30 | November | 2019 | The Ancient Gaming Noob

The Site

Another quiet month when it came to traffic. There was a spike at the start, because writing about Blizzard and BlizzCon will get you some attention. But then writing about EVE Online or Daybreak games… that is pure death for traffic. But I write about what I am interested in and what I am playing.

It was apparently also “internet picture posting month” or “inpipomo” or some such. People were posting screen shots and keep count and that sort of thing. I thought about joining in, but every month is picture posting month around here. I am well past 100 for the month I am sure, but I’ll post one more just for luck.

SIEGED!

I’ll leave you to figure out what that even means.

One Year Ago

It was the end of days for WildStar.

I commemorated TorilMUD for having survived for 25 years, and did a post about the Castle Drulak zone on Evermeet.

I was looking back at the decade old VirginWorlds podcast dedicated to the Star Wars: The Old Republic announcement.

BlizzCon was on its way and I was projecting what we might see. What we actually got… well, Diablo Immortal didn’t play well with fans, but we heard a lot about WoW Classic. I went over why I felt fan expectations for Blizz are hopeless, but nobody listens.

I had finally schlepped my way to level 120 in Battle for Azeroth and collected my WoW 14th anniversary gifts.

In EVE Online, there was the very pretty Crimson Harvest event. I was also showing off the swag I got from EVE Vegas. There was also an op out to Geminate to tangle with Pandemic Horde.

But mostly there was the Onslaught expansion, which landed mid-month and reduced the once mighty POS to just so many bubbles in space, though they still haven’t pulled them from the game a year later. There were also daily login rewards and the activity tracker.

Project Nova, shown at EVE Vegas, had been postponed.

Daybreak was announcing The Burning Lands expansion for EverQuest while the Chaos Descending expansion launched for EverQuest II on my anniversary with the game, though I bid the game farewell for a while.

But the month was really focused on Lord of the Rings Online and its Legendary Server. I wondered what we might see on the eve of its launch. The server itself was overwhelmed pretty quickly and there were problems with its login queue. A second server was announced almost right away.

After fiddling around with ways to beat the queue I was able to get in and start a new character. There were some quirks of the game to come to grips with, like the lack of tin. But I made it to the Lone Lands before the month was out, working on the many deeds there.

Five Years Ago

Pokemon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire Launched.

There was BlizzCon, about which I made the usual predictions. I found the event itself vaguely dissatisfying. But those who were bitching about lack of focus on WoW at BlizzCon 2015, go back and look at how little attention it got in 2014! Otherwise we were in Azeroth collecting achievements and waiting for the expansion to hit.

Oh, yeah, the expansion hit… Warlords of Draenor and server queues and all that. Blizz was trying to fix that while I had to figure out who to play. Blizz eventually gave everybody 5 days free for the problems. But hey, they had 10 million subscribers on the hook again, up from the 7.4 million low point during the summer. Remember when subscriber numbers were a thing?

In EVE Online the Phoebe expansion arrived, bringing with it Jump Fatigue and the 10 year/50 skill long training queue. Then they were on about removing other annoyances with the upcoming Rhea expansion.

In game the Reavers had finished up in Feythabolis with a bang and were off into Omist next, hunting the unwary before returning home again.

Rixx Javix was drawing spaceships. He’s still at it.

And there was the This is EVE video that became wildly popular.

I reflected on EverQuest II at its 10 year anniversary. Veterans of the game even got their own island. Over on the EverQuest side of the house, The Darkened Sea, the 21st expansion for the game, went live.

And, finally, the power supply on my computer blew out, taking the motherboard and drives with it. I had to rebuild, but was up and running again in a couple of days.

Ten Years Ago

I was writing about how I had not changed the blog format since I started. I have since changed it, though mostly due to the fact that WordPress.com broke the old theme.

Our Thanksgiving entertainment was Rock Band 2. While I was really bad at it, it was a lot of fun. The next year we played Super Mario Bros. Wii, which I was also really bad at, but which isn’t nearly as much fun. However, the kids liked it. I rode along in a bubble most of the time.

And while Tech Crunch was exposing the odious practices favored by Mark Pinkus to get FarmVille and Mafia Wars profitable, the New York Times was gushing over this wonderful new virtual goods market, which I summarized and provided links to here.

I managed to get some playtime in with the original Torchlight, though there were some problems. It turns out that if you bought the game from the wrong vendor, you could be a while waiting for patches.

The first LEGO Harry Potter game was announced, which I had anticipated would come to pass almost two years before it was announced.

Warhammer Online announced that levels 1-10 were going to be free, making me wonder if they were just going to breed a mass of level 1 twinks. I think that is what the end result was. Well, there were twinks, but I don’t think the amounted to much of a “mass” in any way.

In EVE Online, PLEX was off to a booming start. The price of a PLEX has risen some since then (~300 million then, well over a billion ISK now in new PLEX). Meanwhile, the first Hulkageddon was on and even I noticed something was amiss. Eventually somebody pointed me in the right direction in the comments.

I wondered if fishing was really the secret ingredient for MMO success.

I got all nostalgic for Star Trek because of Star Trek Online’s impending release.

World of Warcraft and EverQuest II both hit their five year anniversaries. Then I had the temerity to say that there were things that EQII didn’t do very well in my opinion. Odd how some of those things from a decade back have changed… or how I have changed… or both.

On the WoW end of things, somebody was suing because they felt the game wasn’t easy enough.

Then there were Mr. T Mohawk grenades and a 24 slot Portable Hole, outrages both along with the $10 vanity pets. And I was complaining about not getting the Headless Horseman’s mount during Hallow’s End. Again, sound familiar?

I wrote a very short post about Pilgrim’s Bounty which went on to become the most viewed post on the site November of five years ago.

And the instance group started in with Ragefire Chasm, Wailing Caverns and Deadmines on the RP-PVP server. Actual PVP occurred since we had to walk to the Deadmines. We get called griefers for daring to engage in PVP on a PVP server.

Fifteen Years Ago

As may have been mentioned, World of Warcraft launched fifteen years ago this month.

Also celebrating a fifteenth birthday this month was EverQuest II. It launched a few weeks earlier, but has ever remained in WoW‘s shadow.

EVE Online got its second free expansion, Exodus, which introduced player owned starbases… the POS of yore… one of the uses of which was to claim territory in untamed null sec space. And thus the race to for empires began.

Twenty Years Ago

Asheron’s Call, the third of the big three break out MMORPGs of the late 90s, launched. Never as big as its rivals (it peaked at 120K players to Ultima Online’s 250K and EverQuest’s 550K) it blazed its own trail in trying to define what an MMORPG ought to be. Neglect, a mis-handled sequel, and a studio that made some dubious and costly moves, left the game without a home when Standing Stone Games was split off to support Dungeons & Dragons Online and Lord of the Rings Online. Asheron’s Call was officially shut down in January 2017.

Most Viewed Posts in November

Search Terms of the Month

how to like raspberries
[to my mind they can only be tolerated]

new everquest game
[Maybe some day]

meeting stones dont summon in classic
[no they do not]

mau wow
[poppa oom mau wow]

why did ccp change the cyno rules in eve online
[If I could answer that…]

Game Time from ManicTime

World of Warcraft gets dethroned from the top spot after three months in a row, as I spent some time in EverQuest II for the 15th anniversary. I did play less WoW Classic than I did in October. However, EQII got a big boost thanks to my being off from work most of Thanksgiving week, giving me the time to indulge in its long, side track questing. It was well behind in time spent until this past week.

EverQuest II – 49.47%
World of Warcraft – 42.94%
EVE Online – 5.53%
EVE Aether Wars – 1.69%
LOTRO – 0.37%

EVE Online

Not a lot happened in New Eden for me. I went on a total of two ops. I’m not terribly interested in a lot of the game at the moment and a good chunk of my time was simply spent moving all my junk from one Keepstar to another since our staging station changed.

EverQuest II

Went back for the 15th anniversary and managed to find a goal that seemed obtainable, getting my alleged main to the level cap of 110. Getting to 108 was quick, but then there was a few days of distraction as I went off on what was something of a wild goose chase, at least when it came to the task at hand. However, there were some other things unlocked that may do me well later.

Pokemon Go

Still lingering around level 37, though 38 is getting closer. My wife asked me what we were going to do when we hit level 40. I said we’d probably quit and go play the Harry Potter version of the game for a change. That seemed to be okay, since she is much more of a fan of that than Pokemon.

Level: 37 (+0… but very close to 38)
Pokedex status: 470 (+7) caught, 495 (+7) seen
Pokemon I want: I need more Sinnoh stones…
Current buddy: Tepig

World of Warcraft

I logged in for Darkmoon Faire, which is what I do every month. I will level up my trade skills that way eventually. I also logged in for the 15th anniversary, though really only to get the achievement and whatever they were handing out directly. I did not do any of the events nor the LFR for the mount. I might regret that if mounts were rare, but when you have more than 400, it just isn’t that big of a deal I suppose.

WoW Classic

I slowed down a bit in WoW Classic in November. I didn’t stop, but as you can see from the play time break down, I didn’t spent more than 90% of my time playing it to the exclusion of all else. It isn’t a sprint but a marathon to get to level 60 and through all those instances.

Coming Up

It’s the most wonderful time of the year, according to some. I like that the production servers at work will be locked down for most of the month so no worry about pushing updates or changes. Just don’t let anything go wrong.

Game companies though… there will be expansion for EverQuest and EverQuest II and EVE Online next month. We’ll also be getting battlegrounds in WoW Classic. Then there will be holiday events and the Steam Winter Sale and all of that.

As for me, expect the usual end of the year nonsense I suppose. There is of series of annual posts I have accumulated over the years that I will no doubt get to again. Reviews of predictions, a look at what I played, highs and lows, maybe even something about books, all culminating in predictions for the new year.