30 | June | 2019 | The Ancient Gaming Noob

The Site

I was excited momentarily when I saw another WordPress.com blog had a switch on their side bar that allowed you to turn on and off “night mode” on your blog. This mode makes your blog dark, which solves the war between those who want black text on a white background and white text on a black background.

The magic switch

On seeing that I immediately started looking up how to add that to TAGN. And I found out how. It is a plugin, and to be able to add plugins you need to have a business level account with WP.com, which runs past $300 a year. Given that is over 10x what I pay today (I have a no longer available “No Ads and CSS editing” plan for $30 a year), night mode won’t be here any time soon. I just don’t care about you, the reader, that much. Sorry.

I did also see that WP.com had re-arranged their plans yet again. I hadn’t gotten a note about that, but the range now includes some more reasonably priced options.

The June 2019 personal plans

The Blogger plan is only slightly more than what I pay now, so I might be tempted by that for the other site, if only to remove ads. The Premium plan would even be within my means for this site, if I had any use for most of the features. Therein lies the problem. I don’t even want a custom domain name. After more than a dozen years as tagn.wordpress.com, why would I want to mess with that. All I really want is ads removed and enough storage space for my many screen shots.

Meanwhile, WordPress.com pushed a new version of their mobile app last week that not only shows less information, but insists on showing stats based on the time zone you happen to be in as opposed to the time zone to blog is set to. My attempts to engage with WP.com have been met with the usual blank looks and unhelpful replies. This does not make me want to give them more money.

On another front, I got sick of the Blog Roll Feed in the side bar failing to load. It was always a bit problematic, but of late it seemed to be failing to load almost all the time. So I dug into my Rube Golberg setup and found a problem that should have prevented it from loading ever.

This comes up more often in software than you might hope in software.

Anyway, I redid how everything connects and it seems to be much more reliable now. So op success for what is now v.7 of the sidebar feed. It isn’t bullet proof… it is still a hack… but it shows data now more often than it did previously.

One Year Ago

I was done with DragonVale.

Blizzard picked the version of the game that would become WoW Classic. Version 1.12 would be the destination for nostalgia.

With Pokemon moving on to other platforms, it was clear that the Nintendo DS/3DS/2DS platform was on its way out.

In New Eden it was time for the CSM13 election. Surprise! Null sec candidates won most of the seats yet again. #NoCollusion

Running Abyssal pockets seemed to be all the rage. The Federation Grand Prix, on the other hand, was something of a disappointment… unless you were selling shuttles I suppose.

I was also time for the great outpost conversion, where all those stations dropped in null sec over the years were converted to faction Fortizars.

We were also wondering what EVE: Project Galaxy was. I guess we still are, since it hasn’t shipped yet.

Somebody said something dumb about PvP in EVE Online, then went on to get banned.

Star Citizen was roundly trolled for rolling out a ship that looked a lot like an EVE Online ship, and they took that trolling badly. It happened to be the same ship that we used for a race.

I also went on a main fleet op, which is something I do every so often to remind myself why I do not go on main fleet ops.

And then there was the return of the Mystery Code in EVE Online. There was a lot of stuff going on at CCP.

And it was a year ago that Steam announced that they weren’t going to judge games, they were just going to let everything onto their service… unless they considered it “trolling,” which sounds like a judgement to me… or if it was on the version of their service in China. The Central Committee of the Communist Party of China pretty much demands curation of all aspects of life.

But the Steam Summer Sale was on, so who really cared about all that?

I wrote something like a review of the game Vietnam 65.

Daybreak gave us all another free character boost in EverQuest II.

I did a summer reruns post about 80s video games.

Finally I did a Friday Bullet Points post that included Star Citizen, Diablo IV, Apple killing support for OpenGL, the pending Aquatic Update for Minecraft, free video games for Amazon Prime subscribers, and perhaps my last Pokemon download even post ever.

Five Years Ago

I toasted the Newbie Blogger Initiative class of 2014. Long may they post… those that remain in any case.

WildStar launched… and started its journey to F2P and eventual closure.

SOE finally broke its ties with the ill-fated and ill-conceived ProSiebenSat.1 deal.

Derek Smart was telling us why to charge for beta. Lord British was getting serious with virtual real estate. Meanwhile, DC Universe Online was doing well on the PlayStation.

It was summer and the short lived strategy group was looking to the Steam Summer Sale for a new game. Meanwhile we were still playing our epic game of Civilization V.

We heard about how CCP handled/mishandled World of Darkness.

CCP launched the last of its expansions with a six month lead-time. Kronos was the end of the line for twice yearly expansions. I set off on the training plan to be a wing/fleet booster in EVE Online.

I also did a summer reruns post about the Fountain War in EVE Online.

In Azereoth, my attempt at the Loremaster achievement had me in Darkshore and then on to Ashenvale and the Stonetalon Mountains .

Meanwhile the Warlords of Draenor alpha was starting, so I had to avert my eyes. So I started pondering things like how Blizzard should change the starter edition of WoW.

The instance group, heading towards its regular summer hiatus, was hitting the Mogu-shan Palace.

I took a look at a long history of gear obsession.

And I was wondering if authenticators were still a thing.

Ten Years Ago

People were upset about Blizzard not including LAN play in StarCraft II. It looks like Blizzard stuck to that plan company-wide, as every game since has been always online.

The NeuroSky MindSet was released, but I still cannot cast fireballs in WoW using only my brain.

Then there was that Wii Bowling Ball controller. Seemed more like a lawsuit magnet.

There was a new definition of hard core gamers.

I was complaining about the local newspaper being made up of 8 pieces of paper. I have since stopped getting the daily paper. We still get the Sunday paper however.

There was an attempt to get Age of Empires II: Age of Kings going while people in the instance group were on vacation. We did end up getting connected via a service called Game Ranger. Now you can play it live on Steam.

The in-game map in EVE Online was showing me where I had been and where all my stuff was. Pretty neat. CCP added a new map since, but they had to leave the old one in because the replacement still hasn’t achieved feature parity.

And then there was World of Warcraft. They changed when you got mounts in the game allowing people to (literally and figuratively) fly through The Burning Crusade. There was that whole WoW/Mountain Dew cross promotion which, if nothing else, got me another in-game pet. I spent all my gold on the artisan flying skill, and then they lowered the price with the mount changes. I got the achievement The Explorer, but that didn’t mean I was necessarily an achiever. And I bought an authenticator. Viva account security.

And then there was the Midsummer Fire Festival.

The instance group was deep into Wrath of the Lich King. We did Ahn’kahet: the Old Kingdom and Drak’Tharon Keep when we were all available. When not we went back to TBC and did some heroics with four of us just for kicks.

And then there was FarmVille, a Facebook game that had our attention for a brief moment. It went live ten years ago. It won awards and faced criticism from a range of sources. Even Martha Stewart was on Zynga’s case for a bit. And, of course, it set the standard for spammy, cash hungry crap games on social media.

Twenty Years Ago

The Half-Life mod called Counter-Strike had its first public beta release. Valve hired the two people who developer the mod, acquiring the code and name as well, and it was developed into the stand-alone title Counter-Strike.

Thirty-five Years Ago

The first version of Tetris was released. It might have made an appearance on more platforms than any other commercial title, and variations on it are still appearing.

Most Viewed Posts in June

Search Terms of the Month

best way to raid with mouse/keyboard in eq2
[Can you even do so without mouse/keyboard?]

redeeming starter pack eve online
[There wasn’t much redeeming about it]

wow classic support 32 bit?
[A big negative on that]

Game Time from ManicTime

Overall time was down by 30% this month. I must have been doing other things, like writing blog posts about everything that happened last week. WoW also seemed to be down, though I’ll get to why in that section.

EVE Online 40.10%
WoW 27.47%
RimWorld 21.79%
Civilization V 6.16%
Minecraft 3.99%
LOTRO 0.50%

EVE Online

There was quite a lot going on in New Eden in June, what with EVE North, CSM14 elections, selling skill points, and the war in Tribute and Vale, I had lots to write about. And then the Drifters started hitting our structures, future war plans were suspended, and we all went back to Delve to PvE. Oh well. The 64-bit client seems to work though. I used that all month.

Lord of the Rings Online

I did, in fact, play a bit of LOTRO this month. I wanted to grab the 64-bit client, which didn’t take too long, relatively speaking. LOTRO updates always take longer than they should because the patcher is archaic. But I managed it. Then I logged in and was in Bree and had to remember how to get back to Moria. And then Mirkwood opened up a few days later on the Legendary server and my interest waned completely.

Minecraft

I ran out of steam somewhat when it came to the Village and Pillage update. I found villages, improved them, fought pillagers, did a bunch more exploring, and then came to the usual “now what?” part of the game, at which point I tend to stop logging in so much. We’ll see if the bug hits again.

Pokemon Go

I had a pretty good month with Pokemon Go. I didn’t level up, but I got some break throughs, such that there is a blog post in progress on this, that would have gone last week… but last week managed to fill itself up. So I’ll get to that. Otherwise, the usual stats:

Level: 36 (+0)
Pokedex status: 425 (+6) caught, 453 (+6) seen
Pokemon I want: Togekiss
Current buddy: Prinplup

RimWorld

As Minecraft faded, RimWorld came back into the picture. Both are games you can sit and play while listening to podcasts or audio books, which I find relaxing. Having won the original scenario a couple of times, I wanted to do the next more difficult scenario. You start with five colonists and almost no technology. That led to a some restarts as all my colonists died again and again. But I got past that finally. There is a blog post in the works as to where that led.

World of Warcraft

What with the war in EVE Online and not much new happening in Azeroth, WoW time slid quite a bit. The percentage shown even includes the WoW Classic load test, since the final WoW Classic client registers with ManicTime as the same as the live client.

Actually, something big did happen. We got the 8.2 update and more content and the chance to unlock flying. Due to EVE Online, I haven’t even started on any of that.

Steam Summer Sale

Despite my guess last week, the Steam Summer Sale is not the same old thing. No, they have some new ideas, and some old ones, and they have had odd results. First, you have to choose a team and nearly everybody decided to go with Team Corgi because corgis are cute. So Team Corgi wins a lot. I went with Team Tortise, which won a day after Valve gave us a way to sabotage other teams effectively and everybody hit Team Corgi.

Then there was the chance to win something from your wish list. They did this years back, and it got people to add games to their wish list. Now we all have so much crap on our lists that Valve threatening to give us a random game from it for free triggered a mass wish list purge, much to the horror of devs, who get stats on that. That was amended so that you will now win the first game on your wish list, so you don’t have to banish all the five dollar indy crap from your sight. I did so anyway, paring my wish list from 71 to 11 games.

Finally, to earn points and such in the event you have to buy games (duh), play some specific games and complete special tasks within them, or play a game that has Steam achievements. I did the latter, which is how Civilization V made it onto my ManicTime list this month. I would have just played RimWorld, but it does not have Steam achievements. Oh well.

Coming Up

We have another week or so to run with the Steam Summer Sale, so we shall see if I end up buying anything. My daughter is pestering me about a couple of titles.

In World of Warcraft I have the whole Rise of Azshara update to explore. With almost two months to go before WoW Classic I should have enough time to unlock flying.

With null sec wars in EVE Online called off on account of CCP, there will likely be a return to SIGs and Squads being the place to actually play the game. We’ll see what CCP has planned for this Drifter invasion, but it isn’t making people in null sec happy. The Drifters aren’t actually killing structures and don’t even drop loot. They are just a plague sent to afflict us. We’ll survive, but there had better be a point to this.

And, otherwise, it is July. People used to say August was the dead month for video games, but then Blizz started launching things in August, so now July is it I guess.

The Ancient Gaming Noob

Veni, Vidi, Scripsi

Daily Archives: June 30, 2019

June 2019 in Review