Category Archives: Steam

April 2024 in Review

The Site

A while back WP.com introduced Blaze, a paid ad program that allows you to promote your blog. Back when it first showed up they gave me a $50 credit and I tried it… and it was not worth the cash. 65 clicks into my promoted post seemed like a joke for that much money.

Then they sent out surveys and talked about how they were making it better. So when they gave me another $50 credit this month I decided to try it again. This time I chose my post about Balatro, which I though was maybe a bit more mainstream for a video game ad.

And this time they are telling me the ad pulled in almost 500 clicks. A serious improvement… if it is true. The problem is that if I go into the WP.com stats and look at how many clicks that post received during the run of the ad, it is actually closer to 250.

Still an improvement… but the stats on my admin page show clicks from all sources, just not the ad, and while traffic often dies off after a day or two, it can still carry on for weeks in little drips and drabs. So there is no saying that all of those 250 were from the ad.

In the end, even if it was a great improvement and added another 25 to 50 views a day over a ten day campaign, would you spend $50 of your own money for that result? I wouldn’t.

Meanwhile, just because I need an excuse to put an image in here somewhere, the surges of direct traffic continue to pop up now and again.

Direct traffic as a source in April 2024

However, these surges are a lot less regular than they were back in November and December. Search engine traffic… which means Google 99% of the time, remain steady.

Also, WTF is going on with the Google Analytics site? Have they just broken it on Firefox to be dicks?

Finally, the Flag Counter widget informs me that somebody from a new country visited the blog in April. Welcome random person from Palau! I hope you found something interesting!

First new county in a few years

Palau, a trust territory of the United States in the wake of the second world war, is an independent island nation, but has two ZIP codes assigned to it and is still served by the US Postal Service.

One Year Ago

I did what I believed to be my final post specifically covering April Fools at Blizzard, Blizz having gone pretty cool on the whole thing since around 2017. We’ll see if this pans out.

The Fellowship and Fire update came to New World, bringing with is seasons and season passes.

LOTRO offered a limited time level 140 boost, which was the cap at the time. I bought one and went through the process of using it.

Niantic was going after remote raiding in Pokemon Go.

Honest Game Trailers took on the Civilization Series, which aligned nicely with my own brief retrospective on the games. I did my own round up of the series, with some ranking. All versions I looked at were playable in some form. I even went and played Civilization VI. I am still not a fan.

In Wrath Classic the group was culling Stratholme with Arthas. I also had some minor gripes about Wrath Classic. We also had the Activision Blizzard Q1 2023 financials.

I wrote about five EVE Online maps that were better than the two in-game maps the game offers. Spoiler: fifth place was a multi-way tie, so it was way more than five. Meanwhile, somebody did a video of the 2007 to 2022 null sec influence map… which was one of the maps on my list.

Meanwhile, as we drew closer to the EVE 20th anniversary, CCP was refurbing the EVE monument, which included the ability to get your character name on the plaques if you missed that at the ten year anniversary. They also outlined the road to Alliance Tournament XIX.

I also did a Friday Bullet Points post about EVE Online that covered the new launcher beta, another in-game theft, a reminder about the monument thing, Fraternity Keepstars, and the MER. Oh, and they also announced that EVE Anywhere was going away. Cloud Computing was sooo 2016.

In the game, the Imperium and B2 coalitions managed to win the armor time against Fraternity’s Keepstar in X47L-Q, a battle than ran through down time, so we all got kicked and had to log back in again to resume the fight. Having lost the armor timer, Fraternity and its allies did not contest the final timer and the Keepstar was destroyed. The Imperium then dialed-back operations in Pure Blind.

I also looked into March 2023 destruction in the game.

Then there was the a16z Project Awakening that CCP was going on about. I was not a fan. Since Pearl Abyss was all in on this blockchain scam nonsense, I wondered who should have bought CCP back in 2018.

I was wondering what Atari… or the company that owned the Atari name… was actually in the business of doing.

I was also kind of wondering what the Metaverse Standards Forum was doing… another working group for a nonsense idea.

I did another Friday Bullet Points post, this time about the Worldle-verse, where Wordle itself hit puzzle 666, Spotify was shutting down Heardle, a DOS version of Wordle, a WoW focused version of Wordle, and Digits from the NYT which they have since shut down.

I was fiddling with AI bots, asking what the difference between an MMO and an MMORPG was, why there were so many fantasy MMORPS, and how to find a warm ocean in Minecraft.

And over on Twitter, which was still Twitter then, Elon’s threat to take away blue checkmarks for verified users and make them only available for sale failed to appear on the appointed day… except for the New York Times, which Elon felt was spreading the “woke mind virus” or some BS. “Woke” quickly came to mean “something I don’t like” when used by Elon. The unpaid for blue checks eventually were taken away in the back half of the month. The blue check mark went from “this celeb or whoever is who they say they are” to “This bozo paid $8.”

Five Years Ago

April Fools, once a grand tradition at Blizzard, was pretty sparse.

Google Plus went away.

The Minecraft Village & Pillage update landed.

CCP loudly announced the removal and banning of CSM13 member Brisc Rubal. And then in what I described as the “nightmare scenario,” CCP hedged, promising to investigate further. And then they exonerated Brisc and restored him apologizing for all the trouble. A disastrous example of “measure once, cut twice” by CCP. And Brisc didn’t get his reputation back. I still see people who think he must have been guilty and somehow worked a deal or threatened to sue in order to get CCP to back down.

CCP also announced the CSM14 election timeline. Brisc opted to stay away from that. And the April update brought capital nerfs, especially for the Rorqual. Hilmar was starting on something about player retention. And CCP unveiled the Katia Sai monument in Saisio.

Actually out in space myself in EVE Online, I was flying with Liberty Squad as we visited The Spire for a fight over a Sotiyo as well as busting some other structures and setting some timers. There was also an op from Delve to Lonetrek and another Reavers Race.

NantWorks handed H1Z1… or Z1 Battle Royale… back to Daybreak, having failed to make a go of the challenge of reviving the game.

I reviewed a bit of the coverage the EverQuest 20th anniversary got. There was also some changes to the Selo progression server, which reflected on what players wanted versus what Daybreak was offering.

I was also playing World of Warcraft, binging on pet battles and catching some new pets. We got some news about the approaching update, which would unlock flying in Battle for Azeroth. That promoted me to get the first part of the pathfinder achievement done. I also got my first alt to level 120, though he hadn’t even been to Zandalar or Kul’Tiras. Pet battles will do ya.

And I came up with a guide to criticizing games you do not like.

Ten Years Ago

Spacewar! for the PDP-1 was up via emulation on the internet archive.

The Elder Scrolls Online launched, hitting its planned April 4th date. I did not play.

I was diving in to Pokemon X & Y, having returned to Pokemon at last.

The strategy group played a game of Civilization V that ended with a win via nuclear terror.

The Kickstarter campaign for the book A History of the Great Empires of EVE Online kicked off. We were also watching Pantheon: Rise of the Something was splutter along after failing its Kickstarter campaign.

In EVE Online proper there was Burn Jita 3, which seemed like less of a thing the third time out. There was a video. Then there was the CSM9 vote. At least there were only 36 candidates on the ballot.

In null sec we were shooting Black Legion things, because that is what we did in the CFC. I was just happy to be using lasers, those skills having been trained up amongst my 120 million skill points. There were also some posts about being space famous and an attempt at in-game blackmail.

But on the broader CCP front, World of Darkness was officially cancelled.

On the iPad I was playing Hearthstone and QuizUp… for about a week.

Turbine announced that Beornings were coming to Lord of the Rings Online.

SOE gave me a key for seven days of Landmark, so I went and tried it out. SOE also announced H1Z1 and began their love affair with Reddit and got their new All Access plan running. While on the old school front, Dave Georgeson said SOE never plans to shut down EverQuest.

Warlords of Draenor was still a long ways away. But Blizzard was doing well on other fronts. The instance group finished up Zul’gurub. And there was the usual April Fools stuff.

Over at GamesIndustry.biz they have a round up of what was going in April of 2014.

Fifteen Years Ago

Dave Arneson passed away. He was, with Gary Gygax, the co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons, that so-influential gaming system that has shaped how we view fantasy swords and sorcery games for over 30 years now. There would be no World of Warcraft as it is today without Dungeons & Dragons.

We also saw the launch of SOE’s Free Realms, which stuttered a bit on day one. Soon though they had millions of people signed up for the game, but since it was free to play, not a common thing at the time, that was no indication of revenue. My daughter tried to sign up four times, so that was at least four out of the millions. SOE was advertising the game heavily on Cartoon Network. But FR did not run on MacOS, and my daughter was running on an iMac at the time. I knew she has signed up because her email used to get routed to me.

In EVE Online I was mulling over the Apocrypha expansion and configuring up a Cerebus to try out as a mission runner. I was also doing invention to make tech II missiles, which meant data cores and research agents and such, and pondering the idea that maybe using your skills should increase your skill points or something.

As usual, there was much ado about World of Warcraft.

PETA was planning some event in WoW. I had trouble believing it wasn’t a joke.
In a blinding flash of the obvious, Nielsen reported that a lot of guys play WoW.
There was Noblegarden, or Blizzard Easter, and its egg collecting frenzy.
There was my daughter and I trying to swim to Silvermoon to find a pet for her hunter.
I couldn’t find a copy of The Burning Crusade at Fry’s.
After hitting level 30 my daughter, my mom, and I were all riding around together on our night elf cat mounts.
And the instance group, after a hiatus, got back together, did a warm up run in the Shadow Labyrinth, then went on to finally collect the head of Ingvar the Plunderer. After that it was on to The Nexus.

I was sniggering like a pre-teen about Cornhole. Also, there was something about Honest Scrap that was a meme, back when memes weren’t just pop culture references.

I was looking back on two years of the Wii and the games we played on it.

On the TV we were apparently watching Castle and Dollhouse.

And then there were new comers as we brought home two wee kittens.

Twenty Years Ago

City of Heroes launched in the US. Closed down by NCsoft in 2012, the game lives on with a privately run server called City of Heroes Rebirth, built on the original code base.

Lineage II launched in North America. This successor to the Lineage never reached the original’s popularity, but hung on to its own user base.

Thirty Five Years Ago

The Nintendo Game Boy launched in Japan. Perhaps the definitive hand held console for a generation, it lasted from the Tetris era into the original Pokemon series of games.

Most Viewed Posts in April

Search Terms of the Month

eve origin of the northern coalition
[Pretty sure it started in the north…]

zombie heat gay game
[Look man, just leave me out of this…]

“ttc-collective-agreement-2020”
[Widely criticized, now just a PanFam thing]

is jetpack replaced wordpress app
[Sort of…]

valheim how much iron do i need for the entire game
[All of it. Seriously, later biomes use it.]

how to get edencom lp
[Run Edencom missions?]

Game Time from ManicTime

In the end, April was pretty evenly divided. I came in on Conan Exiles and out on Wrath Classic really.

Conan Exiles – 29.56%
WoW Classic – 23.75%
Balatro – 21.81%
Valheim – 13.00%
EVE Online – 5.50%
EverQuest – 6.39%

Balatro

A deck building rogue-like poker based card game. That ate up some time. I’ve kind of hit a wall on getting past 80K points in a single hand to be a boss blind. The cards have failed me there a few times.

Conan Exiles

We were all-in on this at the start of the month. Many hours were invested. We explored, found horses, did our first dungeon… then it kind of faded. It didn’t help that GPortal’s LA data center, where our server is hosted, was down for a full weekend this month. That’ll break your stride.

EVE Online

I did undock and go on a couple of fleets this month. I left my mark on zKillboard to at least provide proof of life. But I haven’t been all that invested. The interesting ops have been running in early EU time, which is the only time PanFam and Fraternity will show up.

EverQuest

I continue to explore some of the old places still there in Norrath, with erratic tales of the old days based on foggy memories and rose colored glasses. Not done with this yet.

Pokemon Go

Just a few more Team Rocket leaders to go to unlock level 45 for my with and I. At least we still earn xp as we try to knock down that one final objective, so we’ll be a few million points into that level once we finish the task.

Level: 44 (138% of the way to 45 in xp, 3 of 4 level tasks complete)
Pokedex status: 822 (+1) caught, 836 (+2) seen
Vivillon Evolutions obtained: 15 of 20
Pokemon I want: Three specific Scatterbugs; Sandstorm, Icy Snow, and Meadow
Current buddy: Zygarde

Valheim

We had a slow down in Valheim as Conan Exiles became a focus for several weeks. Also, the Mistlands were a bit too oppressive. Now that I have banished the mist… at least on my client… I am going to see if we can unlock some of the resources of the biome as the Ashlands loom.

WoW Classic

We started off the month having spent weeks away from the game. But the coming of Cataclysm Classic awakened the desire to carry on… at least in Potshot and I. I spent time working on one last alt who is already level 79 as I write this. I will have some options going into a revamped Azeroth late in May.

Zwift

Zwift gave up on its bonus experience for weekly usage streaks, so my unearned advancement up the level path has slowed down. Not that levels mean much, aside from cosmetic unlocks, and I am many levels from anything interesting. But still I get on and ride.

Level – 27 (+1)
Distanced cycled – 1,973 miles (+35 miles)
Elevation climbed – 72,198 (+1,457 feet)
Calories burned – 59,692 (+1,075)

Coming Up

I wrote a post about a number of things coming up on the WoW front in May. Probably the most on point is the coming of Cataclysm Classic. The pre-patch lands today and the expansion on May 20th. The will no doubt generate some sort of assessment of Wrath Classic and a bit of history about Cata.

It is also the Capsuleer Day celebration in EVE Online. I’ll get to that, but it looks like that day, the game’s 21st anniversary this year, will be celebrated all month long.

I also strongly suspect that we’ll get the Ashlands update for Valheim in May. They are close.

I have to travel quite a bit more than usual in May, so my posting streak is at risk of being broken… not that such a streak has any real meaning. But it is a thing.

Mounts and Mods and DLC in Conan Exiles

Surviving the Conan Exiles April Update

Finding Followers in Conan Exiles

5 Replies

I am going to start with a very general overview first before I get into the details. Believe me, it is funnier that way.

In Conan Exiles you can recruit followers from the NPC population. There are many NPCs scattered about the map in various camps, some of them are skilled in the combat arts, while others have talents in crafting. In fact, each crafting station that you build has a slot in it for a follower so that they can tend that crafting station and add recipes to the list of items that can be made.

Conan Exiles

The NPCs also come in different levels. A fighter II is better than a fighter I, for example. Likewise, the crafters have levels and the higher the level the more they add.

And, once you recruit one of the NPCs you can gear them up and they have their own leveling system that unlocks abilities as they grow. They are pretty much an essential and fully integrated part of the game and one of the earliest journeys you unlock involves followers.

Sounds nice, doesn’t it?

Okay, now I need to bring us back to the game itself, which is set in the age and land of Conan the barbarian, when life was a brutal Hobbesian nightmare of survival at all costs. I mean, what is likely the most famous Conan quote? It isn’t about loving thy neighbor, I am pretty sure of that. It is more likely this one:

What is best in life? To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women.

So when I say you can recruit followers, well… the recruitment process is one of that age.

To start with, most NPCs will attack you on sight. Nobody is happy to see you, save the occasional sign post NPC who has some bit of description to give about some aspect of the land, like Gilzan the Treasure Hunter, who has is theories about the city named The Unnamed City.

He also teaches an emote!

Most everybody else you meet is pretty much set on messing you up the moment they see you.

So how do you recruit. First you and your friends… and this works better with a friend or two… make sure you have your main weapon ready as well as a truncheon.

Got my truncheon ready

Then you roll up on the hostile camp and start a fight, killing anybody you don’t want to recruit with your main weapon. This can be a bit tricky for me as I have opted for the two handed steel sword at this point, all the better to kill my foes. Conan Exiles has that full area swing where you catch anybody within the sweep of your blade, and my sword has quite a sweep.

But, managing that, it is then out with the truncheons to pummel the target into unconsciousness. Then it is out with the rope… did I mention the rope… you need rope… to bind your recruit and drag them back to your base.

We have our next volunteer

You drag your new beaten buddy back to the wheel of pain. This is a key part of the recruiting process.

We only have a lesser wheel so far

You then put your recruit on the wheel, stock it up with some gruel, and set it going.

The wheel is actually not that exciting. They basically push a heavy wheel around until their will is broken. The details say it has the bonus of strengthening the recruit while the monotonous effort and sustenance degrades their ability to resist.

On the wheel in an earlier version of our base

Then it is just a matter of waiting and being sure the gruel doesn’t run out. Higher tier recruits take longer, but they all submit in the end.

I’ve used a few euphemisms in this; buddy, recruit, follower, NPC. And the game itself refers to them directly as thralls. The crafting stations all have a slot that are reserved for thralls. The journey that guides you is called Thrall Taker.

New thrall now available for work

Elsewhere it calls them followers or companions. Your pals!

But the reality is, if you’re raiding a camp, hauling people off and making them work for you you’re taking slaves. You are not completely out of bounds asking the obvious question.

We’ve avoided skulls on our gear so far

And while on the main path it uses other terms, there are all sorts of references to slaves, slavers, slave taking, and all the related gear.

I mean, the upgrade to the wheel of pain, along with the more efficient steel truncheons, comes from the crafting station called the torturer’s workbench… and that isn’t a euphemism.

So, I will say, if that mechanic gives you pause, you might think twice about Conan Exiles I guess.

Oh, but it gets better.

Because, of course, I rolled up a character that resembles me… like a lot of people, I want to see a bit of myself in some of my characters… that means, as in real life, my avatar takes a bit after my half Swede half Catalan grandmother. Basically an obvious white guy.

Meanwhile all of our nearby neighbors, from whom we began raiding, were all Darfari, who favor a very dark skin tone. White guy taking black slaves. The optics of that… well, you could easily over think that.

Sure, the lore says that the Darfari worship Yog and practice cannibalism and human sacrifice. I mean, our nearest neighbors have this in their back yard.

Good lord, what is happening in there?

Though, I only know about that because I’ve been next door to kill them all repeatedly and does that really justify slavery?

I know, it is only a game. Still, I felt a little better about myself when we shanghaied a white guy we found squatting up the way and put him on the wheel. We’re equal opportunity slavers or something.

This guy could be a cousin from Aland

And, in light of decades of decades of slaying all and sundry in a long series of video games, this hardly seems like something to get worked up about. It is a game mechanic, and not even close to being the worst I have ever encountered. I am making pixels and database entries behave in a way that gives me advantage in a video game.

Still, I’d have to completely without self-reflection if I didn’t at least consider what was going on.

So that is the way it goes with Conan Exiles.

All in on Conan Exiles

4 Replies

If you were expecting me to end up narrating a tour of Tamriel and our group’s experiences in The Elder Scrolls Online, I fear you I have some bad news for you. After a couple of weeks of poking our toes into ESO, the arrival of Conan Exiles has grabbed out attention and left Tamriel in the rear view mirror for now.

Conan Exiles

Valheim too for a bit, judging from our play time in Conan Exiles, though there are some other factors in play that is a topic for another post.

Why has Conan Exiles grabbed us?

It certainly hasn’t been for any epic fights. In fact, we seem to die quite a bit in CE.

Named with a skull… this will end badly

Being done in by some random wandering named NPC was a regular occurrence early on.

There is a nice blood splatter effect around the screen as you take damage

Death has a reasonable sting. All your stuff remains with your corpse, so there is a corpse run to be done, but otherwise it is mostly an inconvenience. Still, enough deaths and such will make you a bit cautious… though we have gotten a bit better. I beat another mob with a skull icon on his name.

The big 2H sword swing for the win… murderer gets murdered

And, just to round things out, I did eventually get even with Tessa.

Bent over panting from the effort, but I still won

And we certainly aren’t in it for the PvP, which is a popular option on a lot of open servers. I accidentally left that option on for our server until we started killing each other in our ham-fisted early attempt to group up to fight mobs. Things were much better once I turned that off.

Instead, the game right now seems to appeal to the explorer. And I do mean that, at least partially, in the “exploring the world” way. The world is well crafted and interesting.

Looking out over some of the terrain

Of course, this is the world of Conan… you actually meet him at the start of the game… so not everything is sweetness and light and pretty desert vistas.

Good lord, what is happening in there?

Yeah, the neighbors are a bit strange. But they don’t come around looking to convert you or anything, so that is nice.

The world is very static in an MMORPG sort of way. If you go wipe out a camp of hostiles, you can go back the next day and find that they have respawned, an MMORPG mechanic as old as time at this point.

That was an old, established thing when these guys were a brand new thing

That can make farming for specific mobs easier, as there is some randomness as to who respawns, even if the locations are pretty fixed. Likewise, things you harvest, like iron or coal, always respawn in exactly the same location. So to see the world is to know the world.

But when I say that the game appeals to the explorer, I mean the classic Bartle-type explorer who doesn’t just walk the landscape but seeks out all the ways the game can be played, all the options made available to them… and Conan Exiles is loaded up with that.

We have mostly been playing with crafting, though we have also been out “obtaining” followers, which is something I will get to in another post. But even followers relate to crafting!

The game sets up a series of journeys you can follow to learn about some small aspect of the game. They are usually just 4-6 steps and guide you through some of the simplest aspects of the game mechanics. They aren’t always well explained or as helpful as you might want… go mine brimstone would have been easier with a hint about brimstone being found in caves… but the are there to guide you. And in doing one you often get another made available to you.

There is also a whole range of knowledge to be unlocked. As you level up… there are levels which are obtained through experience which you earn through both combat and resource harvesting… you gain knowledge points which you can use to unlock various abilities, mostly crafting and building related, but there are other paths.

And there are a lot of aspects to crafting. Our base now has a sprawl of crafting stations within it.

Some of the crafting stations… also trees…

(Side note: There is often mention of bugs in many of the reviews on Steam, and we’ve run into a few, including random deaths, losing corpses, and the above where there were trees inside our base when I logged into the game, though Potshot didn’t see them. When I left and came back they were gone. But they haven’t had any real big impact on our time so far.)

You also don’t just make something and are done. Everything wears out and, unlike Valheim, need resources in order to repair. There are repair kits you can make that will fix an item partially, but the durability will be less. But if you have unlocked the knowledge needed to craft an item you can then repair it fully.

Next to all of that is food, which needs to be prepared unless you want to eat bugs all your life, and there is a whole crafting journey related to that. Food also has a limited shelf life. In fact, the default is so short than one of the only settings I have tinkered with so far… and there are over 100 server settings you can tweak, not all of which are well described… is the rate at which food decays because we kept ending up with piles of rotten food. Sure, you can put that in the composter… another crafting station… but it would be nice for it to last a bit longer.

So there is a lot to explore just in that. And then there is our base. I think the building mechanics are also pulling us in… or at least Potshot. Our first setting was less of a base and more of a single wide mobile home in layout.

We got a BBQ and some crafting here in the car port

After scouting around a bit a new location was chosen for our ever growing base.

Our base viewed from above

It had to keep growing to contain all the crafting stations that needed to be housed… that and to keep them out of the weather. There isn’t any rain that I have seen, but sandstorms rise up now and then and do more than just make it tough to see very far.

I was on a corpse run when one kicked up and out and exposed it literally began to peel away my health. I survived by hiding in a niche in cliff that reduced the effect while applying a stream of bandages to myself to keep from dying right there.

So we’ve mostly been about gathering resources and crafting so far… and leveling up in order to unlock more crafting… which has been enough to keep us busy.

Dropping into Conan Exiles

1 Reply

What I really need right now is another game to play, right? Potshot and I are already waist deep in Valheim, the group is sizing up Elder Scrolls Online, there is a possible war brewing in null sec over in EVE Online, and I have been running around EverQuest on yet another nostalgia tour. Do I have any gaming time left?

Of course I don’t, but when did that ever stop me when the mood struck?

Rewinding a bit, back during the the Steam Winter Sale I picked up a few co-op survival-ish titles looking for something that might be of interest to our group. I solicited for other possible titles, and Conan Exiles was suggested in the comments. When I went to the AI for suggestions, Conan Exiles was on their lists as well.

Conan Exiles

But by the time it really got on my radar the Winter Sale was over and I wasn’t ready to spend $40 on a whim. So we ended up playing Valheim to get our Valheim fix.

Enter the Steam Spring Sale, which I derided a bit on Friday for starting too early and being somewhat brief relative to the solstice sales. But there, on sale, was Conan Exiles, marked down 70%. For $12 I could see myself testing it out.

Steam Spring Sale Prices

I wasn’t going to go all in on the DLC or anything, but the base game seemed possible.

Then Potshot messaged me on Discord about it being on sale, which pushed me just enough to click the button and install it.

I went and played it for about an hour on Friday night, and my wife had to poke me to go start the barbecue because I had said I would make dinner because I was into the game. So later that evening I did the usual “bad decisions made after 8pm” thing and quit my local game, went over to G-Portal.com and rented a server for 30 days and setup a new channel on our Discord dedicated to the game with the IP address and password. We now had a server.

I hadn’t even done that much, but it felt like there was something there with Conan Exiles that we could explore.

My initial impressions are that it has a lot in common with Valheim, so much so that I am sure the Valheim developers must have at least some familiarity with Conan Exiles.

Then again, there are some ways you’re just going to do thing with a first person survival crafting building title in today’s gaming environment. A lot of the titles I looked at felt akin in some very mechanical ways.

But it also feels different from Valheim. To start with, the game has a fixed, set map. You can find detailed versions of the default game map that will point out every camp and harvest node spawn location. Conan is a lot more MMO-like in that regard. Also mobs and resource nodes respawn. You do not have to keep going further and further afield to find iron or some NPCs to fight with. When you clear a camp one day the same party will be there the next, at least with the default settings. The list of server setting is a mile long, so it seems fairly customizable.

So we have jumped into that for the moment. I managed to stumble upon Potshot and his first camp, where he had already setup some crafting and had a hat for me.

We meet up in game

The world is gritty and dry and your relationship with food and drink is a lot more survival driven than with Valheim. In Valheim food is a booster, something that gives you more health or stamina, but which wears off over time. In Conan you need to eat and drink just to stay alive and maintain your current levels of health and stamina regen.

That said, but titles lean heavily on stamina as a combat limiting mechanic.

The world, more hand crafted than the randomly generated Valheim worlds, also has some different dynamics… like climbing. I ran around for quite a while, going past mesas and hills, not sure what to think of stuff often up on top of them. There was no path up that I could see. Then I accidentally jumped at a cliff face and found I could scale it. You can just climb up things.

Climbing up to visit the neighbors

The game also feels rooted a bit in its predecessor from Funcom, Age of Conan, the 2008 MMORPG. That was viewed as pushing boundaries because it allowed nakedness and had an “endowment” slider so you could set your penis size. That is always worth a headline and some attention from the media. I did peek at my full naked self, but opted for modesty as who in the hell needs to see that waving around when you’re running back to your corpse.

Death is a thing. You die and respawn at your bed or bedroll… another Valheim thing, though also a Minecraft thing if you want to go back a ways… and by default have to run back to get your stuff, which can be challenging if that bastard sword wielding NPC woman is still camping your corpse.

And, also true to the Age of Conan legacy… at least as I understand it, I never got around to actually playing Age of Conan fifteen years back… is somewhat graphical levels of mayhem in combat, with the loser falling to pieces like that Patsy Cline song.

Did I really just cut off this guy’s feet?

At times it is almost absurd.

That’s you all over

And it happens to you when you die as well. I went back for one corpse recovery and could only find my legs. However, all of your stuff is there in a nice little grave marker that glows in the dark. You just have to hit one key to loot it and re-equip everything, which is handy if whatever killed you is still there.

So we are diverting into Conan Exiles for a bit. Expect a travelogue of our journey there I suppose. We will see what goes to the back burner if we end up focused on this.

Friday Bullet Points on the Cusp of Spring

The New System Purge of Video Games

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While I have spent quite a bit of the last few days moving things from the old machine to the new, I am trying to limit the whole thing to things I feel I need and ongoing work and things I use regularly… or maybe just do not want to find and configure again.

But I am also trying to NOT bring over things that I am not using, something that weighs heavily on the video game front.

My goal is to start out installing ONLY things I am playing currently.

A few of those were easy… and were on my C drive so were migrated as a whole. So I started off with:

EVE Online
World of Warcraft
WoW Classic
WoW Classic Era

Those seemed like a gimme… and you get all the WoW titles as a group… along with some support software like Overwolf, which ended up owning Curse Forge, to start with. Also, Combat Mission: Barbarossa to Berlin is in there, largely because the new machine does not have a built-in opitcal drive. It has been a long time since I had a machine without some built-in removable media. I think I have to go back to the Apple II era for that.

Apple II external floppy drives

Things on my old (and new) D drive however, those I was going to be somewhat more discerning about.

For example, there is Steam, the directory for which had 96 titles in it. Some of those were the remains of uninstalls, leftover config files and such, but quite a few were still live. That is less than half of the 204 titles Steam says I own, but a solid majority of the 131 it has logged play time for in the last 13 years.

My SteamDB Stats this morning

So, despite the fact that Steam will nicely copy files across the network, I wasn’t going to restore everything. For example, all the titles I was trying out in search of a Valheim-like experience, those can fall to the wayside for now.

For Steam I ended up copying over just:

Forza Horizon 4
Wreckfest
Valheim

Three titles out of the list. Valheim was easy. Wreckfest I copied to have a driving game

Steam grabbing from the old PC

Then driving that I decided to pull over Forza Horizon 4 again, though how much I will play it we’ll see. I mostly wanted to test the built-in BlueTooth on the motherboard with the controller I bought for it. It took me a bit to get the 8BitDo SN30 Pro+ Blluetooth gamepad paired because the instructions online for it reference an older revision. But there was an answer on Reddit to help me out. (The online docs reference a switch that isn’t there. Instead you hold down the unmarked pairing button for a few seconds and the unit will become discoverable. Easy, but when you haven’t done it for a few years and the docs say something very different, not as obvious as I would have hoped.)

Yes, I am leaving behind, never to be installed again, late titles such as Hero’s Song, H1Z1 Just Survive, and EVE Valyrie. They are being jettisoned to the footnotes in video game history that they represent.

Everything else I can install again later if I get the urge. Steam has my achievements and what not, and there is nothing there that I cannot start or re-start from scratch pretty easily.

Then there are the other titles I kept on the D drive. Returning for the new rig are:

Civilization II
EverQuest
EverQuest II
ZMud

The EverQuest titles have anniversaries coming this year and I have been logging into EQ a bit here and there.

Civilization II is my patched and updated 32-bit copy of Civilization II Gold, which is all that will run on the current OS. I have an image of the CD it came on and a utility to mount it so I can play it.

And then there is ZMud, which probably won’t run. I had a hell of a time getting it to run on Windows 10, and only managed it because Microsoft still kept around and supported a bunch of MDAC related patches the last time I tried. For Win11… it might work. I am keeping ZMud around mostly for the sake of nostalgia. Maybe I will write a couple more posts about it at its heyday. But it is a 30 year old MUD at this point and, frankly, the scrolling text of combat… always something of an unreadable blur in my relative youth… gives me a headache just trying to look at it. I may have aged out of MUDs.

Titles I opted not to bring over include Guild Wars 2, Runes of Magic, New World, Lost Ark, LOTRO, Rift, Path of Exile, Minecraft, World of Tanks, and any flavor of Diablo.

If I want any of those, they are all out there. And their remains are backed up on an external phyical drive should I feel the need to restore them, should a fresh install not do.

This is one of those benchmark posts I suppose where, six months or a year from now I’ll post about how I am installing this or that or wonder where I put that drive with all the screen shots or mods or config files.

But for now I have settled on which titles are coming to the new system on day one.

The End of the Steam Winter Sale with 2023 Stats and Awards… and I actually bought something

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If this post goes live as scheduled, the Steam Winter Sale 2023 will have just ended and we will all be back to the normalcy of Steam… finding slightly fewer things on sale.

Another seasonal discount opportunity

In a departure from some past Steam Sales I actually went on a bit of a buying spree. I wasn’t in the crazy mode of years long ago when a Steam sale was a unique occasion, but some titles were in fact purchased.

What did I purchase?

Elevator Action – Returns

Elevator Action

This was my major impulse buy, one of my favorite arcade games from the mid-80s, which was about the last time I hung around in arcades with my pals. It is true to the original, though the keyboard versions of the controls took me a bit of getting used to. Worth whatever it was I paid for it just to support the effort of making it available.

Astro Colony

These next four titles are all in a similar theme that will become a blog post on its own, but for the moment Astro Colony is a nice little survival space colony base builder sim with co-op. As noted in the December month in review I already have a couple of hours into this. Generally solid, the main complaint I have seen is that you eventually get to a “done” state where there isn’t much else to do, but it is an early access title being built by one person as I understand it. And given that, it is pretty good.

RUST

In Rust we trust?

Rust is now ten years old… marking from the date of its first public access. It is a base building open world co-op survival sim that places an emphasis on PvP, but which can be played in PvE mode. I have no real opinion of it yet as both times I have tried to join a server it spent 20 minutes downloading 11K resource files then crashed. Also, seems a bit of a memory hog. Still, I have a new computer on order, maybe it will run better on that.

The Front

The Front is an open world, base building co-op survival title in early access. It seems similar in theme to Rust, including offering both PvP and PvE server options. I have at least been able to log into this to check it out, though the server I chose had been around for a while so the area around the spawn was an array of bases in various styles. I guess that was kind of cool to see at least.

Sons of the Forest

I have not launched this one yet, but it is a open world base building survival title with co-op support, only this time you’re trying to rescue somebody on an island full of cannibals, so it is more survival-horror.

I also considered Lethal Company and Don’t Starve Together, if I need to reinforce the theme, but I figured four titles to try out was enough.

Wreckfest

A complete last minute impulse buy. Wasn’t even on my wishlist, I just found it by accident and grabbed it. Lots of demolition derby-style car antics with the usual upgrades, customization, and career path options.

Also, I bought our daughter a copy of Valheim in the last two minutes of the sale. We share Steam libraries, but if our group puts up another world I want to be able to play at the same time.

Now to see what becomes of those titles in the coming year.

The Steam Awards

Meanwhile, we also got the results of the Steam Awards, the user nominated and voted on contest run by Steam along with the Winter Sale.

This year saw Baldur’s Gate 3 win Game of the Year, in a surprise to just about nobody I expect.

Steam Awards – 2023 Winners

It also managed Outstanding Story-Rich Game, which it no doubt deserved. And that is the only winning title that I played in 2023, though I did mention that Lethal Company was on my potential purchase list.

Best of Steam 2023

Is there an Illuminati theme going on in this image?

Here is where we’re all about the money. You can check the link to see who ranked where, but the biggest surprise for me was that GTA V did not make it into the Platinum level achievement for the second year running after years of being a top earner. No wonder they announced GTA VI.

Meanwhile, Baldur’s Gate 3 making the Platinum cut was no surprise.

And the chuckle of the charts, Goose Goose Duck made it into the Platinum level for the most hours played category, the one slot that isn’t all about the money.

The Steam Hardware Survey

Steam Hardware Survey December 2023

I always like to look at the Steam Hardware Survey around this time of year to see where my system falls compared to Steam users.

Some things are no surprise, such as Windows representing 96.04% of Steam users. That Linux clocked in at 1.97%, while MacOS fell to 1.63% is somewhat interesting, though it is helped along by the fact that the Steam Deck is a Linux device. That is probably why Arch Linux is the most used flavor.

As one expects, nVidia remained the top GPU while Intel was the majority of CPUs and Oculus dominates the VR headset numbers.

Finally, the one that always surprises me a bit, the monitor sizes. I’ve pulled out the top ten resolutions from the survey.

1920 x 1080 – 59.58%
2560 x 1440 – 16.39%
1366 x 768 – 4.23%
3840 x 2160 – 3.77%
2560 x 1600 – 2.86%
Other – 2.74%
3440 x 1440 – 2.23%
1440 x 900 – 1.24%
1600 x 900 – 1.24%
1920 x 1200 – 1.08%

On the bright side, 1920×1080 is down from 65% of systems surveyed last year. One the down side, that resolution still represents almost 60% of users. Even my work gave me a bigger monitor for my laptop dock. Anyway, Standing Stone is going to look at that number and push out 4K monitor support for LOTRO by another five years I bet. Do I need to stop harping on that? Maybe. Will I? No.

My own resolution, 3440×1440, at least made the top ten.

And so it goes. Another Steam Winter Sale is in the rear view mirror. On to 2024… and the Steam Summer Sale in six months!

Addendum: And it was apparently another new high for the number of games released on Steam in 2023.

December 2023 in Review

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The Site

We have arrived at the end of another year. This will be my 385th and final post of the year… unless somebody announces something crazy here in the fading moments of 2023.

My 2023 banner courtesy of our daughter

The site itself did fairly well this month. The traffic surge of November carried on into December, if somewhat subdued… except on Fridays. Every Friday there is a significant drop off in page views and visits… down to the old pre-surge levels at least… and I am now trying to figure that one out. Do I publish dull things on Friday… or on Thursday, since the traffic on one day seems to be focused on the post of the day before?

The traffic means that the ad revenue is good as well. I made enough that I put my other blog, EVE Online pictures, on a personal plan so it has no ads now. Of course, that means that WordPress is now sending me email notes about upgrading to the next most expensive plan for TWO blogs now. Joy.

One Year Ago

Steam had a Winter Sale… as it always does.

Eleven months after announcing the plan, the US FTC sued to block Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard.

Blizzard gave us a launch date for Diablo IV, which was June of 2023.

In Wrath Classic we finished up the Pilgrim’s Bounty achievements. Then the group was off to Ahn’kahet: The Old Kingdom. Then it was time for a run at Drak’Tharon Keep.

My DK was off in Gizzly Hills and hit level 77, which meant it was time for cold weather flying, which quickly saw him get to level 80, the first of my characters to do so.

Meanwhile, Honest Game Trailers was taking on Wrath Classic.

EverQuest launched its Night of Shadows expansion, the 29th on the list.

Over in Valheim, the Mistlands biome arrived. Our world was still up on the server we had rented, so I went to go explore the new biome a bit.

In EVE Online there was a pretty big fight at H-PA29 in Venal, part of the Fraternity/PanFam assault on the B2 coalition. I did my last run through the economy with the December MER. I switched to just charting destruction in 2023. I was also on a bit about Evermarks and the inflating prices of Rifters, which may or may not have been related.

There was also a review of my year in EVE Online thanks to CCP.

And in a Friday Bullet Points post I covered the Winter Nexus, the addition of a multiple overviews option with the new UI, an attempt to fix the isogen shortage by putting special mining sites in systems with blue stars, some faction warfare updates, the somewhat delayed official results for Alliance Tournament XVIII, and the fact that CCP was ending sales of physical ship models… again.

In the usual end of the year wrap up posts, I scored my predictions for 2022, I reported on my time on Reddit, totaled up my time on Twitch, picked my books for the year, and did my annual highs and lows post.

For the Star Trek movie rewatch, we saw Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, and Star Trek: Generations, where the whole numbering scheme gave up, and which was where the original series cast handed over the helm to captain Picard and the next generation. That led us into Star Trek: First Contact, Star Trek: Insurrection, and Star Trek: Nemesis, none of which thrilled me. That was the end of the initial theatrical run of films.

Then we were on to Star Trek (2009), Star Trek: Into Darkness, and Star Trek: Beyond, the Kelvin parallel universe reboot, which I kind of like, something that makes me a bit of a Trek heretic.

Five Years Ago

Epic Games set out to challenge Steam with their own digital games store front. That didn’t stop Steam from going on with its usual Winter Sale.

Somebody was trying to crowd fund yet another gamer social network which got me on a tear about gamers not being a unified demographic. The Kickstarter failed, as I expected. It was a dumb idea.

Blizzard stepped back a bit from their MOBA, Heroes of the Storm.

In a season of MMO offers, Dungeons & Dragons Online had a $299 season pass offer, Lord of the Rings Online had a $199 legacy bundle, and Daybreak had a limited $299 lifetime subscription offer, though when buyers hit the limit, the limit was extended.

Daybreak launched The Burning Lands expansion for EverQuest as they were laying off staff. The layoff was alleged to be focused in their Austin office, where PlanetSide stuff happens.

Daybreak, which had been hinting about a new game coming, then announced PlanetSide Arena, which didn’t feel like a new game at all. And didn’t they just lay people off from that team? It was slated to be available by February 2019.

On the LOTRO Legendary server I made a side trip to Esteldin. I also made a side trip to the fall festival to get drunk. LOTRO does a very nice drunk simulation. Then it was off to Evendim, where I made it through Tinnudir and Annuminas. After that I was in the Trollshaws. I even made it into the Misty Mountains. I was on a roll in Middle-earth.

CCP put out their December update for EVE Online, which included changes to high sec war decs, as well as the assets for the holiday login rewards and the Operation Permafrost event. I wasn’t happy with that event. It didn’t measure up to the Halloween event in my mind. I did have some better luck with it eventually.

I was also carping about the dearth of ship SKINs in the New Eden Store. How do you run a space cash shop where I cannot buy something for my ship? That situation has since improved.

CCP also announced the final destinations for the Invasion World Tour, in which they would change things up by bringing EVE Fanfest to eight locations around the world.

Actually in EVE Online Asher brought the Reavers SIG on a wormhole adventure to help blow up a Keepstar, which I recorded in a series of posts:

Waiting for a Hole – Dec 9, 2018
Fort Knocks Way Down in the Hole – Dec 12, 2018
Sotiyo Boom – Dec 13, 2018
A Keepstar Waits in the Hole – Dec 14, 2018
The Other Keepstar Falls in Rage – Dec 15, 2018
Out of the Hole and Back to Delve – Dec 19, 2018

The Reavers also went out and did one of our null sec space races for fun.

In my usual year end posts, I reviewed my predictions for 2018, wrote about my five books of the year, went over the highs and lows of the last dozen months, reviewed the games I played, and ranted a bit about the state of MMORPGs.

Also, I had something about how the core player base will always optimize their behavior to match game mechanics. Then there was a throw away post about various game studios.

Finally, I told the story of the two chocolate pies.

Ten Years Ago

It was the final shut down for Warhammer Online.

It was also the end of the road for World of Darkness at CCP, which shut down the project and laid off much of the staff.

CCP did give me a copy of the EVE Online Second Decade Collector’s Edition.

Actually in EVE, I was looking at flying a dreadnought, looking at my hull tanking certificate, and actually went on a couple of ops, blowing things up in NS2L-4 and BW-WJ2.

Shroud of the Avatar was an actual thing. You could log in and see stuff. Granted, a year later it was still in alpha and had a long way to go, but at least progress was being made I guess.

Turbine threw their hat in the ring with their own insta-level scheme for Lord of the Rings Online. It got you all the way to the doors of Moria. I was not impressed. Not only was the level cap well beyond Moria at that point, I tend to believe that the best content in the game is the 1-50 run. But that is the nature of level based games.

Blizzard put a cash shop in World of Warcraft. But don’t call those microtransactions, because they are not. Microtransactions require an intermediate currency. If you’re selling in straight up dollars, pounds, and euros, it isn’t a microtransaction.

The instance group in World of Warcraft ventured under the sea and into the Mount Hyjal region, then ran through the Throne of Tides and Blackrock Caverns instances. Meanwhile, I had an alt finish up The Burning Crusade for me. And then there was my character a level cap, swamped with options including Timeless Isle.

I reviewed my goals and tried to sum up 2013.

I did some book reviews of a sort, looking at The Kindly Ones, The Circle, and some space operas.

Finally, we were very sad at our house when our cat Fred died. We still miss him.

Fifteen Years Ago

December seemed to be all about the micropayments and the like. Sony Online Entertainment surprised some by putting Station Cash driven stores into EverQuest and EverQuest II. The selection wasn’t great and the pricing seemed a bit off, but I was more interested to know what other SOE products would get the Station Cash treatment.

In EverQuest II I ran Reynaldo Fabulous from creation to level 50 in an very short (to me) stretch of time. And then I stopped.

And then EA announced that Star Wars: The Old Republic would be microtransaction financed. Or maybe they didn’t. It ended up that way eventually, but three years later at launch it was very much a subscription game in the classic sense. Free to play and a cash shop came later.

In Azeroth we were still coming to grips with the Northrend instances. In Utgarde Keep we managed to kill off Prince Keleseth, but couldn’t hold it together to finish the instance. Outside, we were running around doing quests.

Meanwhile, somebody was working on a WoW code, akin to the old geek code that used to clutter many a .sig file back when Usenet was cool and we knew the spammers by name.

I actually found some time to play Lord of the Rings Online.

And on the MUD nostalgia front I was reminding people what quests used to be like and sharing some really bad limericks.

Best selling PC Games from 2008:

Spore
Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures
Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning
The Sims 2: FreeTime
Spore Creature Creator
Sins of a Solar Empire
The Sims 2: Apartment Life
The Sims 2: Kitchen & Bath Interior Design Stuff
Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War: Soulstorm
The Sims Castaway Stories

Twenty-Five Years Ago

The original Baldur’s Gate was released.

And, in something of a reductive cycle, the first video game version of the physical Pokemon Trading Card game, itself based on the Pokemon Red & Blue video games, was released on the GameBoy in Japan. In a nod to simplicity, it was called the Pokemon Trading Card Game by the time it arrived in the US.

Thirty Years Ago

Doom arrived. You might have heard of it.

Most Viewed Posts in December

An ongoing side effect of the traffic boom is that more recent posts are making this monthly list. Usually it is the same eight old posts and maybe four more recent ones, so that I can just copy the list from month to month. Now I have to go and build out a whole list every month.

Search Terms of the Month

“wagering-agreement-meaning-in-nepali”
[I think every time I post this I end up getting it as a term]

pen and paper mmorpg
[If it is pen and paper it isn’t really an MMORPG, is it?]

хижина морлока
[No idea where his hut is]

cracked zmud 7.21
[Mine is still licensed]

mmo news 8 dec 2023
[BG3 on consoles? I don’t know…]

stuffit expander free download
[Wow, now that is an oldie]

wraptrick yoruba movie
[Eh?]

Game Time from ManicTime

What did I end up playing in December? I bet you can guess some of the list!

EVE Online – 59.37%
WoW Classic – 37.41%
Astro Colony – 1.99%
EVE Vanguard – 0.91%
Wizardry – 0.31%

A lot of time spent on the Winter Nexus event in New Eden, plus a general clean up and list for sale of stuff accumulating in my hangars. I made some ISK. WoW Classic was almost entirely Season of Discovery, though ManicTime doesn’t break those two out. I will below however.

Then three new items. EVE Vanguard was the first public player test of the game which reminded me once more about why I don’t play shooters. The other two I will mention below.

Astro Colony

A little building game I picked up on Steam during the Winter Sale. It is a space sim colony/factory builder that you can setup as a shared private server if you like… and I am checking it for that sort of group play potential. Pretty well done but still in early access. Look for a deeper post on it next year.

EVE Online

I scoffed a bit at the Winter Nexus event because the combat sites were overrun like a Westfall Defias gathering in WoW Classic Season of Discovery. Then I did most of the event on two alts via the ice mining path, which worked out though it was kind of boring… something good to do while AFK. Then I did some of the data sites via scanning, and found that engaging enough that I did the whole thing a third time on my main and mostly in null sec storms in hostile space. It was modestly lucrative and enjoyable.

Pokemon Go

There was a good community event in December… and by good, I mean one where my wife and I, using lucky eggs, were able to make some significant progress in the slog to level 50.

Level: 44 (62% of the way to 45 in xp, 2 of 4 tasks complete)
Pokedex status: 812 (+8) caught, 825 (+6) seen
Vivillon Evolutions obtained: 15 of 20
Pokemon I want: Three specific Scatterbugs; Sandstorm, Icy Snow, and Meadow
Current buddy: Larvesta

Wizardry

There is a remake/remaster of the classic Apple II (and other platforms) title Wizardry available up on Steam. At some point I will have to post about whether remastering a game that old, keeping the exact same mechanics but simply updating the graphical interface, is a viable path forward.

WoW Classic – Season of Discovery

In many ways this has exceeded my expectations, though maybe we were just ready for a new vanilla WoW experience again. There are downsides, the primary one is the crowding on servers and the fact that the population is compressed into the first 25 levels, so at prime time on a weekend or holiday zones like Westfall, Redridge, Loch Modan, and even Darkshore are crowded, making people surly and unhelpful about other people hunting the same mobs or drops. This is no day one of WoW Classic with everybody queuing up nicely.

WoW Classic – Wrath of the Lich King

I thought I would be getting one more character up to level 80 and then Blizz turned of the Joyous Journeys XP buff and that, in turn, pulled the plug on my desire to get my rogue up to the level cap… largely because he was still in Outland. We still have one dungeon left to do. We’ll see if we get back to it.

Zwift

Still waiting on permits from the power company… Pacific Gas and Electric (of Perpetual Graft and Extortion as my grandfather referred to them) is notoriously slow and indifferent to customers. The city has our permits approved, but PG&E hasn’t gotten back to the contractor, so the back room of our house where the exercise bike is still has no power. My one new years resolution will be to get back on the bike and exercise regularly once things are fixed.

Coming Up

A whole new year, with a lot going on… but not so much in January.

The first thing up tomorrow will be the usual annual predictions post. I went pretty hard at that the day I scored my 2023 predictions, so there should be something in there to annoy just about everybody.

There will be the end of the Steam Winter Sale and the data that brings up… plus I bought a few things!

I will have a summing up of my 2023 game play time as well as a look into what I might play in 2024.

The instance group made its first run at the Deadmines yesterday… need to write that up… as well as how things are faring in Season of Discovery overall.

There will be the EVE Online MER and a look into December destruction, but I feel like I should do a post about overall destruction in 2023 as well… especially since I remember the command line function to concatenate .csv files.

I did, in fact, order a new computer from Digital Storm. That should show up in the next week or so, which means I will have to mention that.

And the ongoing telephone tales series will continue. I already have the post for next Sunday ready to go.

Basically, same stuff, different year. Have a safe and happy New Year’s Eve.

The Ancient Gaming Noob

Veni, Vidi, Scripsi

Category Archives: Steam

April 2024 in Review

Mounts and Mods and DLC in Conan Exiles

Surviving the Conan Exiles April Update

Finding Followers in Conan Exiles

All in on Conan Exiles

Dropping into Conan Exiles

Friday Bullet Points on the Cusp of Spring

The New System Purge of Video Games

The End of the Steam Winter Sale with 2023 Stats and Awards… and I actually bought something

Elevator Action – Returns

Astro Colony

RUST

The Front

Sons of the Forest

Wreckfest

The Steam Awards

Best of Steam 2023

The Steam Hardware Survey

December 2023 in Review