April 2012 in Review

The Site

April was a record month here at TAGN, pulling in the most page views ever for a month as well as setting a new one day record not once but twice.

Click to make readable

This was thanks largely to Google and interest in April Fools at Blizzard at the start of the month and  the Burn Jita event in EVE Online at the end of the month.

My post with pictures from the first night of the Jita event ended up getting linked at a number of sites, including on CCP’s press site. (They credited another site, Poetic Discourse, but linked here.  So I won I guess.)

Not Poetic Discourse, actually…

The event got quite a bit of coverage, getting articles at major sites like EuroGamer, PC Gamer, and Kotaku.  In a twist, the one site you would think would cover a player run game event in an MMO, Massively, was strangely quiet on the whole affair.  I suspect that they have taken a vow to never mention “Goons” or “The Mittani” again.

My video from the first night also got embedded in quite a few posts, and has become my most popular item on YouTube by a fair margin.  I think having a short video with immediate explosions and the UI turned off made it the go-to choice.

What I thought was my best, or most amusing bit, “Is Jita Burning?” was pretty much ignored, except by one Polish site that didn’t bother to attribute the source. At least they embedded my video as well, and according to the YouTube stats, a lot of people viewed it from there.

The reference itself was probably too obscure for kids these days.  Or maybe, like so many things, it was just amusing to me.

All in all, a matter of being at the right place at the right time.  Things will get back to normal soon I suspect, since most everybody else wants to talk about Guild Wars 2, something I am not writing about pre-launch.

One Year Ago

Of course, there was some April foolery both here and at Blizzard.

I also wrote something about magic quadrants.

Sanya Weathers had one of the best quotes about MMO gamers ever, made all the more amusing by its truth.

Battlefront.com released a completely new version of their original WWII Combat Mission series.

Wargaming.net released World of Tanks.

SOE’s spy themed MMO, The Agency, was officially cancelled.

We got a PlayStation 3.  And then the PlayStation Network got hacked.  At least I could still play Blu-Ray disks and stream Netflix.

The instance group got together and decided to try out EverQuest II Extended, the one-time separate free to play version of EverQuest II.  However, the game immediately began to kick us in the teeth for daring to do solo content as a group.

Being there in EQIIx also meant looking at what the cash store had to offer.  Some of this stuff is gone now in the post merger era of EQII.  Flying mounts are still around.  And some idea, like selling max-level characters, never made it to prime time.

And Potshot and I were still playing EverQuest.  We moved on from Unrest to Lake Rathetear and spent an evening there.  Then it was on to Kerra Island and finally we made it to Runnyeye, at which point SOE also went down due to the PSN hacking.  That pretty much ended our EverQuest adventures for 2011.

I did have to explain EverQuest to my daughter.  Her foundation in MMOs is World of Warcraft.

Five Years Ago

Back in April 2007 we were wondering what was going to happen with Sigil Games Online after their less than stellar Vanguard launch. (*snort*) There was much speculation. Soon, however, we would be free from the rambling posts of Aradune.

In EverQuest II Gaff and I visited Emperor Fyst, I ran around in Nektropos Castle with the Everling clan, and complained about experience in Splitpaw.

While our WoW group was winding down for the summer, with Earl off to Broadway, the remaining four of us went off to Middle-earth with the launch of LOTRO. Titles were the new thing! A year later, I still have yet to get any of those emote titles.

I answered the musical meme question, “Five Reasons Why I Blog.”

Van Hemlock was leet.

Our Wii finally came out of the box.

And, finally, I had a problem with a video card that eventually had to be RMA’d, which sounds a lot like the next April as well. At least it did not turn into a yearly thing.

Old/New Linking Sites

For the first time in more than five years, I was unable to find two sites not previously mentioned that included me on their blogroll.  I rather expected this day to come much sooner than it did.  So now, at last, I will go to my original plan of starting back at the top of the list and mentioning sites that are still active and which still have me in the blogroll.  Thanks to my great survey of linking blogs, I have that list to hand.

So this month I thank, again, the following sites!

• Kill Ten Rats – A little more Zubon and a little less Ethic, but still good
• Kinless Chronicles – Actually at a new address now
• MMO Quests – All Wurm Online all the time these days
• VirginWorlds.com – A bit neglected, but still alive
• World IV – Pretty quiet these days

Please take a moment to visit them, if they are not already regular stops for you.

Most Viewed Posts in April

A heavy emphasis on EVE Online this month, and Jita especially.

1. April Fools at Blizzard – 2012
2. When in Rome Do as the Goons – Jita, Hulkageddon, and the EVE Economy
3. Scenes from a Burning Jita – First Night
4.  Travel Advisory – Conflict in Jita
5. Reshiram and Zekrom Download Event for Pokemon Black and White
6. Hulkageddon V: Unholy Union – Coming Soon
7. LEGO Rifter? Do Want!
8. Running Civilization II on Windows 7 64-bit
9. Hulkageddon, Technetium, and the Circle of Life
10. Burn Jita – Video from the Jita 4-4 Undock
11. Is Jita Burning?
12. The Return of the RAZOR Alliance to Tenal

Deleted Comment of the Month

Do these guys ever have time to get laid?
[Normally I reserve deletion for the incoherently obscene, but this was so generic and so off-topic that I refused to let it pass. Can you even tell me what post this was left on?]

Search Terms of the Month – Alternate Character Set Edition

мертвый пикачу
[If Google translate is to be believed, this is how somebody in Belarus writes “Dead Pikachu”]

жджджджджджджджд
[No idea on this one]

pokemon black להורדה
[Have you ever tried to copy and paste a line of text that contains languages read in opposite directions?]

Цивилизация 2 windows 7
[Interest in running Civ II on Windows 7 has spread to Bulgaria.]

EVE Online

A big month in EVE Online for our Corp/Alliance.  The end of the War in the North finally came to pass, something that had dominated my time in null sec since I showed up.  It was time to draw down and return to our home systems in Deklein and get back to a peacetime routine.  Time to make some ISK.

Then there was the Jita event, which like many others I went to watch rather than participate in.  I will have a summing up of that later.  And, finally, Hulkageddon V is on, running up until May 29th.  This does not impact me directly, as it isn’t really my thing.  But the rise is in mineral prices means that I might get out and mine in null sec a bit, where the even doesn’t really have any impact.  Anybody who would gank you would get shot at just for showing up.

EverQuest

My time in Norrath tapered off rather dramatically.  The same thing happened last year in April, as you will note in the “One Year Ago” section above.  At the time I blamed it on the PSN hacking and SOE being down.  But maybe it is seasonal.  I always get nostalgic in the autumn, maybe spring cures that and I go on to other things?  Anyway, not much went on after Potshot and I did our one Lost Dungeon of Norrath.

GuildWars 2

I am not playing in the beta.  I have pretty much decided that I will probably get this game when it finally comes out, so I do not want to spoil things now with a long and change-filled beta cycle.  Likewise, gushing fan-boy article and early how-to guides have no real interest for me at this point.

What I am really looking for are the negatives.  That may sound bad, but really that is the only thing that will change my course.  If the negatives aren’t that bad, I will go ahead.  If they are flaming, festering sores, it will impact my buying decision.

So far, the worst I have read is that the game is very much like GuildWars.  I didn’t really like GuildWars.

Lord of the Rings Online

The five year anniversary of the game’s launch has been going on, allowing me to remind everybody what a good deal it was buying a lifetime subscription back in 2007.  Go me!

The events have been fun enough.  They even brought Potshot back for a bit.  I went through and got the mounts, then returned to yet another trip through the first 50 levels.  I have found that just concentrating on a single character has sped things up a bit.  And it has made me richer.  That one character has more gold than any two of my others, mostly because I am not squirreling away tradeskill materials for alts.  I can sell or auction them.

Rift

The instance group has been continuing on with Rift.  I haven’t written much about it lately, as we have been doing a couple of quest running nights to get ourselves up to the right level to go into King’s Breach.  Everybody is still on board with the game, at least for our once a week group.  Aside from Potshot and I fishing though, there is not much group activity in Telara.  That does not bode well for a long term commitment from us.  But for now, there are plenty of instances left to conquer.

Coming Up

EVE Online will hit its 9 year anniversary in May, and will be giving out some toys to celebrate.  That will be worthy of note I am sure.  Plus there is Hulkageddon V and some summing up to be done around the Burn Jita event.

The LOTRO 5 year anniversary activities will continue for another week, so I might go get the fireworks laden mount on another character or two.

The instance group is just about at the right level for King’s Breach now, so there will no doubt be an attempt on that.

But the big item for May has to be the launch of Diablo III.  Not being an MMO, I suspect I won’t write much about it beyond initial impressions.  But the fact that it is out might lead to a quiet period here on the blog in the latter half of May.  You have been warned!