The Site
I managed to break the blogger feed on the side bar. It actually stopped working on its own and as I dug around I noticed that Pinboard said I had 32,768 entries there, which is exactly 2^15, which I suspected meant that I might have hit an upper limit on entries. So I cleared all entries and… then nothing there has worked reliably since.
So I have an alternate feed now in the side bar which was, honestly, much easier to setup and get going, and seems more reliable. However, I have less control over the feed so I cannot, for example, inject the blog name into the feed, so it is just post title, date, and author. There will no doubt be a blog post about this when I get it settled.
Meanwhile, the blog has seen a bit of a traffic boom this month. As usual, this traffic bump appears to be completely based on the whims of Google search, which suddenly doubled in impressions and clicks for my site.
Google’s own graph
Things were about normal in March, then there is the usual big April 1st spike, after which traffic and impressions taper off. And then, suddenly, on May 6, they about double and I couldn’t tell you why. It might be related to the Activision Blizzard financials. There are a bunch of searches for “wow subscription numbers.” But that should have tapered off after a few days. Instead things appear to have kept going.
Also, in the usual post-Blaugust tradition, I have carried on after Blapril and posted every single day in May as well. I am not sure that has an effect, but historically the September after Blaugust is usually a pretty good month for traffic as well, so maybe that plays into it. Mysteries of the internet.
One Year Ago
Back in May of 2018 there was a rumor leak about Daybreak, so a year later I went back over them to see what came to pass.
Blizzard revenue margins dropped considerably. As if to prove the point, WoW dropped off of SuperData’s digital revenue chart.
To hide that in the news cycle Blizzard gave us a date for WoW Classic. I wondered if the Cataclysm expansion was a necessary prerequisite for WoW Classic. I also was speculating as to what would happen with WoW Classic as it aged.
The beta for WoW Classic had been up for a while, but they decided to do a stress test, so they let everybody in for a bit. Of course I went! And I did the following week as well.
In what we now call retail WoW I was off collecting the Children’s Week pets.
Blizzard also gave us a peek at their 15th Anniversary Collector’s Edition.
The Mittani uttered the words, “Gevlon was right” in a public forum.
EVE Online celebrated its sixteen year anniversary with a sixteen day login campaign. The Invasion expansion was slated for the end of the month. Its arrival brought more Triglavian fun to the game as well as the big revamp of The Agency interface and some war dec changes.
CCP Peligro Tweeted out a chart about who gets banned for botting in New Eden. CCP had also been trying to nerf ratting and mining, so that was the focus of my MER review that month.
The CSM14 election was coming up and Jester did a Reddit AMA about his time on the CSM as his NDA had finally expired. I also had a bullet points post about CSM14 candidates and rewards and a coming war and such.
Out in Delve I got to undock my dreadnought.
With Liberty Squad I went on ops to Amamake and into Etherium reach that resulted in explosions. I also got to drop on some Rorquals with Black Ops.
But people were focused on the coming Imperium attack on the north and where it would land. Even as we formed up and moved vast fleets to the north of null sec, our target was still speculation, though once we set up shop in the east of Pure Blind it looked like Tribute was the target. There was a rush to see if we could kill the PanFam staging Keepstar, but when that failed we settled in to burn down the region.
In Minecraft I was growing bamboo and looking for the new village types that came in with the Village & Pillage update. The I went looking for pillagers.
Connor at MMO Fallout announced that the site was winding down… and then he changed his mind.
And I watched the Catch-22 miniseries on Hulu. I liked some of it, but there were issues for me. There always are.
Five Years Ago
There was another Newbie Blogger Initiative, for which I wrote a post.
The whole World of Warcraft “flying in Draenor” explosion started when Blizzard announced that they probably wouldn’t allow flying in that, or any future, expansion. Lots of people spoke up. I linked to a bunch of them.
It was not a good month for World of Warcraft. Subscriptions were down to 7.1 million… and then they banned 100K accounts, so make that an even 7 million.
In the Warlords of Draenor expansion itself I was mostly going garrison stuff and pet battles.
Carbine announced that WildStar would be going free to play after continuing poor financial performance.
EVE Online turned 12 years old. CCP was offering fan site the option of a free account OR receiving a PLEX every month. I actually attempted to opt-in for the PLEX, but never heard back. Was that option ever really a thing? Did anybody get PLEX? Is the fan site program still around?
The war in Fountain and Delve was over, NCDot had been pushed back yet again, and we were moving back north as our empire contracted. Entosis stuff was looming. Black Legion caught us taking a badly planned convoy through KVN-36.
Meanwhile, down in Querious, the Reavers were playing with Ravens. Up in the north, TNT was moving out of Deklein and into Tribute as part of our Fozzie Sov plans. And I hit 140 million skill points.
Then Daybreak went for a crowd pleaser by launching a new time locked expansion server named Ragefire. It was such a crowd pleaser that it couldn’t handle the crowd. In addition to some first night problems, you simply couldn’t log in most of the time. They worked on a login queue and some zone instancing technology from EverQuest II and eventually opened up another server named Lockjaw to take care of the crowding.
TorilMUD, the MUD on which EverQuest was largely based, softened its death penalty. A sign of the times.
There was word of a Warhammer Online private/pirate server for those who missed the departed game.
And I was playing LEGO Star Wars on the PlayStation 3 while the freshly minted Imperium was going to try and play H1Z1.
Ten Years Ago
I was unemployed thanks to the great mortgage meltdown, which you would think would leave me a lot more time for gaming and blogging. But the anxiety of looking for a job for the first time in 12 years… and the first time in 20 years where there wasn’t just one out there waiting for me… made for a quiet gaming and blogging month.
Yes, I did start to poke my nose back into LOTRO. A game where I didn’t have to pay a subscription seemed about right. (I have a lifetime subscription.) That meant getting back into the swing of the game and figuring out what had changed.
We actually got THE DATE for the release of StarCraft II. How did that turn out for everybody? I skipped the whole thing. Maybe when the StarCraft II warchest version comes out with all the expansions I’ll look into it.
The Agency came to Facebook, in the form of The Agency: Covert Ops. A Mafia Wars-like game, without the multi-level marketing aspect, it had its good and its bad. I liked the puzzles. The dogs with guns… and the submarine fight… not so much. Who knew that would be all of The Agency we would ever get?
Meanwhile SOE was transcending bad taste with their EQII PWNZ marketing campaign.
EVE Online got the Tyrannis expansion, though I wasn’t paying much attention there. Something called EVE Gate was introduced… later closed and now being proposed again I think… as well as integration with DUST 514… also later closed and effectively proposed again with Project: Nova. Pattern here?
There was some Pokemon fun going. I was twinking the Pokewalker while our cats worked against me. The cats won in the end.
We also went to see the Pokemon Video Game Championships in our area.
And the Horde remix of the instance group was wrapping up Dire Maul and Stratholme. Then, having hit 60, we let the Dungeon Finder guide our way into the Outland.
Fifteen Years Ago
Sony unveiled the PlayStation 3 in a pre-E3 announcement while Microsoft announced the XBox 360 on MTV.
Pokemon Emerald, the final third generation Pokemon game and the last GameBoy Advance Pokemon release, arrives in North America.
Twenty Years Ago
Diablo II launched. It enlarged on its predecessor with more classes and a four act storyline that played out over different environments. A pre-digital distribution title, it was awarded a Guinness Book record as the fastest selling video game ever, having shipped and sold one million boxes over the course of the first month. For comparison its 2012 successor, Diablo III, sold 3.5 million copies in the first 24 hours, also setting a Guinness Book record.
Shogun: Total War launched, setting down a template that would become the Total War series that is still getting new titles.
Forty Years Ago
The Empire Strikes back, arguably the best movie in the whole series, debuts. Or, as I sometimes think of it, the last great Star Wars movie.
Most Viewed Posts in May
- SuperData and Wavering WoW Subscriptions
- Minecraft and the Search for a Warm Ocean
- Darkpaw Announces and Adjusts Plans for the Rizlona and Aradune Time Locked Progression Servers
- Alamo teechs u 2 play DURID!
- Getting Upper Blackrock Spire Access
- LEGO Star Wars The Skywalker Saga is Coming
- How Many People Play EVE Online?
- EQ Aradune and Rizlona Servers off to the Usual Rocky Start
- New Servers and Server Merges and More with the EverQuest Anniversary
- Where is the Scenario Mod for This?
- Burn Jita 2020 Seems Unlikely
- Hints of a Diablo II Remaster
Search Terms of the Month
iowa wooden deck
[You’re far from Iowa friend]
robert jordan wheel of.time repetitive writing
[Clip that and you’d lose a book worth of text]
eve online auction house no more undercut
[Well, no more .01 ISK undercut]
how to make bamboo grow faster in minecraft
[You’re kidding, right?]
wve onlune mist active cirporations
[Your fingers are on the wrong keys]
mmo when you can play as kobold
[Uhh… I don’t know]
where’d holly windstalker go?
[Blizzard]
Gaming Time from ManicTime
A bit of a surprise for times this month. If you had asked me on the first I would have probably guessed that EVE Online would be at the top, with WoW Classic maybe not too far behind. And then I launched Minecraft.
- Minecraft – 43.20%
- EVE Online – 32.22%
- WoW Classic – 16.58%
- EverQuest – 6.65%
- World of Warcraft – 0.69%
- RimWorld – 0.66%
It is really easy to put on a podcast or an audio book and while away the hours with Minecraft. Meanwhile, WoW Classic has languished a bit as the group has been busy so hasn’t had a chance to get back to Zul’Farrak.
EVE Online
With the Goon Expeditionary Force deployed, there has been some opportunity for fun in space. I am definitely in a mood where I only log in for fleets and not much else. I have gone on some fleets, but perhaps not as many as I thought I would. But we’re still out there in Cloud Ring.
EverQuest
I have been mostly poking along with the Overseer feature here, though I did log in and make a character on one of the new progression servers. The Overseer got some updates, and there is a post about it in the making. It remains, to my mind, superior to the EverQuest II version of the feature. As for the progression servers, I am likely going to give this round a pass. I poked my nose in for a first day glimpse, but without a group already stood up and ready to go it is more than I care to take on.
Minecraft
I mentioned Minecraft and a new world appeared. My post about exploring our old world inspired Skronk to roll up a fresh on on Minecraft Realms, so we’ve been playing with that for about a week or so now. I guess I had best move it up into the “games I play” list again.
Pokemon Go
Having hit level 39 at the end of last month I am still in the midst of the long climb to level 40. Niantic’s quality of life changes to support pandemic play, like remote raid passes, have helped out. I caught my first raid legendary, the Terrakion. However, for every legendary I catch, four more seem to get away. Oh well.
Level: 39 (19% of the way to level 40)
Pokedex status: 541 (+10) caught, 569 (+9) seen
Pokemon I want: Some of these Unova Pokemon where I only have one
Current buddy: Axew
Pokemon Sword
I made no progress this month. I didn’t even pick up the Switch Lite except to move it when it was in the way of something. I think it is a nice little unit, but I haven’t worked in where it fits in my play time. I used to sit on the couch when nobody was home, turn on a TV show I had seen before (reruns of The Wire FTW) and play, but now there is never a time when nobody is home.
World of Warcraft
I thought at the start of the month that I would totally get my Horde alt out and to level cap now that I have unlocked flying and there is double XP available until the next expansion. It should be easy mode, a quick tour of the Horde story. And then all I did was a bit of Darkmoon Faire. I guess I can recycle that plan. Maybe next month.
WoW Classic
Things slowed down some in WoW Classic, mostly due to the group being busy with other things in life. We managed to get started in Zul’Farrak, but haven’t managed to get back for a return trip. It is still on our agenda though. Maybe next month.
Coming Up
A preview of June’s month in review: I will no doubt be complaining about the new editor WordPress will be forcing on us. I’ve been using the old editor for over a decade and have heard little good about the new one. But the old one may be dead tomorrow, so expect some curse words. (They say it will still be there, but in the past they have broken things like that on purpose to force people to change.)
It seems likely that, should I be able to still write posts, there will be some updates about the deployment in EVE Online, something about the instance group in WoW Classic when we get back to ZF, and maybe a further thought or two about Minecraft.
The CSM15 elections start tomorrow for EVE Online. I bet you can already foresee that post coming.
I did buy a copy of the new Minecraft Dungeons, which I will probably try out later today, so perhaps something about that will pop up in June.
Otherwise, summer is coming, my daughter is graduating from high school, the weather is warm, and we’re coming up on three months of “stay at home” and even I am feeling like I need to go to the mall or something. We shall see how we manage.
