November 2025 in Review

The Site

The site itself ran on its merry way without much in the way of problems with WP.com.  In fact, they even sent me some money.  I hit the mark for a WordAds payout so they put money into my PayPal account, bringing my total since I began turning ads on back in 2021 to just shy of $900.  I am not going to quit my day job, but that does cover the hosting for both this site, which is on the Premium plan, and my other site, which is on the Personal plan.

As always, if you are reading this, I advise you to use an ad blocker.  I don’t control the ad content and I want to tax comment bots and random passers by, not any returning guests.

Still, that is enough ad revenue to make me consider the Business plan which, among other things, lets you use plugins.  It is a limited set of plugins, and some of the better plugins also have a monthly or annual charge, but at least it would be an option.  That might get me to blogroll version 10.

Also, the business plan gives you a staging version of your site to check out changes before pushing them live.  This tempts me as I have mentioned my current blog theme, 2012, has passed its expiration date and it likely to break at some point so I feel like the time is ripe to start trying on new templates.

Finally, only semi-related, I was away all last week.  It is hard to tell, I know.  The quality of my content doesn’t change much whether I write that morning or out several days in advance.  I suspect the former has more typos, but not many more.  We were down in San Diego for the holiday week, where the weather was warm and pleasant along the beach.

Crystal Pier stretching out into the calm Pacific

It wasn’t hot, but it was warm enough, getting up into the mid-70s while we were down there.  We were down there to escape both the 30+ year tradition of hosting Thanksgiving at our house and to check out the university down there where our daughter may go to grad school.  We spent a day wandering the sprawling campus, but for me the highlight was the library.

The Theodor Geisel Library, named for Dr. Seuss

If there is one thing that makes me wistful for college it is a giant, sprawling university library.  Much of this one is below the structure you see above, sunk below ground level.  I could wander the stacks of obscure volumes for days, many of which will never move beyond print, not being deemed valuable enough to be gobbled up by the Bezos Kindle machine.

I used to spend a lot of idle time at the library at my own alma mater discovering things like bound regimental histories, donated by members, detailing their journeys and assignments back in WWI, competing theories of acting methodologies, a dense tome detailing regional accents of the US getting down to county level variations with pronunciation keys, and budgets for local cities back into the 19th century.  This was back when the internet was still getting used to the concept of electronic mail and more than a decade before even Yahoo was a thing.

Anyway, that was a nice distraction.  Now we’re back home and it is 15 degrees cooler and I can understand why people flock to the southern end of the state.

One Year Ago

The Stars Reach pre-alpha play tests took us into space for the first time.  We then got some new worlds, and some of the fun of the time was bugs like falling through the world.  We even got some weekday tests.  The team also put out a new trailer and those of us in the pre-alpha were able to buy a special T-shirt.

The Legacy of Morgoth expansion landed in Lord of the Rings Online.

I reflected on 20 years of EverQuest II.  That was much lower key than my EverQuest 25th anniversary posts.  There was also the launch of the Scars of Destruction expansion, the 21st for the game.

Blizzard put out a roadmap for WoW Classic.  That included the quickly launched 20th Anniversary classic servers, a replay of 2019 with some slight changes. A whole legion of players seemed unable to understand that saying The Burning Crusade would be coming to these servers in Winter/Spring 2026 meant it wouldn’t be arriving until Winter/Spring of 2026.  Really, some peak “I didn’t read the assignment” levels of reaction.

Anyway, I poked my nose in… and it wasn’t crazy like 2019 and original WoW Classic.

There was also a roadmap for retail WoW, which included housing… only 20 years late according to some.  It was still a year away, but the very idea made a lot of people pin their hopes and dreams on the idea.

I also reflected a bit on the 20 years of World of Warcraft on its anniversary.

Meanwhile, our time in Cataclysm Classic , where 2019 classic currently sat, was waning as we attempted the Heroic Deadmines.  It did not go well.

Azeroth nostalgia having been sated, I decided to try out Enshrouded.  I quickly reported back to the group and soon had a server up for all of us.  We dove right in and started to learn about all the things to do in the game, including how to tame a feral cat.  That seemed to be the end of Cataclysm Classic for us.

In EVE Online I was reflecting on a rather modest Crimson Harvest event.  The October MER certainly indicated that somebody made a lot of ISK off of the event.

Then the Revenant expansion arrived.  New ships, new SKINNR stuff, new attempts to “fix” null sec from people who never played in null sec.  But, hey, free Omega time and login rewards!

Out in null sec we were in our fourth week of the great move op to Tenerifis.  We were more committed to the bit than you can imagine.  The Initiative announced that they would be resetting all standings and going it alone come January 1.

I wrote about EVE Galaxy Conquest and how it was not the 4X game you might have been hoping for.  I may have referred to it as Clash of Clones.  I also deleted it from my iPad shortly thereafter.

In my telephone tales series, I was on about how bad Intervoice was as a company and then went on to West Corporation… also a bad company, but a different… or maybe indifferent… sort of bad.  I mean, at least they had a plan.

I had a Friday bullet points post about financials from Enad Global 7 and Pearl Abyss.

Blue Sky seemed to be doing well in the social media wars.  It was certainly a better place that whatever Twitter had become and whatever Threads was pretending to be.  At least it wasn’t run by immoral billionaires to further the cause of immoral billionaires.

Finally, I was wondering how elves in general, and Elrond in particular, could even handle the passage of time as immortals.

Five Years Ago

EverQuest II celebrated its sweet sixteen with some unexpected downtime.  Oops.  EverQuest was getting ready for the Claws of Veeshan expansion.

World of Warcraft was spinning up for the Shadowlands expansion, and I was getting in a few tasks before it landed.  There was also the beta and something about multiboxing software and the fact that BlizzCon Online being free.  I was also wondering if anybody really needed a level booster after the big level squish.  The ride to 50 was pretty fast.

We were still playing around a bit in the level squished Northrend, trying to do a three person with Prince Keleseth.  That did not end well.  I also started a demon hunter to try the run to 50 in the level squish.  It was a quick run, though it got strange because I wasn’t in quite the right timeline.

Then there were the pre-events in Northrend… and I always love going to Northrend.  There was plenty to do up there.

And then there was the pre-launch calm before we were finally let into Shadowlands.  It seemed like a pretty smooth launch once you got past the crowd in Stormwind.  The zones were quick and fun and I was soon making my debut in the theater of pain. and then off into Ardenweald.

Meanwhile, in WoW Classic, we were working out way to the detention block in Blackrock Depths and then Shadowforge City after which we went walking with Marshal Windsor.

On the WoW Classic front Blizz was talking about plans and bans.

I hit level 40 in Pokemon Go.  I was also using Discord to get overseas raid invites to catch special legendaries.

There were some more shows to write about in the great pandemic binge watch.

And of course there was EVE Online and World War Bee, which I will just sum up in a list of posts:

• Seventeen Weeks of World War Bee
• Eighteen Weeks of World War Bee
• The November Update brings Null Sec Nerfs and Supercarrier Clone Bays to EVE Online
• Robbing Some Space Banks
• Nineteen Weeks of World War Bee
• The October MER Shows Destruction in Delve and Mineral Prices at an All Time High
• PAPI Drops a Keepstar in T5ZI-S
• PAPI Keepstar Anchors in T5ZI-S
• Twenty Weeks of World War Bee
• The Explosive Velocity Update Lands in EVE Online

And so it went.

Ten Years Ago

The launch of Fallout 4 caused a dip in porn viewing on the internet.

Nintendo announced they were re-releasing Pokemon Red, Blue, & Yellow on the 3DS Virtual Console.

BlizzCon was approaching and I laid out a “need vs greed” list of things I thought would happen at the event.  But before BlizzCon there had to be the Q3 quarterly results.  The big news was that World of Warcraft held steady and had 5.5 million subscribers.  However, Blizzard said they were not going to talk about subscription numbers any more.  They would be talking about Candy Crush Saga though, having purchased King for 5.9 billion dollars.

Then BlizzCon came and I had to score my list.

It also slipped out a bit early that the WoW Legion expansion would not hit until summer 2016, September 21 being the last possible date listed, which seemed a long ways off.  I wasn’t yet ready to return to the game.  I used gold to grab a WoW Token for 30 days of play time and spend the most of it just earning that money back running missions in my garrison.

StarCraft II: Legacy of the Voice, the final part of the trilogy launched.

I dipped my toe back in Lord of the Rings Online for a bit.

Still playing Minecraft, I finished up the Great Northern Road and highlighted the guardian farm that Aaron built.

In New Eden, the Parallax expansion was released, the last named monthly update in Syndicate to be released.  From then on names were reserved for big expansions while monthly updates were simply know by their date… or New Eden date… or build number.  CCP can’t even hold the line on that naming scheme.

There was also the start of the ill-fated Fountain War Kickstarter campaign, which was plagued by hubris, gaffes, bad ideas, and “Grrr Goons” hostility.  Not that it didn’t deserve some of the latter as it was a clusterfuck and was not winning fast enough.  It was finally cancelled before the clock ran down, but it left a bad taste in everybody’s mouth.

There was also a Fountain War video which was better received… but then nobody was asking for $150,000 to produce it.

Meanwhile, another member of CSM X got cut.  Not a Goon.

CCP Quant took his EVE Vegas presentation and made it the first of the monthly EVE Economic reports to be publish.

And actually in the game, the Reavers were down in Wicked Creek to spar with TEST.  We were not there long, but it was one of those deployments that generated its own legends in the SIG.  We were called back because a small war was brewing in Cloud Ring against some foes, old and new.  Some had no sov and were hitting us from low sec.  We fell on them when we could in what was being dubbed the “Kickstarter War.”  Herein lay some of the seeds of what would become the “Casino War.”

Over at Daybreak, EverQuest II got the Terrors of Thalumbra of expansion while EverQuest got expansion number 22, The Broken Mirror.  There was the Phinigel “true box” progression server coming up for EverQuest.  The EverQuest II server consolidation was wrapping up, on Stormhold the Kingdom of Sky expansion was voted down, and the game turned 11, all of which I covered in a single post.

Daybreak also shut down Dragon’s Prophet, which lived on in Europe under another publisher.

Smed, gone from Daybreak, wanted to stop talking about money when it came to video games.

And finally, I had a test… a Star Wars test… for those wishing to date my daughter.

Fifteen Years Ago

I was talking about group size and roles.  That has come up again, especially since SWTOR groups seemed to be limited to four players.

On the retro front, I played some Total Annihilation.  Still one of the best RTS games ever.

I took a look at the soon to be defunct EverQuest II Extended.  It seemed quite busy.  Of course, I went Station Access so I could peek into EverQuest II  (with some issues) and EverQuest as well.

The rump instance group was wrapping up another Summer in Middle-earth at the far end of the Lone Lands as well as in and around Ost Guruth.

At the same time, Turbine was putting crafting materials in the LOTRO Store.  Meanwhile, the OTHER LOTRO store, the real life one, wasn’t doing much for me.

CCP announced that they were removing learning skills from EVE Online.  I hit 60 million skill points and was going to get to reallocate some of them as part of the skill point refund.

The Cataclysm open beta was coming to an end at last. I think part of the problem with the expansion was how long people were freely talking about the expansion… and playing it… before it came out.  We all knew what the hot new hunter pet would be and how much the world was going to be changed.  Cheap copies of WoW were not going to fix that.

Back in pre-Cataclysm Azeroth, I was summing up my Wintergrasp experiences and moaning about missing the damn Hallow’s End mask quest achievement again.

On the Pokemon front, I finished the National Pokedex in Pokemon SoulSilver.  In your face!  And the march to the release of Pokemon Black and White was commencing.

The Microsoft Kinect for XBox launched.

The news seemed to be confused as to whether or not flying cars had come at last.

And, finally, in the completion of a boyhood dream of mine, the San Francisco Giants won the World Series, officially releasing me from caring about major league ball ever again.

Twenty Years Ago

Guitar Hero launches for the PlayStation 2 and kicks off a series of games (and a competitor) for people who can play air guitar.

The New Game Experience, or NGE, hit Star Wars Galaxies, completely changing the character development path.  Landing just days after the Trials of Obi-wan expansion launched, players were so enraged that SOE ended up offering refunds to players who bought the expansion.  The NGE became a weight around SOE’s neck and studio head John Smedley ends up being asked (and harassed) about the whole thing for many years.

Forty Years Ago

Origin Systems releases Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar, the last of the Ultima series I ended up playing.  I had an Apple II at the time, but by the time Ultima V came along I had a Mac and the Ultima series never went there.  Also, I liked Ultima III better… or enjoyed it more.

Most Viewed Posts in November

1. The No Man’s Sky Holidays 2025 Expedition Schedule
2. No Man’s Sky Expedition 2 Beachhead Redux: Let’s Talk Freighters
3. Planning my Platinum Medal Strategy for Pokemon Go Level 49
4. Cat Catching in Enshrouded
5. Enshrouded Releases the Wake of the Water Update
6. Pandemic Horde Breaks, Seeks to Flee the Drones, Allies, and Goons
7. No Man’s Sky – Playing with Friends
8. Building My First Corvette in No Man’s Sky
9. Enshrouded and our First Night Sanctum
10. No Man’s Sky – Heading off into Expedition 20
11. In Which I Fish and Play with Water in Enshrouded
12. Blackrock Depths and Shadowforge City

Search Terms of the Month

enshrouded wake of the water update
[Fresh this month]

enshrouded water dispenser
[The thing is crazy, right?]

water dispenser near me
[Where ever you place it]

enshrouded wake of the water builds
[I want to see them]

warm water minecraft
[Always annoying to find]

do coral reefs spawn in lukewarm water minecraft
[No]

deepwater hooligans
[They are moving into the Drone regions]

palworld watering
[Your pals will do that for you]

captain stillwater
[Bloodsail Buccaneers represent]

valheim ashlands water
[I never saw any outside of the boiling ocean]

unit economics of water
[You have come to… well, a place]

Game Time by ManicTime and iOS

On the PC November was spaceships month for the most part.

1. EVE Online – 46.82%
2. Pokemon Go – 25.63%
3. No Man’s Sky – 16.33%
4. Palia – 4.83%
5. Balatro – 3.87%
6. Enshrouded – 2.45%

Given that I was away for the last week of the month, EVE Online is probably under represented… and doubly so when you consider how much time I spend tabbed out while playing.  No Man’s Sky was running two expeditions… which didn’t leave much time for Palia or checking out much more than a bit of the new water stuff in Enshrouded.

Meanwhile, Palworld managed to get pushed off the list completely.  We might be looking for a replacement.

Enshrouded

We got water in the game, along with more levels, a new zone, and fishing.  In another month I might have spent a lot more time exploring all of this.  November though… it was more about spaceships really.

EVE Online

So much time in the Drone regions, so many structures to shoot, and so many trips around the region.  That got me on three more Keepstar kills and a host of other smaller structures.  It has also opened up a great land rush into the Drone regions that will be an unfolding drama for a while.  Then there is the question of what becomes of Pandemic Horde.  They remain the fourth largest sov holding alliance in the game, and fifth largest if we expand to all alliances (which may soon be relevant as they may soon not hold any sovereignty) even after shedding nearly 60% of their members.  What will become of them?

No Man’s Sky

It was the kick off of holiday expedition time.  That has its ups and downs.  On the one hand, I do like being able to go back and run expeditions that I have missed.  On the other hand, doing several expeditions in close succession does tend to emphasize the sameness of some of the expeditions and tasks they require.  They do have a pattern.

Palia

I spent two weeks playing just NMS and EVE and now my chickens are all depressed.  And, as noted earlier this week, I can’t figure out what to buy in the cash shop.  But for a cozy MMO it has managed to carry on for me.

Pokemon Go

This got over represented in play time if only because it was the only title I played for a week while we were down in San Diego.  My wife and I tend to play even more when on vacation.  Meanwhile, we have been focusing somewhat on the tasks to get us to level 72.  It looks like the stardust task will be the final one for both of us.

• Level: 71
• XP Progress: 71% of the 203,353,000 xp needed for level 80
• Tasks for Level 72
  • XP: Done
  • Platinum Medals: 20 of 20
  • Follow a Route 7 days in a row: 7 of 7
  • Use 200 supper effective Charged Attacks: 137 of 200
  • Earn 1,000,000 stardust: 549,000 of 1,000,000
• Pokedex status: 906 (+9) caught out of 1,008 in the Pokedex
• Pokemon I want: Hawlucha
• Current buddy: Keldeo (for the event)

Coming Up

Oh, it is time for all of the end of the year nonsense, isn’t it?  So many recaps that I will probably need a meta recap post to sum up all the summing up or something.

Also, the holiday season, something reflected in many titles.  For EVE Online it will mean the Winter Nexus event.  It promises to be an otherwise quiet month, at least in our portion of null sec.  The Drone regions will still be in flux.

In No Man’s Sky we have three more expeditions on the agenda, though I did two of them earlier this year, so may tap out after the next one.

Everybody else will have seasonal events, and there will even be the housing launch in retail WoW, though I will be sitting that one out, my account having lapsed.

Then, of course, there is the Steam Winter Sale, the Steam Awards (nominations open now) and all which that entails.

And we’ll be down to the wire on Fantasy Critic League.

But mostly it will be wrapping up 2025 and getting ready to cast a weather eye on what is approaching in 2026.