December 2007 in Review

The Site

Due to the mysterious workings of the search engines, December has been a very active traffic month. The monthly page view tallies show that December has been the best month ever.

monthlyview.png

There were no traffic spikes over the month to account for this. It seems to be more of a slow news month phenomena along with seach engine behavior. On the latter, people searching for pictures of Rudolph the red nosed reindeer made for a lot of my search engine traffic, while the former meant that I received some attention from Massively as well as having a post or two of mine able to linger in that ever-so-important “last 10 items listed” segment at VirginWorlds.

One Year Ago

My daughter and I were chasing Rudolph across the Frostfell zone in EQ2. We did that again this year.

Digg starting listing podcasts and there was a call to help Digg some of the MMO related podcasts. Some podcasts went up in Diggs since then, others… well…

Podcast           Diggs Dec 06    Dec 07
EQ2-Daily                21        21
Fear the Boot            33        80
Massively Online Gamer   32       200
VirginWorlds             27       191

The Commonlands in EverQuest got a make over. The two zones also got combined into a single zone.

I compared the Butcherblock chessboard in EQ and EQ2

I correctly predicted the venue for this year’s EQ2 expansion, Kunark, which I will never let anybody forget.

And the instance group did Gnomeregan and started in on Scarlet Monestary.

New Linking Sites

A big thanks to these sites who link to TAGN. I encourage you to give them a visit in return.

If your site does link here and I have not mentioned it in the past, feel free to drop me a note, as it is getting harder and harder each month to find sites! (And I’m lazy.)

Most Viewed Posts in December

  1. Play On: Guild Name Generator
  2. LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga
  3. How To Find An Agent in EVE Online
  4. EVE Online – The Tutorial
  5. The Next EverQuest II Expansion?
  6. Trinity First Glance: Issues
  7. The Road to Invention!
  8. EverQuest and the Keyboard Question
  9. And Then I Lost a Battlecruiser
  10. EverQuest Nostalgia Tour – 2007 Edition

Best Search Terms

arasai butt
[we’re not that kind of site]

star trek red shirt
[Make me the tank and I might as well be the red shirt]

EVE Online

My time with EVE Online is beginning to fade… for now at least. There are just other games I would rather be playing now. I let my miner account lapse. Making ISK was fun, but the answer to the question, “How many asteroids must a man burn down?” is apparently a smaller number than I thought. Still, he is there should I need him again. On my main, Wilhelm, I continue to play the market, train, run missions, and try to get that elusive Tech II Cargohold Optimization Rig blueprint.

EverQuest

Gaff and I decided to run off to Norrath of old for some more adventures there. And we did play for a bit. Of course, as these things tend to go, we found that, while playing EverQuest is fun and interesting, there are frequently things we would rather play more. Still, we got some way towards our goal.

EverQuest II

Frostfell. I actually parked all of my alts in the Frostfell zone to get their daily presents. I also got off to a round of trade skill activity, my prime motivator being the high price of T7 items and materials. I laid in a huge stock of T7 stuff when it was cheap. My wood worker is leading the way, since the arrows he makes sell well.

In the larger view, I made that prediction and made fun of the seeming non-stop stream of odd news that came from SOE this month.

World of Warcraft

The instance group was active on off-nights with alts as we all got closer to level 60 with out mains. We are all trying to get together cash for epic mounts and such. We are moving into the last instances from the original game before we start in the Outlands.

Wii

It was Christmas. The Wii was not forgotten. There might even have been something in the pile that my wife could enjoy.

Upcoming

The WoW instance group will continue to roll on!

Several articles on Wii games which will invoke names that will make Brent scoff at me again.

Pirates of the Burning Seas. I have Station Access. I have the pre-order. I have otherwise avoided reading much about the game to keep my mind clear (easy) and fresh (not so easy) on the subject.

And, finally, do I do what the cool kids are doing a list out some more predictions for 2008? I will have to see what I can pull out of my… um… forsee in the next day or so.