31 | May | 2012 | The Ancient Gaming Noob

The Site

What Alexa says about my readership. (Emphasis is theirs.)

Based on internet averages, tagn.wordpress.com is visited more frequently by males who are in the age range 18-24, have no children, have no college education and browse this site from home.

At least they didn’t specifically mention your mother’s basement. Still, I cannot say that is a winning endorsement. I am just glad there isn’t a feature that attempts to describe the owner of the site based on readership!

I suppose I should be happy that Alexa has anything to say about my site. It has nothing to say about my other blog.

In general, Alexa says the following about the site:

tagn.wordpress.com is ranked #1,087,910 in the world according to the three-month Alexa traffic rankings. Approximately 68% of visits to the site consist of only one pageview (i.e., are bounces). We estimate that 21% of visitors to the site come from the US, where it has attained a traffic rank of 541,171. Visitors to it spend roughly 78 seconds on each pageview and a total of two minutes on the site during each visit. The fraction of visits to Tagn.wordpress.com referred by search engines is about 14%.

Wasn’t that interesting? 68% of you arrive here and immediately leave, having discovered your mistake. About par for the course I imagine. I am surprised that it only pegs the number of US visitors as 21% of the total traffic, as the flag counter on the side bar puts the number just over 50%.

Flag Counter Tally as of May 2012

And when two such sources disagree, how do we decide who is right? Probably neither, but somebody is probably closer.

And that is our site discussion of the month.

One Year Ago

May 2011 was the time of the great Sony outage, with the Playstation Network down for 24 days and Sony Online Entertainment down for 13 days. It was a communication fiasco from start to finish, with bad updates almost daily. About all they could do was promise us all goodies for when they finally came back up.

CCP was starting the build up to the Incarna fiasco with the introduction of Aurum.

On the Fippy Darkpaw time locked progression server, there was agitation to vote NO on unlocking the Kunark expansion. Such agitation shows up with each unlock vote. But no vote failed until Gates of Discord came along.

The instance group was in EverQuest II… when it was up… and trying to get the hell out of the starter area. We managed it, but it took a lot more time than I would have thought. We started in on some dungeons and got ourselves a guild hall.

World of Warcraft subscriptions started to decline, while Trion started offering free server transfers in Rift.

And finally, as hot as things seemed to be around here, there was no rapture. You just couldn’t buy a break that month.

Five Years Ago

The usual discussions were going around, what made WoW so successful and what games might contend with WoW? Some of the so called “contenders” were pretty silly picks.

The instance group was focused on LOTRO for the first time. I had things to complain about, especially the state of the economy. And, only a month in we spotted a level 50 player. That must have been some hard work, as the game sort of petered out at about level 35 back then. Still, Middle-earth was a pretty place. It even had rainbows.

Vanguard was heavily in the news. Sigil fell and SOE stepped in to pick up the pieces, though I wondered how long before the many problems with the game became attached to SOE. I was also wondering about the impact of the game’s system requirements.

I was wondering how many more expansions EverQuest would have, while pointing out that you could get the game and all the expansions for only $15.

The owners of Allakhazam, long a staple of EQ knowledge, sold off their gold selling RMT wing, thus removing that taint and a host of gold selling ads from the site.

SOE officially announced the Rise of Kunark expansion for EverQuest II, keeping the game firmly on the nostalgia train. Meanwhile, I had a suggestion for the new Arasai race.

Finally, there were some podcasts I thought people should listen to again. I am not sure you can get most of them any more.

New Linking Blogs

After having to dip into the recycle pile to reuse some past linking sites last month, this month there are three new sites to mention!

Please take a moment to visit them.

Most Viewed Posts in May

Search Terms of the Month

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[Brought more traffic here during May than all other search terms combined]

p-51 bomb-aiming stripes sight lines for dive bombing
[A few of these… this has to be a World of Warplanes related search]

fiesta outspark atlas sword
[There is an Ayn Rand reference in there somewhere]

Diablo III

As expected, Diablo III was the focus of about half of the month. I have had a good time with it, having gotten through normal mode with my barbarian. I am currently in Act II with him in nightmare mode. This second run through is going slower both because it is actually harder… they throw a lot more blue elite monsters at you… and because it is the same thing I just did, so the drive to advance the story is gone. I know how the story goes, where the surprise twist is, and so on. And the randomization is pretty minimal, killing another aspect of change between plays, as the anchor points of the story pretty much force things into place. So while I am still playing, I am concentrating more on playing with friends.

EVE Online

Things in New Eden were a bit quiet mid-month. I did managed to get out on one strategic operation, so I am at least on the kill boards for May. Who I might be flying with in these ops is interesting. And, of course, there is skill training, always skill training. I should be able to fly a heavy interdictor in about a week with all skills at IV or V. Now will I actually buy one and fly one? That is another story.

Portal

I Finished Portal. I got half the achievements. It was fun, though pretty short. I am glad I got it for free. It was probably $10 worth of cool… and met that $2/hour threshold for games… but I probably wouldn’t have bought it. Portal 2 is on my Steam wish list now, waiting for a sale.

Rift

After the instance group finished up King’s Breach, we haven’t really been back to Telara. As a group we have to get a couple of levels before we can hit the next dungeon, and we can get about a level a week if we focus as a group. Instead of focusing we’ve been on vacation or playing Diablo III. I am not sure if this means any change to our future plans or not at this time.

World of Warcraft

Since I paid for Diablo III by signing up for a years worth of WoW, I have felt compelled to at least log on once in a while. I have one character at 85 and have settled into a pattern of logging on for Darkmoon Faire every month, specifically for the tradeskill related quests, since they boost your skill by 5 each time. This is part of my plan to have at least one character max’d out on all skills when PandaVille arrives. And then I log in to do whatever event happens to be going on, but only if I still have some achievements left to get. So I was on for Children’s Week. That got me the last of the companion pets and two achievements, though I still do not have the meta achievement. I am just not going to do those battleground achievements.

Coming Up

Summer, and the expectation of warm weather. It has been unseasonably chilly out here for much of the month.

And gaming… hrmm… I am out of immediate goals after Diablo III.

Something will turn up, I am sure of it. It always does.

What is Richard Garriott de Cayeux up to these days?

All good things must come to an end. This holds for mediocre and bad things as well. You can pick which you felt the New Blogger Initiative was. Syp certainly seems happy about things.

As one of the so-called sponsors, I committed to putting up an announcement about the event, writing a bit of advice (I even did some advice embedded in a live post), and then posting a summing up of all the new blogs and advice shared. And so here we are at that final step, the summing up.

Hrmm.

I really have nothing else to add, so I will let you sum it up.

(NBI advice: polls are a great way to avoid committing to an opinion! And, as a bonus, you can always wring another post out of evaluating the results!)

That said, onto the long lists of blogs and articles, which are after the cut.

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