Bubble Wrap Plan Gets a PAPI Keepstar Anchored in NPC Delve

When I first came here, this was all swamp. Everyone said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built in all the same, just to show them. It sank into the swamp. So I built a second one. And that one sank into the swamp. So I built a third. That burned down, fell over, and then sank into the swamp. But the fourth one stayed up. And that’s what you’re going to get, Son, the strongest castle in all of England.

–King of Swamp Castle, who only took four tries to get his castle built

On the bright side, the Imperium didn’t have to sacrifice another trillion ISK in ships.

Today saw the fifth attempt by PAPI to get a Keepstar planted in NPC Delve, this time in YZ9-F6, the site of the failed trap last week.  When the Imperium jumped in and warped to the structure to start the fight, we found it surrounded by 149 warp disruption bubbles.

Bubble wrapped Keepstar

There were also dictors putting up bubbles inside the bubbles and various groups of hostiles deployed around the Keepstar.

When the timer hit zero they managed to get the Quantum Core in right away, so we didn’t even get the free hits we got away with last time around.  But there were so many objects on grid that people were getting disconnected as they warped onto grid.  There was a momentary discussion about what we should do, but the timer was ticking down in real time.  In the end, there did not seem to be a way forward, so after some small clashes we turned around and went home.

Bubble fly by

The battle report shows a very small amount of losses compared to previous battles.

Battle Report Header

I had to go in and fix the battle report to get people on the correct sides.  That is a sure sign that not much happened, when the BR tool doesn’t know where to put people.

We were, of course, out numbered as usual, though not by the margin that the BR might suggest.  There was around 4,500 people in local, so the numbers on the BR are an under count of people who who showed up, since it only grabs people who were on a kill mail.

4,438 in local as the timer started

If you came and left without blowing something up (or getting blown up yourself), you were not added to the tally.

Bubbles in bubbles with more bubbles showing up

So PAPI has their foothold in NPC Delve.  Now where will they go from there?  Have they changed their mind about avoiding our Keepstars?  Or has the past two weeks of fighting in NPC Delve convinced them that would be a bad idea?  Either way, some of us got most of our Sunday back to do other things.  But somebody had to hang around and clean up those bubbles.

Other coverage:

• New Eden Post – PAPI Keepstar Fully Operational in YZ9-F6, NPC Delve
• INN – PAPI Keepstar in YZ9-F6 Comes Online

The Canadian Visitor

Warning: This is a Tales from the Blog sort of story and involves page view stats.  No video games are mentioned.

I like to watch the traffic stats for my blog, less because they are meaningful at any given moment… web stats are a polite lie most of the time… but because I like to see what brings people here and the patterns of interest.  As I have said in the past, even an flawed system of measurement, applied consistently, can reveal patterns that even an accurate single data point cannot show.

So when I noticed a big pop in page views a couple weeks back, I started looking at what might have caused it.  Running a WP.com hosted blog means that I do not get to see raw data, but I have a couple of avenues to check that can be lined up to indicate what was going on.

The first check is usually to see who is referring traffic.  Often a traffic spike is related to the site, or a specific post, being linked somewhere with some visibility.  Every so often, for example, somebody will link the Alamo teechs u 2 play DURID! post gets linked to one of the World of Warcraft sub-reddits and between a dozen and a couple hundred people will click on that link.

This is very easy to spot in the basic stats.  The referrer will be obvious and the post linked will have a bunch of page views which will push it to the top of the daily list.

This time there were no referrers that stood out and no particular post seemed to be getting traffic that could account for the jump in total page views.  In fact, referrer and post stats seemed very much within the recent norm, while page views were exploding.  The second day of this saw the site get just over five thousand page views but Google, always the default top referrer, had only sent me 350 viewers, and the top post of the day only had 30 page views.

Sometimes that means somebody went scrolling through the blog.  I have the theme set up for infinite scroll, so you can just press the page down or arrow key and scroll all the way back to September 2006 if you have the time and patience.

But when you do that, a page view gets counted for every ~20 posts and gets attached to the Home Page view stats.  The Home Page, somebody showing up at the base URL, always has the most page views on any given day because I don’t hide post content and make people click on titles to read a whole post.  I could do that, and I am sure my page views would go up, but I don’t like that on other blogs so I don’t do it here.  As I always say, be the blog you want to read.

And this might have explained all those page view.  The flag counter widget on the side bar did not show anywhere close to the number of page views that WP.com was showing me, which is consistent with somebody doing a long scroll, as the widget only gets loaded once when you do it.

That is one of my checks on the WP.com stats.

Also, the visitor count, WP.com’s attempt to track daily unique visitors, was very low relative to the page views.  The visitor count is very broken, more so than page views I would guess, since I can get referrals from seven different locations, which implies seven different people visiting, and WP.com will tell me I had two visitors so far.  Also, the Flag Counter widget would count a different number, maybe five, maybe seven, just to confuse the issue.  As I said, web stats are a polite lie.  But, again, if I ignore accuracy and look at trends, somebody doing the long scroll tends to widen the gap between page views and visitors.

However, the Home Page only showed about 400 views, leaving a few thousand page views unaccounted for.  So nobody did the long scroll.

Then I noticed that Canada seemed to be way over represented in the demographic stats.  Again, specific count is probably garbage, but trends are likely reflective of reality, and the usual daily trend tends to look something like this.

Typical top five distribution

Those countries tend to be in the top five in that order every single day.  That is the same order displayed in my annual blog wrap up, the fourteenth of which I posted back in September.

On the peak day, however, the country list looked like this.

The big day

Germany was a bit down that day… they tend to trend up with EVE Online posts… while Canada was through the roof.

But where was all that traffic going.  There was no referrer sending me that much traffic, there was no single page that seemed to be receiving it, and the visitor count indicated that it wasn’t a bunch of people in any case.

So I drilled down in the WP.com stats.  It will show you all the pages that got traffic on a given day, with a page view count.  And there I noticed that after the usual fifty or so on a given day that get multiple page views, there was a long, long list of pages that got exactly one page view.  Hundreds and hundreds of pages with a single page view.

At that point I think I figured it out.  This person, from Canada, started with one post, probably the latest one, and began viewing the all one at a time.  At the bottom of each post there are links that let you view the next and previous posts in the chronological order of their appearance.

I think this person sat there and clicked through, page by page, each post using those links.  That explains all the page views, the low user count, the lack of referrals, and the fact that no single page, not even the Home Page, saw a spike in traffic.

And the flag counter widget?  I thought that it would reload with each new page and count a page view there.  But when I tried it myself on my phone, it seemed to ignore the count of views if I went post to post that way.  But it is much more interested in unique visitors than page views.

So this whole post adds up to the fact that one person, from Canada, appears to have paged through nearly every singe post on the site, one at time, over the course of two days.  The page views did not come in a single burst, but took time to accumulate over those two days.

Or, alternatively, somebody in Canada ran a script that scraped all the content from the blog one page at a time.  So if you see another site that features a lot of familiar content, let me know.  I’d like to see where I am being backed up!