The Site
It was Blaugust and Promptapalooza this month. I participated a bit in the prompt thing, though not very much. I kept myself busy elsewhere. There was plenty to post about without additional prompts.
August means some sort of Blaugust
Belghast, who set the whole thing up, has a summary post about the event up with links out to everybody’s prompt post.
I did, however, stick closer to the old school meaning of Blaugust by posting every single day over the course of the month. In fact, I managed to do that from the start of April, which was Blapril, all the way through August of Blaugust.
A post a day keeps… something away…
153 days in a row of blog posts, so “go me” I guess.
One Year Ago
I wrote way too many posts. 49 in one month, and not a bunch of short ones either. But it was Blaugust, so I was in the mood. As usual I went on about all sorts of things like what to write, and burning things down, and how to crank out posts. Oh, and that gamer motivation profile thing again.
Daybreak was setting up Twitter accounts for its new sub-studios. They also brought DCUO to the Nintendo Switch. And they were sketching out some plans for the EverQuest II 15th anniversary.
PlanetSide Arena also resurfaces with a new plan.
I explained the difference between Team Fight Tactics and DOTA Overlords.
There was more talk about lock boxes and bad analogies.
I hit three years with Pokemon Go.
The August update brought community fittings to EVE Online. A big cyno nerf was also announced. EVE Fanfest Home also happened.
Out in null sec the blackout continued, though not without issues. Local came on for a bit, even in WH space. The MER showed a big hit to NPC bounties in null sec. I was starting to wonder about chaos fatigue from the stuff CCP was doing.
Meanwhile, I was in low sec with Liberty Squad, flying Abaddons. Some days we didn’t get a fight. Other days lots of stuff blew up. But we tired of the locals refusing to fight unless they had the numbers to overwhelm us us, so we flew home. The “hell dunks or blue balls” routine gets tiresome and there was nothing really at stake.
I was also on about the absolute nature of some things in New Eden, warp core stabilizers, interdiction nullification, and the things that they counter.
There was also announcement of the the alpha for EVE Echoes, the mobile version of EVE Online. Could you play EVE on your phone? Should you play EVE on your phone?
There was another round of EVE Aether Wars to try, this time with prizes. It seemed to go pretty well.
I also celebrated 13 years of playing EVE Online by going down the list of all the places I had called home in the game.
But mostly I was wetting myself about WoW Classic. The count down to launch was on. They announced the server names, a list which ended up expanding greatly. The crowd trying to reserve names on various servers proved Blizzard was not thinking big enough. PVP realms seemed popular. Like, very popular. Super popular.
Blizzard was trying to get the word out on what you should know. They even did a Reddit AMA and explained things like layering in detail as well as some videos with the game’s creators.
I tried to define the different factions of players these servers attract. I also had some predictions about what would happen on the eve of the launch.
The instance group eagerly played the last load test just to get a taste of it, because all I really wanted to do was play WoW Classic. I was wondering about addons, which have come a long way since back in the day. What would enhance the experience and what would ruin it?
And then it was LAUNCH DAY and we queued up to get in the game, then queued up again once we got in. My hunter tamed his first pet just a couple days in as I wrote about the strange ways of the class. Good times.
Five Years Ago
It was Blaugust and a lot of people played along.
I told the strange tale of my first automotive test drive.
Project: Gorgon had Kickstarter success at last, then there were stretch goals, the grand total, and mapping out a plan going forward.
Blizzard, on the other hand, was facing bad news as WoW subscriptions dropped to 5.6 million, the lowest since December 2005. In order to drown that out, Blizz had a big WoW announcement planned later in the week. There was much anticipation. I speculated on what it might be, but it turned out to be the WoW Legion expansion announcement, sans cinematic. Of course, once they announced it, everybody wanted to know when we would get it.
In EVE Online, it was all about Fozzie Sov. People were complaining. We had to take sov from allies in order to transfer it, at which point MOA temporarily scooped up a couple systems. Crazy days! The Galatea expansion addressed some of our issues.
Then the Imperium went to Providence to test out the new sovereignty mechanics… and to purge the Jamylites with the blessings of Maximilian Singularity VI. The resulting conflict is all under the Provi War tag here.
Meanwhile, CCP was doubling down on VR, adding EVE Gunjack to their lineup.
Turbine was warming up for the great LOTRO server upgrade and merge effort.
Daybreak was also planning server consolidations, these for EverQuest II. They were also working on a server for misfit players, which seemed like a dubious idea. And on the Stormhold server, the first expansion unlock vote came up. The players said “no” to the unlock. And in EverQuest, on the Ragefire and Lockjaw servers, the inevitable enforced raid rotation schedule was implemented, with an eye to keeping out casuals it seemed.
In Minecraft, I was discovering fire and putting our world up on a hosting service to share it with friends. Xydd joined up and began working a lot on the nether, while Skronk began his own building project, as I tinkered with dungeons. We had a setback with our hosting service. It was a good thing I was keeping backups.
ArenaNet made the base version of Guild Wars 2 available for free, no doubt hoping to sell expansions.
And I wrote a little something about the passing of Robert Conquest.
Ten Years Ago
Let’s see… people were hating on GameStop for selling used games, which was equated with stealing. That was before GameStop started officially stealing.
Massive Blips went away. I miss it.
I made my position on raspberries perfectly clear.
Yahoo had a couple game related lists. I love lists.
Cryptic and Atari announced they were doing the game Neverwinter.
Runic started talking about Torchlight II.
Stunt Rock. I need say no more.
EverQuest Next was announced at Fan Faire, and I was wondering about the lessons SOE has learned after a few turns of the EverQuest wheel. Pity nothing came of it.
In the real world, boars were starting to become more like their MMO counterparts.
WoW account hacking was still a big deal, though getting to be common enough as to not be news on an individual level any more. People have their views on whose fault it is. But was any game facing as much account hacking as WoW?
My daughter got into the WoW Cataclysm beta. She got me some screen shots of Stormwind, Southshore and the Barrens. This, by the way, probably killed her interest in Cata when it finally did ship. Indulging early can take the edge off of things.
Blizzard got a serious judgement against somebody running a for-profit WoW pirate server.
The instance group, done in WoW and on the now usual summer hiatus, was spending some time in Middle-earth, which required a bit of selling. We made it through Othrongroth, and to the North Downs and the Lone Lands. I finally found my way to Evendim, which I had never managed to visit before. It was in a state of change, pre-quest revamp but after they added in the boat routes.
And, finally, in EVE Online, there was the PLEX story we had all been waiting for.
Twenty Years Ago
The Age of Empires II expansion, The Conquerors, launched. Good times.
Twenty-Five Years Ago
Command and Conquer launches, an RTS game that spawned a franchise and gave us the hell march (with Red Alert at least).
Most Viewed Posts in August
- The Fall of Niarja and the Shape of High Sec
- SuperData and Wavering WoW Subscriptions
- Alamo teechs u 2 play DURID!
- Minecraft and the Search for a Warm Ocean
- CCP is Just Going to Keep Selling Skill Points for Cash
- The Ahn’Qiraj War Effort set to Begin in WoW Classic
- Remembering Brian Green
- Reflections on the Eve of the 20 Year EverQuest Anniversary
- Campaign Medals
- Burn Jita 2020 Seems Unlikely
- The Coming Metaliminal Storms May Decloak You in Null Sec
- WoW Tokens Five Years Later
Search Terms of the Month
project discovery 40 million isk per hour
[Tell me more]
eve online notoras
[They have icecream]
can a drake null sec rat
[A Drake can do anything… except light a cyno]
felwood or un’goro first
[Un’goro]
Spam Comment of the Month
Hey mate are you selling your blog by chance?
[Everything has a price!]
Gaming Time from ManicTime
I was away for a week… pretty much all of last week… so my overall hours played were at their lowest since February, when I was also away for a week. I was in Portland, Oregon both times, as that is where my daughter goes to college now.
As an aside, I was downtown a couple of times last week and it is not the dystopian landscape of destruction that the President or Fox News would have you believe. In February we stayed at a hotel that is at the mid-point between the park where the nightly protest forms up and the two federal buildings where the protests take place. Unless you’re in about a four block area, you might never notice a thing, and during the day nothing looks out of place.
Anyway, game times:
- EVE Online – 50.33%
- WoW Classic – 33.31%
- Diablo II – 13.93%
- World of Warcraft – 1.01%
Both Minecraft and EverQuest dropped off the list in August, with no time recorded for either.
Diablo II
I kept on going through Diablo II, if a bit more slowly than back in the day. I am through Act II, so a post about that is coming this week, and into Act III. I think the challenge will be Act V, the expansion act, as I have zero memory of it.
EVE Online
World War Bee continues. The invaders have taken all of Fountain and have moved their supers and titans into the region. Querious remains a skirmish zone around the gate to Catch and the hostiles come through into Period Basis as well, but our core home region of Delve remains mostly unscathed. Oh, and Niarja fell to the Triglavians and people wonder what that will mean in the long term. We shall see.
Pokemon Go
A good month for Pokemon Go. A friend of my wife’s is part of a raiding group and she got us on the friend’s list, so we get remote invites to raid now. Have to save up coins for remote raid passes though. (Good thing they are selling some cheap ones soon.) On the down side, I haven’t hatched anything new or useful from an egg in months now.
Level: 39 (70% of the way to level 40)
Pokedex status: 572 (+16) caught, 601 (+12) seen
Pokemon I want: Need some Unova Pokemon to fill in the gaps
Current buddy: Fraxure
World of Warcraft
As has been the pattern for a while now, I went and did the Darkmoon Faire stuff on my main and then mostly did not log into retail WoW. We did get some big WoW news though; Shadowlands will launch on October 26th, which means the big 9.0.1 patch will hit some time before then, introducing the level squish.
WoW Classic
The instance group did the ground work for quests and then dove into Sunken Temple for the first time. I had to miss a couple of weeks due to travel, but we have another run or two there to finish up the instance.
Coming Up
More World War Bee in EVE Online is a given.
More instance group in WoW Classic for sure. Also, we’ll probably get the retail WoW pre-expansion patch with the big level squish.
More Diablo II certainly.
And some sort of anniversary post. I’d better start working on that.
What else is coming up in September? I am sure I missed something.
from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8262364
0 comments: