The Site
As a follow up from last month I did, in fact, go back and put the year into the title of every past Month in Review post. It wasn’t all that difficult. Now will I remember to put the year in going forward?
On to my current annoyance with WordPress.com… because they are always pissing me off with one dumb thing or another… which this month is a change to how they handle dates on the main stats page. Previously you just picked the scale… days, weeks, months, years… and the data sized to fill up the available space, with an arrow to click if you wanted to see older data.
For some reason they decided that on this page… and not on any other stats page… what people really needed was an awkward date picker.
Also, it looks like complete amateur hour
Now you have to pick the scale you want and the range you want to display. For example, if you go from Days to Months, it doesn’t switch scale and, instead shows you the current month in the scale of the current month… which would be one month. So you have to complete multiple clicks to see what you want, which used to be available with a single click. [Addendum: They have worked to make this slightly less awkward over the last week, but it is still a poor idea, adding complexity without much benefit.]
But that isn’t the real annoying bit. The date picker also won’t let you pick dates in the future. Makes sense, because why would you want that? There is not data there, right?
Unless, of course, your computer and your blog are set to different time zones. Mine are, or were, because back when I started the blog UTC was the only option WP.com allowed, so I just got used to doing everything in UTC. That was fine. Our servers at work do everything in UTC and EVE Online is in UTC, so I am pretty used to converting everything to UTC, at least during waking hours.
With this change, when it hit 5pm Pacific time on my computer, tomorrow started in UTC (and that will soon be at 4pm as Daylight Savings Time ends this coming weekend), but the stats page woouldn’t let me see what was going on with the blog until midnight, because until then the blog lives in some bizarro tomorrow world that the the stats page doesn’t understand.
This, by the way, has always been a problem on the WP or Jet Pack apps on my phone and tablet. But you could trick them into showing you the current UTC day with a little effort. The web stats update, however, is steadfast in denying me that.
I gave in and finally changed the blog time setting to be Pacific time. I long fought that change fearing that WordPress would find some way to screw that up. Also, all of my stats are now 7 or 8 hours offset from before and the cycle of traffic is different.
But what about the benefits of this new date picker? I mean, theoretically you could view different ranges of data than just the old defaults, right?
Let’s try a few months of days in the stats
You might think that, but the stats page itself didn’t get updated, just the date and scale selectors, so if you try to display anything that falls outside of the previous parameters if just doesn’t draw. Jesus wept, why are so may devs just so dumb about thinking these things through, or at least putting in a minimal amount of freaking error handling?
This is truly the boundary between seasoned developers and the kids we hire straight out of college because the VP doesn’t want some other company’s “bad habits.”
Anyway, as expected, changing the time zone for the blog caused some issues. Stats didn’t work at all for about a day and when things finally settled down, I found that the change reset my streak counter. On Sunday the 22nd I had hit 1,302 consecutive days posting. On Monday, after having gone back and recalculated everything with the new time zone settings, I was knocked down to a mere 153 day streak.
This is not the streak you’re looking for
The post I wrote for May 24th was posted before midnight local time on May 23rd, so it didn’t count after the big reset. I would consciously do that at times, knowing I was working in UTC and not local time. (Though if you go look at the actual posts on those dates, they are still dated with the original post date and not the time change date, so at some level the WP.com is still indicating my streak SHOULD be valid. And the publish times aren’t off by enough to have been a UTC issue anyway.)
So rather than my having to take a day off or reach an amusing number… 1,337 was my next target… WP.com put a bullet into that whole journey.
On the up side, you likely won’t ever see me write about that posting streak again. On the down side, what am I going to use this section of the Month if Review posts for?
Besides complaining about WP.com I mean.
One Year Ago
Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion and the tidings of doom began. Twitter, now called X, is still a thing as of this writing… the new name is dumb and everybody who uses it has to immediately explain they mean Twitter… but it is partially broken and is actively promoting white nationalism and antisemitism. Elon Musk’s behavior since the takeover has also thoroughly tarnished his reputation… except with white nationalists and fans of antisemitism I suppose.
Completely unrelated to that, I was wondering why there were so many used Teslas on local dealership lots. A year later people are apologizing for owning Teslas… because we’ve seen what kind of person Elon Musk really is.
Meanwhile Mark Zuckerberg, who became Elon’s nemesis at some point, was still on his metaverse kick even though his own development team did play the Horizon Worlds app on their own time. Meta was trying to address the lack of legs in Horizon Worlds, but I wasn’t convinced.
The EverQuest II expansion Renewal of Ro was announced. while EverQuest was getting the Night of Shadows expansion.
New World also had its Brimstone Sands expansion launch, while the studio was out bragging about how much they had learned since the game launched. A lot of it felt like things they could have figured out before launch. I took a peek into the game and had no server yet again.
With the launch of Wrath of the Lich King Classic, the instance group was landing in Borean Tundra to start our journey. I needed to do some work on weapon skills there. I was also trying to not leave character behind in Outland.
I had my druid alt pick up inscription, the trade skill added with Wrath.
We made it 70 in Borean Tundra and moved over to Howling Fjord, giving us a chance for our first peek into Utgarde Keep. Our second run, after a bit of research, was more successful, but it took the third try to get our act together and finish the whole thing.
I had some early wishes for Wrath Classic.
On the retail WoW front Blizzard was getting ready for the Dragonflight expansion. The pre-patch was up soon and it changed the whole UI.
RimWorld launched its BioTech expansion.
And then there was EVE Online, where I was looking into the effect on PLEX prices that the Omega clone sale, which made a month of Omega 300 PLEX versus the usual 500. I even did a post about the MER focused on just that before I got to the rest of the economy. Somewhat related, there was also a opinion on how a perfectly safe high sec was working out in EVE Echoes.
I also did a bullet points post about the Empires of EVE vol. II audio book, The Mittani no longer in Goons, the start of Alliance Tournament XVIII, and the three day Weekend Omega pack.
There was the result of the war on Orcas. The Reavers SIG turned 8 years old. We also got the Crimson Harvest event.
And CCP made the new Photon UI the default with the October update. They also decided to fix the dynamic bounty system… kind of a surprise since they had been so sure that its previous form would fix ratting or stop botting or drive conflict. (Spoiler: it did none of those things.)
Five Years Ago
Gamigo bought the games of Trion Worlds, leaving not much behind.
We heard that a lot of people play Minecraft, that there would be no Minecraft 2, and that pandas were coming.
We were told that Google Plus would be going away. It had few fans, a bizarre UI, and was the excuse used to kill Google Reader, so I didn’t shed a tear at that announcement.
We learned that Mike Morhaime would be stepping down as CEO of Blizzard to be replaced by J. Allen Brack of the infamously incorrect quote about the idea of WoW Classic.
Standing Stone decided to farm nostalgia with the LOTRO Legendary server idea.
We learned that the 25th EverQuest expansion would be The Burning Lands. For EverQuest II the Chaos Descending expansion was coming.
I was on a nostalgia tour of EverQuest II that involved a quest chain that was literally a nostalgia tour of EverQuest II. That got me geared up to run through The Withered Lands. I made it to level 100 even.
There was a hint that the survival side of H1Z1, Just Survive, might survive. And then we were told it would not.
In New Eden the Keepstar War was over and a massive move op got me back home to Delve. There was even a video. Then it was back to shooting stuff around home.
The Reavers SIG turned four years old.
We seemed to be headed to war in high sec in Perimeter, and shot the Panfam trading Fortizar. That ended when TEST dropped a Keepstar, the Perimeter Trading Tower.
The October update was about balance, which meant killing ECM really, while the CSM 13 summit minutes mentioned how war decs were killing high sec.
I was headed to EVE Vegas where we would see Pearl Abyss, CCP’s new owners, for the first time. Much info was shared and swag gathered. I even gave a presentation. But it was about blogging, so nobody saw it. I summed it all up when I got home. I was dubious about the announced FLEX structures.
There was some joyful hysteria as a DCMA exception was made for MMO preservation. However, it required the owner of the source code give it over voluntarily, which seemed like a huge stumbling block to me. Creating emulators was still verboten.
And then there was that Rules for Rulers video, which prompted me to read the source material on which it was based, which made me even more cynical about politics than I already was.
Ten Years Ago
EverQuest: Mactinosh Edition was slated to shut down after a ten year run. Meanwhile, EverQuest Live launched Call of the Forsaken, the game’s 20th expansion. The Fippy Darkpaw server made it to The Buried Sea expansion. And in EverQuest II, insta-level characters were set to become a thing.
Also, Daybreak got DC Universe Online onto the PlayStation 4 where it reportedly continues to do quite well.
With the release of Pokemon X & Y, which required upgrading to Nintendo 3DS hardware, I was saying farewell to the series. Little did I know I would be pulled back in a few months down the road.
As part of some NBI event I attempted to recount all the guilds I had joined over the years.
Somebody was attempting to remake the old Kesmai game Stellar Emperor.
Path of Exile finished up beta and was officially live.
After a post-F2P boom, Trion went back to paring down the number of servers for Rift while its servers in China were shut down completely.
The instance group was still running Foundry modules in Neverwinter.
I was trying out War Thunder. After failing to get through the tutorial for World of Warplanes, I opted for its competitor, which seems better suited for the inept like me. I was able to get out there and be a target for other players while bombing at least.
In New Eden our gate camp deployment to the Curse region was wrapping up almost as soon as it started. It felt like we had just snuck in. It was time to go home to the quiet of Deklein for a while and wait for the Rubicon expansion. While there I finally bought my first capital ship, an Archon carrier. It went for its first jump and then stayed docked for almost a year. Of course, I found out I had a lot of stuff sitting in hangars around New Eden. Nine million things, to put a number to it. And CCP was setting up classes for new players… which was great if you lived in the European time zone.
I was pondering the “journey vs. destination” question with MMOs while feeling a bit wistful that World of Warcraft holidays were not offering much new.
Marc Pinkus, founder of Zynga, declared he was bored of games.
And we finally ditched AT&T DSL for Comcast cable-modem internet, resolving the bandwidth sharing problems at our house.
Fifteen Years Ago
In one of the worst kept secrets in video game development it was announced that BioWare’s MMO project was in fact Star Wars: The Old Republic. Their subscription goals were, of course, quite modest.
I celebrated my 15 years of playing Sojourn/TorilMUD with the first in a series of posts. Nostalgia FTW! And I guess that makes this the 25 year mark. My, how time flies! I probably need a post about that.
And speaking of Nostalgia, Tipa was out looking for EverQuest blogs. I’m not sure any were discovered. EverQuest itself launched its fifteenth expansion, Seeds of Destruction, which brought NPC mercenaries to the game to assist players.
The instance group formed up a guild and was running in Warhammer Online. We had our best night and our worst night, plus a few that were somewhere in between. All in all though, things were not as exciting as we had hoped.
Mythic was trying out incentives to get better server balance while starting to talk about new stuff coming soon. Not a word about the quest log however.
In EVE Online Potshot, Gaff, and I were playing with fleets and I was flying a shiny new ship. Also the EVE Blog Pack was defined.
Finally, I stared logging into World of Warcraft again to get things lined up for the upcoming Wrath of the Lich King expansion. I managed to survive through the controversial scourge event and was intrigued by the shiny new achievements.
Twenty Years Ago
A shooter named Call of Duty launched. Now Activision’s annual revenue pretty much depends on shipping a sequel to it.
Lineage II launched as well. The successor to the original Lineage, which was in last month’s post celebrating its 20th anniversary, it had the usual problem of MMORPG sequels in never living up to the success of the original.
Twenty-Five Years Ago
The Rise of Rome expansion came out for Age of Empires.
Delta Tao launches Clan Lord, and early MMORPG on the Macintosh platform.
Thirty Five Years Ago
The Sega MegaDrive launched in Japan. Mentioned mostly because I ended up with a Sega Genesis, the name used in the US, a few years later.
Elevator Action arrives in the US, an arcade title I pushed a lot of quarters into back in the day.
Forty Five Years Ago
Really, am I going back that far now? Yes I am! I went back 50 years for Atari’s founding didn’t I? Anyway, back in October of 1978 Space Invaders arrived in North America. I posted about that event. It was a big deal back in the day.
Most Viewed Posts in October
Normally I don’t say anything about the most viewed posts because they tend to be mostly some older posts that still have some traction on Google and maybe one of two things from the current month. Most months I just paste in the previous month’s list, change the order a bit, and add/delete maybe four items tops. But this month was a little different.
- A Year of Elon Musk Wrecking Twitter
- Timing those Lucky Eggs for Friendship Milestones in Pokemon Go
- The Great Dial Tone Drought of 96
- Binge Watching into yet another Autumn
- When the Modem Business Ran Out at the Village
- The Headless Horseman’s Mount Finally Obtained
- Dropping into WoW Classic Hardcore and the Deathlog Addon
- 20 Games that Defined the Apple II
- Alamo teechs u 2 play DURID!
- Answering Gaming Questions with AI – Finding a Warm Ocean in Minecraft
- False Memories and the Halls of Reflection
- The Death of eWorld
The blog saw a pretty big uptick in traffic and I cannot explain why. It started with my post about Elon owning Twitter for a year, but carried on. My post from yesterday made the cut, and the last post before the review almost never has enough traffic to manage that. Also, none of that traffic is from search engines, which have been pretty flat this month. Don’t know where the traffic is coming from, and it will probably be gone tomorrow, but for now it is almost like… well, 2020 and the Covid shut down, which saw a brief resurgence in traffic here. It would take a lot more to get me back to 2012/2013 numbers.
Search Terms of the Month
Gamer Blogs
[I feel like I’ve been here before]
FI.RE Coalition Logo
[I think it was just FI.RE in outline block letters like this]
Game Time from ManicTime
No surprises here really. Lots of time in Northrend. A bit of time spent in New Eden. And I think I logged into retail WoW twice to check things claimed via Prime Gaming.
- WoW Classic – 82.18%
- EVE Online – 13.28%
- Baldur’s Gate 3 – 4.50%
- World of Warcraft – 0.05%
Baldur’s Gate 3
After taking a month off Potshot and I did get some time in on BG3 this month, making it back to the druid’s grove after defeating the bosses at the goblin outpost. We didn’t get beyond that yet, but we made some progress. Maybe as the holidays approach we’ll find some more free time for this.
EVE Online
It was Crimson Harvest and some war fighting up in the north in New Eden in October, along with GM Week. I didn’t do any of the Crimson Harvest event, but I was in for some of the sov war up in Deklein and I got an alt in for the GM Week bot bash, so I have yet another character whose kill board is all capitals and nothing else… besides losses.
I also spent a lot of time with EVE Online Twitch streams running in a browser tab, fishing for Twitch drops. CCP went nuts with the Twitch drops. I have more drops from them over the last month than all other titles combined. My Twitch end of year summary is going to be hilariously inaccurate, at least relative to what I actually sat and watched.
Pokemon Go
- Level: 44 (39% of the way to 45 in xp, 1 of 4 tasks complete)
- Pokedex status: 804 (+3) caught, 819 (+6) seen
- Vivillon Evolutions obtained: 15 of 20
- Pokemon I want: Three specific Scatterbugs; Sandstorm, Icy Snow, and Meadow
- Current buddy: Smolive
WoW Classic
We got the final update for Wrath Classic, the last three dungeons are in, and it is time to finish this expansion off. That and running through Hallow’s End, where the Headless Horseman’s mount dropped for me at last, about sums up the month. Gave me plenty to do, so I didn’t spend any time back in Hardcore.
Zwift
Another month where I got on the bike just twice. I have excuses, but I was seriously considering just omitting this from the post. But I don’t put it here for you I suppose. I put it here to remind myself I am slacking. We’ll see what the next month brings.
- Level – 19 (+0)
- Distanced cycled – 1,762 miles (+19 miles)
- Elevation climbed – 66,588 (+577 feet)
- Calories burned – 54,158 (+459)
Coming Up
The holiday season is pretty much here. It is Halloween today, Day of the Dead tomorrow, Thanksgiving in the US at the end of the month, and then your December holiday of choice culminating in New Years where we used to all need a new calendar, but now with digital how many people even hang up a physical calendar anymore?
With the closing of the year we will see a series of announcements and no doubt a few MMO updates.
BlizzCon starts this Friday. What will Blizzard, now a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft Corporation, announce?
EVE Online is slated to launch the Havoc expansion.
EG7 and Daybreak will be launching the Corsairs of Umbar expansion for LOTRO and getting ready for the two musically theme expansions for EverQuest and EverQuest II, Laurion’s Song and Ballads of Zimara respectively.
And as the weather cools down and it is easier to stay at home in front of the computer, digital nostalgia has a chance to settle in. Will I drag out some old title to play?
Then there are holiday events in the offing. But more of that lands in December.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 