February 2011 in Review

The Site

I guess the big thing for the site this month has been the the Say100 recognition.


That was quite a surprise to me.  And it brought a lot of traffic to the blog, though not in the way you think.

I do get a referral or two a day from the Say 100 site.  They put all of my posts in their feed.  But they also put up the posts from Joystiq, Destructoid, and Games Radar, so my few posts a week kind of disappear in that mix.

No, WordPress.com sent me all the resulting traffic.  The blog was featured again on the Freshly Pressed front page.


That sent me enough traffic to finally remove Paul the Octopus from the “most traffic in one day” throne.  A World Cup winner picking cephalopod and cats playing patty cake are no match for the web referencing itself.

It was actually a banner month for traffic here, with the highest average page views per day so far and the most page views ever for a single month.  Not bad for a 28 day stretch.

The other big contributor was the team at Wargaming.net who linked my post reviewing World of Tanks, or at least my view of the open beta, on their Facebook page.  So there is a free tip if you are desperate to drive some traffic to your site, go write something about World of Tanks.

Of course, these traffic spikes are mostly one-time viewers.  Writing about EverQuest for a week straight showed the more steady stream of regular visitors, as EQ doesn’t bring out that much excitement.  Still, after each of these spikes, the overall page view average goes up ever so slightly, so a few people stick around.

One Year Ago

We learned SynCaine’s dirty secret.

I was invited to go play in the beta for the web based Crown of Byzantus.  It didn’t really stick with me, though I wrote about it a couple of times.

There was another press release or some such for a Wheel of Time MMO.  My call: It isn’t going to happen.

Ten Ton Hammer made a list of their Top Ten PvP MMOs, and there was some chagrin that Ultima Online didn’t make the cut.

For reasons I cannot recall, Omali started looking into how MMO companies ranked over at the Better Business Bureau.

There was an announcement for this new game… World of Tanks!  Hey, almost a year later I got to try it!

In World of Warcraft, the instance group got as far as Zul’Farrak in our horde adventures, though we were still forgetting we could use the Dungeon Finder.  Otherwise we were running around doing holiday events and the like.

Oh, the Dungeon Finder.  My first runs with that were… not so good.  I seemed to run into some cliche bad groups.

Meanwhile, WoW decided to emulate WebKinz and start selling stuffed animals that had codes for in-game versions.  Did anybody buy one of those?

And the Azeroth Advisor went buh-bye.  I saved all the email tips they sent me.  They are all pretty much worthless post-Cataclysm.

Finally, I was still playing Star Trek Online.  The head start ended, The game went full-live, I was fiddling with my super special pre-order collector’s edition junk, and I gave out some codes in a caption contest.  There was even some new content.  But by month’s end, STO faded for me.

New Linking Sites

I would like to thank the following site for linking here.

Please take a moment to visit them in return, it is totally worth your time.

Most Viewed Posts in February

  1. And Then I Was Mistakenly Declared “Influential”
  2. Battleground of Tanks
  3. Download Mythical Celebi at GameStop
  4. Shiny Pokemon Events Coming to GameStop in January
  5. Pokemon Black and White Tour – Hunting Pokemon at Oakridge Mall
  6. How To Find An Agent in EVE Online
  7. Download Ash’s Pikachu at Toys R Us
  8. Fighting Blood Elf Porn
  9. Play On: Guild Name Generator
  10. Hulkageddon Declares War on All Industrialists
  11. 2011 Pokemon Video Game Championship Series Announced
  12. Hulkageddon IV – Tears of Veldspar is Live

Most Common Search Terms of the Month

  1. gamestop celebi
  2. pokemon black and white tour
  3. tagn
  4. blood elf porn
  5. elf porn
  6. white mouse
  7. celebi at gamestop
  8. ancient gaming noob
  9. guild names
  10. thorin oakenshield
  11. hulkageddon 2011
  12. eve character creator

Search Terms of the Month

raspberry dessert for those who dislike raspberries
[sadist]

“everquest 2” “no pants”
[Is that the Destiny of Velious?]

my mum is a noob
[My mum has two level 80s and can kick your mum’s ass!]

Spam Comments of the Month

Greetings! Mitigate the immature wench, I contrariwise play a joke on started to effort recently on the Internet
[Uh, greetings to you to I suppose.]

These condoms are really great, and despite what you might read below, are not that huge. They’re the same length as regular rubbers, and only slightly girthier (is that a word?). Anyway, you can look up the stats on these and see, in millimeters, that the measurements aren’t all that different.
[What makes you think that “not huge” is what I want to hear?]

Where I Spent My Gaming time

Game time distribution as counted by my Raptr profile, which doesn’t count everything… it still doesn’t track Lord of Ultima.

  1. EverQuest – 40%
  2. World of Warcraft – 27%
  3. World of Tanks Beta – 16%
  4. Rift Beta – 12%
  5. EVE Online – 3%
  6. Lord of the Rings Online – 2%

EVE Online

I haven’t been doing much with EVE Online, mostly training and playing the market there.  I have been living on PLEX purchased with my ever diminishing fortune.  That time may now be at an end.  I forgot to buy another PLEX and my account lapsed.  I cannot see spending any money to get back into the game just to keep training going.  So I stopped at somewhere around 67 million skill points.

So that is what I did during Hulkageddon IV.

EverQuest

The surprise game of the month for me.  I had been pretty neutral on the idea of running back to old Norrath.  And then, like the old dope peddler, SOE gave us all a free taste that included the new Fippy Darkpaw progression server.  Right in the vein.  And it was good.  Good enough to sign on for another month at least.  We’ll see how it goes from there, but so far the whole thing is just authentic enough to bring back good memories, while mellowed out enough with updates to the game to remove some of the more heinous parts of the 1999 experience.

Lord of the Rings Online

I enter the lotteries that the community team posts… when I remember.  And winning usually gets me to log in for a bit.  But other than that, I have not done much in Middle-earth.  No closer to Moria.

World of Tanks

This has been the new game of the month.  The beta turned out to be surprisingly good in my opinion.  The whole thing still needs a bigger reason for being beyond 16×16 death matches, but it looks good and is playable in short bursts.

World of Warcraft

I did not get in a lot of play time in Azeroth in February.  The instance group only got together for one night over the course of the month, and EverQuest ended up eating heavily into my discretionary gaming time.  I’ll be back, but for now I am enjoying the old school experience of Norrath.  I’ll have to watch out though, my mom is going to beat me to level 85 if I am not wary.

Coming Up

Pokemon, EverQuest, WoW, and… who knows.

Oh, and GDC is this week.  There is always the possibility of seeing something interesting there.

But I think there will just be a lot more Pokemon and EverQuest posts in March, unless something else big is coming our way next month.

2 thoughts on “February 2011 in Review”

  1. missfruitypie

    I bought the Wind Rider Cub pet from the Blizzard store when they debuted. I might not have if I’d known I would quit the game (for the second time) just a few months later. The in-game pet was utterly adorable and I miss it.

    Like

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