31 | July | 2014 | The Ancient Gaming Noob

The Site

No major upsets on the site this month, just the usual measure of gripes about little things.

In a behind-the-scenes change, WordPress.com updated the editor so that it is no longer a window the a scroll bar within a page with a scroll bar. I can appreciate trying to get away from the embedded scroll bars thing. I think the SAP time reporting module at my last job could get five deep in nested scroll bars if you were not careful.

Unfortunately, while the tool bar stays nicely at the top of the infinitely long edit window, the “save” button on the sidebar scrolls off into the distance as your post gets longer… 500 words isn’t a big issue, but when I get 2,000 words into something, it is a long trip back up to the top to save, and a long life using computers has made “save early and often” a mantra. So I now spend a lot more time scrolling with the new layout than I did with the old.

Then there is the MMO Bloggers RSS feed on the side bar. It seems to be a bit more reliable of late, being up often enough for me to notice that some blogs it claims should be in the feed don’t show up. Sugar Kyle, who posts daily at her Low Sec Lifestyle blog, never appears on the list. Others show up every time. And it does not appear to be order related. Bio Break is at the end of the feed list, but every post from there appears. And it doesn’t seem to follow any particular blogging platform, while the feed itself appears to have all the data. So WordPress.com is not handling something correctly in its RSS feed widget.

I found that annoying enough that I seriously contemplated moving the whole thing over to Blogger, just so I could have the wonderful blogroll sidebar available to blogs there. (Which, on a side topic, seems to hate my blog currently, links to my feed seem to sit for days without updates in sidebars of late, even when I have new posts.) There are some tools to modify the XML you can export from WordPress.com so you can import it into Blogger. However, my site has grown large enough that I am no longer able to export it. WordPress.com just times out and throws an error. So I am stuck here, which is probably okay. I didn’t really want to move.

Meanwhile, I have been messing around with blog themes again. Go take the poll if the site is still some color other than white.

One Year Ago

I was looking for gold in the MMO blogging community, which became the topic of the moment.

It was summer, so there was a Steam Summer Sale.

Activision-Blizzard was moving away from Vivendi… and WoW dropped 600K subscribers.

There was a promise of some news about EverQuest Next, so I started speculating about what we might hear. Sandbox gets mentioned a lot.

The battle at 6VDT-H ended any hope left for TEST and heralded the end of the war in Fountain. I have since complied a full list of posts about the war in Fountain. The war made up most of my posts for the month.

On the iPad, DragonVale and Candy Crush Saga were my current games of choice.

My summer vacation in Middle-earth got me to Moria.

The instance group got together just long enough to defeat the Storm Queen… and that was about it for us and Rift.

The Civilization V expansion Brave New World changed up the game again.

I starting musing about the inventory management aspect of games.

And we said goodbye to Google Reader.

Five Years Ago

I won a contest. Granted, all I got was a T-shirt. But that was probably more than you got.

Mythic announced a version of Warhammer Online for the Mac. Not sure that helped anything at all.

I was, as usual, asking silly questions like why does Tetris gets faster. Okay, it was an analogy, but it was still silly.

Oh, and then there was the horse. Remember the $10 horse? I did a poll about it and everything. Boy, that seems like small potatoes these days. I mean, that was a cash shop game selling a horse for $10. Now WoW and EQ2 will sell you mounts that run much more.

Gary Gannon announced that GAX Online was going to close in August, bringing to an end that experiment in gamer community building.

I asked what people considered cheating in an MMO. It included another poll. I was doing polls that July.

I did a parody of Tipa’s Daily Blog Roll feature. That is some pretty rich stuff in hindsight.

In EVE Online I got another step closer to mining perfection. I was also fiddling around with a fit for a Dominix.

The instance group hit Violet Hold and Gundrak, but couldn’t get the team together for Halls of Stone, so went back and did some Burning Crusade heroics just for kicks.

Then the instance group took a run at Onyxia. The old school Onyxia. She’s since been remade into a level 80 raid.

And even as we were doing all that, we were starting to mull over what we should do once we were level 80 with no new expansion in sight. It only took us a year to try another game. At about that time, my hunter alt hit level 80.

I also dredged up the old Alamo Teechs U 2 Play Druid post from the WoW forums. Philisophical question: Would Alamo have posted that if RealID had forced him to use his real name?

And, finally, my daughter was trying to get me to help her make WoW videos to post on YouTube.

New Linking Sites

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

Please take a moment to visit them in return.

Most Viewed Posts in July

Search Terms of the Month

wow why i cant chosse monk class
[Because you haven’t bought Mists of Pandaria]

ned for saped gem fare donlowd
[Alrighty then…]

are the galaxies emulators alive?
[Let’s not get all SkyNet here…]

star wars player housing source code
[Making a trailer park simulator?]

eve online awful
[How am I on the first page for that, but the Massively comment section isn’t?]

Civilization V

After a month’s hiatus, we finally returned to Civ V and our grudge match game that we started back in May. Not quite the forever war, but we are still stringing this out for a stretch. We have reached the 21st century, but nobody really has a definitive upper hand as yet. And remember what happened last time when the nukes came out.

EVE Online

The war in Delve… which isn’t so much a war as a mass “looking for fights” venture… continues. And fights have happened. I have been able to get into fleets and, now and again, they actually undock, fly off, and shoot people. We said hello and good-bye to the Gamma Fleet doctrine, which served mostly to drive up the price of Rupture cruiser hulls. Meanwhile, the quest to “fix” null sec continues, with just about everybody sounding off except CCP.

World of Warcraft

Summer in Azeroth is still humming along. The instance group has been on the expected hiatus, but I have been pursuing my Loremaster achievement goal. My daughter set her own goal of getting a new character up to level 90 before school starts again. However, she also spends a bunch of time with a role play group in-game, which hasn’t exactly sped her along. She would much prefer to get in the Warlords of Draenor beta and get pre-made level 100.

Coming Up

It will be August, the driest news month of the year.

We will have Blaugust going for us, which will distract us for a bit, but which won’t bring Warlords of Draenor much closer.

Civilization V, World of Warcraft, and EVE Online will be there for me one way or another. And I have an game obituary half written for tomorrow. Two, actually.

But other than it being the one month when I start to wish we had air conditioning, what else will August bring?

August is in the wings, waiting to bring with it the usual end of summer ennui on the gaming front.

Nothing new ships. Very little gets announced. The releases we are looking forward to are generally somewhere off in autumn. At times it feels like you should join half of France and just take August off.

Over at Tales of the Aggronaut, Belgahst has proposed something to help bloggers get through August.

He calls it Blaugust.

Blagust_No_BR

The basic idea is simple: Put up a post a day on your blog during the month of August.

There are of course rules as to what counts, but to sweeten the deal there is also a community cross-linking thing going on, some potential prizes, and some topic suggestions that you can use or ignore at your pleasure.

Belghast explains it all in The Gospel of Blaugust, including the whole Anook aspect of things, which I am still pondering. Go check it out.

Now, I suspect the immediate reaction from some will be that more posts are not necessarily better.

True enough.

But over the long term… just about eight years at this point… I have often found that longer “thinking” posts sometimes get overtaken by events and look horribly naive or just uninformed even a year later. (Granted, that might just be me or just the things I write.)

On the other hand, some things that I have hesitated even to post, things like a game launched, an expansion shipped, some numbers were announced, or the ever amusing quote of the day, turn out to be nuggets of information I fall back on later. Nothing like having a library of past Smed quotes when he is off on his latest bout of enthusiasm.

Basically, never stop posting.

Anyway, we shall see. I come pretty close to posting once a day as it is, and Belghast looks like he’ll give us a pass if we get in 31 posts during the month, so I might actually be able to play video games on the weekends still rather than writing about them!