September in Review

The Site

In an oft repeated story here, WordPress.com changed something, announced it in an irregular location (or not at all), broke stuff for users, and then acted surprised.

This time they retired a bunch of themes from WordPress.com.  80 themes, mostly from the early days of WordPress.com… from which I now count my origin I guess… were junked because they didn’t want to have to update them to support new (for sale) features.  This was a detail you would think would be important enough for the WordPress.com news feed, to which I subscribe.  But it was not.

And, since I came from what is now the early days of the site, both of my active blogs used themes from the retired list.  However, we were told the themes just wouldn’t be available for new users, that those of us still using them would be able to continue on as before.  Until, of course, they started breaking them.

EVE Online Pictures, which used Redoable Lite, basically stopped displaying posts on September 4th and I had to scramble to find a new theme for it that I felt fit the style I had set.

Now I am worried that Regulus, the theme for this blog, for which I have never been able to find an acceptable replacement, might have its days numbered as well.  I like the theme I grabbed for EVE Online Pictures, which is called Piano Black if you are interested.  If I could find a light version of that, I would use it here.

And, as if to prove my point, WordPress.com then changed how images were displayed in blog posts and every image on the site with a vertical orientation was suddenly outsized relative to its border/caption. They all looked like this.  Again, no warning, just a change that happens to break things only on some of the old themes, followed by some very general suggestions and a promise to look into things at some point after locking the thread and deleting all the complaints.   To be fair, it does appear that they fixed the problem since that point, though no mention was made when it happened.  Things just went back to normal.  Now I am just waiting for the next change to go in and break something on my out-dated theme.

In other news, I went into full “piss off the neighbors mode” here and took advantage of the new WordPress.com integration with Google+.  WordPress.com, in announcing this feature, implied that Google would like me better if I did this.  Now every post here and at my other site generates a Google+ entry.  Have you evicted me from your circles over this atrocity yet?

The traffic increase from this change has been exactly one page view per day.  On my other site.  Somebody clicks on each new EVE Online spaceship picture.  Meanwhile, Google search traffic has plummeted… right off a cliff, an 80% reduction… giving lie to the implied promise of Google liking me better.  Seriously, on my other blog, traffic is so low I am now getting alerts if somebody looks at too many pictures.

Up From 2!

Of course, maybe I just misinterpreted that implied promise.   Maybe Google just likes me better on Google+.  Or as a person in general.

Google remains a mystery to me.

In any case, we may be getting down to traffic numbers that represent the actual number of people who read this blog, as opposed to people mistakenly sent here by bad search engine results.

The only bright news there is that I stopped my summer experiment of posting a new EVE Online picture daily, dropping to three pictures a week.  I worked through much of my picture backlog.  So less spam for everybody.

One Year Ago

Mists of Pandaria launched, adding a panda race to Azeroth, right on Ultima Online’s 15th anniversary.   I think the shark jumping trope jumped the shark that day.

I was falling out of WoW myself, though still not allowed to unsubscribe. Being locked out of the Theremore event due to item level helped kill any enthusiasm I had for staying with the game.

Torchlight II showed up.  Still waiting for the Mac OS version.

In the land of EverQuest, the Rain of Fear expansion was announced, while EverQuest II went straight to truth in advertising and revealed an expansion called Chains of Eternity.

On the Fippy Darkpaw server, Omens of War went live and was finished.

SOE was talking about some form of Wizardry that was Online.   PlanetSide 2 was planned for the end of the year… sort of.  And then there was Player Studio and all that implied.

The next chapter in the Darkfall saga was announced.  And they had a new game/expansion or some such.

In EVE, the CSM was looking for a way to… well… screw most of the people who actually vote for the CSM.  I stranded my null sec Drake in Jita.  I compared Traffic Control to a hostile FC.

In a more serious vein, the real world reached into our game took a fellow player.  Even tragedy cannot displace idiocy though.

My goal to get my fourth class in Rift, a mage, to level cap before Storm Legion had me in Stonefield.

BioWare, not done with their trend of announcing public metrics they eventually failed to meet, committed themselves to a new content schedule for SWTOR.  Later we found out that “adding items to the cash shop” counts as new content.  Meanwhile, I pondered the SWTOR lore choice.

The Lord British saga continued as he opted to jump in bed with Zynga!  He, of course, expressed great fondness for Zynga, while I wondered what his sith name would be, since he was clearly going the Anakin Skywalker route.

I remembered Spaceship Warlock.

Free to play was still under discussion.  An article in Game Developer Magazine included the warning to not assume profitability just because people are going on about revenues.  And yet all I hear about are revenues when it comes to free to play.

The people at Stormpowered started in against marriage.

And the blog turned six and felt very clever about it.

Five Years Ago

Warhammer Online went live, first with the head start and then for everybody.

As we just saw with other MMOs, there were issues coordinating with friends about which server to choose, leading to yet another gripe post about the whole sharded existence we have to put up with in MMOS.  I did wonder if the EverQuest II mechanism of multiple versions of a given zone might be worth it to get everybody on a single server.

The instance group was game was into WAR (after escaping from Durnhold Keep), though as a group we have some parameters that we had to work within.

In Warhammer itself, war were declared on gold sellers and Mythic was being very demonstrative about it.  Of course, it did not appear to stem tells from gold seller bots that seemed to sit active for days.

I went on about those tips you see on the loading screen of many MMOs, spurred by a couple less than helpful tips in WAR.

In EVE Online I hit a major ISK milestone.  But I was building up ISK because I had my eye on a freighter.

The Empyrean Age 1.1 update was upon us, which included 2 changes designed to reduce the scourge of suicide ganking.

Meanwhile CCP was offering up battleships for sale… model battleship for real cash, not ISK.

But the most important EVE Online event was probably Yahtzee Croshaw’s Zero Punctuation review of EVE Online.  Much shoe-on-head wearing and talk about tactical logistics reconfiguration ensued.

In EverQuest II, the Living Legacy promotion was ending.

LEGO Batman showed up.

And, finally, the site hit the two year mark.

New Linking Blogs

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

• Party Business
• Bits of Bacon, Spaceships, and Serious Business

Please take a moment to visit them in return.

Most Viewed Posts in September

1. Alamo teechs u 2 play DURID!
2. Running Civilization II on Windows 7 64-bit
3. Nostalgia Starts in Azeroth This Time
4. In Space You Can Never Be Too Rich or Too Well Tanked
5. Sweet Home Azeroth – Summing Up a Bit
6. LEGO Legend of Chima Online – A Second Try at a LEGO MMO
7. The Dreadmines and the Scarlet Something or Other
8. Small Features I Want MMOs to Copy
9. Warhammer Online to Shut Down in December
10. Neverwinter – The Foundry Comes Through
11. Blizzard Killing The Diablo III Auction House
12. Delve on a Saturday Night

Search Terms of the Month

raptr keeps emailing me stupid
[The internet is in the business of stupid most days, what did you expect?]

the french resistance online game
[Is that the one everybody claims to have played when they were playing a competitor most of the time?]

timelist island wow
[Is that the Dalaran train station?]

gank proof procurer
[You can get to “gank resistant,” but nothing is “gank proof.”]

running civ2 on windows 8
[Sorry, I go with the “skip a version” policy with Windows, and 8 is clearly the version to skip.]

Spam Comment of the Month

Club foot amateur money talk porno
[This came with a link, but I was afraid to click on it.]

EVE Online

As the conquest of Delve wound down, so did my time in New Eden.  I focused more on where I wanted my training plan to go than how I was going to get all those ships, now scattered about Fountain, Delve, Querious, and Cloud Ring, back to Deklein.  My time in-game did pick up some as we formed the new corp, Black Sheep Down, and went trying to build on that.

And my procrastination around getting ships home might pay off in any case.  The latest GSF CEO update asks that the alliance, and the coalition in general, be ready to fight from VFK-IV, 4-EP12, and F20Y-X with ships for the coalition doctrines in each.  If anything, I might not have enough ships strewn about the galaxy.  Then there is the call to also form up in G-0Q86 in Curse in order to crush the remnants of TEST.  The rumor is that TNT is going to give that a pass and go off on a camping holiday of its own.  We shall see.

On the bright side, I only lost a single ship in EVE this month, an Ibis that I was using to scout ahead while moving things back to Deklein.

Neverwinter

Not enthusiastic at first blush, this game continues to gain ground in my eyes.  It still sits too far down my list of things to play to get much attention, but explorations with the Saturday night group has shown it to have merit.  Of course, as a group, we are still in the shallow end of the pool, being all of level 14 in a game that goes to level 60.  So we have been more sightseers than dungeoneers I suppose.  We shall see how things play out as we progress.  And it looks like the game is moving to a single shard, so maybe you will see us… if you’re on at the right time on a Saturday night.

World of Warcraft

This is where I spent the majority of my gaming time over the course of the month.  As I noted in a post, it is fun, familiar, and comfortable.  But things haven’t quite worked out as well as I had hoped.  We ended up not making the guild due to having only four friends on the server.  Attempts to keep the four of us within a couple of levels of each other so we could do things together fell apart pretty quickly.  Various people, including myself, raced ahead at times.  I am actually on my third serious character now, having stopped the other two in hopes of playing with other people.  But Kihei has been off with her level 90s exploring the 5.4 patch while my daughter… who actually suggested this whole outing… has been more interested in Team Fortress 2 of late.

So things have not been bad.  WoW is what it is and tends to be very good at it.  But it has not quite been the revival I was hoping for, and it certainly isn’t inspiring much in the way of blog posts.

Coming Up

It will soon be October and the lead-in to the end of the year frenzy, with in-game events and expansion and BlizzCon and what-not coming at us from now through until January.  That will give us all something to chat about I suppose.  But will it mean playing anything new?  There seemed some hope of getting EverQuest Next Landmark by the end of the year, though SOE seems to be in full “bore the player base with tangential questions” mode still.  Seriously, every poll question they have had so far has either been a complete non-issue for me or makes me think that the vision of the game is incomplete.  Oh well.

It might be time to look at those goals I set myself back in January.  Or maybe not.  I don’t seem to be doing very well with them.

There will likely be some sort of deployment for us in EVE Online.  That should fuel a few posts.

EverQuest II has some changes coming up.  Should I buy a level 85 character with all that Station Cash I have rattling around, of should I sit on it just in case there is some movement on EverQuest Next?

There is also some sort of permanent floating New Blogger Initiative that is going on.  I will have something about that I am sure.

And… and… well… business as usual I suppose.