleets. I parked my interceptor in one of our structures, destroyed my pod to revive back in 1DQ1-A, where I grabbed a Rokh to join Mister Vee’s fleet.

While M2-XFE had cyno jammers setup by the hostiles, they were bringing them down now and then to jump in reinforcements, which allowed us to jump in our own reinforcements. Since the system was running at 10% tidi, the five minute up/down cycle of the cyno jammer lasted almost an hour for those of us jumping in from normal speed space.

I got in and joined the fun, shooting fighters and subcaps of opportunity. Tidi worked in my favor as my ECM burst hit a titan that was blown up after I returned in the Rokh, so the game counted me on the kill mail. It shows my ship as a Rokh, but my weapon as an ECM burst. I fulfilled my goal of getting on at least one titan kill. (I also got on the 10 billion ISK MTU kill mail.)

But then there was a call for boosters for the titan and super fleets. Asher pinged out to Reavers to get some boosters, so I went to answer the call, which took me out of the fight for almost two hours. I went to dock up and leave my ship so as to self-destruct again to get back to 1DQ again. However, by that point the server was under a lot more pressure, and docking took a long time and left me with a black screen that took a long time to clear. The client went unresponsive and I have to exit and try to log back in. That took ages, but eventually I was back in and in my pod. Then it was time to self destruct. That took a while as well.

I may have pressed the button a few times

Eventually though I ended up back in 1DQ where I had a Damnation command ship ready to go. The cyno jammers were down again, so I was able to take the slow bridge back to M2-XFE, where I got in one of the capital fleets and started boosting.

My Damnation in the orange of another explosion

With that setup, I felt ambitious and got out my main alt and flew him over in another interceptor. As he flew over I contracted the Rokh to him, and he was able to dock up, collect the Rokh, board it, join Mister Vee’s fleet. That took about an hour to accomplish, but I managed it, after which I set him up on my little second monitor in UI-only mode and shot targets of opportunity as I heard them called. Along the way I tagged some hostile titans with him, and now he his on more titan kill mails than my main.

The command ship had a target painter, so I was able to get on a few kills with my main, but all the big toys were out of range of that.

The hostiles won the objective, reinforcing the armor timer and setting the structure up for the final timer. That will come out in about two days. But the fight kept on going.

The exchange of kills was fairly even, favoring PAPI by a few kills for much of the fight, but as the evening drew on past midnight Pacific time and towards downtime, which hits at 3am where I live, the exchange of titans began to favor the Imperium, though ships from both sides kept blowing up until the server shut down.

Ships still exploding around the Keepstar

The tally for this fight will be huge. I am writing this as the battle is winding down, so the final numbers have not settled, but for titan kills I last saw 10 Leviathan, 18 Avatar, 87 Ragnorak, and 126 Erebus titans destroyed. That is almost 250 titans down and there will no doubt be more on the list once things settle down.

But this battle far exceeded B-R5RB back in 2014, the previous high water mark for the Tranquility server, when 75 titans were destroyed. This fight went well beyond that, though the destruction was much less lopsided than the earlier battle.

Expect follow up posts about this fight. Not only were many titans destroyed, but the total cost of the fight will easily exceed 20 trillion ISK according to early battle reports. To put that in perspective, the total destruction in Delve in October, which saw five huge fights in NPC Delve, only amounts to about 11 trillion ISK according to the October MER. (11 trillion ISK was also the amount of destruction wrought at B-R5RB, so this fight eclipsed that in ISK as well as losses.)

And there will be some clean up to do after downtime, as many people just went to bed after that and they will need to have their capitals, supers, and titans extracted.

Addendum: Now that I have had a bit of sleep and zKillboard has caught up, the titan loss totals look like this:

Imperium Titan Losses:

Erebus – 66
Ragnarok – 42
Leviathan – 10
Avatar – 5
Vanquisher – 1

PAPI Titan Losses:

Erebus – 63
Ragnarok – 50
Avatar – 14
Leviathan – 1

Total Imperium: 124
Total PAPI: 129
Total Titans Destroyed: 252

[Edit: This is getting updated as kill mails show up. ]

You can tell which titans are considered the least tanky. Both sides shot the Erebus and Ragnaroks first. The first titan to die belonged to the appropriately named Titanic Death, while the last was Sandrin Stone, who blew up just before downtime kicked everybody out.

To expand on titan numbers, the count of them on the battlefield was:

Imperium:

Avatar – 317
Erebus – 137
Ragnarok – 135
Leviathan – 82
Vanquisher – 2
Molok – 2

Total 675

PAPI

Avatar – 248
Ragnarok – 193
Erebus – 111
Leviathan – 90
Molok – 2
Vanquisher – 1
Komodo – 1

Total 646

Combined Titan total: 1,321

That is a lot of very expensive ships thrown in on a Keepstar armor timer.

For the battle report, the difference in the ISK totals pretty much comes down to that Vanquisher faction titan loss on the Imperium side. Otherwise it was a pretty even exchange on the titan front. Now we will no doubt see both sides going on about how the other cannot afford to replace their losses.

Another historic day in New Eden. We shall see what the post battle repercussions lead to. This should certainly inflate the December MER.

Tuesday, December 31, 2019

December in Review

The Site

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

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

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

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

One Year Ago

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Five Years Ago

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ten Years Ago

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fifteen Years Ago

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

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

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

Twenty Five Years Ago

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

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

Most Viewed Posts in December

Search Terms of the Month

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

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

fozzie sov mechanics
[They suxor]

nantworks just survive
[It did not]

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

daybreak all access lifetime
[That was last year]

Game Time from ManicTime

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

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

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

EVE Online

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

EverQuest II

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

Pokemon Go

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

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

World of Warcraft

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

WoW Classic

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

Coming Up

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

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

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

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

Monday, December 31, 2018

December in Review

The Site

Here we are at the last day of 2018 and the 402nd and final post of the year… unless something big and/or stupid comes up and I feel compelled to post about it before the end of the day. I think we’re pretty safe though. Who announces things on New Years Eve?

402 posts is kind of a lot for a single year, especially when my goal is just a post every weekday. I didn’t post every single day. You can see by the chart below I missed more than a few days.

Graphical Representation of Days Posted – I added the day guide to clarify it

The gray squares mean no post. But I made up the missing days with double, and occasionally triple, post days. Those are the darker squares. I did not post more than three times in a single day. I usually like to leave a time gap of a few hours between posts, since it is my impression that some visitors only read the top post. And most things I write aren’t all that time sensitive. I make a point of writing about things soon after I have done them, things like fleet ops, more because my memory is fresh than anything else.

(The same chart for my other blog is all just black squares as I never post more than once a day.)

Anyway, a lot of posts in 2018.

But 402 is not the most posts in a single year. The current ranking is:

2007 – 490 posts
2011 – 488 posts
2012 – 442 posts
2010 – 406 posts
2018 – 402 posts

2007 is explicable in that I hadn’t really settled down on what I wanted to do, so I was posting a lot of very short and random stuff. The run from 2010 through 2012 corresponds with the peak of the blog in many ways; traffic, posts, games I was playing and writing about, interest in new games, and so on. That probably represents the final gasp of the pre-cynical era for me.

Well, pre-cynical relative to my current outlook anyway.

There is also a correlation between the wave of Kickstarted and early access games and the end of blog’s peak era. I’m not saying they’re connected, but the coming of one seemed to herald the end of the other.

In total words, or even average words per post, 2018 is at the top of the list

2018 – 427,278 words (without this post, so add another 2K words)
2014 – 395,517 words
2013 – 346,436 words
2015 – 342,813 words
2016 – 334,911 words

That gives me another correlation. Traffic has gone down as my word count has gone up. Again, I cannot definitively say that one caused the other… I’m not going to follow the madness of Gevlon and assume correlation means causation without evidence… but it sure looks suspicious. Or it would, except, as I noted in the highs and lows post on Friday, traffic to the site went up a bit this year. So who knows what it all really means? As I have said in the past, there are many factors in play here, including Google’s search result algorithms.

One Year Ago

We got the Ring of Scale expansion for EverQuest.

Nintendo and Game Freak released what might end up being the last Pokemon title to arrive on their handheld hardware in the form of Pokemon Crystal for the Virtual Console.

I was kind of bummed when Blizzard took away my sunglasses. But I was still out fishing and doing pet battles in World of Warcraft. And, most important of all, I unlocked flying in the Legion expansion. I also spent some time trying to find an objective way to measure my favorite WoW expansion.

CCP launched the Arms Race expansion for EVE Online which included expanded Alpha Clone abilities and special skill injectors just for them. The Agent Finder also got moved into The Agency completely. Meanwhile, the Yule Lads weren’t delivering presents to us in New Eden. We had to go find them ourselves.

I also hit a tipping point in the game, where now most of my time playing was now in null sec.

Actually out in space Reavers were deployed into Pure Blind and were quite active in December, with the following posts about fleet ops:

There was the usual set of review posts for 2017. I looked at my predictions, my MMO outlook, highs and lows, and some MMO bloggers.

And there was, of course, a Steam Winter Sale. I was in the “not enthusiastic” part of my relationship with Steam.

Five Years Ago

It was the final shut down for Warhammer Online.

It was also the end of the road for World of Darkness at CCP, which shut down the project and laid off much of the staff.

CCP did give me a copy of the EVE Online Second Decade Collector’s Edition.

Actually in EVE, I was looking at flying a dreadnought, looking at my hull tanking certificate, and actually went on a couple of ops, blowing things up in NS2L-4 and BW-WJ2.

Shroud of the Avatar was an actual thing. You could log in and see stuff. Granted, a year later it is still in alpha and has a long way to go, but at least progress is being made I guess.

Turbine threw their hat in the ring with their own insta-level scheme for Lord of the Rings Online. It got you all the way to the doors of Moria. I was not impressed. Not only was the level cap well beyond Moria at that point, I tend to believe that the best content in the game is the 1-50 run. But that is the nature of level based games.

Blizzard put a cash shop in World of Warcraft. But don’t call those microtransactions, because they are not. Microtransactions require an intermediate currency. If you’re selling in straight up dollars, pounds, and euros, it isn’t a microtransaction.

The instance group in World of Warcraft ventured under the sea and into the Mount Hyjal region, then ran through the Throne of Tides and Blackrock Caverns instances. Meanwhile, I had an alt finish up The Burning Crusade for me. And then there was my character a level cap, swamped with options including Timeless Isle.

I reviewed my goals and tried to sum up 2013.

I did some book reviews of a sort, looking at The Kindly Ones, The Circle, and some space operas.

Finally, we were very sad at our house when our cat Fred died. We still miss him.

Ten Years Ago

December seemed to be all about the micropayments and the like. Sony Online Entertainment surprised some by putting Station Cash driven stores into EverQuest and EverQuest II. The selection wasn’t great and the pricing seemed a bit off, but I was more interested to know what other SOE products would get the Station Cash treatment.

In EverQuest II I ran Reynaldo Fabulous from creation to level 50 in an very short (to me) stretch of time. And then I stopped.

And then EA announced that Star Wars: The Old Republic would be microtransaction financed. Or maybe they didn’t. It ended up that way eventually, but three years later when it launch it was very much a subscription game in the classic sense.

In Azeroth we were still coming to grips with the Northrend instances. In Utgarde Keep we managed to kill off Prince Keleseth, but couldn’t hold it together to finish the instance. Outside, we were running around doing quests.

Meanwhile, somebody was working on a WoW code, akin to the old geek code that used to clutter many a .sig file back when Usenet was cool and we knew the spammers by name.

I actually found some time to play Lord of the Rings Online.

And on the MUD nostalgia front I was reminding people what quests used to be like and sharing some really bad limericks.

Best selling PC Games from 2008:

Spore
Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures
Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning
The Sims 2: FreeTime
Spore Creature Creator
Sins of a Solar Empire
The Sims 2: Apartment Life
The Sims 2: Kitchen & Bath Interior Design Stuff
Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War: Soulstorm
The Sims Castaway Stories

Twenty Years Ago

The original Baldur’s Gate was released.

And, in something of a reductive cycle, the first video game version of the physical Pokemon Trading Card game, itself based on the Pokemon Red & Blue video games, was released on the GameBoy in Japan. In a nod to simplicity, it was called the Pokemon Trading Card Game by the time it arrived in the US.

Most Viewed Posts in December

Search Terms of the Month

lotro emulator
[Let’s not go there quite yet]

whats the orcs name from warcraft
[Azog? Gorbag? Grishnakh?]

how much.gold.can.a.portable.hole.hold
[All of it?]

eve online spider tank
[I don’t think that is a thing any more]

images of people reenlisting inside a battleship barrel
[Gun barrel? Pork barrel? Pickle barrel? I am not sure I get this.]

Spam Comments of the Month

Do not underestimate the power of contemporary flowers.
[Well, alrighty then!]

When guests click on advertisements, publishers earn money.
[So that’s how that works!]

No matter funeral particulars you favor, it is important that you make your wishes clear in writing.
[Just put me on the curb with garbage on pick up day]

Now YOU Can Grab Our New Web Traffic “Robot” That Works 24/7 to Bring You Free Traffic and Subscribers!
[Act now!]

This site was… how do I say it? Relevant!!
[Spam bots are the worst liars]

EVE Online

My time in New Eden this month was dominated by the events in wormhole J115405, known as Rage, where the Initiative setup operations to destroy Hard Knocks structures there, including the first Keepstar deployed in the game. After that I mucked around with some high sec alts playing the Operation Permafrost event and logging in every day for the holiday rewards. The only other item of note was that, after a bit too much red wine on Christmas Eve, I signed up for Liberty Squad, one of the Imperium SIGs and squads that are responsible for much of the activity during what one might otherwise call peace time. We’ll see how that plays out.

Lord of the Rings Online

I carried on with the Legendary server, keeping up a pace of logging in almost every single night. At least until I got to the holidays and the Misty Mountains. Those two together caused me to slack off a bit. But I remain determined to get through the epic quest line and up to level 50 before SSG gets around to unlocking the Mines of Moria expansion.

Pokemon Go

I managed to make another level this month, largely thanks to the bonus points you get for achieving friendship levels with other players. Still, it is a long way to level 40. I am also stuck on the task where you have to make an excellent curveball throw. This is the second time that has come up. I got it done the first time, but this time around I have yet managed it.

Level: 35 (+1)
Pokedex status: 380 (+9) caught, 400 (+9) seen
Pokemon I want: Rhyperior, the Rhydon evolution, but I need about 70 candies
Current buddy: Togetic

RimWorld

RimWorld left early access and went live a while back this year. Some people I read/know started playing it this month, which got me back to playing it a bit. It is still an epic consumer of free time. My usual loop tends to have me playing for a stretch, then some huge bad event hits and I save and go away for a while. Then I come back later, clean up the mess, or the corpses, or both, and carry on.

World of Warcraft

My account hasn’t quite lapsed, so I keep thinking I’ll go play a bit. I did log in to get the holiday present and achievement. But other than that it is in limbo.

Coming Up

Happy new year I guess. I’ll have to remember to put the right year on checks.

Of course, the first thing out of the gate every year here is a predictions post. Look for my doom and gloom about 2019 tomorrow. Also, some sort of MMO outlook for the year will likely show up as well next week.

The Steam Winter Sale will wrap up come Friday morning. I’m sure there is a post in what I bought… if I end up buying anything. So far I haven’t purchased anything for myself. I did grab a title for my daughter however.

With the new year there will also likely be some news and forward looking statements from various studios about what they plan for the year.

In addition to all of that, I still have quite a few half done posts in the drafts folder to work on. I shan’t fall off the face of the internet, at least not for lack of topics.

Otherwise it will be EVE Online and Lord of the Rings Online and Pokemon Go I suppose.