December 2012 in Review

The Site

WordPress.com continues to fiddle with the site interface.  They have very much the same attitude as Google on this sort of thing, where it often seems more important for them to get a cool new feature out than to check to see if it is actually better than what was in place… or even if it breaks what was already in place.  Oh, and they always implement features first then wait half a day or so before posting something to explain that whatever it is you are raging about was on purpose.  So it can be a matter of two steps forward, one step back, one step to the side, and cha cha cha.

So we got, for example, maps that do little to indicate anything.  My little flag counter widget in the side bar is much more informative.   They removed the ability to search on image files based on date… because screw searching by date I guess. They also broke, then later removed completely, RSS feeds that allowed you to follow tags and categories across all of WordPress.com, an incredible powerful feature that they let rot.

On the step forward side of things, they have decided to report unique visitors as well as page views as part of their standard statistics.  I don’t know why it took them so long, but as of December 3rd, they were there.  So the in the graph now, light blue is page views, dark blue is uniques.

I ran Site Meter here for a few months at one point just to see how unique visitors compared to page views, and the ratio back then was generally about 7-8 uniques per 10 page views.  Now looking at the new stats, it seems to be around 6 uniques per 10 page views, which I guess means that people are staying longer or clicking on more things.  I guess that is good.  It would probably matter if the site generated ad revenue or such.  For now it is just another bit of statistical trivia for me to mull over.

One Year Ago

There was the usual looking back at the Highs and Lows of 2011.  And, hand-in-hand with that, there was the look forward at games I might play in 2012.

One of those games was Diablo III and another Torchlight II.  They were both vying for the mantle of successor to Diablo II.  So I tried to define the essence of Diablo II.

I also had some demands for 2011 and had to look at how that worked out.

I began my journey into null sec appropriately, by killing myself.  Then I saw titans, lit cynos, and got blown up.  But hey, a ship blows up every six seconds in EVE.  There was a war on, and it was announced we were going to be driven from Deklein.  And there was something about ganking tourism and three flavors of ravens.

There was the end of Star Wars Galaxies, though people were saying it had been dead for years.

Star Wars: The Old Republic went live, completing the changing of the Star Wars MMO guard, for all the lack of actual change that brought about.

EverQuest II and its free to play twin, EverQuest II Extended, were merged into a single fighting force of extraordinary magnitude or something.

Richard Garriott de Cayeux went a little nuts talking about his Ultimate RPG, his great fondness for EA, and the failure of Tabula Rasa and Ultima 8.  He seemed to try to be getting EA to join with him by talking to the press… and not to EA.  And then it was the Mayans.

Closer to planet Earth, the instance group was in the Realm of the Fae.

And I proved my laser tag prowess against a bunch of little girls.

Five Years Ago

December 2007 seemed to be a busy time for the SOE.  First there was the whole “moving a whole guild from test to a live server” brouhaha.  Then there was the rumor of SOE being purchased by Zapak Digital Entertainment.  And, finally, there was the deal with Live Gamer to take over transactions on the Station Exchange servers, at which time Smed himself said that this did not mean that they were going to open the flood gates of RMT on any of their servers not currently served by SOE’s own Station Exchange RMT plan.  All of which I wrapped up in one post.

The yearly EverQuest Nostalgia Tour was off to the usual activities.

I put up my predictions for the “Next EverQuest II Expansion,” which I have yet to score.  I will have to get a post together comparing The Shadow Odyssey with my own guesses.

The Saturday Night Permanent Floating Instance Group was finishing up Blackrock Depths.

Dr. Richard Bartle brought up the “why so much fantasy” question for its regular beating to death.

I was interviewed over at World IV.  So far that is the only interview I have ever been asked to do.

I lost my first battlecruiser to pirates in EVE Online.  Meanwhile, after pissing away a lot of ISK on invention, I was not getting a lot of results.

And I bought a new gaming computer full of Quad Core goodness.

New Linking Sites

The following blogs have linked this site in their blogroll, for which they have my thanks.

• Causual Gaming Chronicles (Pitrelli again!)
• Healing the Masses

Please take a moment to visit them in return.

Most Viewed Posts in December

1. Running Civilization II on Windows 7 64-bit
2. Considering Star Wars Galaxies Emulation? Better Grab a Disk!
3. An Unfiltered (and Unfair) Impression of Wizardry Online
4. A SWTOR F2P First Impression
5. Travels with Commander Bond
6. Love, Hate, and the T-28
7. A Year in Null Sec
8. Second Life Among Technology Fails?
9. WoW Drops More Subscribers Than SWTOR Has Left
10. In the Hardware Doldrums
11. Tobold Prediction – CCP Bankrupt in 2012
12. First Peek at Retribution

Search Terms of the Month

gay league of legends porn
[Okay, Rule 34 strikes again I suppose…]

gf cfc
[Good fight to you too…]

continued opportunity to kill off halflings
[About all we can ask for]

EVE Online

Things have been quiet in EVE Online this month.  I haven’t been on the kill board since October.  I have ratted now and again, which is something I can do while listening to the news or an audio book… or while writing checks.  But fleet ops haven’t been very frequent with the end of the war in Tribute and Vale.  Time to find some new activity in EVE I think.

EverQuest II

The nostalgia tour sputtered out basically when I made it past the original content.  At level 50, the Desert of Flames content seems to be the most interesting to tackle, and it isn’t all that interesting after a bit.  So Sigwerd made it from 42 to 53.  He is fully equipped in mastercrafted gear again, should I want to make the run to 62 at some future date.  But for now, EQII has petered out for me.  Nostalgia always has a short shelf life.

Need for Speed: World

We have spent a bit of time in NFSW, where we have played it as a networked racing game, ignoring the rest of the world for the most part.  That is actually pretty fun.

Rift

The holidays have kept the instance group from doing much in Telara.  We did finish off all of the pre-Storm Legion five person instances, at least in “normal” mode.  Now we are getting ourselves equipped in the expansion.  With the new year we ought to be able to take a run at the first instance.

World of Tanks

This has become something of my main game for the last few weeks.  Basically, it is a shooter that concentrates on vehicles, where I have always done better.  In PlanetSide 2 I am always just a target on the ground.  So it is probably best to just stay with the shooter where it is all vehicles all the time.  I have made it to tier VI on a couple branches of the tech tree.  But each higher tier becomes a bigger effort.  We’ll see if I get to VII.

Coming Up

A whole new year.

The instance group will return to Telara.  I will continue to play tanks.  We will see if Need for Speed World was more than a week or two of fun.

But otherwise it will be a cold, gray month.  Lots of time for games and writing about games I suppose.