The Site
This month, many words about the site.
For reasons unclear to me, the automatic WordPress.com syndication to Google+ stopped working for me in the last month or so.
Well, technically, it still works perfectly for me… but only for me. Everything that gets syndicated is shared only with myself.
As far as I can tell, nothing has changed at my end. The transition seemed to have happened somewhere between the 22nd and 23rd of last month, because on the 22nd things were sharing just fine!
But after that items were only shared with myself. Looking through Google+ for some setting or change brought me no joy, while the settings within WordPress.com are minimal.
Looking at the WP.com support forums though, it appears I am not the only one seeing this issue. However, given that WP.com is not answering any threads opened about the topic, instead choosing to close them without comment, seems to indicate that I am not going to find a solution there. I have a manual work around, but that requires me to go into G+ every day and republish every item. And then they appear twice in my own feed, which is kind of annoying.
So, if you were following my blog via Google+… which I think would make you Potshot, Tipa or Brian Green, my G+ following being fairly limited… and you noticed I suddenly stopped posting there, this is why. Of course, if you only follow me there then you may never see this.
Elsewhere automatic syndication remains active, so I am still a menace on Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook.
Meanwhile, in the midst of a somewhat sleepy month here there was a sudden spike in page views when Reavers CO Asher Elias posted my Higgs Anchor Rigs tale to /r/eve. That was a big enough one day boost to secure that post the top spot on the “most viewed” post list below and to prove that people in /r/eve/ will click on just about any link put in front of them.
Then there was this:
Which made it sound like my MMO Blogesphere side bar feed was about to die. Since that came up I got a notification that my Rube Goldberg implementation only has until April 4th, then it is gone. Time to figure out a new course on that one I suppose, because it is the one thing readers here click on regularly according to the stats.
Addendum: Got a note this evening indicating that IFTTT and Pinboard might come to some agreement that will keep them working together. At least it won’t shut down on Monday as planned. We shall see.
And then, in a minor odometer moment, one of my post categories actually rolled into four digits. With this post, the top five most used categories (aside from “entertainment” which is everything here) now are:
- EVE Online – 1,000
- World of Warcraft – 999
- EverQuest II – 612
- EverQuest – 492
- Lord of the Rings Online – 360
CCP wins the race to one thousand. Is this an EVE blog or a WoW blog now? Random people keep telling me it has to be one or the other.
One Year Ago
I hit level 50 yet again.
The Elder Scrolls Online dropped the subscription business model.
The Crowfall Kickstarter campaign was still running. I was wondering if they had a mid-game plan. They really didn’t, but the campaign still brought in $1.7 million, double what was asked.
EA closed down Maxis as an entity within its organization. It is what EA does best.
It was a Turbine roast as an insider spilled the beans on problems that have plagued the developer of Lord of the Rings Online.
Rift hit its four year anniversary, but it felt like it had been around for longer than that.
I was wondering what a progression server would look like with EverQuest II. But it was Sweet 16 for EverQuest, which was getting a new progression server for its birthday it seemed.
Blizzard announced that they were going to go ahead with their PLEX-like idea, the WoW Token. The instance group was in the Iron Docks and farting around in garrisons.
CCP was talking about the next stage of the proposed sovereignty changes for EVE Online. There was the Scylla release, which was overshadowed by Fanfest. Also, the members of CSMX were announced.
In New Eden I attempted to fly an Ibis from Immensea to Deklein. Then there was a rumor of war as the usual suspects attacked our sovereignty in Fountain. That called for a big old move op which, in post-Phoebe New Eden, meant caps taking gates. Then there was that system our foes took. And once they were evicted from Fountain, it was time for a punitive expedition to Delve.
And The Mittani declared that the power blocs of New Eden would never die. We shall see.
My daughter and I tried out Diablo III on the PlayStation 3.
I put together a review of my Kickstarter history… I should do that again.
Finally, it seemed as though some of the MMO news sites were paying attention to bloggers again… at least briefly.
Five Years Ago
Rift officially launched. And while I wasn’t playing, the social media options integrated into the game made it feel like I was there. And I don’t mean that in a good way.
Pokemon Black and White came out, which became the theme for my birthday.
World of Tanks was talking about going live in April. There was, of course, a pre-order offer. There always is these days.
Potshot and I made it to GDC thanks to Darren, where we were able to hobnob with the likes of Brian Green and Damion Schubert.
March of five years ago found me spending time in EverQuest. It was on the Fippy Darkpaw progression server last year, which at that point was still set in the original EverQuest zones. Potshot and I were doing some classic things, like getting stuck in the Ocean of Tears and making alts. And running out of money.
There were the newbie armor quests to work on, which required travel to Freeport at one point, something as hard as we remembered. We also visited Unrest, North Karana, the Desert of Ro, and Najena.
It was also the 12 year anniversary of the EverQuest launch, and nobody was more surprised that I that I was playing the game 12 years later. But no corpse runs please.
The instance group, still in Cataclysm Worgen form, spent a couple of nights in Scarlet Monastery and then went to Razorfen Kraul.
I put up a poll asking people which of several items in my drafts folder (current population: 57) I should buckle down on and finish. I think almost everything on the list except the winner is still in my drafts folder.
And I came home one day to find the TV had died. Emergency CPR (read: banging on the damn thing) brought it back to life temporarily, but clearly a replacement was going to be needed. It was, after all, a few years older than EverQuest.
Ten Years Ago
World of Warcraft hit 6 million subscribers. Eventually it would double that number.
Twitter launched, but who in the hell wants a platform limited to just 140 characters?
Brent, going by the “Prognosticator” handle back then, launched the VirginWorlds podcast which began what was, for me, the golden age of MMO podcasting. His site is still up and chugging away and you can go and listen to VirginWorlds episode 1 if you care to relive the world of possibilities that seemed to be ahead of us for MMOs back then. It was a different time.
Featured Sites of the Month
For this month’s featured MMO Blog I want to bring your attention to:
Belghast, who runs the blog, is in the “must post every day” club. If there are 31 days in the month, he’ll have 31 posts on his site. He doesn’t even take weekends off. And every day he posts many words about the MMOs and other games he plays. Then, every August, he runs a community event called “Blaugust” where he invites his fellow bloggers to join him in his post-a-day routine. I’ve kept up with him each time so far. He is also much more active in fostering community in our corner of the internet. I talk about that community once in a while, he tries to make it really a thing. Oh, and he does a podcast as well. I get tired just thinking about all that. So go visit him and say, “Hi!”
Then of the “other” site of the month, I want to point you at is:
I remember when Meclin first went to null sec and told me about this site. It seemed confusing, but I was mining in high sec in the same system every day. I didn’t need all that. And then I went to null sec, and the site became as necessary is air. I have said in the past that EVE Online’s in-game map is a very impressive. Show it people who don’t play and they will be in awe.
But it isn’t very useful.
Yes, it is more useful than it used to be, but it still mostly getting by on looks alone. And the new map is even more slanted in that direction. So if you want to know what is where, what the best route is, who owns what system in null sec, or what systems are being attacked, DOTLAN is THE place to go. I am constantly looking at the site and regularly use screen grabs of maps there for posts. I need to donate some more money to Wollari just thinking about all that. You do too!
CCP also did a community spotlight dev blog about DOTLAN a few years back if you want to read more about it.
Most Viewed Posts in March
- Me and the Medium Higgs Anchor Rig
- Betrayal at M-OEE8
- The Imperium Abandons the Vale of the Silent Region
- EverQuest Next and the End of the Classic MMORPG
- The WildStar Headshot
- Setting Sail with Yacht Fleet
- Upgrading to Minecraft 1.9
- Will EVE Online Get a Bounce from M-OEE8?
- SOE and Its MMORPGs
- Market Saturation and the Cash Shop
- Skill Injectors, Meet Experience Injectors
- Contemplating that Last Stand at VFK-IV
Search Terms of the Month
how to 2 box everquest on phinigel true box server
[You are a bad person]
syncrude shutdown march
[I think SynCaine is planning to carry on]
how many characters are in wheel of time
[Too fucking many]
pantheon rise of the fallen will the trolls be playable
[No, the trolls will remain in the forums and comment threads]
playstation how to use daybreak cash?
psn soe settlement how to use daybreak cash?
ps3 how to use station cash?
how to use daybreak cash psn dcuo
bought dc market cash but can’t use it
[There is some problem with Daybreak Cash on PSN I guess]
Diablo III
Well, I carried on and played through Season 5 right up until the moment I competed the set dungeon for the final baseline achievement… and then I totally stopped playing. There is a lesson in that somewhere. Anyway, it is off my currently playing list and will likely remain so until at least Season 6 starts… whenever that happens.
EVE Online
To put it mildly, shit got real in our small… now smaller… corner of null sec. The war has been given a few names. The Second Great War, or World War Bee, starring Goonswarm in the role of Band of Brothers. Noizy dubbed it The Casino War, because one side is being proudly financed by an online gambling site. (Making it one of The Mercenary Wars in Matterall’s expansive write up.) Then this week it was suddenly The Easter War, because CCP likes… bunnies and Cadbury eggs? Seriously, CCP claims this is what most people are calling it, but I never heard the term until they started using it this week. I get the feeling that, in hindsight, we might end up calling this the Propaganda War, as spin on both sides is getting quite thick.
Anyway, I expect we will be seeing a lot more of that from both sides as the war continues. It will all be a good read a year from now.
EverQuest II
After writing about all sorts of Daybreak topics this month, including the cancellation of EverQuest Next, I had a rather unsurprising urge to go wander around Norrath. I picked EQII and the Stormhold server for my focus, and spent some time doing the quest lines in The Commonlands. It was both nostalgic, a lot of things haven’t changed in 11 years, and a bit disappointing, a lot of annoying things haven’t changed in 11 years. Still moving myself slowly forward in hopes of getting to Nek Forest.
Minecraft
I wasn’t playing too much Minecraft until our server bill started to loom. That got me in and playing as I was looking for a new home. I settled on Minecraft Realms, which has worked out well so far. That got me back in and working on a huge new “public works” project, which I will post about at some point… as soon as I get around to posting about my last such project.
Pokemon
Pokemon celebrated 20 years back in February and I bought a copy of Pokemon Blue for the Virtual Console from the Nintendo eShop. As I spent some time traveling early in the month, I actually got to spend some time focused on the game. (Nothing like a couple of five hour plane trips to make time for that.) I have been pleasantly surprised by the game, though perhaps not for the obvious reasons.
Coming Up
Tomorrow is that day where the unfunny think they are funny, the grumpy act grumpier, and the wise treat any headline as though it were posted on Reddit. It is only for a day, but since nothing on the internet is ever fully gone, your regrettable mistakes will last forever.
The war New Eden will carry on. After the hammer blow of the CO2 betrayal, things feel like they are hitting a new equilibrium, with a war of attrition over command nodes running every night. Each side either needs a new tactic, a new defection, or the other side to stop showing up to make big gains. Rumors say that there will be an official State of the Goonion tomorrow. One has to ask if April Fools is setting the right tone?
Meanwhile, the new expansion looms, bringing with it citadels and capital ship changes. Will that change the face of the war, and will the war still be going when it hits? April promises to be interesting.
As noted above, I hope to make it to Nek Forest in EverQuest II. I am not sure how well nostalgia will sustain me there however. The original version of the zone was a punishing horror show, so I don’t really miss that. The last time I did anything in the zone though, the whole thing had turned into a tedious amount of running half way across the zone and back for quest updates. Maybe Echoes of Faydwer will go live by then. I already have a crafting guild request to go to Butcherblock, which won’t be live on the server until that expansion hits.
I also want to buckle down and finish Pokemon Blue… then write about it. Or maybe just write about it. Something.
And I need to figure out a new scheme for my side bar. My current plan is to try Pinboard’s mortal enemy Delicious. A test version is even now lurking at the bottom of the side bar. If that doesn’t work out though, it will be back to a static blogroll for a while.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 