Elf

No, I am not trying to trigger Syp.  Well, not just that anyway.

Any elf will do for our purposes…

Back in high school, a distance through time more easily measured in decades than years at this point, I took German as my foreign language.  I think the primary outcome of three years of the language is that my writing in English improved greatly.  One of those side-effects, you have to examine your own language in order to learn another one.

I think my greatest achievement in German was reading Catch-22 in the language, something that took me most of a summer, a copy in English, and my German-English dictionary.  Other than that, I retain very little of the language.  Enough to annoy my mother-in-law (who is German), catch the occasional bit of dialog in a movie, appreciate The Germans episode of Fawlty Towers slightly more, get that joke about the German novel where the last two chapters are nothing but verbs, and make a poor joke from a post title.

Anyway, the German word for “eleven” is “elf,” something endlessly amusing to a 13 year old boy, an age I have never fully ceased to be.  The title is a joke because I write about fantasy MMORPGs now and again… less lately than before… where the elf is a staple, and yet relevant because this is one of those anniversary posts… my eleventh.

The Annual WP.com achievement

I am clearly out of clever titles and amusing intros at this point.  Remember that anniversary post that was full of Soviet propaganda?  Or the one grounded in Winnie the Pooh?  Now I am hanging my hat on the fact that the German word for eleven is a mythical creature in English.  It’s all I’ve got, and I’m not even going to run with it.  I’m going to just break in the usual statistics for a bit and hope I can come up with something new to say before we get to the end of the post.

For those interested in some of my better attempts at anniversary posts, here is the list:

• A Year of Living Noobishly
• Two Years Below the Masthead
• Three Years We Grew in Virtual Sun and Shower
• Four Years In, No Further From Noobdom
• Heroic Results of the First Five Year Plan
• But Now I am Six, I’m as Clever as Clever
• The Seven Year Kvetch
• Eight Years of Link Rot
• Nine is a Magic Number
• A Decade Under the Influence of Online Games

And from that we might as well get stuck into this.

Base Statistics

In which I attempt to quantify what I have done here in the last twelve months.  The change over last year’s totals are noted in parentheses.

Days since launch: 4,018 (+365)
Posts total: 4,416 (+341)
Average posts per day: 1.097 (-0.013)
Comments: 29,415 (+1,456)
Average comments per post: 6.66  (-0.2)
Average comments per day: 7.32  (-0.33)
Spam comments: 1,376,145 (+63,980)
Comments Rescued from the Spam Filter: 424
Average spam comments per day: 342.5 (-16.7)
Comment signal to noise ratio: 1 to 47.2 (+0.2)
Comments written by me: 3,873 or 13.1%
Images uploaded:  10,416 11,764 (+1,348)
Space used by images: 270MB of my 3 GB allocation (9%, down 69%)
Blog Followers: 1,340
Twitter Followers: 722
US Presidents since launch: 3
British Monarchs since launch: 1
Prime Ministers of Italy since launch: 6 (one twice)

This is the first year of the blog where I wrote less than one post per day, hitting the publish button 24 fewer times in the last year than the year before.  That is about a month of weekday posts I did not do.  See the effect of MMO malaise?  Because, seriously, I didn’t take any long vacations or suffering from debilitating illness over the previous twelve months.  I just wrote less, something that generally happens when I am just not interested in a given topic, which in this case is my MMO hobby.

Still, the average over the full life of the blog is over a post a day.  And even 333 is more than a post every weekday, the goal for which I strive.  That would only net me about 260 posts so, while no Stakhanovite, I have exceeded my posting norm.  Not bad for an eleven year long streak.

With posts down, comments were also down, both overall… simply fewer comments than last year… and as a percentage of posts… people commented less per post.  My comments, as a percentage of the total, was up.  Probably me talking to myself.

One oddity in the stats above is the amount of space used by my uploaded images, which dropped precipitously since last year’s post.  For some reason WordPress.com reset my allocation last year.  Maybe it was a happy anniversary gesture.  Maybe it was a bug.  I suspect that nothing good will come of it and that some day I will log in and find every screen shot from 2006 through 2016 missing, having been deleted by some automated process.  But for now they survive.

Anyway, that is the basic gist of what happened here over the last year.  The remainder of the post is after the cut to keep the long list of mostly meaningless words and statistics from overwhelming the from page.  See you on the other side, should you choose to go there… or if you are looking at this in an RSS reader.

Demographics

Yawn.  Nothing much here has changed.  A video game blog in English unsurprisingly gets most of its traffic from countries where English is commonly spoken, with the United States dominating the map as it accounts for half the traffic that shows up.

The darker the color, the more visitors

The countries providing the most visitors to the site remain pretty constant, being:

1. United States
2. United Kingdom
3. Canada
4. Germany
5. Australia
6. France
7. Netherlands
8. Sweden
9. Brazil
10. Poland
11. Spain
12. Russia
13. Denmark
14. Norway
15. Belgium
16. New Zealand
17. Finland
18. Italy
19. Czech Republic
20. Romania

Brazil dropped off the top 20 last year, then somehow rebounded to 9th place.  I am not sure why.  Countries that are not primarily English speaking that high on the list tend to have a lot of people who speak either English as a second language or or EVE Online.  Brazil doesn’t really fit there, so I am not sure what brought them here.

Meanwhile, the list of countries that have sent visitors to the site exactly once remains a collection of likely suspects.

1. North Korea
2. Eritrea
3. Equatorial Guinea
4. Central African Republic
5. Kirbati
6. Gambia
7. Montserrat
8. Somalia
9. Timor-Leste

I do wonder who in North Korea ended up here, given the heavy government restrictions on internet access.

Incoming!

Time to look at the sources of traffic to the site.  This year I am going to break this out into two categories, bloggers and blogger sites for one list and commercial sites such as search engines and social media for the other.

-Referring Bloggers over the Last Year

1. Total EVE
2. EVE Bloggers
3. Low Sec Lifestyle
4. Blessing of Kings
5. Greedy Goblin
6. Inventory Full
7. Keen & Graev
8. The Nosy Gamer
9. EVEOGANDA
10. Hardcore Casual

There is definitely a pattern there.  8 out of 10 on the list dynamically update links to other sites based on new content being posted, most of them through the ever awesome Blogger side bar blogroll widget.  Keen & Graev just have a short blogroll, while SynCaine at Hardcore Casual links to me and I comment on his blog.  I expect that Gevlon will drop off this list next year as he recently changed from Blogger to WordPress.com and so will no longer have the dynamic blogroll.

-Referring Commercial Sites over the Last Year

1. Google Search
2. Reddit
3. Twitter
4. WP.com Reader
5. EVE Online Forums
6. Bing
7. Facebook
8. Yahoo
9. Yandex
10. Duck Duck Go

Google search is the monster in the room, referral from it dwarfing all other sources combined.  Google sends me more than 22 times more traffic than Total EVE, the second place referrer.  So you can see why people get cranky when Google changes their algorithms and they drop off the first page of results.

Reddit and Twitter are almost tied.  Twitter tends to be more regular as the blog puts a link there automatically with every post, while Reddit is very burst-y.  Somebody will post a link here every so often leading to a short spike, then traffic will go away.

Likewise, the EVE Online forums hits in bursts, usually if CCP Phantom links something of mine in his This Week in EVE Online post.

Facebook is an odd one.  WP.com puts a link there for every post, but that accounts for almost no traffic.  Wilhelm Arcturus has very few friends on Facebook.  Traffic there usually comes from somebody popular linking to one of my posts on their own.

Then there are the other search engines, Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, and Duck Duck Go.  Bing only tops that list because Microsoft shoves it down everybody’s throat with IE11 and Edge until they figure out how to turn it off.

Despite auto-posting there as well, something that was finally fixed earlier this year, Google+ generates almost no traffic at all.  Again, Wilhelm Arcturus isn’t exactly bursting with friends there added to the fact that I think the only people who still use Google+ are myself, Belghast, and Richard Bartle, and all three of us only auto-post stuff from our blogs there.

Now to look at some slightly different referrer numbers

-Referring Bloggers over the Life of the Blog

1. VirginWorlds
2. Blessing of Kings
3. Low Sec Lifestyle
4. EVE News 24
5. Keen & Graev
6. EVE Bloggers
7. Total EVE
8. Hardcore Casual
9. Jester’s Trek
10. Popehat

This list is, in its way, more a reflection of inertia and longevity.  VirginWorlds hasn’t linked to me in years at this point, but it was a referral powerhouse for the first five years of the blog.  Blessing of Kings is popular and has had me in the sidebar for years.  Likewise, Hardcore Casual and Keen & Graev.   Being on the blogroll of a current/former CSM member is a good source of traffic even after they stop blogging.

EN24 and Popehat are the outliers.  My posts used to be syndicated on EN24, which accounted for traffic for about a year.  Otherwise the site would sooner cut off their right hand as link to me, so that is all legacy traffic.

Meanwhile, Popehat has me on their blogroll and, through alphabetical advantage, I appear at the top. (They omitted “the” from the name.)  When it was on the side of their main page it was a very steady trickle of traffic.  Then they moved it off the main page and all traffic dried up completely.  There is a lesson in that for all of us.

-Referring Commercial Sites over the Life of the Blog

1. Google
2. WP.com Reader
3. Google Reader
4. Reddit
5. Twitter
6. Bing
7. Feedly
8. Facebook
9. Netvibes
10. Yahoo

Again, no surprise that Google rules the roost, still providing 22 times more traffic as the next leading contender.

WP.com reader always surprises me a bit, but I guess some people use it and it doesn’t suck nearly as badly as it once did.

Ah, then there is the dearly departed Google Reader.  Where’s your Google+ Messiah now?

After that it is sort of the commercial also rans.  Bing is the second place search engine where that means first place delivers 97 times as much traffic.  Feedly shows up now and again as a steady, if weak, trickle of traffic.  But since I put full posts in the RSS feed, there is no need to visit my site from there.  And then there is Yahoo which provides nearly half the traffic of Bing.

Outgoing!

Now on to where I send traffic.  Again, I will break this out between bloggers and commercial(-ish) sites, just because.

-Click Destinations over the Last Year – Bloggers

1. The Nosy Gamer
2. Hardcore Casual
3. Inventory Full
4. Greedy Goblin
5. EVE Online Pictures
6. Bio Break
7. Neville Smit
8. EQ2 Wire
9. Imperium News
10. Blessing of Kings

-Click Destinations over the Last Year – Commercial(-ish) Sites

1. Various Blizzard sites
2. Wikipedia (the Ultima I article being the most popular)
3. Various CCP pages related to EVE Online
4. zKillboard
5. Civ Fanatics (for that Civ II 64-bit patch)
6. Massively OP
7. Reddit
8. Daybreak Games (for their server status page mostly)
9. YouTube
10. Various Pokemon sites

-Click Destinations over the Life of the Blog – Bloggers

1. Hardcore Casual
2. Keen & Graev
3. Blessing of Kings
4. Kill Ten Rats
5. EVE Online Pictures
6. Bio Break
7. Tobold
8. Inventory Full
9. Player vs. Developer
10. West Karana

Definitely both some inertia and ascendance due to longevity on that list.

-Click Destinations over the Life of the Blog – Commercial(-ish) Sites

1. Nick Yee Guild Name Generator
2. Various Pokemon.com pages
3. Wikipedia (Castle Wolfenstein being the most popular click)
4. Civ Fanatics (for that Civ II 64-bit patch)
5. Various Blizzard sites
6. Various CCP pages related to EVE Online
7. Star Wars Galaxies: A New Hope
8. Kickstarter
9. Daybreak Games (for their server status page mostly)
10. SWG Emu

Breaking things out like that was interesting.  It certainly bubbled Star Wars Galaxies emulation projects to the surface.

Most Viewed Posts

What posts are popular here?

-Most Viewed over the Last Year

1. April Fools at Blizzard 2017 – Not Much to Talk About
2. Pokemon Go Account Hacked and Recovered
3. From Alola Pokedex to National Pokedex in Pokemon Sun
4. Where the Hell is that EverQuest Successor Already?
5. Pondering That Legion Level 100 Boost
6. Alamo teechs u 2 play DURID!
7. Make My Alpha Clone
8. WoW Legion Sales Numbers Stacked Up Against Past Launches
9. Running Civilization II on Windows 7 64-bit
10. 20 Games that Defined the Apple II

World of Warcraft and Pokemon seem to have dominated, with some nostalgia thrown in.

-Most Viewed over the Life of the Blog

1. Play On: Guild Name Generator
2. Running Civilization II on Windows 7 64-bit
3. How To Find An Agent in EVE Online
4. How to Catch Zorua and Zoroark
5. April Fools at Blizzard – 2013
6. Considering Star Wars Galaxies Emulation? Better Grab a Disk!
7. Diablo III vs. Torchlight II – A Matter of Details
8. The Mighty Insta-90 Question – Which Class to Boost?
9. EVE Online – The Tutorial
10. Alamo teechs u 2 play DURID!

As with other “all time” lists, inertia keeps some out of date posts near the top.  The list mostly re-ordered itself.  Alamo fell down a bit while post #4 on the blog about the 2006 EVE Online tutorial displaced a post about the official World of Warcraft Magazine.

Categories and Tags

Categories are the stable staple of the blog filing system here at TAGN, at least one being assigned to every post.  Leaving out the generic “entertainment” category, a legacy of the early days of WP.com, there are 90 categories on the site.  That is the same number as last year, so I haven’t seen fit to add any games to that list. The top ten most used are:

1. EVE Online (1084, +173)
2. World of Warcraft  (1034, +51)
3. EverQuest II (629, +46)
4. EverQuest (496, +24)
5. Lord of the Rings Online (361, +11)
6. Sony Online Entertainment (336, +1)
7. Blizzard (309, +22)
8. Instance Group (273, +0)
9. Humor (227, +3)
10. Misc MMOs (181, new to list)

So we’re starting to get to the point where people who call this an “EVE Online blog” are more correct than people trying to call it a “WoW blog” or some other game.  Still, even with more focus on EVE and less on other MMOs, fewer than a third of the posts on the blog are about New Eden.

Tags, as I have noted in the past, are the more whimsical part of the system here, being subject to immediate mood or fancy.  They fill in for games that don’t rate a category, details like zones or solar systems or expansions, or sometimes just my general feelings about a post or warnings to the reader.  There are 3,204 tags used over the last 11 years, up 198 from last year.  I must make up a new tag for two out of every three posts.  The top ten tags I have used are:

1. Progression Server (105, +7)
2. CCP  (94, +23)
3. Fippy Darkpaw (82, +1)
4. Nostalgia (72, +8)
5. Meaningless Milestones (60, +11)
6. Free-to-Play (60, +1)
7. Warlords of Draenor (58, +1)
8. MMO Expansions (53, +2)
9. Asher Elias (51, new to list)
10. Reavers (48, new to list)

I suspect that I write enough about CCP that it should be moved to a category.  At least the list isn’t completely static.  I used each of those tags at least once in the last year and two new items appeared on the list.  But it does also point out some rather inconsistent usage as well.  I am pretty sure I should have used the “MMO Expansions” tag about a dozen more times to cover things like expansion announcements.  Such is the way of life on the blog.

I’ve Been Down this Path Before

Some days I feel as though there is nothing new under the sun.  If you’re an MMO blogger and you haven’t at some point thrown down on RMT, achievements, cheating, immersion, lockboxes, free to play, aggressive monetization, gear, story, drop rates, Steam sales, events, expansions, PvE vs. PvP, soloing, progression, forced grouping, dungeon finder, difficulty, how much better things used to be back in the day, and why nine out of ten MMORPGs are locked into the swords and sorcery fantasy model, you just haven’t been upholding your blogger oath.

The problem with blogging for this long isn’t that you really start to notice how often you repeat yourself so much as how much you feel you need to repeat yourself.  Old arguments never die, they only hibernate for a while so as to re-emerge more powerful and divisive than before.

Of course, part of the reason so many of these topics recur is that they have no definitive answer.  Some of them are just abstract; free to play is just a business model, and has been implemented well in some places and badly in others.  Some of them hinge on a definition on which people cannot agree; I have had comments here saying that there is no such thing as immersion in a game, that it is impossible.  Even cheating, a seemingly cut and dried topic, has its shades of gray.  A poll I ran about eight years back indicated that some people see some very benign things as cheats.

Sometimes a topic comes back around again and I jump back in to the discussion if I think I have something new to add or my view has changed a bit.  More often than not however, I am able to link back to some older post on the subject, usually with the line “I’ve been down this path before.”

Going Wayback

The Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine feature of it is one of the saviors of the internet.  So many things disappear over time as web sites get revamped, moved, taken, bought and re-purposed, or otherwise just go missing.

And even for sites that don’t go missing, it can be fun to go back and see what they were up to in the past.  And so it is that you can go visit the Wayback Machine to see how TAGN used to look over the history of the blog.  So, for example, if you go back nine years ago today you can see the old theme I used for the site, my two year anniversary post, and all the stuff in the side bar relevant to the time.

A screen from nine years ago

Back then EverQuest II was my most posted about game… and WP.com only had tags as opposed to the tags and categories scheme they have now.  No wonder my older posts are all over the place.  It couldn’t be me being careless!

I still sort of miss the original theme for the blog, even if it was too narrow and WP.com started breaking it every few months.  Looking at it gives me a similar sense of nostalgia as looking at old MMO screen shots does.  Anyway, the blog has been preserved for future generations I guess.  Good luck to them.

Blogroll Evolution

Blogroll blogroll blogroll… I used to obsess a bit… or more than a bit… over the blogroll on the sidebar of the blog.

Having observed blogroll behavior elsewhere I set myself a goal back when I started the blog.  I wanted to have a blogroll that linked out to a few regularly updated blogs.  I was going to limit it to ten blogs, then a dozen, then twenty, then no more than twenty five.

I wanted to keep the list small under the theory that a shorter list is more likely to get clicks, but I wasn’t able to keep it down to my original plan.  Still, I was determined to curate the list, to keep it up to date, make sure it was a quality list.  The difficulty really lay in keeping it short.  Back in the day there were so many new blogs popping up.

Flash forward eleven years.  I now know that almost nobody clicks on the blogroll in the side bar.  I haven’t really gone through it in months as I have supplanted it with a Rube Goldberg approximation of the Blogger dynamic blogroll, which does get clicks.  I have pondered with simply removing the static blogroll, but I occasionally use to go to a blog and it is nice to just have the link handy there.

And, of course, it has been at least a year, if not more, since somebody dropped me a note to ask if I would put them on my blogroll.  I am not sure if there are enough blogrolls out there to even play blogroll breadcrumbs any more.

A Peek into Page Views

As always, the yearly peek into page view statistics for the site.  As with the past few years, page views are down yet again.  Some of that is no doubt due to blogs just not being much of a thing any more, and some it due to how Google works… 2012’s numbers were only so high due to Google… but some of the downward trend also tracks what I have been posting about.  WoW gets page views (see most popular posts), as does controversy.  And if you have something controversial to say about WoW, well, you’re in there.  I haven’t had much in either category over the last year.  Anyway, eleven years in, this is where the blog stands.

Total Page Views by Month/Year

Average Daily Page Views by Month/Year

New this year is a color version of the chart.  WP.com added a new stats page, which has its ups and downs, but it has a color coded version of the above charts, which I will post as well in case the color blue speaks to you.

Total Page Views by Month/Year – New Version

Average Daily Page Views by Month/Year – new version

That puts the sum total of page views over the last 11 years at just past 4.6 million.  As I’ve said before, not a number that will impress anybody running a commercial site, but a lot more than I ever expected to get.

Other bits of page view trivia; the most active day over the life of the blog is Thursday, which gets 16% of the views.  Not exactly a stand out, since if page views fell evenly on days, each would have about 14% of the views.  Still, Thursday seems to be slightly special for some reason.

Meanwhile, the most popular time of the day for page views is 19:00 UTC, which gets 6% of views.  Since I tend to post at 17:15 UTC, I guess that means there is about a two hour delay before people start reading.

And then there is the Feedly statistic that I cannot explain.

What Feedly says about the site

Somehow Feedly thinks 11,000 people follow this site on their service.  And that is up from a count of 9,000 last year.  If every alleged Feedly follower clicking on the link to view the site directly, my stats would blow up.

That is it for stats.  If you have any questions, feel free to ask in the comments.

That Forward Looking Statement

So here is the part at the end of the anniversary post where I generally make a statement about writing less and playing more.

It has always been my assumption that I would eventually tire of writing and just go back to playing video games without feeling the need to blog about them.

Imagine my surprise over the last year or so as I began to tire of video games in general, and fantasy MMORPGs in particular, the staple of my interest, and yet feel no desire to stop blogging.

Then end of the blog might come due to lack of material to write about due to my not actually playing very many games.  Look at how many automatic posts I get in every month that don’t require me to actually play anything.

• Month in Review
• SuperData Monthly Top Tens
• EVE Online monthly update
• EVE Online monthly economic report
• Fantasy Movie League weekly updates

That is nine or ten posts right there when your typical month has about 20 weekdays.  Half a month of posts is mostly just writing without playing anything.  Add in announcements about expansions and such or Kickstarter news or the occasional rant or reminiscence and how much time do I spend on posts that I categorize as “I did a thing!” in a video game?

August was a bit hectic for me when it came to writing.  Not because I wanted to do my own Blaugust and write every day… I came up with a list of topics to explore that could have filled the month… but because there was a deployment in EVE Online to write about.  I had to move around all the semi-regular posts to fit in the posts about doing something in a game.

I will write about playing video games, when I am actually playing them.  But it looks like I’ll carry on writing even when I am not playing them.  Odd that.  I wonder how long I would carry on if I stopped out or habit, routine, and sheer momentum.

Routine is the key word I suppose.  In part I have a routine for a lot of the standard posts.  For example, I generally have the one year/five years/ten years ago portion of the month in review post written out a month or two in advance. Likewise, there is a formula to the EVE Online monthly economic reports and the SuperData posts and even the Fantasy Movie League posts.  The follow the same path just about every time.

So, in a change up here in at the end of year eleven, my warning isn’t that I expect to blog fade in the next twelve month so much as I expect that I might completely grow bored of video games.

How in the hell did I get here?

Anyway, we will see if I make it to twelve.  But first I have to do one of those automatic posts tomorrow.