The Site

WordPress.com acknowledged once again that I posted every day for a year straight, a reminder than quantity does not equal quality.

Another year gone by…

Also, it only says that because I changed the time zone setting for the blog from UTC to Pacific time which changed my streak when it recalculated it.  The count should be around 1,522, but I posted the occasional item for the next day before midnight Pacific time so the changing of the time setting changed what counted.  That’s the way it goes.

There is a Dril tweet for all occasions

Also, the chaos that social media has become has taken a lot of the edge off of Dril these days.  But that is for another post I suppose.

Anyway, I am not mad because what is a posting streak anyway?  Plus, WP.com did something nice this month… they paid me.  Those ads some of you had to endure earlier in the year paid the hosting fee for the site for 2024.

Getting Paid

Granted, they took their time about it.  But dollars are dollars… and they are in my PayPal account just in time for me to blow it all on the Steam Summer Sale in June, if I can wait that long.

Then there is my other site, EVE Online Pictures, which I have let slide this month.  Part of that is due to not playing much EVE Online, so not having any new screen shots… I am surprisingly picky about what I post there, though you might not believe that if you scroll through the place… has taken the edge off.  That and the fact that not posting has had pretty much zero impact on traffic… nobody visits when I post, so it is hard to go downhill from there… has made it easy to ignore.  I might go back to it with the new expansion… but after 16 years of being essentially unknown, it might also be time to let the experiment fade.

The question back in 2008 was whether or not an all pictures blog about EVE Online could achieve some level of popularity.  The answer, in this case, seems to be “no.”

One Year Ago

EVE Online turned 20 and the month long capsuleer day celebrations kicked off.  I did my own post reflecting on the two decades of the game.

CCP was also talking about the upcoming Viridian expansion, which included tech II capital ships.

I also did a bullet point post about the game that included the deadline to get on the monument, the minutes from the CSM17 summit, the delay of the CSM18 election, fireworks in Jita, the building of the first shipcaster, an ESS theft story, and the end of the BOSS alliance.  Then I did another one, again mentioning the monument, chat channel issues, the MER, player made billboards, a T-shirt design contest, and the Pearl Abyss financials.

I was considering average daily destruction as a metric for EVE Online and looked into the April 2023 destruction count.  I also wondered how many skill points were enough in New Eden.

Over at Enad Global 7, My Singing Monsters was still making the most money, but investment groups were demanding more money from the company, suggesting that the company explore being sold.  Good thing Embracer Group didn’t get hold of them.

In Wrath Classic I had accomplished some of my goals in Wintergrasp and the Argent Tournament, though I could not yet build Jeeves.  The group managed to get through The Oculus,

Blizzard said they were going to make a hardcore mode server for WoW Classic and they introduced WoW Tokens to Wrath Classic.

I started my lossless scaling experiment to see if that would make LOTRO more playable on my 34″ wide screen monitor.  It helped, but couldn’t overcome all of my large screen issues.  That was just in time for the 16th anniversary.  Meanwhile, Amazon said they were again interested in doing a Middle-earth game.

In the AI Question Time series I asked about a tank in EVE Online, sandbox MMO options, whether it could generate some ideas for an RPG campaign, including a royal family, and about Wilhelm Arcturus.

I was on about timing lucky eggs with friendship levels in Pokemon Go.  That is probably my most popular post from 2023.

I did a mail bag post after being inundated by media op offers.

I caught up with HBO becoming Max, Netflix ending its DVD services, and MTV just ending, along with some more binge watching.

I was checking out Twitter alternatives as Elon’s reign kept getting dumber and dumber.

Finally, it was Memorial Day once more.

Five Years 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.

Ten Years Ago

EA killed off Mythic Entertainment.  They had already handed over Ultima Online and Dark Age of Camelot to Broadsword, so what was left in any case?

The news about post-Kickstarter Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen continued to be off-putting.

I got another seven day trial in Landmark.

The strategy group started in on our BIG map campaign in Civilization V.

Nintendo announced Pokemon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire were coming in November. They also closed down the WiFi game services for the Nintendo DS and Wii, which led EA to shut down the server support for 50 games a month later.  Most of them were DS and Wii related, but EA used the opportunity to kill off some PC game support as well.

Nintendo also launched Mario Kart 8, one of the few bright spots on the otherwise disappointing Wii U.  Soon the Luigi death stare was everywhere.

In EverQuest the Fippy Darkpaw progression server wrapped up the Seeds of Destruction expansion.

In EVE Online I was wondering about the prospects for a summer war.  Everybody just assumed that there would be one, though in null sec the various empires seemed to be settling in and consolidating.  Sure, there was the trap at Daras… another on the list of reasons we shy away from low sec… the run down to Placid for a kill, and that op down in Syndicate (my post on which stirred up some sour grapes about day one players) but otherwise things were quiet.  That left plenty of time to go find my name on the monument.

As EVE Online turned eleven I was wondering if the alleged ‘learning cliff’ was still the biggest issue facing EVE Online.

Meanwhile CCP announced they were getting off the twice a year, huge update release pattern in order to have releases… named releases for a while… every month.  This led into a post about the pacing of content delivery.

In World of Warcraft the Timeless Isle was still a thing.  The Warlords of Draenor expansion was still over the horizon and subscriptions were down to 7.6 million under the weight of wait.  That seemed like a big drop until Warlords of Draenor fell to 5 million two years later.   Meanwhile, our group was slowing down a bit even as we started in on dungeons in Pandaria.

In attempt to make plans for another summer hiatus, I gave Star Wars: The Old Republic a try, going through the Sith starting area.

And then there was the kick off of the 2014 Newbie Blogger Initiative.

Fifteen Years Ago

I was able to expose the true conspiracy behind the EuroGamer Darkfall review.  Powerful forces have been suppressing this story ever since.

EA lost a billion dollars.  This came after the CEO announced that recessions were good because they eliminate competitors.  They can also eliminate bad execs.

Meanwhile, EverQuest was celebrating its 10 year anniversary by putting up a new server.  Polled on what it should be, people chose the 51/50 rule set.  I’m sure that, somehow, that says something about MMOs and nostalgia.  I cannot recall how that server even played out at this point.

I went back and played some Blizzard classics, Diablo II and StarCraft, both of which received  patches that meant you no longer needed the CD to play.  This was prompted by Blizzard’s pushing people towards Battle.net and the announcement of the opt-in for the StarCraft II beta.  I opted in right away.  I hear that some people got in to the beta almost a year later. *cough*

In New Eden, it was new ship time, as I picked up both an Orca and a Buzzard.  I also managed to lose my Cerebus.   Oops.

And speaking of EVE Online, I announced my one year experiment, EVE Online Pictures.

CCP put a new boxed version of EVE Online on store shelves.  I bought a copy and made a fabulous new character.

In World of Warcraft the instance group was moving along slowly.  We did hit Azjol Nerub, but vacations and such kept us down to four people, so we spent a bit of time back in Burning Crusade doing heroics and generally messing around.  That included our run into Ogrimmar to do Ragefire Chasm.

I also messed around with the Noblegarden holiday.  I actually got all the achievements for that.  However, Children’s Week was another story.

Playboy’s “Massively Casual Online Game” Playboy Manager was announced.  The game was supposed to launch in the summer of 2009 according to the press release.  There was a whole story about what happened… but you’ll have to search up on it because it is too long to repeat here.

And then there was a little game called Minecraft that was first made available in early access back in May 2009.  Estimates put it as possibly the best selling game of all time.

Twenty Years Ago

Nintendo announces a new console code named Revolution to follow from the GameCube.  Revolution would latter be given the official name Wii.

Twenty-Five Years Ago

Nintendo started talking about Project Dolphin, the console to follow the Nintendo 64.  This would eventually become the GameCube.

The 4th Coming, an early MMORPG developed by the French Canadian firm Vircom Interactive, is officially launched.  The game is still running and being updated as of this writing by DialSoft, which took over the title in 2006.

Thirty Years Ago

Chaos Studios, once called Silicone & Synapse, having changed its name to Ogre Studios the month before due to a trademark claim by Chaos Technologies, changed its name one last time and became Blizzard Entertainment.

Most Viewed Posts in May

1. Are the Ashlands going to Kill Valheim?
2. The Ashlands Arrive in Valheim
3. Quote of the Day – Just Say No?
4. Timing those Lucky Eggs for Friendship Milestone…
5. Just a Sap in the Mistlands
6. The Special Business Unit
7. After Three Weeks of the Cataclysm Pre-Patch
8. Finding an Infested Mine in Valheim at Last!
9. Level 45 at Last in Pokemon Go
10. Warm Ups for Cataclysm Classic
11. EverQuest Starting Points – Butcherblock and Kaladim
12. EverQuest Starting Points – Ak’Anon and Whatever Happened to the Steamfont Mountains

Search Terms of the Month

can i still play the older versions of civilization?
[Have I got the post for you!]

pokemon go best friend lucky egg can i claim later
[I don’t think so]

gamer blogs
[I think I am on page 912 of that search on Google]

waerzor
[Neither than nor porn here]

Game Time from ManicTime

WoW Classic, with Cataclysm showing up, got the gang back together and into Azeroth.  Clearly I spent a lot of time there… and all the more so due to Valheim issues.  At the bottom end is Palia, which I tried briefly early in the month for somebody’s friend code bonus and… I don’t really remember much… and the retail WoW, where I logged in to collect something and to check an achievement.

• WoW Classic – 80.02%
• EVE Online – 6.68%
• EverQuest – 5.86%
• Valheim – 5.66%
• Palia – 1.72%
• World of Warcraft – 0.06%

EVE Online

I did managed to collect all 30 daily rewards for capsuleer day/month in celebration of the game’s 21st anniversary.  I even logged in and went on a couple of fleets, got on my requisite kill mail, updated my PI… and did nothing else.  I am kind of waiting around for the Equinox expansion to show up to see what that will mean.

EverQuest

I spent a bit of time running around old Norrath in search of starting points.  I think I have one more post in me on that front, if I can find some words.  But I think come June and the launch of the EverQuest II Origins Server that I might need to turn my eye towards post-cataclysm Norrath.

Pokemon Go

As noted earlier this month, my wife and I finally made it past the final task to get to level 45, which meant we were already halfway to 46 on the xp front.

• Level: 45 (+1, now 57% of the way to 46 in xp, 1 of 4 level tasks complete)
• Pokedex status: 825 (+4) caught, 839 (+5) seen
• Vivillon Evolutions obtained: 15 of 20
• Pokemon I want: Three specific Scatterbugs; Sandstorm, Icy Snow, and Meadow
• Current buddy: Varoom… which is really a Pokemon, I swear

Valheim

The letdown of the Ashlands and Iron Gate going all in on “you must suffer to play our game!” along with the arrival of Cata Classic made for a pretty steep downturn in my play time here, which is saying something because so for in 2024 Valheim is my most played title by a fair margin.  I still want to try The Queen in the Mistlands, but that will probably be then end of things until somebody rolls up a “make the Ashlands available to casuals” mod like the mist removal mod for the Mistlands.

WoW Classic

Cataclysm Classic is now a thing.  It may not be a popular thing, but it does seem to be our thing.  For all the issues it has and my general angst about it as an expansion, I have spent more time playing it than anything else this month.  We’ll see how that carries on though…

Zwift

My last entry for Zwift.  As I noted earlier this month, they sent me a note saying that on my next billing cycle they would be raising the price to $20 a month.  That prompted me to cancel immediately.  I thought I had the rest of May to ride because the note said my next billing date was June 6… however, that was wrong and I found my account lapsed by mid-month.  So it goes.  These are my final numbers for Zwift.

• Level – 27
• Distanced cycled – 1,980.5 miles
• Time spent riding – 4d 8h 23m
• Elevation climbed – 72,375
• Calories burned – 58,617 (+1,323)

Going back to something I was doing previously, that distance would be about from my house to Davenport, Iowa.

Coming Up

On June 11th we’re going to get the Equinox expansion for EVE Online, so that will be a thing that I will be there to try out.

Over at Daybreak, the EverQuest II time locked expansion server Anashti Sul will go live, and I want to take a peek into that.

Traisland, the Tencent MMORPG that the gaming press cannot stop calling a WoW rip-off, is set to go live on June 21.  Given that it is following the free to play model, it is likely I will give it a try.

The first day of summer… the summer solstice is on Thursday, June 20th, should see the start of the Steam Summer Sale.  Like I need more titles in my back log.  Still, there it is.

And then there is Cataclysm Classic.  We’re invested for the moment and the first dungeon is waiting for us.

I had already been wondering whether Zwift, the app I use to “gamify” my exercise bike usage, was worth the $15 a month fee it was charging.

Ride On?  Screw off!

If I had been more hardcore, a dedicated rider that used many of the features the app offers to keep myself in competitive shape, I might see some real value in the options Zwift offers.  But as a causal 2-3 day a week rider that basically uses two features and just likes the fact that it tracks my totals… well, there are cheaper alternatives out there I am sure.

So when I received the following message from Zwift this week I sprang into action.

We’re writing to inform you of changes to your Zwift Subscription pricing. The monthly Zwift subscription price will be increased to $19.99, plus applicable taxes.

Your first payment at the new price will be on your next billing date after June 6th.

We hope you’re enjoying your time on Zwift. We have worked hard to keep prices locked since 2017 and have made this change to allow us to continue making indoor cycling fun with more content experiences and product innovation.

And by “sprang into action” I mean I went straight to their site and cancelled my subscription.

Just to belabor the point I made above, the value proposition for Zwift relative to other $15 a month options… things that include our Valheim server rental, my WoW subscription, a number of streaming channels we might watch, or even my Daybreak all access subscription where I am doing little more than touring old zones in EverQuest… was dubious to start with.

Add in that I am already feeling quite a bit of subscription fatigue in the current economy where literally everything and everybody online is asking me to fork over a recurring subscription fee for content… and I get it, content costs money to make, but money is also a limited resource so I can’t give everybody money and still pay the mortgage… and I am suddenly pretty price sensitive.  Also, the price of everything is going up a lot faster than my salary since the pandemic.  Thanks to the magic of inflation and a decade of 1% raises, I effectively make less than I did fifteen years ago.

Anyway, Zwift is off the menu.  It was only inertia that kept me from cutting it previously.  The price increase just cemented my feelings about it.

They sent me a survey to ask why I cancelled and I was pretty clear that the price increase was the reason.  I am sure that will go into the bin as I have found that any company that makes a suddenly price increase without any warning it is coming has already convinced themselves that they are making the right decision and any complaints can be brushed away as outliers.

Of course, the funny thing is that if they decided tomorrow that the price hike was a huge mistake and they declared that they were rolling back to $15 a month, I wouldn’t go back.  I was bothered by the old price, but not enough to be moved to action.  But now that the price change has made me reflect on the value of Zwift, I wouldn’t go back, even at the old price.

It is generally a mistake to make users think too hard about the value your service offers.

Anyway, I am now in the market for an exercise app that works with the BlueTooth connection to our Schwinn IC4 exercise bike, preferably something without a recurring subscription model.  And if such a thing doesn’t exist, then I can just peddle away without an app.  I’ll just use the timer on my phone or listen to a podcast that is about the right length and not worry about it.

I had already been wondering whether Zwift, the app I use to “gamify” my exercise bike usage, was worth the $15 a month fee it was charging.

Ride On?  Screw off!

If I had been more hardcore, a dedicated rider that used many of the features the app offers to keep myself in competitive shape, I might see some real value in the options Zwift offers.  But as a causal 2-3 day a week rider that basically uses two features and just likes the fact that it tracks my totals… well, there are cheaper alternatives out there I am sure.

So when I received the following message from Zwift this week I sprang into action.

We’re writing to inform you of changes to your Zwift Subscription pricing. The monthly Zwift subscription price will be increased to $19.99, plus applicable taxes.

Your first payment at the new price will be on your next billing date after June 6th.

We hope you’re enjoying your time on Zwift. We have worked hard to keep prices locked since 2017 and have made this change to allow us to continue making indoor cycling fun with more content experiences and product innovation.

And by “sprang into action” I mean I went straight to their site and cancelled my subscription.

Just to belabor the point I made above, the value proposition for Zwift relative to other $15 a month options… things that include our Valheim server rental, my WoW subscription, a number of streaming channels we might watch, or even my Daybreak all access subscription where I am doing little more than touring old zones in EverQuest… was dubious to start with.

Add in that I am already feeling quite a bit of subscription fatigue in the current economy where literally everything and everybody online is asking me to fork over a recurring subscription fee for content… and I get it, content costs money to make, but money is also a limited resource so I can’t give everybody money and still pay the mortgage… and I am suddenly pretty price sensitive.  Also, the price of everything is going up a lot faster than my salary since the pandemic.  Thanks to the magic of inflation and a decade of 1% raises, I effectively make less than I did fifteen years ago.

Anyway, Zwift is off the menu.  It was only inertia that kept me from cutting it previously.  The price increase just cemented my feelings about it.

They sent me a survey to ask why I cancelled and I was pretty clear that the price increase was the reason.  I am sure that will go into the bin as I have found that any company that makes a suddenly price increase without any warning it is coming has already convinced themselves that they are making the right decision and any complaints can be brushed away as outliers.

Of course, the funny thing is that if they decided tomorrow that the price hike was a huge mistake and they declared that they were rolling back to $15 a month, I wouldn’t go back.  I was bothered by the old price, but not enough to be moved to action.  But now that the price change has made me reflect on the value of Zwift, I wouldn’t go back, even at the old price.

It is generally a mistake to make users think too hard about the value your service offers.

Anyway, I am now in the market for an exercise app that works with the BlueTooth connection to our Schwinn IC4 exercise bike, preferably something without a recurring subscription model.  And if such a thing doesn’t exist, then I can just peddle away without an app.  I’ll just use the timer on my phone or listen to a podcast that is about the right length and not worry about it.

I had already been wondering whether Zwift, the app I use to “gamify” my exercise bike usage, was worth the $15 a month fee it was charging.

Ride On?  Screw off!

If I had been more hardcore, a dedicated rider that used many of the features the app offers to keep myself in competitive shape, I might see some real value in the options Zwift offers.  But as a causal 2-3 day a week rider that basically uses two features and just likes the fact that it tracks my totals… well, there are cheaper alternatives out there I am sure.

So when I received the following message from Zwift this week I sprang into action.

We’re writing to inform you of changes to your Zwift Subscription pricing. The monthly Zwift subscription price will be increased to $19.99, plus applicable taxes.

Your first payment at the new price will be on your next billing date after June 6th.

We hope you’re enjoying your time on Zwift. We have worked hard to keep prices locked since 2017 and have made this change to allow us to continue making indoor cycling fun with more content experiences and product innovation.

And by “sprang into action” I mean I went straight to their site and cancelled my subscription.

Just to belabor the point I made above, the value proposition for Zwift relative to other $15 a month options… things that include our Valheim server rental, my WoW subscription, a number of streaming channels we might watch, or even my Daybreak all access subscription where I am doing little more than touring old zones in EverQuest… was dubious to start with.

Add in that I am already feeling quite a bit of subscription fatigue in the current economy where literally everything and everybody online is asking me to fork over a recurring subscription fee for content… and I get it, content costs money to make, but money is also a limited resource so I can’t give everybody money and still pay the mortgage… and I am suddenly pretty price sensitive.  Also, the price of everything is going up a lot faster than my salary since the pandemic.  Thanks to the magic of inflation and a decade of 1% raises, I effectively make less than I did fifteen years ago.

Anyway, Zwift is off the menu.  It was only inertia that kept me from cutting it previously.  The price increase just cemented my feelings about it.

They sent me a survey to ask why I cancelled and I was pretty clear that the price increase was the reason.  I am sure that will go into the bin as I have found that any company that makes a suddenly price increase without any warning it is coming has already convinced themselves that they are making the right decision and any complaints can be brushed away as outliers.

Of course, the funny thing is that if they decided tomorrow that the price hike was a huge mistake and they declared that they were rolling back to $15 a month, I wouldn’t go back.  I was bothered by the old price, but not enough to be moved to action.  But now that the price change has made me reflect on the value of Zwift, I wouldn’t go back, even at the old price.

It is generally a mistake to make users think too hard about the value your service offers.

Anyway, I am now in the market for an exercise app that works with the BlueTooth connection to our Schwinn IC4 exercise bike, preferably something without a recurring subscription model.  And if such a thing doesn’t exist, then I can just peddle away without an app.  I’ll just use the timer on my phone or listen to a podcast that is about the right length and not worry about it.

The Site

A while back WP.com introduced Blaze, a paid ad program that allows you to promote your blog.  Back when it first showed up they gave me a $50 credit and I tried it… and it was not worth the cash.  65 clicks into my promoted post seemed like a joke for that much money.

Then they sent out surveys and talked about how they were making it better.  So when they gave me another $50 credit this month I decided to try it again.  This time I chose my post about Balatro, which I though was maybe a bit more mainstream for a video game ad.

And this time they are telling me the ad pulled in almost 500 clicks.  A serious improvement… if it is true.  The problem is that if I go into the WP.com stats and look at how many clicks that post received during the run of the ad, it is actually closer to 250.

Still an improvement… but the stats on my admin page show clicks from all sources, just not the ad, and while traffic often dies off after a day or two, it can still carry on for weeks in little drips and drabs.  So there is no saying that all of those 250 were from the ad.

In the end, even if it was a great improvement and added another 25 to 50 views a day over a ten day campaign, would you spend $50 of your own money for that result?  I wouldn’t.

Meanwhile, just because I need an excuse to put an image in here somewhere, the surges of direct traffic continue to pop up now and again.

Direct traffic as a source in April 2024

However, these surges are a lot less regular than they were back in November and December.  Search engine traffic… which means Google 99% of the time, remain steady.

Also, WTF is going on with the Google Analytics site?  Have they just broken it on Firefox to be dicks?

Finally, the Flag Counter widget informs me that somebody from a new country visited the blog in April.  Welcome random person from Palau!  I hope you found something interesting!

First new county in a few years

Palau, a trust territory of the United States in the wake of the second world war, is an independent island nation, but has two ZIP codes assigned to it and is still served by the US Postal Service.

One Year Ago

I did what I believed to be my final post specifically covering April Fools at Blizzard, Blizz having gone pretty cool on the whole thing since around 2017. We’ll see if this pans out.

The Fellowship and Fire update came to New World, bringing with is seasons and season passes.

LOTRO offered a limited time level 140 boost, which was the cap at the time.  I bought one and went through the process of using it.

Niantic was going after remote raiding in Pokemon Go.

Honest Game Trailers took on the Civilization Series, which aligned nicely with my own brief retrospective on the games.  I did my own round up of the series, with some ranking.  All versions I looked at were playable in some form.  I even went and played Civilization VI.  I am still not a fan.

In Wrath Classic the group was culling Stratholme with Arthas.  I also had some minor gripes about Wrath Classic.  We also had the Activision Blizzard Q1 2023 financials.

I wrote about five EVE Online maps that were better than the two in-game maps the game offers.  Spoiler: fifth place was a multi-way tie, so it was way more than five.  Meanwhile, somebody did a video of the 2007 to 2022 null sec influence map… which was one of the maps on my list.

Meanwhile, as we drew closer to the EVE 20th anniversary, CCP was refurbing the EVE monument, which included the ability to get your character name on the plaques if you missed that at the ten year anniversary.  They also outlined the road to Alliance Tournament XIX.

I also did a Friday Bullet Points post about EVE Online that covered the new launcher beta, another in-game theft, a reminder about the monument thing, Fraternity Keepstars, and the MER.  Oh, and they also announced that EVE Anywhere was going away.  Cloud Computing was sooo 2016.

In the game, the Imperium and B2 coalitions managed to win the armor time against Fraternity’s Keepstar in X47L-Q, a battle than ran through down time, so we all got kicked and had to log back in again to resume the fight.  Having lost the armor timer, Fraternity and its allies did not contest the final timer and the Keepstar was destroyed.  The Imperium then dialed-back operations in Pure Blind.

I also looked into March 2023 destruction in the game.

Then there was the a16z Project Awakening that CCP was going on about.  I was not a fan.  Since Pearl Abyss was all in on this blockchain scam nonsense, I wondered who should have bought CCP back in 2018.

I was wondering what Atari… or the company that owned the Atari name… was actually in the business of doing.

I was also kind of wondering what the Metaverse Standards Forum was doing… another working group for a nonsense idea.

I did another Friday Bullet Points post, this time about the Worldle-verse, where Wordle itself hit puzzle 666, Spotify was shutting down Heardle, a DOS version of Wordle, a WoW focused version of Wordle, and Digits from the NYT which they have since shut down.

I was fiddling with AI bots, asking what the difference between an MMO and an MMORPG was, why there were so many fantasy MMORPS, and how to find a warm ocean in Minecraft.

And over on Twitter, which was still Twitter then, Elon’s threat to take away blue checkmarks for verified users and make them only available for sale failed to appear on the appointed day… except for the New York Times, which Elon felt was spreading the “woke mind virus” or some BS.  “Woke” quickly came to mean “something I don’t like” when used by Elon.  The unpaid for blue checks eventually were taken away in the back half of the month.  The blue check mark went from “this celeb or whoever is who they say they are” to “This bozo paid $8.”

Five Years Ago

April Fools, once a grand tradition at Blizzard, was pretty sparse.

Google Plus went away.

The Minecraft Village & Pillage update landed.

CCP loudly announced the removal and banning of CSM13 member Brisc Rubal.  And then in what I described as the “nightmare scenario,” CCP hedged, promising to investigate further.  And then they exonerated Brisc and restored him apologizing for all the trouble. A disastrous example of “measure once, cut twice” by CCP.  And Brisc didn’t get his reputation back.  I still see people who think he must have been guilty and somehow worked a deal or threatened to sue in order to get CCP to back down.

CCP also announced the CSM14 election timeline.  Brisc opted to stay away from that.  And the April update brought capital nerfs, especially for the Rorqual.  Hilmar was starting on something about player retention.  And CCP unveiled the Katia Sai monument in Saisio.

Actually out in space myself in EVE Online, I was flying with Liberty Squad as we visited The Spire for a fight over a Sotiyo as well as busting some other structures and setting some timers.  There was also an op from Delve to Lonetrek and another Reavers Race.

NantWorks handed H1Z1… or Z1 Battle Royale… back to Daybreak, having failed to make a go of the challenge of reviving the game.

I reviewed a bit of the coverage the EverQuest 20th anniversary got.  There was also some changes to the Selo progression server, which reflected on what players wanted versus what Daybreak was offering.

I was also playing World of Warcraft, binging on pet battles and catching some new pets.  We got some news about the approaching update, which would unlock flying in Battle for Azeroth.  That promoted me to get the first part of the pathfinder achievement done.  I also got my first alt to level 120, though he hadn’t even been to Zandalar or Kul’Tiras.  Pet battles will do ya.

And I came up with a guide to criticizing games you do not like.

Ten Years Ago

Spacewar! for the PDP-1 was up via emulation on the internet archive.

The Elder Scrolls Online launched, hitting its planned April 4th date.  I did not play.

I was diving in to Pokemon X & Y, having returned to Pokemon at last.

The strategy group played a game of Civilization V that ended with a win via nuclear terror.

The Kickstarter campaign for the book A History of the Great Empires of EVE Online kicked off.  We were also watching Pantheon: Rise of the Something was splutter along after failing its Kickstarter campaign.

In EVE Online proper there was Burn Jita 3, which seemed like less of a thing the third time out.  There was a video.  Then there was the CSM9 vote.  At least there were only 36 candidates on the ballot.

In null sec we were shooting Black Legion things, because that is what we did in the CFC.  I was just happy to be using lasers, those skills having been trained up amongst my 120 million skill points.  There were also some posts about being space famous and an attempt at in-game blackmail.

But on the broader CCP front, World of Darkness was officially cancelled.

On the iPad I was playing Hearthstone and QuizUp… for about a week.

Turbine announced that Beornings were coming to Lord of the Rings Online.

SOE gave me a key for seven days of Landmark, so I went and tried it out.  SOE also announced H1Z1 and began their love affair with Reddit and got their new All Access plan running.  While on the old school front, Dave Georgeson said SOE never plans to shut down EverQuest.

Warlords of Draenor was still a long ways away.  But Blizzard was doing well on other fronts.  The instance group finished up Zul’gurub.  And there was the usual April Fools stuff.

Over at GamesIndustry.biz they have a round up of what was going in April of 2014.

Fifteen Years Ago

Dave Arneson passed away.  He was, with Gary Gygax, the co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons, that so-influential gaming system that has shaped how we view fantasy swords and sorcery games for over 30 years now.  There would be no World of Warcraft as it is today without Dungeons & Dragons.

We also saw the launch of SOE’s Free Realms, which stuttered a bit on day one.  Soon though they had millions of people signed up for the game, but since it was free to play, not a common thing at the time, that was no indication of revenue.  My daughter tried to sign up four times, so that was at least four out of the millions.  SOE was advertising the game heavily on Cartoon Network.  But FR did not run on MacOS, and my daughter was running on an iMac at the time.  I knew she has signed up because her email used to get routed to me.

In EVE Online I was mulling over the Apocrypha expansion and configuring up a Cerebus to try out as a mission runner.  I was also doing invention to make tech II missiles, which meant data cores and research agents and such, and pondering the idea that maybe using your skills should increase your skill points or something.

As usual, there was much ado about World of Warcraft.

• PETA was planning some event in WoW.  I had trouble believing it wasn’t a joke.
• In a blinding flash of the obvious, Nielsen reported that a lot of guys play WoW.
• There was Noblegarden, or Blizzard Easter, and its egg collecting frenzy.
• There was my daughter and I trying to swim to Silvermoon to find a pet for her hunter.
• I couldn’t find a copy of The Burning Crusade at Fry’s.
• After hitting level 30 my daughter, my mom, and I were all riding around together on our night elf cat mounts.
• And the instance group, after a hiatus, got back together, did a warm up run in the Shadow Labyrinth, then went on to finally collect the head of Ingvar the Plunderer.  After that it was on to The Nexus.

I was sniggering like a pre-teen about Cornhole.  Also, there was something about Honest Scrap that was a meme, back when memes weren’t just pop culture references.

I was looking back on two years of the Wii and the games we played on it.

On the TV we were apparently watching Castle and Dollhouse.

And then there were new comers as we brought home two wee kittens.

Twenty Years Ago

City of Heroes launched in the US.  Closed down by NCsoft in 2012, the game lives on with a privately run server called City of Heroes Rebirth, built on the original code base.

Lineage II launched in North America.  This successor to the Lineage never reached the original’s popularity, but hung on to its own user base.

Thirty Five Years Ago

The Nintendo Game Boy launched in Japan.  Perhaps the definitive hand held console for a generation, it lasted from the Tetris era into the original Pokemon series of games.

Most Viewed Posts in April

1. Timing those Lucky Eggs for Friendship Milestones in Pokemon Go
2. WoW Classic Season of Discovery Phase 3 Kicks Off
3. Wake up sweetie, Cataclysm Classic is Almost Home…
4. Now Playing – Balatro
5. Web Banking, The Acquisition, and the Start of the Great Decline
6. Ahbazon Fight Sees 100+ Dreads Destroyed over Fortizar Hull Timer
7. The Contested Seat – Every Vote Counts
8. Pokemon Go Now Lets You Use a Lucky Egg at Friendship Milestones
9. The Altar of Zul and Jintha’alor
10. Answering Gaming Questions with AI – Finding a Warm Ocean in Minecraft
11. Alamo teechs u 2 play DURID!
12. EverQuest Starting Points – West Karana Where the Scope of the World Begins

Search Terms of the Month

eve origin of the northern coalition
[Pretty sure it started in the north…]

zombie heat gay game
[Look man, just leave me out of this…]

“ttc-collective-agreement-2020”
[Widely criticized, now just a PanFam thing]

is jetpack replaced wordpress app
[Sort of…]

valheim how much iron do i need for the entire game
[All of it. Seriously, later biomes use it.]

how to get edencom lp
[Run Edencom missions?]

Game Time from ManicTime

In the end, April was pretty evenly divided.  I came in on Conan Exiles and out on Wrath Classic really.

• Conan Exiles – 29.56%
• WoW Classic – 23.75%
• Balatro – 21.81%
• Valheim – 13.00%
• EVE Online – 5.50%
• EverQuest – 6.39%

Balatro

A deck building rogue-like poker based card game.  That ate up some time.  I’ve kind of hit a wall on getting past 80K points in a single hand to be a boss blind.  The cards have failed me there a few times.

Conan Exiles

We were all-in on this at the start of the month.  Many hours were invested.  We explored, found horses, did our first dungeon… then it kind of faded.  It didn’t help that GPortal’s LA data center, where our server is hosted, was down for a full weekend this month.  That’ll break your stride.

EVE Online

I did undock and go on a couple of fleets this month.  I left my mark on zKillboard to at least provide proof of life.  But I haven’t been all that invested.  The interesting ops have been running in early EU time, which is the only time PanFam and Fraternity will show up.

EverQuest

I continue to explore some of the old places still there in Norrath, with erratic tales of the old days based on foggy memories and rose colored glasses.  Not done with this yet.

Pokemon Go

Just a few more Team Rocket leaders to go to unlock level 45 for my with and I.  At least we still earn xp as we try to knock down that one final objective, so we’ll be a few million points into that level once we finish the task.

• Level: 44 (138% of the way to 45 in xp, 3 of 4 level tasks complete)
• Pokedex status: 822 (+1) caught, 836 (+2) seen
• Vivillon Evolutions obtained: 15 of 20
• Pokemon I want: Three specific Scatterbugs; Sandstorm, Icy Snow, and Meadow
• Current buddy: Zygarde

Valheim

We had a slow down in Valheim as Conan Exiles became a focus for several weeks.  Also, the Mistlands were a bit too oppressive.  Now that I have banished the mist… at least on my client… I am going to see if we can unlock some of the resources of the biome as the Ashlands loom.

WoW Classic

We started off the month having spent weeks away from the game.  But the coming of Cataclysm Classic awakened the desire to carry on… at least in Potshot and I.  I spent time working on one last alt who is already level 79 as I write this.  I will have some options going into a revamped Azeroth late in May.

Zwift

Zwift gave up on its bonus experience for weekly usage streaks, so my unearned advancement up the level path has slowed down.  Not that levels mean much, aside from cosmetic unlocks, and I am many levels from anything interesting.  But still I get on and ride.

• Level – 27 (+1)
• Distanced cycled – 1,973 miles (+35 miles)
• Elevation climbed – 72,198 (+1,457 feet)
  
• Calories burned – 59,692 (+1,075)

Coming Up

I wrote a post about a number of things coming up on the WoW front in May.  Probably the most on point is the coming of Cataclysm Classic.  The pre-patch lands today and the expansion on May 20th.  The will no doubt generate some sort of assessment of Wrath Classic and a bit of history about Cata.

It is also the Capsuleer Day celebration in EVE Online.  I’ll get to that, but it looks like that day, the game’s 21st anniversary this year, will be celebrated all month long.

I also strongly suspect that we’ll get the Ashlands update for Valheim in May.  They are close.

I have to travel quite a bit more than usual in May, so my posting streak is at risk of being broken… not that such a streak has any real meaning.  But it is a thing.

The Site

WordPress.com always wants to make sure I have something to write about in this section every month.  This time around I am back on about email subscriptions.

Last month I was complaining that they were only getting delievered to my inbox every other day.  This month… that stopped completely.  No email delivered with my posts any day of the week.  This coincided with WP.com removing a bunch of the email section of the subscription UI they put in a while back that looked like they wanted to take on Substack.  They have clearly changed their mind or are covering up some failure.

Anyway, if you are still getting email updates from here, WP.com clearly thinks you are special.

Also mentioned last month was the RSS feed issue, where WP.com is updating the feed only every few days.  I see this from other sites that use WP as their host, like Game Developer.  I will see nothing in Feedly for three or four days from them, then suddenly there will be 35 posts.

If that sort of burst behavior doesn’t bother you, carry on.  If it does, you can use the Feedburner RSS feed, though recommending a Google solution to a problem feels like herasy these days.  How have they not shut down Feedburner yet?  It must drive ad revenue in some way.

WP.com has also gotten extremely finicky about being able to leave comments without having a WP.com account.  It seems that you either need to be completely logged in or be willing to leave a full anonymous comment, with no in between.  Thanks a lot WP.

Finally, the wierd direct source bursts of traffic continued this month, though it has grown more erratic and seems to be tapering off somewhat.

The Direct traffic line so far this year

Basically, if it wasn’t there I would be getting about 500 page views a day, 300 of which would be from Google search.  But with that direct traffic the daily views run between 550 and 1,300.  That makes direct traffic the top source so far this year.

Traffic sources so far in 2024

I don’t know what it means, but it does seem to be driving ad revenue.  Go money.

Also, I strongly recommend you use Ad Block when visiting here.  I want the bots to pay my hosting, not you.  I currently use uBlock Origin for my own ad blocking needs.

One Year Ago

We were in Vegas during the Pro Bowl, those that was pretty much on accident.  We didn’t go see it or anything.

Meta was trying to get a younger demographic into Horizon Worlds.  I was also still on Twitter, though the alternatives were ramping up.

At Enad Global 7, the Q4 2022 financials celebrated the start of the My Singing Monsters hype bubble.

I was going on about some of the barriers in the way of going back to play old MMORPGs.  I was also pondering what Twitch drops do for games.

Activision Blizzard Q4 2022 financials were out and, while Dragonflight did well, it clearly did not break any records.   They were also trying to drum up pre-sales for Diablo IV.  Would that mean that season 28 would be the last season for Diablo III?  Probably.  Meanwhile, Mike Ybarra was pleading poverty or some absolute BS.

I was already on about the whole Cataclysm Classic question.  It would not be announced until BlizzCon later in the year.  I was also wondering when the peak era for crafting was in WoW.

In Wrath Classic we were working on the Lunar Festival achievements, since those were now available.  We all achieved the title of The Elder.  I was also going pretty heavy on the Wrath Classic dailies.  We ran off and did Violet Hold and Gundrak.

CCP was finally putting their Microsoft Excel plugin in to beta testing.  There was also the January 2023 MER to go over and a PLEX for Good campaign for earthquake relief in Turkey which raised $26K.

I did a Friday Bullet Points post about EVE Online that covered the Photon UI, pink SKINs, Imperium War Bonds, and the company financials.  I also started looking at ship destruction in New Eden and I hit 260 million skill points on my main.

At the CSM17 winter summit there was a dubious proposal about improving PvE.

Actually in game, the collapse of the FI.RE coalition ended up with the South East Agreement in null sec.

I had something about the postcards in Pokemon Go.  What are they ever there for?

And WordPress.com changed out the WordPress app out for the JetPack app, though aside from a color change, I couldn’t tell you why.

Five Years Ago

Epic Games had announced their digital storefront the previous December (2019), but we were finally getting a deeper look at their strategy for taking on Steam.  One word: Exclusives.  (Some of which were already up for sale on Steam, then withdrawn, making as many people angry as happy.)

Over at Activision-Blizzard they announced record annual revenues for 2018, then laid off 8% of their staff.  I suppose, in hindsight, they predicted 2019 correctly, but laying people off while execs get bonuses is never a good look.

Daybreak gave us some details about their planned special rules EverQuest II PvP server.  On the same front, the plans for the EverQuest anniversary servers sounded a bit muddled.  They gave us a revised plan for all servers before the month was out.

Meanwhile, the PlanetSide Arena launch, pushed back to March, was pushed out again, this time until “summer,” with a planned simultaneous Playstation 4 launch given as a reason.

I also wondered what EverQuest III should even look like, were it a possibility.  I doubt that it is, but it is fun to speculate.

All of that aside, with the approach of the EverQuest 20th anniversary I started logging in to play a bit with a fresh character.  I started on Vox, a standard rules server, with an eye on the tutorial.  I ran through the revolt in Glooming Deep.

On the LOTRO Legendary server I was wrapping up in Eriador.  It was time to start considering Moria.

I was also rolling back into WoW and Battle for Azeroth for a bit.  It was a change up from LOTRO.

On the EVE Online front it was announced there would be no alliance tournament for 2019.  The February update brought us some fixes and the Guardians Gala event.  CCP was also talking about letting people buy skills straight from the character sheet.  There was also talk of a new launcher coming.

I wrote something about the time zones of New Eden, it being a world spanning, 24 hour game.

Burn Jita was back again, kicking off with explosions as usual.

I wrote a bit about the city of Waterdeep, the heart of TorilMUD.

Twitch offered me a free trial in Final Fantasy XIV, but I couldn’t get it to work.

I was on about there being no good expansions again.

And there was word of a smaller Switch, the end of the Wii Shop Channel, eports was stomping its feet and demanding to be taken seriously, and the Olympics rejecting esports all wrapped up in a Friday bullet points post.

Ten Years Ago

A lot of people got their panties in a twist about Steam tags.  It was the literal end of civilization as we knew it… for about 30 minutes.

EA handed over the running of Camelot Unchained and Ultima Online to Broadsword.

I spent some time with Warcraft III attempting to discover the pre-history of WoW.

There was Diablo III version 2.0, and the changes looked promising.

On the World of Warcraft front, we were still talking about Warlords of Draenor.  Pre-orders were announced an there was a rumor that the expansion would cost $60, which seemed a bit steep.  Also, insta-90s looked to be coming as a cash shop item.  Would all of that stem the tide on subscription decline?

Meanwhile, I finished the last of the LFR raids, witnessing the downfall of Garrosh Hellscream.  For all of the complaints about LFR, I enjoyed my raid tourism.  The instance group did Grim Batol, then made the jump to Pandaria before returning with slightly better equipment for Heroic Deadmines.

I was wondering why PvP seemed to be a requirement for all MMOs.

I got into The Edler Scrolls Online beta and declared it Skyrim-like enough for me, then never played it again.

Brad McQuaid’s Pantheon: Further Falling of the Fallen Kickstarter campaign was winding down, doomed to failure.  There was talk about what would happen next.  Plan B anybody?

I ran another EVE Online screen shot contest to give away some items from the Second Decade Collector’s Edition which I scored for free… after having bought it for myself.  And then there was the monument and drone assist and campaign medals and the repercussions of B-R5RB to talk about.

I wondered what was going to happen with people being given free reign in Landmark.

And, finally, it was the end for Flappy Bird.  I grabbed that from GameIndustry.biz and their look back to February 2014.

Fifteen Years Ago

My 8800GT video card died.  That was the second one to go.

I had been looking at my dis-used GAX Online account and wondered what gamer social networking needed to be viable.  Since then, GAX Online has shut down.

PLEX showed up in EVE Online fifteen years ago.  It doesn’t seem like it has been around for that long.  And then there was the whole Goonswarm disbandment of Band of Brothers, and act that effectively ended the Great War, and which made the BBC news.  This led to talk of how much control players should have over their destiny.

In game I got the mining foreman mindlink as a storyline mission drop, I upgraded to a Raven Navy Isssue, and finally bought the freighter for which I had been training, and got some ships blown up in the Worlds Collide mission… again. There was EVE Vegas, which was just a player run meet up at that point.

I was still active in Lord of the Rings Online, playing characters on the Nimrodel server.  Looking for a class on which to affix the Reynaldo Fabulous name, I put up a poll on the subject.  While Minstrel won the poll, Reynaldo ended up being a hunter with a fabulous hat.  And when I wasn’t fooling around with alts, I was leveling up my captain who made it all the way to Rivendell at one point.

While over in Azeroth, it was revealed that my mom plays WoW.  I wondered at how active Westfall seems to be most of the time.  But the answer to that seems to be the Deadmines, which I ran my mom and daughter through. (No dungeon finder back then!)  There was a little pet drama with my daughter who wanted a raptor.  I also managed my first exalted status with a faction in WoW, the Kalu’ak in Northrend.  I wanted that fishing pole.

On the Wii, we had Wii Music, which was crap, and LEGO Batman, which suffered a bit from being yet another variation in the successful LEGO video game franchise.

And then there was the usual blog war shenanigans as somebody was still looking to blame WoW and WoW players for Warhammer Online’s failure to meets its subscriber goals.  I think we’re all over that now, right?  Warhammer did what it did on its own faults and merits in a market that was well known before they shipped.

And Darkfall finally launched and began its short life as… whatever it was.  I didn’t play it.

Twenty Years Ago

The aptly named Gates of Discord expansion for EverQuest launched.  While Smed called its bug-ridden launch “SOE’s worst mistake in five years” it did see the game to its subscription peak of 550K and introduced instancing as the default dungeon mode, something WoW would make a genre default soon enough.

The creator of the original Castle Wolfenstein game from 1981, Silas Warner,  passed away at the age of 54.  I played that game a lot back on my Apple II.  Also, that seems young now.

Twenty-Five Years Ago

Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri, arguably one of the best entries in the Civilization series, ships.  My only nit-pick is that it ran full screen at pre-set resolutions so, unlike its predecessor Civilization II, if you play it today it either has to be in a small window or distorted full screen on your likely much-bigger-than-1999 monitor.

Star Wars: X-Wing Alliance also launched, one of the better Star Wars titles.  But Star Wars was never plagued by bad titles the way Star Trek has been over the years

Most Viewed Posts in February

1. Just a Lockpicking Minute…
2. Twitter and the Unleashing of the Great Blue Hope
3. The New System Purge of Video Games
4. Timing those Lucky Eggs for Friendship Milestones in Pokemon Go
5. Bonemass and Mountain Fever in Valheim
6. Stock Options and the IPO
7. Moving in to a New Computer Once More
8. Sailing into a Lightly Modded Valheim
9. EverQuest Starting Points – What Can I Even Say About Qeynos?
10. Quote of the Day – The Fourth A stands for… what now?
11. Quote of the Day – But Think of the Shareholder Value!
12. A Look into January 2024 Destruction in EVE Online

Once again, the direct traffic surge favored recent posts, so there were only two carry overs from last month.  The Lucky Eggs post is a Google search favorite, which is what keeps it on the list.

Search Terms of the Month

“wagering-agreement-meaning-in-nepali”
[I guess I keep this going by posting it]

“aveo-enterprise-agreement”
[Oh now what is this?]

battle of m2-xfe titans lost by corporation
[How about by alliance? I can do by alliance]

poe daily game like wordle
[There are many…]

“civ5-research-agreement-worth-it”
[Still yes…]

gay game
[Not my bag, but don’t let me stop you…]

gay game pc
[Still not much help here]

game java sex gay
[Does being in Java change anything?]

геи игры
[Saying it in Russian doesn’t go anywhere either]

Game Time from ManicTime

The numbers this month pretty much confirm what I probably could have told you based on my gut; I spent a lot of time playing Valheim, to the exclusion of other titles.

• Valheim – 89.63%
• EVE Online – 5.08%
• EverQuest – 3.40%
• Forza Horizon 4 – 1.13%
• Wreckfest – 0.50%
• WoW Classic – 0.26%

The biggest change was WoW Classic, which had been topping the list for months.  I clearly took a month off from Azeroth.

EVE Online

I did get in and go on a few fleets this past month.  I did not spend a lot of time playing in New Eden, but I kept my PI farm going.  That is my sole source of revenue these days, though with the demand for mechanical parts, which among other things are required for fuel blocks, PI is worth about a billion ISK a month to me.  That and SRP is what keeps me solvent.

EverQuest

I am not so much playing EverQuest as touring.  I have been and out for my posting series for the 25th anniversary.  A nostalgia tour of my own.  The visuals stimulate memories which I then take and turn into rambling, semi-coherent posts.  The touring will continue until my writing style improves… or I get bored… or we get past the anniversaries.  The $1,500 Fippy Fest 2024 in-person ticket price certainly did not endear me to Darkpaw.

Pokemon Go

My wife and I are very close to hitting level 45… or we would be if we had finished up that last task.  You have to defeat 50 Team Rocket Go bosses to get to 45, and I stand at 25 defeated and my wife at 20.  We still have some remedial work to do on that front.  It could take a bit.  But at least we can still earn xp towards level 46 while we do it.

• Level: 44 (75% of the way to 45 in xp, 3 of 4 level tasks complete)
• Pokedex status: 818 (+3) caught, 832 (+3) seen
• Vivillon Evolutions obtained: 15 of 20
• Pokemon I want: Three specific Scatterbugs; Sandstorm, Icy Snow, and Meadow
• Current buddy: Arctibax

Valheim

Whether or not Valheim was the right choice, it was the choice I jumped into in February.  I have pretty much taked a break from WoW all month to play Valheim, where there is always something to do.  We are currently in the mountains mining silver and search for the next boss.  I’ve geared up enough that I have ventured into the plains a few times and lived to tell the tale.  The mistlands await and maybe the Ashlands will be done before we burn out… so to speak.

WoW Classic

A very quiet month.  I did spend a little time in Wrath Classic working on my rogue, who is up to level 72 now.  Season of Discovery hasn’t held much interest for me since we got past Westfall.  That is kind part of the nostalgia barrier I guess.  Happy memories of Westfall and a bit after that.

Zwift

I managed to get on the bike every weekend this month.  Color that a win.  Meanwhile, the lower level curve meant I racked up three more undeserved levels.  Still no glowing neon tire sets available to me yet.

• Level – 21 (+2)
• Distanced cycled – 1,879 miles (+59 miles)
• Elevation climbed – 69,829 (+1,909 feet)
  
• Calories burned – 57,294 (+1,609)

Coming Up

Apparently one aspect of getting old is constantly asking things like “Is it March already? How did that happen?” aloud to your aging friends and family, who all declare their mystification as well.

So yeah, March.

That means that we will hit the EverQuest 25th anniversary on the 16th.  Expect a post.  Also, I will likely carry on with my own series of starting points posts.  A few more zones and then a couple about getting places.  I will have to run from Qeynos to Freeport.

You can expect some more Valheim I am sure.  Not done there yet.  At least not until we get to the mistlands… though reading up on that, things will get more complicated there.  Something about magic and a mana-like player resource.  We’ll see.  We still have the mountains to finish and the plains to conquor.

I will have to cast an eye towards WoW at some point.  Things are going on.  Cataclysm Classic looms.  Descisions will need to be made.

And then whatever news the wind might bring I suppose. I guess we already know that Microsoft is laying more people off in March.  We’ll have to see who else carries on with this trend.

The Site

WordPress.com always wants to make sure I have something to write about in this section every month.  This time around I am back on about email subscriptions.

Last month I was complaining that they were only getting delievered to my inbox every other day.  This month… that stopped completely.  No email delivered with my posts any day of the week.  This coincided with WP.com removing a bunch of the email section of the subscription UI they put in a while back that looked like they wanted to take on Substack.  They have clearly changed their mind or are covering up some failure.

Anyway, if you are still getting email updates from here, WP.com clearly thinks you are special.

Also mentioned last month was the RSS feed issue, where WP.com is updating the feed only every few days.  I see this from other sites that use WP as their host, like Game Developer.  I will see nothing in Feedly for three or four days from them, then suddenly there will be 35 posts.

If that sort of burst behavior doesn’t bother you, carry on.  If it does, you can use the Feedburner RSS feed, though recommending a Google solution to a problem feels like herasy these days.  How have they not shut down Feedburner yet?  It must drive ad revenue in some way.

WP.com has also gotten extremely finicky about being able to leave comments without having a WP.com account.  It seems that you either need to be completely logged in or be willing to leave a full anonymous comment, with no in between.  Thanks a lot WP.

Finally, the wierd direct source bursts of traffic continued this month, though it has grown more erratic and seems to be tapering off somewhat.

The Direct traffic line so far this year

Basically, if it wasn’t there I would be getting about 500 page views a day, 300 of which would be from Google search.  But with that direct traffic the daily views run between 550 and 1,300.  That makes direct traffic the top source so far this year.

Traffic sources so far in 2024

I don’t know what it means, but it does seem to be driving ad revenue.  Go money.

Also, I strongly recommend you use Ad Block when visiting here.  I want the bots to pay my hosting, not you.  I currently use uBlock Origin for my own ad blocking needs.

One Year Ago

We were in Vegas during the Pro Bowl, those that was pretty much on accident.  We didn’t go see it or anything.

Meta was trying to get a younger demographic into Horizon Worlds.  I was also still on Twitter, though the alternatives were ramping up.

At Enad Global 7, the Q4 2022 financials celebrated the start of the My Singing Monsters hype bubble.

I was going on about some of the barriers in the way of going back to play old MMORPGs.  I was also pondering what Twitch drops do for games.

Activision Blizzard Q4 2022 financials were out and, while Dragonflight did well, it clearly did not break any records.   They were also trying to drum up pre-sales for Diablo IV.  Would that mean that season 28 would be the last season for Diablo III?  Probably.  Meanwhile, Mike Ybarra was pleading poverty or some absolute BS.

I was already on about the whole Cataclysm Classic question.  It would not be announced until BlizzCon later in the year.  I was also wondering when the peak era for crafting was in WoW.

In Wrath Classic we were working on the Lunar Festival achievements, since those were now available.  We all achieved the title of The Elder.  I was also going pretty heavy on the Wrath Classic dailies.  We ran off and did Violet Hold and Gundrak.

CCP was finally putting their Microsoft Excel plugin in to beta testing.  There was also the January 2023 MER to go over and a PLEX for Good campaign for earthquake relief in Turkey which raised $26K.

I did a Friday Bullet Points post about EVE Online that covered the Photon UI, pink SKINs, Imperium War Bonds, and the company financials.  I also started looking at ship destruction in New Eden and I hit 260 million skill points on my main.

At the CSM17 winter summit there was a dubious proposal about improving PvE.

Actually in game, the collapse of the FI.RE coalition ended up with the South East Agreement in null sec.

I had something about the postcards in Pokemon Go.  What are they ever there for?

And WordPress.com changed out the WordPress app out for the JetPack app, though aside from a color change, I couldn’t tell you why.

Five Years Ago

Epic Games had announced their digital storefront the previous December (2019), but we were finally getting a deeper look at their strategy for taking on Steam.  One word: Exclusives.  (Some of which were already up for sale on Steam, then withdrawn, making as many people angry as happy.)

Over at Activision-Blizzard they announced record annual revenues for 2018, then laid off 8% of their staff.  I suppose, in hindsight, they predicted 2019 correctly, but laying people off while execs get bonuses is never a good look.

Daybreak gave us some details about their planned special rules EverQuest II PvP server.  On the same front, the plans for the EverQuest anniversary servers sounded a bit muddled.  They gave us a revised plan for all servers before the month was out.

Meanwhile, the PlanetSide Arena launch, pushed back to March, was pushed out again, this time until “summer,” with a planned simultaneous Playstation 4 launch given as a reason.

I also wondered what EverQuest III should even look like, were it a possibility.  I doubt that it is, but it is fun to speculate.

All of that aside, with the approach of the EverQuest 20th anniversary I started logging in to play a bit with a fresh character.  I started on Vox, a standard rules server, with an eye on the tutorial.  I ran through the revolt in Glooming Deep.

On the LOTRO Legendary server I was wrapping up in Eriador.  It was time to start considering Moria.

I was also rolling back into WoW and Battle for Azeroth for a bit.  It was a change up from LOTRO.

On the EVE Online front it was announced there would be no alliance tournament for 2019.  The February update brought us some fixes and the Guardians Gala event.  CCP was also talking about letting people buy skills straight from the character sheet.  There was also talk of a new launcher coming.

I wrote something about the time zones of New Eden, it being a world spanning, 24 hour game.

Burn Jita was back again, kicking off with explosions as usual.

I wrote a bit about the city of Waterdeep, the heart of TorilMUD.

Twitch offered me a free trial in Final Fantasy XIV, but I couldn’t get it to work.

I was on about there being no good expansions again.

And there was word of a smaller Switch, the end of the Wii Shop Channel, eports was stomping its feet and demanding to be taken seriously, and the Olympics rejecting esports all wrapped up in a Friday bullet points post.

Ten Years Ago

A lot of people got their panties in a twist about Steam tags.  It was the literal end of civilization as we knew it… for about 30 minutes.

EA handed over the running of Camelot Unchained and Ultima Online to Broadsword.

I spent some time with Warcraft III attempting to discover the pre-history of WoW.

There was Diablo III version 2.0, and the changes looked promising.

On the World of Warcraft front, we were still talking about Warlords of Draenor.  Pre-orders were announced an there was a rumor that the expansion would cost $60, which seemed a bit steep.  Also, insta-90s looked to be coming as a cash shop item.  Would all of that stem the tide on subscription decline?

Meanwhile, I finished the last of the LFR raids, witnessing the downfall of Garrosh Hellscream.  For all of the complaints about LFR, I enjoyed my raid tourism.  The instance group did Grim Batol, then made the jump to Pandaria before returning with slightly better equipment for Heroic Deadmines.

I was wondering why PvP seemed to be a requirement for all MMOs.

I got into The Edler Scrolls Online beta and declared it Skyrim-like enough for me, then never played it again.

Brad McQuaid’s Pantheon: Further Falling of the Fallen Kickstarter campaign was winding down, doomed to failure.  There was talk about what would happen next.  Plan B anybody?

I ran another EVE Online screen shot contest to give away some items from the Second Decade Collector’s Edition which I scored for free… after having bought it for myself.  And then there was the monument and drone assist and campaign medals and the repercussions of B-R5RB to talk about.

I wondered what was going to happen with people being given free reign in Landmark.

And, finally, it was the end for Flappy Bird.  I grabbed that from GameIndustry.biz and their look back to February 2014.

Fifteen Years Ago

My 8800GT video card died.  That was the second one to go.

I had been looking at my dis-used GAX Online account and wondered what gamer social networking needed to be viable.  Since then, GAX Online has shut down.

PLEX showed up in EVE Online fifteen years ago.  It doesn’t seem like it has been around for that long.  And then there was the whole Goonswarm disbandment of Band of Brothers, and act that effectively ended the Great War, and which made the BBC news.  This led to talk of how much control players should have over their destiny.

In game I got the mining foreman mindlink as a storyline mission drop, I upgraded to a Raven Navy Isssue, and finally bought the freighter for which I had been training, and got some ships blown up in the Worlds Collide mission… again. There was EVE Vegas, which was just a player run meet up at that point.

I was still active in Lord of the Rings Online, playing characters on the Nimrodel server.  Looking for a class on which to affix the Reynaldo Fabulous name, I put up a poll on the subject.  While Minstrel won the poll, Reynaldo ended up being a hunter with a fabulous hat.  And when I wasn’t fooling around with alts, I was leveling up my captain who made it all the way to Rivendell at one point.

While over in Azeroth, it was revealed that my mom plays WoW.  I wondered at how active Westfall seems to be most of the time.  But the answer to that seems to be the Deadmines, which I ran my mom and daughter through. (No dungeon finder back then!)  There was a little pet drama with my daughter who wanted a raptor.  I also managed my first exalted status with a faction in WoW, the Kalu’ak in Northrend.  I wanted that fishing pole.

On the Wii, we had Wii Music, which was crap, and LEGO Batman, which suffered a bit from being yet another variation in the successful LEGO video game franchise.

And then there was the usual blog war shenanigans as somebody was still looking to blame WoW and WoW players for Warhammer Online’s failure to meets its subscriber goals.  I think we’re all over that now, right?  Warhammer did what it did on its own faults and merits in a market that was well known before they shipped.

And Darkfall finally launched and began its short life as… whatever it was.  I didn’t play it.

Twenty Years Ago

The aptly named Gates of Discord expansion for EverQuest launched.  While Smed called its bug-ridden launch “SOE’s worst mistake in five years” it did see the game to its subscription peak of 550K and introduced instancing as the default dungeon mode, something WoW would make a genre default soon enough.

The creator of the original Castle Wolfenstein game from 1981, Silas Warner,  passed away at the age of 54.  I played that game a lot back on my Apple II.  Also, that seems young now.

Twenty-Five Years Ago

Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri, arguably one of the best entries in the Civilization series, ships.  My only nit-pick is that it ran full screen at pre-set resolutions so, unlike its predecessor Civilization II, if you play it today it either has to be in a small window or distorted full screen on your likely much-bigger-than-1999 monitor.

Star Wars: X-Wing Alliance also launched, one of the better Star Wars titles.  But Star Wars was never plagued by bad titles the way Star Trek has been over the years

Most Viewed Posts in February

1. Just a Lockpicking Minute…
2. Twitter and the Unleashing of the Great Blue Hope
3. The New System Purge of Video Games
4. Timing those Lucky Eggs for Friendship Milestones in Pokemon Go
5. Bonemass and Mountain Fever in Valheim
6. Stock Options and the IPO
7. Moving in to a New Computer Once More
8. Sailing into a Lightly Modded Valheim
9. EverQuest Starting Points – What Can I Even Say About Qeynos?
10. Quote of the Day – The Fourth A stands for… what now?
11. Quote of the Day – But Think of the Shareholder Value!
12. A Look into January 2024 Destruction in EVE Online

Once again, the direct traffic surge favored recent posts, so there were only two carry overs from last month.  The Lucky Eggs post is a Google search favorite, which is what keeps it on the list.

Search Terms of the Month

“wagering-agreement-meaning-in-nepali”
[I guess I keep this going by posting it]

“aveo-enterprise-agreement”
[Oh now what is this?]

battle of m2-xfe titans lost by corporation
[How about by alliance? I can do by alliance]

poe daily game like wordle
[There are many…]

“civ5-research-agreement-worth-it”
[Still yes…]

gay game
[Not my bag, but don’t let me stop you…]

gay game pc
[Still not much help here]

game java sex gay
[Does being in Java change anything?]

геи игры
[Saying it in Russian doesn’t go anywhere either]

Game Time from ManicTime

The numbers this month pretty much confirm what I probably could have told you based on my gut; I spent a lot of time playing Valheim, to the exclusion of other titles.

• Valheim – 89.63%
• EVE Online – 5.08%
• EverQuest – 3.40%
• Forza Horizon 4 – 1.13%
• Wreckfest – 0.50%
• WoW Classic – 0.26%

The biggest change was WoW Classic, which had been topping the list for months.  I clearly took a month off from Azeroth.

EVE Online

I did get in and go on a few fleets this past month.  I did not spend a lot of time playing in New Eden, but I kept my PI farm going.  That is my sole source of revenue these days, though with the demand for mechanical parts, which among other things are required for fuel blocks, PI is worth about a billion ISK a month to me.  That and SRP is what keeps me solvent.

EverQuest

I am not so much playing EverQuest as touring.  I have been and out for my posting series for the 25th anniversary.  A nostalgia tour of my own.  The visuals stimulate memories which I then take and turn into rambling, semi-coherent posts.  The touring will continue until my writing style improves… or I get bored… or we get past the anniversaries.  The $1,500 Fippy Fest 2024 in-person ticket price certainly did not endear me to Darkpaw.

Pokemon Go

My wife and I are very close to hitting level 45… or we would be if we had finished up that last task.  You have to defeat 50 Team Rocket Go bosses to get to 45, and I stand at 25 defeated and my wife at 20.  We still have some remedial work to do on that front.  It could take a bit.  But at least we can still earn xp towards level 46 while we do it.

• Level: 44 (75% of the way to 45 in xp, 3 of 4 level tasks complete)
• Pokedex status: 818 (+3) caught, 832 (+3) seen
• Vivillon Evolutions obtained: 15 of 20
• Pokemon I want: Three specific Scatterbugs; Sandstorm, Icy Snow, and Meadow
• Current buddy: Arctibax

Valheim

Whether or not Valheim was the right choice, it was the choice I jumped into in February.  I have pretty much taked a break from WoW all month to play Valheim, where there is always something to do.  We are currently in the mountains mining silver and search for the next boss.  I’ve geared up enough that I have ventured into the plains a few times and lived to tell the tale.  The mistlands await and maybe the Ashlands will be done before we burn out… so to speak.

WoW Classic

A very quiet month.  I did spend a little time in Wrath Classic working on my rogue, who is up to level 72 now.  Season of Discovery hasn’t held much interest for me since we got past Westfall.  That is kind part of the nostalgia barrier I guess.  Happy memories of Westfall and a bit after that.

Zwift

I managed to get on the bike every weekend this month.  Color that a win.  Meanwhile, the lower level curve meant I racked up three more undeserved levels.  Still no glowing neon tire sets available to me yet.

• Level – 21 (+2)
• Distanced cycled – 1,879 miles (+59 miles)
• Elevation climbed – 69,829 (+1,909 feet)
  
• Calories burned – 57,294 (+1,609)

Coming Up

Apparently one aspect of getting old is constantly asking things like “Is it March already? How did that happen?” aloud to your aging friends and family, who all declare their mystification as well.

So yeah, March.

That means that we will hit the EverQuest 25th anniversary on the 16th.  Expect a post.  Also, I will likely carry on with my own series of starting points posts.  A few more zones and then a couple about getting places.  I will have to run from Qeynos to Freeport.

You can expect some more Valheim I am sure.  Not done there yet.  At least not until we get to the mistlands… though reading up on that, things will get more complicated there.  Something about magic and a mana-like player resource.  We’ll see.  We still have the mountains to finish and the plains to conquor.

I will have to cast an eye towards WoW at some point.  Things are going on.  Cataclysm Classic looms.  Descisions will need to be made.

And then whatever news the wind might bring I suppose. I guess we already know that Microsoft is laying more people off in March.  We’ll have to see who else carries on with this trend.