January in Review

The Site

We are already a month down for 2021 and it has seemed… a bit less crazy.  Or, at least we seem to be confining big events to Wednesdays… insurrection, impeachment, inauguration, GameStop… to give everybody time to catch up.  It is a welcome change from the last four years of “what new outrage will I awake to in the morning?”

I mentioned a while back that I had setup the blog as a magazine on the Flipboard app, so if you wanted to read the blog in a handy way on your phone or tablet you now had that option.

Flipboard

As I said, I find it a nice way to flip through headlines with the ability to dive into the news story about which I want to know more.  Well, last week I received a note from Flipboard saying that my configuration had been approved and TAGN was now available generally on the app.  So you can find it if you search on TAGN.  I would still be interested to hear if anybody uses it or likes the format.

One Year Ago

A new year meant predictions.  Also, there was the end of another Steam Winter Sale complete with stats and my own gaming outlook for 2020.  I also had a list of things I wanted to see in the year and my game time played for 2019.

SuperData Research had their own review of 2019.

A research group published a paper exploring the electrical usage impact of video games in the state of California.  It was more than hot tub pumps.

Daybreak finally did their studio split thing, though what it really meant was left unanswered.

In EverQuest II I was gearing up for the moon.  I also leveled up my crafting by doing things other than crafting, though I had our guild hall open for actual crafting.  Leveling up was quick and I soon had three characters on Luclin.

In EVE Online there was the “My Year In EVE” video thing.  GDC also had a video about EVE Online and how they fixed the ghost training problem.

The January game update buffed heavy missiles and added Nirvana implants, the “shield slaves” that people had been asking about for years.

CCP introduced new player packs that were essentially selling skill points… again.  They were also handing out more skill points for logging in, doing a PLEX for Good for the Australian wildfires as well, and finishing the 64-bit client transition.

Our long time corp, Black Sheep Down, was going away, which led me to join Karma Fleet.

Blizzard pushed out Warcraft III Reforged, broken, berefet of expected features, and with restrictions on user created content, all of which made it an object of scorn and an item on many “worst releases of 2020” lists.

World of Warcraft Battle for Azeroth was getting down to its final content drop.  There was a lot of stuff with it.  Also, they were offering a flying rat to six month subscribers.

In WoW Classic the instance group was in the Scarlet Monastery.  We took a shot at the library and the armory, then ran off to Stranglethorn Vale for a bit of xp.  After that we went back and did the library and the armory again.  I also ended up with my first level 40 in WoW Classic.

Five Years Ago

I had 16 predictions for 2016. (Results for those who need to know.)

I was also included on some sort of MMO info page thing.

It was the end of another Steam Winter Sale.

I was wondering what Early Access should really be.  I was also checking out which MMOs made PC Gamer’s latest list.

Smed was going to Kickstarter for Hero’s Song.  It got cancelled before I could finish the post about all the problems it had.  More than a bit of foreshadowing in that I guess.

People were troubled by a potential paywall in Rift.

The price for the Occulus Rift was announced, which led to quite a sum if all I wanted to do is play EVE Valkyrie.

In EVE Online I ran my first incursion boss.  We also got the first of the “no name” monthly updates.  Karma Fleet turned one.  CCP told us about skill extractors. Blog Banter 71 was about spaceships.  Also, there was some sort of conflict going on between I Want ISK and SpaceMonkeys Alliance.  It started in mid-December 2015.  The bankers of I Want ISK were banned then unbanned and eventually the whole thing spiraled out to become the Casino War.

In space we reinforced a tower and ran about in Typhoons and Jackdaws.  At the end of the month Reavers headed south to Wicked Creek to tangle with TEST.

Outside the game Battle Clinic, long a staple of the EVE Online third party universe, was set to shut down while the election process for CSM XI was kicking off.

Daybreak announced that they were going to port the five year old DC Universe Online to the XBox.

I went in to Diablo III to try out the Season 5 content.  I ran through the story quickly, but there was more to do.

I wrote a bit about The Force Awakens.

Finally, I was marveling at all the movies from 1986 that I remembered.  Aliens! Top Gun!  Platoon!  Ferris Bueller’s Day Off!   It was a hell of a year for movies.

Ten Years Ago

Eschewing the predicting convention, I issued demands for 2011. and then tried to figure out the scale used for the Blog Health-o-Meter that WordPress.com sent out to various sites.

The blog was listed at a Vietnamese gaming site in a top 10 post that looked suspiciously like one from Massively.

TERA was trying to win notice by telling people how they had boars in their game!  BOARS!  Can you imagine?

EuroGamer tried to tell us PlanetSide 2 would be out by Q2 2011. (It eventually shipped in November of 2012.)

Rift, on the other hand, gave us a more believable release date.

It was time to start messing with the then new EVE Online character creator.

DC Universe Online launched.  I played in the beta just long enough to remind myself I am not a superhero kind of guy.  Sales of the game were pretty evenly split between Windows and PlayStation 3, but play time seemed to be impacted by American Idol when it came to the console side of the house.

Of course, that was back during the subscription era of MMOs, when Smed was telling us what paying a subscription to lead us to expect.

Meanwhile, competing superhero game, Champions Online, went free to play after less than a year and and a half as a subscription title.  This would end up being foreshadowing for DC Universe Online.

I used Google to tell me World of Warcraft’s five most pressing issues at the time.

Meanwhile, the Twilight Cadre was back in Azeroth in force and checking out Cataclysm.  We got our first guild achievement.  Our group of new characters, four worgen and a gnome, went through Westfall and all its phasing magic, wailed in the Wailing Caverns, before settling down to a pattern of doing three instances every Saturday night.  I wasn’t sure if we had skilled up a lot or if the game had been dumbed down that much, but clearly the 1-60 game in Cataclysm was proving to be not much of a challenge.

The official World of Warcraft magazine was asking me to renew my subscription, though they weren’t really up to mail merge technology it seems.

There was some cool stuff in Cataclysm.  I like the balloons.  Redridge, never one of my favorite places, got turned into a fun solo experience.  And there was the Murloc combat ability.  But otherwise, the game was starting to lose us.

I was muttering about rebates.  My daughter and I were rounding up LEGO minifigures.

And, finally, Pokemon was coming to town.

Fifteen Years Ago

SOE announced that they were going to merge EverQuest II servers a little more than a year after the game went live, trimming the server count down by folding 10 low population servers into 10 low to medium population servers.  The reason given is that the world was sooo big that the population was too spread out.  I’m pretty sure most people thought that the game had just lost too many players to WoW to make that many servers viable since MMO populations are rarely evenly spread but tend to form a bubble in the latest content.

Nintendo, which was still selling the GameBoy Advance (and would continue to in the US until 2008) announced the first major update to their crazy two screen DS handheld platform.  The new Nintendo DS Lite would end up being, in my opinion, one of the finest handheld consoles ever, with sharp screens, a compact form factor, excellent finish, and great battery life along with continuing the backward compatibility with the GBA.  The only problem I ever had with my cobalt blue unit involved me getting old and being unable to read text on the screen without glasses.

Twenty Years Ago

RuneScape launches as a Java based browser game.

Phantasy Star Online launches on the Sega Dreamcast, one of the first proto-MMOs on consoles.

Forty Years Ago

The first DeLorean rolled off the production line.  Not really game related, but very much pop culture related.

Most Viewed Posts in January

1. Titan Massacre at M2-XFE
2. Minecraft and the Search for a Warm Ocean
3. Alamo teechs u 2 play DURID!
4. Robbing Some Space Banks
5. PAPI Thwarted at Final M2-XFE Keepstar Timer by the Early Bird Imperium
6. Time to Earn some ISK
7. CCP is Just Going to Keep Selling Skill Points for Cash
8. Leveling up Your Crafting Without Actually Crafting
9. Do You Need a Level Booster for Shadowlands?
10. Arrival in a Level Squished Northrend
11. Life on the M2 Hell Camp
12. My Year in EVE Online 2020

Search Terms of the Month

elf heroes with flying.mounts
[not asking for much]

dawn rhea eve online
[Over at Theta Thursdays on INN Twitch]

eve online is npc station safe to store my assets?
[with CCP I am hesitant to say yes]

does trion still exist
[Only in our hearts]

звёздные войны буквы уход
[Some nuance there Google translate lacks]

Game Time from ManicTime

Two games dominated my PC play time this month for sure.  It was pretty much a neck in neck tie between WoW Classic and EVE Online all month.  I also spent a little bit of time logged into retail WoW and was in and looking at LOTRO for a bit though, as I mentioned, on the big monitor it is almost unplayable due to tiny, indistinct icons on the hot bar and in inventory.

• WoW Classic – 50.36%
• EVE Online – 49.30%
• World of Warcraft – 0.19%
• LOTRO – 0.16%

EVE Online

The war goes on.  For a short stretch of time after the battles at M2-XFE the invaders seemed dismayed and their participation was way down, allowing the Imperium to push them back in Delve, retaking several constellations and saving a few Keepstars.  PAPI has since recovered, building up to a more aggressive tempo, and in the last week has been able to field their overwhelming numbers again to grind down our gains.  More on that tomorrow though.

Pokemon Go

Pokemon Go has had some weekly events that we have been doing.  With wind and rain and the pandemic, Pokemon Go is often the only excuse to leave the house some days.

Level: 40 (65% of the way to 41 in xp, all tasks complete)
Pokedex status: 613 (+2) caught, 642 (+7) seen
Mega Evolutions obtained: 9 of 10
Pokemon I want: Still need some Unova Pokemon to fill in the gaps
Current buddy: Froakie

World of Warcraft

I did not spend a lot of time in Shadowlands this month.  It isn’t so much that the expansion is bad than I would simply rather spend my time in WoW Classic again.  Since one subscription gets me both, I am not sure it matters too much, the way it would if I were playing a different MMO.  I did, however, keep up with my usual standard of at least doing Darkmoon Faire.

WoW Classic

The instance group has been doing its thing every week, but if I was playing a game this past month and it wasn’t EVE Online, then it was probably WoW Classic.  I will likely have at least one character up to level 60 before Blizzard starts talking about The Burning Crusade, and I will likely have three well before anything based on that launches, even with the most optimistic schedule.

Coming Up

BlizzConline will be coming up on the 19th.  After no BlizzCon in 2020 and relatively few announcements since the Shadowlands launch, it is time to get some news.  If there isn’t an announcement and a plan for The Burning Crusade Classic I expect riots in the street.

It would also be nice if Blizz could come up with something else… and not just another Hearthstone expansion.  2020 was a retro year for Blizz as we once again reached the point where World of Warcraft was the game that mattered and everything else felt neglected.  It isn’t necessarily bad to have just one main game for a stretch… look how long Riot ran on just League of Legends… but Blizz actually has other franchises.

In EVE Online the war will continue no doubt.  Both sides still see a path to some sort of victory, and given Vily’s temperament war aims, it is very likely that both sides will claim victory unless there is a very dramatic end to the war.

Meanwhile, CCP continues to hold the screws to the economy, so prices are rising.  They sent out a survey about their handling of the economy.  I’d like to see the results and comments from that.  I doubt they will share however.  But they will need to do something because the one main threat to the ongoing war is supply and replacement, which is running up against CCP’s belief that if they make us all poor we’ll fight more rather than less.

Otherwise… maybe I will play something beyond EVE Online and WoW Classic next month.

January in Review

The Site

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

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

Citrus nightmare fuel… also 80s counter top tile

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

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

One Year Ago

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Five Years Ago

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ten Years Ago

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, and there was LEGO Rock Band out.

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

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

But the month was primarily about Star Trek Online.

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

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

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

Most Viewed Posts in January

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

Search Terms of the Month

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

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

darlpaw games
[so close…]

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

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

Game Time from ManicTime

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

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

EVE Online

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

EverQuest II

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

Pokemon Go

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

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

World of Warcraft

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

WoW Classic

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

Coming Up

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

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

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

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

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

January in Review

The Site

On my side of the browser WordPress.com decided to change up the color scheme for the admin interface.  Ostensibly this was to improve the contrast, but any color scheme that involves fuchsia as a default might be going too far down the bright scale.  But the post about it said you could go back to the classic blue if you wanted.  Of course, it wasn’t the same set of blues, so it wasn’t really classic.  Also, the change messed up a few things, like the world map.  Things got fixed over time, but it was another in the long list of WP.com pushing something that wasn’t ready to be pushed.  The main surprise was that they actually announced it almost concurrent with pushing it.  Usually they change something, confuse people, field a bunch of questions, then finally post about the update.

Otherwise it has been a slow traffic month on the site.  For the first time since February of 2008 a monthly total dipped below 20K page views.  2018 came close to doing that early in the year as well, but then traffic rebounded.  Blaugust was very much a success in reviving traffic around here, though that tapered off as the holidays hit.  And now, in another cold new year, it is back to low ebb again.

Slow months show up in the most viewed posts pretty clearly.   As you can see below, the traffic tends to come into older posts via Google as opposed to newer posts from the current readership.

Finally, I am going to add a new section to the Month in Review posts starting this month, because clearly these posts are not long enough already, stretching out past 2,000 words of late.  But don’t worry, this new section will be short.  It will be a list, and everybody loves lists, right?

I saw over at Endgame Viable’s year in review post that he had a program for tracking play time… and application usage time in general… called ManicTime.

The free version of ManicTime does pretty much all I need to track game play time.  And, unlike Raptr or XFire from days gone by, it tracks the time you have the application up front as opposed to just the time it is running.  (Or, in the case of GW2, when the launcher was running, which accounted for most of my GW2 play time in Raptr.)  So putting stuff in the background stops the timer.  This gets interesting and/or amusing at times, since it shows your application swaps.  I tab out of EVE Online a lot.

Anyway, you’ll find the first stab at that down in the post.  I’m going to break it out by percentages rather than raw hours because I find that more interesting.

One Year Ago

There were the usual predictions and outlook and Steam Winter Sale posts for the year.  I am consistent, you have to give me that.

Satan was speaking to us about lockboxes.

I played Anarchy Online for a few hours.

There was Trogday.

I was looking into the Legion expansion in World of Warcraft for the new year.

Blizzard gave us four more bag slots… if we had our account security setup correctly.  A year later that little notification about the bag slots still comes up every once in a while.

I was on to pet battles again, collecting them, leveling them up, and looking into the Celestial Tournament.

Blizzard also gave us a target season (summer) for Battle for Azeroth and opened up pre-orders.

In EVE Online the January update moved the Agent Finder fully into The Agency.

But the big news in New Eden was brewing in the system 9-4PR2.  Pandemic Horde was anchoring a Keepstar there and the hype for the battle over it built pretty fast.  Dubbed the “Million Dollar Battle” in advance, it didn’t quite get there, though there were over 6,000 players in the system at one point.  INN spent time reviewing the whole thing.  Still, it was good enough for a Guinness Book World Record. (Yeah, that was in April, but I figured I would tie the whole event together here.)

I moved all of my games and data from my old Nintendo 3DS XL to a new 2DS XL.

In a bullet points post I was on about the Age of Empires remaster, which you could only get through the Microsoft store, Rift Prime plans, legendary Pokemon, the cost of making video games, and how BitCoin miners were buying up all the video cards.

And, finally, I was kind of bummed because, in this age of streaming, if you want to see recent movie releases at home, disks were still the most reliable method for the price… short of pirating the movies, of course.

Five Years Ago

Do I need to say more than B-R5RB?  That was, at the time, the biggest single battle in the history of EVE Online when it came to total ISK destroys, most of it in the form of 75 titans blowing up.  Lots of big numbers in that fight.  It made it to lots of non-gaming news sites.  And I was there.  I am on six titan kill mails to prove it.  The whole thing was a hell of an event after the crash at HED-GPearlier in the month.

That about spelled the end of N3 in the southeast as the Russians rolled in with CFC support.  My joke about the power blocs seemed to be true.  What could possibly go wrong?

Meanwhile, Blog Banter 52 was focused on the EVE Online community.  All sunshine and lollipops there, right?  Otherwise it was a pretty slow month in New Eden for me.

Speaking of bloodbaths, SOE announced they were going to close four titles, Free Realms, Wizardry Online, Star Wars: Clone Wars Adventures, and Vanguard: Rise of the Saga.  Meanwhile, deadbeat Planet Side, which hadn’t netted a nickel of profit in years went 100% free to play.  Way to show favorites Smed!

Then there was how Hearthstone was going to inspire SOE to update Legends of Norrath, because SOE has been cast in the role of follower for a while now.  Also, never going to happen.

Then there was the question of when “Next” was, specifically EverQuest Next.  Things had gotten quiet already.

At least SOE made subscriptions cheaper, though not before pissing off their subscribers first.  SOE being SOE.

And then there was Lord of the Rings Online, which announced there would be no expansion in 2014… or raids or dungeons… which left people kind of wondering what was going to happen.  You want to know when people started to doubt the future of the game?  This was the moment.  I did point out that Turbine was not the only entity that tried to tackle Tolkien’s work, only to be brought up short at Helm’s Deep.  In the end my guess would be that the crisis at Turbine was Infinite Crisis, and that fell flat.

There was the Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen kickstarter.  Brad McQuaid was back, asking for too much money and promising too many features.  We know how that works out.  Even SOE closing his last title couldn’t push his pledge totals up to what he wanted.

Then there was World of Warcraft.  People were wondering what classes to boost to level 90. and what the so-called stat squish was really going to mean.  They also, in hindsight, pretty clearly broadcasted the Warlords of Draenor ship date, only few believed it.

Our own group was still running through the Cataclysm expansion, catching up from our year or so away from the game in places like Deepholm and the Vortex Pinnacle.  I was also lusting for living steel and making friends with the Netherwing at last.

What else?  Oh yeah, EA decided that maybe SimCity should be a SimCity game.  I was wondering if level cap upgrades were an aberration.  There was some naming policy shenanigans.  And there was my yearly MMO outlook for the year as well as the usual predictions.

Ten Years Ago

Ten years ago I was in a Middle-earth mood.  I had rolled up some new characters on the same server as a few notable podcasters and then started trying to catch up to them.  The small and friendly community in LOTRO helped out, so I was able to do the Great Barrow with a pickup group and not feel the need to drink heavily afterward.  Of course, I sometimes feel the need to stir the pot.  And then there was the whole icon thing.

I also mentioned something that involved punching Amy Tan that seemed to go down well.  According to Google, this was the only site it tracks that has ever used the exact phrase “punch Amy Tan.”  I think it is still pretty much a TAGN unique.

In WoW the instance group was working its way up to Ingvar the Plunderer.  This was the height of our “we suck” phase.  Meanwhile Blizz was busy patching in improvements.

While in EVE there was a bit of mission running plus I hit a monetary milestone and 30 million skill points.

I went looking for KartRider and found that after beta Nexon apparently folded up that tent and  called it a day, at least here in the US.

I noticed that the optical drive on our Wii started making a lot of noise.  It still makes noise ten years later, but it also still works, even if Nintendo has turned off almost everything related to it.

There was that whole controversy about Wikipedia deleting entries on MUDs and MUD history.  That lead to the creation of MUD History Wiki over on Wikia.  Many MUDs are still alive and well, and sites like the MUD Connector seem to still thrive.

I pointed to a post over at Massively that showed the top selling games for October of 2008 were almost all a couple years old or more.

Ensemble Studios, who created the Age of Empires series, shut down.  But their games live on, with Age of Empires II remaining popular on Steam.

I hit the 1,000 post mark, which was cause for yet another milestone post and some reflection. (I’m closing in on the 5,000 mark a now.)

Oh, and I predicted a whole bunch of crap that mostly failed to materialize.  But that never stops me from trying again.

And, like everybody else, I had a laundry list for the new President. He totally failed on all fronts!

Most Viewed Posts in January

1. How Many People Play EVE Online?
2. Rumors of Future Daybreak Projects and the End of EverQuest
3. Alamo teechs u 2 play DURID!
4. Minecraft and the Search for a Warm Ocean
5. From Alola Pokedex to National Pokedex in Pokemon Sun
6. Burn Jita 2018 Aftermath
7. Top 25 EVE Online Corporations Graph – The End Number
8. Delta Force – A Memory of Voxels
9. My MMO Outlook for 2019
10. New Years Predictions for 2019
11. The First EverQuest II Progression Server is Coming to an End
12. SuperData and the Free and Mobile Future

Search Terms of the Month

daybreak lifetime membership refund
[Good luck on that!]

guild name generator for animals
[Have you met us? We’re all animals]

eveequest 2019
[This the Pokemon/Norrath crossover?]

dreanor cant fly why do i have a mount then
[So you don’t have to walk?]

Game Time from ManicTime

Listing out the games that ManicTime tracked in January, here is how I divided up my time.

1. LOTRO   –  36.40%
2. RimWorld  –  33.56%
3. EVE Online  –  25.25%
4. Unnamed Alpha  –  2.90%
5. Combat Mission  –  1.00%
6. WoW  –  0.73%
7. EverQuest  –  0.13%
8. EverQuest II  –  0.03%

I had to consider what would be the cut-off for how little time I would list.  But I also wanted to keep track of games I spent time with, even a little time.  So I decided that if a game made the top 50 list of apps tracked in the month, it would make the cut.

The top application tracked was Firefox, the browsed I default to at home for most things, including writing blog posts.

EVE Online

I was off with Liberty Squad and their deployment to the east of New Eden.  I shot a lot of structures, which is fine.  Structure shooting is what we call “putting money in the bank” in Reavers.  Setting timers is investing time in hopes of a future fight.  However, I seem to have missed most of the withdrawals.  Oh well.

Lord of the Rings Online

I made it to level 50 as I carried on with the epic quest line.  I finished the first eight books and have been trying to round up the final seven so I can say I have done them all.  They have started to wear on me a bit, as the structure of those last seven seem designed as much to keep the player busy and running all over Middle-earth as anything.  At this point I only have Book XV left to do.  Once I finish that it might be time for a break from the game.

Pokemon Go

I slipped a bit on the Pokemon Go front this month.  I didn’t play for about a week around New Years.  It was cold and wet and I didn’t want to go outside.  But I live in California, so it is never cold or wet for long.  It soon turned sunny and warm again and I was out playing.  I did finally get my excellent curve ball thrown in for the task that lets you catch a Celebi.  Have I mentioned how annoying it is when the game forces you into AR mode to catch things?  With no sense of scale or distance… or scale and distance distorted by being projected in a small room… I expended a lot of Pokeballs to catch the Celebi.  Still, I got it eventually.

Level: 35 (+0)
Pokedex status: 385 (+5) caught, 405 (+5) seen
Pokemon I want: Rhyperior, the Rhydon evolution, but I still need about 70 candies
Current buddy: Togetic

RimWorld

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I have had RimWorld out again.  I find it a very compelling game to play in sort of the way I find Civilization games compelling; I always want to just finish up the next task or objective before I quit for the night.  And then a raid hits and I lose half my colonists.  It is usually easier to go to bed then.

World of Warcraft

I did log into Azeroth for a bit, though it was only really for Darkmoon Faire.  When I saw that they had fixed the trade skill quests there I wanted to drop in and see if it really was true.  It was.

Others

Now I feel like I have to account for everything on the ManicTime list.  I did play a couple quick rounds of Combat Mission: Barbarossa to Berlin.  Still an excellent game.  I also logged into EverQuest and EverQuest II, mostly just to check on a couple of things in anticipation of upcoming anniversary events.  I don’t think I earned a single point of xp in either.  And the unnamed alpha title shall remain unnamed.  It actually has an NDA.  Remember those?

Coming Up

February, the shortest month of the year.

There will be the usual monthly update for EVE Online, but it already looks like it will be concentrated on small, quality of life items.  That is fine.  We can always use that.  But I am not sure when the “next big thing” will be coming.  We should also start hearing about the next round of CSM elections.  That will get people complaining.

I hope that we’ll hear a bunch of things from Daybreak.  The Producer’s Letters put out this month mentioned all sorts of plans to help celebrate EverQuest‘s 20th birthday.  Most of those plans had details to follow, so one would assume they would follow in February, as once we get into March things will be getting a bit tight.

In Lord of the Rings Online I should finish up Volume I of the epic quest line.  The word is that the Mines of Moria expansion will be opened up around March.  We shall see.  Part of me sees the Anor server as an opportunity to play through all the game and into the Mordor expansion.  Another part believes that the 1-50 game is the best part and maybe I should just stop there.

I also have a plan… we’ll see if it comes to pass… to put together a series of posts about some old games I dug up this month.  Maybe I will have enough for a theme week.  We shall see.

January in Review

The Site

Just trivia for the site this month.  A week or so back my phone buzzed with this announcement.

A New Record!

I found that amusing, though since I have turned off the alert for when somebody clicks “like” on a post, I am not sure who went through and clicked the button on a bunch of posts.  None of the recent posts at that point had more than three or four likes, so I assume it was somebody serially reading and liking posts.

Meanwhile, back in the day, WordPress.com used to give bloggers some end of year stats around New Years, but stopped doing that a couple of years back.  On the stats page there is an Insights tab that shows various meta details about your blog which now includes some annual details.  For 2017 my stats were:

• Total Posts: 350
• Total Comments: 1,429
• avg comments per post: 4
• total likes: 1,398
• avg likes per post: 4
• total words: 326,343
• avg words per post: 932

It also tells me that so far for 2018 I am averaging over one thousand words per post, so the bloviation continues.  Also, the likes per post stat confirms that 21 in a day is an outlier event which has increased my average likes per day for 2018 to 5.

One Year Ago

As with most years here at the blog, it began with predictions.

Nintendo was telling us all about the Switch console, due in March.

I barely had predictions post before Daybreak announced they were closing Landmark, ticking one off the list for me.  That got people freaked out about other Daybreak titles, so I reviewed the list.

That also led me off onto a semi-sarcastic rant about an EverQuest successor.

It was also high noon for Asheron’s Call and Asheron’s Call 2.

With a new iPad I lost all my progress on Candy Crush Saga, so forswore the title forever.

I was also tallying up the results of my purchases from the Steam Winter Sale.  I don’t get why people like Stardew Valley so much.  Just not my thing I guess.  I did play a stretch of Train Valley however.

The long mansion road project was starting to hit home with me, but I kept on moving forward village by village.

In EVE Online I hit the 170 million skill point mark.  All those skill points and I still don’t use my capital ships.  After a false start we got the first update of YC119.  It had music.  It was also the kick off of the CSM election season.

In null sec there was a big battle at F4R2-Q that seemed to herald a new war.  However coordination problems with the local defenders saw us pulling back to Catch.

And in Diablo III we were waiting for the Darkening of Tristram event.  I ran through it quickly once, and then again to get some more achievements.  It was kind of neat, but it wasn’t the original Diablo.

Five Years Ago

Firefly Universe Online.  Was that a hoax or not?  I still don’t know.  And does the acronym FUO seem mildly obscene?

Wizardry Online joined the SOE stable while Pirates of the Burning Sea was sent packing.  Who is laughing now?

We got our full group together in Rift and did our first instance of the year, dying at least 100 times combined.  This lead to a side post about bosses and gimmicks and what makes a challenge.

In World of Tanks the instance group was scooting around. We even created our own little clan.  Potshot and I were totally going French.

In EVE Online, after a sudden burst of war fever died down, there was a surprise battle where more than 2,500 ships clashed in Asakai when CFC FC Dabigredboat led a supercap fleet in to rescue a stray titan.  The battle was so big that CCP did a Dev Blog about it.  Meanwhile, we were to be denied LEGO Rifters.

The DUST 514 open beta was officially open.  I still haven’t bombed anything from orbit yet.

Path of Exile went into full open beta as well.

Krono made its way from EverQuest II to EverQuest while I was wondering what people were spending their Station Cash on.

I was musing about MUDs again, and vendors who wouldn’t simply buy any crap you had for sale and dead rats.

There was a list of 20 games that defined the Apple II.

And I wrote out my yearly list.  This time it was goals, mostly because I was on vacation when I was supposed to be writing it.

Ten Years Ago

I started off with a helping of silly predictions.

I was bemoaning my inability to be a fan boy and parrying claims that PvE players were going to ruin Warhammer Online.

There were some pictures from my daughter’s LEGO birthday party.  Those seem to get linked on Pintrest quite often.

Then, with Tabula Rasa dead to me since open beta, I started wondering if there was any hope at all for a Science Fiction MMORPG.  This ended up being one of my most responded to posts of the time.  Plus, in addition to all the comments, Potshot, Tipa, Lemegeton, Gooney, and even Massively following up with response posts. This post still gets a lot of views every month. (And yes, I do think there is hope, I just don’t know when we’ll get what we’re looking for.)

And, along with that, I wrote about five LEGO Video Games I would like to see made.  And a few of those ended up getting made.  Imagine!

Then there was the start of the run-up to Pirates of the Burning Sea which, among other things, required me to invest in a new router as well as reviewing how to pick a server in a new game.  The latter was from a time when we assumed servers would stay crowded like they did in WoW.

In World of Warcraft the Saturday night instance group was hitting Scholomance, Dire Maul West and Scholomance again as part of the Paladin mount quest, Stratholme, then Dire Maul West once more for the Warlock mount quest, and then Scholomance for the third and final time to get all the epic mounts straight.  By then we were all level 60 which meant we could head  to the Outlands only a year after The Burning Crusade shipped!

In EVE Online, after spending millions of ISK, I managed my first Tech II Blueprint, then I couldn’t afford to build it. Ah, life in New Eden.  I also got my standing past 8.0 with the Caldari Navy and spent time hauling trash.

And, finally, in Lord of the Rings Online I was able to pick up my Bree Pony, the 2007 holiday gift to founders.

Twenty Years Ago

I got nothing.  I think we were all still playing Warcraft II and waiting for StarCraft to come out.  I remember a lot of people I knew being anxious for it to ship.

Most Viewed Posts in January

1. From Alola Pokedex to National Pokedex in Pokemon Sun
2. Where the Hell is that EverQuest Successor Already?
3. Alamo teechs u 2 play DURID!
4. Top 25 EVE Online Corporations Graph – The End Number
5. The Coming Battle in 9-4RP2
6. My 2018 MMO Outlook – Mining for Old Gold
7. A Bit More Bag Space with WoW Patch 7.3.5
8. The Million Dollar Battle Hangover
9. 2018 – Predictions for a New Year
10. A Return to Physical Netflix
11. Quote of the Day – Satan Speaks on Lockboxes
12. Delve – How Does One Value Minerals?

Search Terms of the Month

pokemon battle on middle earth.jar
[Heresy, both the concept and it being in Java]

swtor-digipass@go6
[Somebody knows their VASCO products]

everquest 3
[Dream on]

pokemon sun and moon solo run
[It is a single player game, so I guess that is any run]

what is the name of the third warcraft expansion
[That is the one we do not name]

war thunder plane with most bombs
[I think it is the He-111, at least for lower tier planes]

EVE Online

Early in the month I was in as part of our small deployment to the north, dropping citadels and making the locals come up to fight over timers, which went well enough for us until the locals finally got their act together and blobbed up.  We’d have done the same around Delve, just a lot sooner.

Then came the build up for the big battle at 9-4RP2, which distracted us from other efforts in the north.  When I finally came back to our staging system I found that the locals had been busy removing all of our citadels.  So I guess we’ll be starting from scratch on that front.

Pokemon Go

Pokemon Go saw the releases of more Hoenn Pokemon towards the end of the month, so my captured and caught numbers went up noticeably again.  I also finally got the last candy I needed to evolve my Slowepoke into a Slowbro.  I also managed to squeak into level 31.

Heartbreak moment of the month was finally seeing a Lapras in the wild, then being cheap and not using one of my few sure catch candies on the first throw and having it flee.

• Level: 31 (+1)
• Pokedex status: 262 (+23) caught, 301 (+25) seen
• Pokemon I want: Seaking
• Current buddy: Horsea to earn candies to get that Seaking evolution.

World of Warcraft

I spent a lot of time with Pet Battles, right up to the end of the month finish of the Celestial Tournament.  I am also edging my way up to the 700 pet mark, for which there is no achievement.

I also carried on in Argus rather halfheartedly with my main and then worked on some alts.  I potentially will have quite a pile of level 110 characters when Battle for Azeroth ships, so I am not sure what I will do with the level 110 boost that will come with the expansion.  I am certainly not running out right this second to pre-order because of that.  The allied race thing however…

Other Games

I watched The Mittani playing Stellaris for a bit on the INN stream and then went back and played that for a bit.  That is my problem with watching people stream games, I just want to go play them rather than watch.  Meanwhile, Stellaris is still a good game in which you can get lost for hours.

I got fed up with War Thunder and uninstalled it.  I just got tired of high skill players haunting the lower tiers for easy kills.  Or maybe I am just horrible.  Meanwhile the interface that combines the game’s aerial aspect with tank combat and sea combat… I think that is in there… is confusing enough that I stopped bothering to pursue it.  I’ll have to get my flight sim fix elsewhere. (Also I had to use regedit to remove all of War Thunder, which makes it less likely that I will ever install it again.)

I was invited to play a couple of Jack Pack 3 games with Liore’s club, specifically Trivia Murder Party and Tee K.O., both of which were a lot of fun.  There is also an interesting “watch things on your computer screen, provide answer and/or draw things on your phone/tablet” dynamic to the whole thing.

Coming Up

Well, I would take a guess that there won’t be another huge battle next month in EVE Online.  Null sec needs time to ponder before another 6,000+ player conflict happens.  But there will be updates to citadels with the February release, some of which will make them easier to attack, especially if they are just sitting around out of fuel and unused.

Also we should start hearing something about the CSM election campaign season.

In World of Warcraft I have my eye on the level scaling changes that came in with patch 7.3.5.  Specifically, I want to see what going to Northrend at level 58 and spending 22 levels there is like.  Can I get through all the content before I out level it?  Will I need to take off my heirloom gear?  The latter idea bugs me only because I like not having to worry about gear as I play through the story.  Also, I want to do it as Horde to see if there is much difference between that and the Alliance campaign.

I will also keep running the Celestial Tournament every week until I have all the pets from that.  I’m starting to wind down a bit on the obsessive pet leveling binge… the week with 200% exp where I went nuts burned me out a bit… but there are still some key pets I want to get to 25.  Also I should finish up Argus and run all the instances I need to in order to wrap up crafting.  Doing LFG isn’t that much of a pain, I am just not fond of the “rush rush” nature of it.

We’ll see if I keep with Stellaris or wander off after a couple of games.

Also there are a couple of major sports events coming up, Super Bowl 52, which mostly serves to remind me how old I am since a couple of east coast teams are in it, and the Winter Olympics, so I can look forward to people complaining about how NBC has screwed up the coverage.  Somewhere in between the two is my wife’s birthday, better not forget that!

And, finally, for those interested in blog stats, I also have the 2017 blog stats for my other blog, EVE Online Pictures:

• Total Posts: 183
• Total Comments: 7
• Avg Comments Per Post: 0
• Total Likes: 19
• Avg Likes Per Post: 0
• Total Words: 381
• Avg Words Per Post: 2

I am actually a bit surprised there were that many words, since the count does not include titles.  I guess I can’t keep quiet even on a blog that is supposed to be pictures.  The comments were split, 3 telling me I misidentified a ship, 3 of my copping to my mistake, and one “nice.”  Very few people click the like button or rate the posts there.  I thought the rating feature would be a thing, but it isn’t.  Ah well.  I’ll write more about all of that when it turns ten years old later this year.