The Site
It was a bit of an erratic month. For the past year or so I’ve been trucking along with about 500 page views per day with an occasional spike if somebody links an old post on Reddit or something. I had a couple of those days this month,
January 16th was amusing
(I made a 666 reference in the last January in review as well. This isn’t going to be a running bit.)
However, as the month wore on traffic started to taper off noticeably. While I am sure Bing no longer completely embargoing me helped a bit, Google seemed to be giving me the cold shoulder in the back half of January with traffic from there dropping 20%. Given that the bulk of my traffic is from Google, that has an impact on my stats.
Overall though, the core of traffic, which is about 200 views a day from direct sources, remained about the same. So my daily traffic is generally 200 + Google + other search engines and social media + random links on Reddit.
In other items, for no good reason aside from inertia… well, and the fact that I know the day I stop the counter goes back to zero… I carried on with my posting streak and this is now the 1,039th day in a row. At some point the madness will end.
One Year Ago
Microsoft said they were going to buy Activision Blizzard for 69 billion dollars. That was kind of a surprise. Blizzard also announced an unannounced survival game. And then Sony said they were going to buy Bungie for 3 billion dollars, which was all kind of odd because Microsoft used to own Bungie. I don’t know.
It is hardly a January unless I open up with some sort of predictions post. That and the end of the Steam Winter Sale are practically constants in the universe.
I also reviewed what I played in 2021 and looked forward into 2022. World of Tanks also told me how I did there in 2021, which wasn’t very well.
Harry Potter Wizards Unite shut down.
Square Enix said they were all in on crypto, something they doubled down on a year later. They seemed convinced some people would trade fun for earnings potential… or scam potential if we’re talking about crypto.
Daybreak put out roadmaps for EverQuest and EverQuest II… and stuck to them! There was also a community resource council being set up for EverQuest. Over in EQII I had hit the level cap in Visions of Vertovia.
I was playing Pokemon Shining Pearl on the Switch Lite. I managed to catch Palkia and then went on to fight the Pokemon League.
Then there was Forza Horizon 4 with a controller on my PC.
I was also fiddling around with Stellaris once more. Judging from the month in review play time numbers, I actually spent some time with it.
The instance group was still in New World, seeking out salt and other crafting goods. We were also trying to get to the Starstone Barrows.
Then there was the whole EVE Online + Doctor Who cross-over event in New Eden, which seemed a very strange venture. The event kicked off with some fanfare. There were definitely a series of steps to get to shooting the promised Daleks.
Out in Null Sec The Army of Mango Alliance messed up their attempt to back their way into Imperium membership. That led to blowing up their Keepstar after letting it run out of fuel, so it dumped all the contents out like a giant loot pinata.
Also Progodlegend stepped down from CSM16 and CCP was having problems with the December MER, summed up in a bullet points post. CCP eventually dropped the MERs with some new measurements near the end of the month.
Somebody asked how many games people had spent at least 500 hours playing. I had a list for that one. Being old helps.
Venture Beat, our top source of cypto hype news, held a metaverse summit, where much was said… and I tried to explain how garbage crypto really is.
There was my five books of 2021. I did some headlines from the mail bag.
And I summed up some of our binge watching during the holidays and then a few more shows we watched in the new year.
Five Years Ago
There were the usual predictions and outlook and Steam Winter Sale posts for the year. I am consistent, you have to give me that.
Satan was speaking to us about lockboxes.
I played Anarchy Online for a few hours.
There was Trogday.
I was looking into the Legion expansion in World of Warcraft for the new year.
Blizzard gave us four more bag slots… if we had our account security setup correctly. A year later that little notification about the bag slots still comes up every once in a while.
I was on to pet battles again, collecting them, leveling them up, and looking into the Celestial Tournament.
Blizzard also gave us a target season (summer) for Battle for Azeroth and opened up pre-orders.
In EVE Online the January update moved the Agent Finder fully into The Agency.
But the big news in New Eden was brewing in the system 9-4PR2. Pandemic Horde was anchoring a Keepstar there and the hype for the battle over it built pretty fast. Dubbed the “Million Dollar Battle” in advance, it didn’t quite get there, though there were over 6,000 players in the system at one point. INN spent time reviewing the whole thing. Still, it was good enough for a Guinness Book World Record. (Yeah, that was in April, but I figured I would tie the whole event together here.)
I moved all of my games and data from my old Nintendo 3DS XL to a new 2DS XL.
In a bullet points post I was on about the Age of Empires remaster, which you could only get through the Microsoft store, Rift Prime plans, legendary Pokemon, the cost of making video games, and how BitCoin miners were buying up all the video cards.
And, finally, I was kind of bummed because, in this age of streaming, if you want to see recent movie releases at home, disks were still the most reliable method for the price… short of pirating the movies, of course.
Ten Years Ago
Firefly Universe Online. Was that a hoax or not? I still don’t know. And does the acronym FUO seem mildly obscene?
Wizardry Online joined the SOE stable while Pirates of the Burning Sea was sent packing. Who is laughing now?
We got our full group together in Rift and did our first instance of the year, dying at least 100 times combined. This lead to a side post about bosses and gimmicks and what makes a challenge.
In World of Tanks the instance group was scooting around. We even created our own little clan. Potshot and I were totally going French.
In EVE Online, after a sudden burst of war fever died down, there was a surprise battle where more than 2,500 ships clashed in Asakai when CFC FC Dabigredboat led a supercap fleet in to rescue a stray titan. The battle was so big that CCP did a Dev Blog about it. Meanwhile, we were to be denied LEGO Rifters.
The DUST 514 open beta was officially open. I never ended up bombing anything from orbit.
Path of Exile went into full open beta as well.
Krono made its way from EverQuest II to EverQuest while I was wondering what people were spending their Station Cash on.
I was musing about MUDs again, and vendors who wouldn’t simply buy any crap you had for sale and dead rats.
There was a list of 20 games that defined the Apple II. That remains an evergreen traffic generator.
And I wrote out my yearly list. This time it was goals, mostly because I was on vacation when I was supposed to be writing it.
Fifteen Years Ago
I started off with a helping of silly predictions.
I was bemoaning my inability to be a fan boy and parrying claims that PvE players were going to ruin Warhammer Online.
There were some pictures from my daughter’s LEGO birthday party. Those seem to get linked on Pintrest quite often.
Then, with Tabula Rasa dead to me since open beta, I started wondering if there was any hope at all for a Science Fiction MMORPG. This ended up being one of my most responded to posts of the time. Plus, in addition to all the comments, Potshot, Tipa, Lemegeton, Gooney, and even Massively following up with response posts. This post still gets a lot of views every month. (And yes, I do think there is hope, I just don’t know when we’ll get what we’re looking for.)
And, along with that, I wrote about five LEGO Video Games I would like to see made. And a few of those ended up getting made. Imagine!
Then there was the start of the run-up to Pirates of the Burning Sea which, among other things, required me to invest in a new router as well as reviewing how to pick a server in a new game. The latter was from a time when we assumed servers would stay crowded like they did in WoW.
In World of Warcraft the Saturday night instance group was hitting Scholomance, Dire Maul West and Scholomance again as part of the Paladin mount quest, Stratholme, then Dire Maul West once more for the Warlock mount quest, and then Scholomance for the third and final time to get all the epic mounts straight. By then we were all level 60 which meant we could head to the Outlands only a year after The Burning Crusade shipped!
In EVE Online, after spending millions of ISK, I managed my first Tech II Blueprint, then I couldn’t afford to build it. Ah, life in New Eden. I also got my standing past 8.0 with the Caldari Navy and spent time hauling trash.
And, finally, in Lord of the Rings Online I was able to pick up my Bree Pony, the 2007 holiday gift to founders.
Twenty Years Ago
The game now known as Entropia Universe launches. Riding the virtual world craze and being early on monetizing digital goods, it set some world records for most expensive virtual items. It is also the title you should bring up when some Web3 blockchain bozo starts talking about how they have revolutionary ideas about ownership in the metaverse. Entropia Universe is, from what I have heard, a crap game, which both tells you what you should expect from Web3 ideas and also that they are not anything new.
Thirty Five Years Ago
Electronic Arts launches Wasteland which holds a special place in my own gaming timeline as it is the last title I bought for my Apple //e.
Also, Tetris arrived in North America.
Most Viewed Posts in January
- Minecraft and the Search for a Warm Ocean
- Alamo teechs u 2 play DURID!
- Honest Game Trailers does Pokemon Violet and Scarlet
- Flight in Pre-Patch Outland
- Making the Grey Pit in Valheim
- 20 Games that Defined the Apple II
- The EverQuest Team Expands on their UI Engine Roadmap Update
- Stuck in the Gym in Pokemon Go
- Corpse Spam in Stormwind
- New Eden and China
- CCP Lets EVE Online Players with Multiple Accounts Subscribe Secondary Accounts at a Lower Price
- The Altar of Zul and Jintha’alor
Search Terms of the Month
my character has no server new world select world
[You and me both friend]
palmont police department (world)
[feeling some need for speed?]
star wars empire guild name generator
[Vader’s Fist?]
gay games emulator
[I see this every month, and they never find it here]
Game Time by ManicTime
I ended up playing three titles in January. I also ended up spending half as much time playing games as I did in December. The holidays were over and the new year was busy.
- WoW Classic – 57.58%
- EVE Online – 39.98%
- LEGO Star Wars – 2.44%
There was something of a resurgence of time in New Eden. I probably did the most things there. As I always say, I spend so much of my time playing EVE Online tabbed out of the game that it never really gets tracked properly.
EVE Online
Kind of a lively month in New Eden for me. I was in four good fights, there was some null sec political news, I made some ISK, and did some exploring. On the combat side of things I was on more kill mails this past month than I was in any three months of 2022 combined. The collapse of FI.RE in the face of the Pandemic Horde onslaught got us some political drama and speculation about who will live in that space: Will it be left fallow for new groups or become tributaries to PanFam? And I went to Pochven. Twice. Which means I have been there three times now.
LEGO Star Wars
I meant to play a lot more of this than I did. The problem, really, seems to be the heavy focus commitment it needs as a game. The thing about MMOs, and especially EVE, is that despite there being no pause button, they are pretty interruptible. I can listen to a podcast when I am just running quests or doing tasks in WoW Classic. I can get up and go to the bathroom in a tidi fleet fight in EVE and not be too worried about what I’ll miss. In fact, I am serious that ManicTime doesn’t capture how much time I spend playing EVE because I spend so much of that time tabbed out of the game looking at intel and reference material about the game. LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga needs my hands on the controller and me focused on it alone.
Pokemon Go
The hunt for Vivillon dominated the month, with my wife and I both looking for new friends to fill out the list of 18 zones required to catch them all.
- Level: 43 (21% of the way to 44 in xp, 1 of 4 tasks complete)
- Pokedex status: 750 (+4) caught, 767 (+3) seen
- Mega Evolutions obtained: 21 of 30
- Pokemon I want: All the other Vivillons it seems
- Current buddy: High Plains Vivillon
WoW Classic
We were a bit slow getting back into things after the holidays, but did get through Drak’Tharon and into Violet Hold. And then the Lunar Festival came along and we spent a couple of weekends chasing achievements for that. We still have one blocker between us and the meta achievement and title, but I will get to that tomorrow I think.
Zwift
I did managed to keep on riding. I even did some pretty long rides. Occasionally I get in the groove and go beyond my minimum quota.
- Level – 18 (+1)
- Distanced cycled – 1,493 miles (+94 miles)
- Elevation climbed – 57,838 (+3,429 feet)
- Calories burned – 46,834 (+3,694)
Coming Up
“Is it February already?” said all the old people like myself, as they seem to at the end of every month.
What will we get next month?
February is the butt end of winter, at least in California. We’ve had a bunch of rain, we might get a bit more, but it will return to warmer temperatures here near the coast.
As for gaming… I guess we’ll move from lunar new year to Valentine’s Day related events. And we’ll get some abbreviated earnings statement from Activision Blizzard. But I am not sure what else is coming. No big new releases for me in any case, so I guess I’ll carry on with the same stuff as before.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 