April in Review

The Site

April first is the one day of the year that Google remembers I have a blog and sends me traffic in numbers reminiscent of the “good old days” of blogging, before the likes of Tumblr, Twitter, and Reddit hove into view. So my page views tend to spike a bit.

Who doesn’t love April Fools?

I get a bit of a compound boost from this as well. Since I have covered Blizzard at April Fools regularly for a while now, I include a list of past posts which, unlike almost every other such list or link in any other article I put up, people actually click on these. So my Top Posts list gets a bit skewed towards April Fools early in the month as well.

What you get at the start of every April

That reflects itself again in this post down the page in the most viewed posts section. Rare is the item that can break into the dirty dozen every April, but a couple of posts made it.

Of course it is all downhill from here for the rest of the year on the page view front.

One Year Ago

There was, of course, April Fools, but Blizzard didn’t seem up to its usual level of effort.

Blizzard did make the original StarCraft free to play, no April Fools there.

I was wondering if the plan to make mobs scale with your ilevel was going to make going back to World of Warcraft a chore. It seemed like a bad idea, but in the end it didn’t seem to matter much.

I was going on about the 3K Blissey problem in Pokemon Go.

Meanwhile I was finishing up Pokemon Sun and still felt like playing Pokemon, so went back to Pokemon Alpha Sapphire.

There was the Lord of the Rings Online ten year launch anniversary. We would finally get to Mordor later that year.

Daybreak announced the Agnarr server for EverQuest, a retro server designed to stay retro as it would not progress beyond the Lost Dungeons of Norrath expansion.

In EVE Online Reavers were out camping Circle of Two in Impass, shooting their ratters and such. Asher later told us that this was to have us in place as they had a CO2 director ready defect. This was before The Judge did his thing. However that did not come to pass.

I was going on about corpses in New Eden, which have their own special place in the game. I was also on about force auxiliaries and titan losses.

In Iceland EVE Fanfest was under way. They had a presentation that gave some interesting data about what happened in New Eden over the last year. CCP also announced the winners of the CSM12 election and when/where EVE Vegas would take place. And there was a talk on the plan to convert Null Sec stations into citadels. We’re still waiting on that last bit.

I also started looking at the New Eden Monthly Economic Report as a regular monthly item, something set off by how much ratting and mining was being done in null sec.

I sharpened up my scanning skills, all the better to hunt MTUs. Also, according to CCP I lost 5 billion ISK in space wealth since the month before.

In Minecraft I finished up the long road to the northern forest mansion; it took an hour to ride it on a fast horse.

And then there was the crazy story of the Nintendo NES Classic, which they stopped producing even though it remained sold out everywhere.

Five Years Ago

I was remembering the SEGA Genesis and NBA Jams.

Our Wii seemed to be collecting dust and destined for retirement. Maybe one more round of Wii Bowling?

On the iPad I was fiddling around with Vinylize Me.

The Camelot Unchained Kickstarter had kicked off with a steep $2 million goal. With only three days left to go the campaign was $400K short. Not sure if Mark Jacobs’ dire vision of the future of F2P helped or hurt.

Meanwhile, Lord British’s Shroud of the Avatar wrapped up its Kickstarter campaign over the $2 million mark, having doubled its $1 million initial goal.

LOTRO turned 6 years old and I was wondering what lay it its future.

World of Tanks hit 2 years and I was pondering tank crew skills and finally driving the KV-4 along with some other new tanks.

Age of Empires II – HD Edition launched on Steam.

I took another run at Need for Speed: World, which had added achievements.

In Rift, I was wondering why the Storm Legion expansion just wasn’t grabbing me. I tried to press on. Meanwhile, the instance group spent evenings one person short trying to find something to do.

The Burn Jita 2 event kicked off. People didn’t seem to be paying much attention to it before it started, but it got extended and ended up bagging 573 billion ISK worth of ships.

CCP launched its EVE Online timeline as part of its prep for the 10th anniversary of the game. They’ve since thrown all of that away. But the Dev Blog about it is still there.

I also had items from the mail bag about Darkfall: Unholy Wars, MegaWars IV, and World of Tanks Blitz.

And it was kind of a quiet April Fools at Blizzard.

Ten Years Ago

I made up something for April Fool’s Day, SOE’s Graphite Realms! I thought it was amusing.

Homstar Runner was getting a game on the Wii.

Lord of the Rings Online celebrated a year of being live. Book 13 introduced, among other things, fishing. And my video problems with the game proved to be a bad video card, so I was actually able to get into the game.

Computer Gaming World/Games For Windows magazine ceased publishing as part of the ongoing demise of print media.

In EVE Online I made the big move from Caldari to Amarr space. I also began producing Badger transports for fun and profit. CCP introduced the whole Council of Stellar Management thing, which I dubbed The Galactic Student Council. My opinion on it hasn’t changed much since.

I also managed to get my hauling rigged Mammoth blown up in low sec space, which got me thinking at the recent profusion of those new heavy interdictors.

Meanwhile in World of Warcraft one million people in China logged into the game at the same time. There is still no report on what would happen if they all pressed the space bar at the same time. While that was going on, the instance group finished up the Slave Pens and the Underbog and began the long struggle with the Mana Tombs.

I was looking around for Tetris on the Nintendo DS. You would think that would be easy, right?

And then it was Tipa’s turn to bang the EverQuest nostalgia drum, so I joined in yet again.

Most Viewed Posts in April

Search Terms of the Month

do people still play everquest in 2018?
[You would be surprised]

palkia and dialga memes
[probably a thing]

daybreak games news april 24 2018
[According to Daybreak, there was no news that day]

“columbus nova” “daybreak”
[That’s not news!]

game with large armored “white tiger” creature
[Rift maybe?]

EVE Online

I watch some of EVE Fanfest live, and more of it as videos recorded while I was still sleeping. Some big news out of Iceland this year. But we’re in the gap between hopes and reality now.

In the game the deployment in the north carried on. With Pandemic Horde gone the Guardians of the Galaxy coalition in Fade, Pure Blind, and Deklein seemed to struggle with how to face an every growing guerilla war brewing in their space. Some interesting defections occurred when they decided to just not fight us. Now there is talk of GotG hiring mercenaries to fight us. Stay tuned.

Basically, EVE Online ate up most of my gaming time this month. I even tried out the abyssal pocket content on the test server just to see what that was about.

Minecraft

I have been pottering around in Minecraft. It remains a good game to play when you want to do something while listening to an audio book or serious podcast. I completed the long rail line to from the northern mansion and have just been tinkering around with other projects I’ve left around. I need to do a couple of posts about our server.

Pokemon Go

I remain at level 32, but I have been doing some of the research tasks. As I noted earlier in the month, those are a nice bit of structure to keep people playing. I have ended up collecting a bunch of new Pokemon along the way.

My current state of affairs:

Level: 32 (+0)
Pokedex status: 312 (+18) caught, 342 (+7) seen
Pokemon I want: Lapras, but it remains elusive
Current buddy: Grovyle

Rift

I kept on with Rift Prime this month, but did not spend as much time there as I planned. EVE Online, as noted above, ate up most of my gaming time. Still, I plan to carry on for another month at least, so I will go use some of my Rift funny money to buy another 30 Day ticket.

Shroud of the Avatar

After a weekend of focusing on this I haven’t really been back. Like I said, space battles called. I do want to continue with it some, or so I tell myself, but since it isn’t a subscription it sort of falls back in the queue most nights. Even Minecraft has a monthly server hosting fee.

World of Warcraft

I petered out on Azeroth for the most part last month, so I let my subscription lapse in April, and that was that. I did get an invite to the Battle for Azeroth beta, but like the alpha, I have no real interest in spoiling the content before it goes live. I will be back when the pre-expansion events start to hit.

Coming Up

We’ll all be watching Daybreak in May to see what else might bubble up now that they’ve stirred the pot enough to get everybody staring at them. We’re all waiting on the current rumor that Daybreak owns Standing Stone Games via Jason Epstein’s cat or some such.

On the internet spaceships front it will be a big month for EVE Online. The list of items include:

15 year anniversary events and player gifts
Operation: Conscious Interruption event
The Into the Abyss expansion
The death of the the old API and the 3rd party app holocaust
The run to grab null sec stations before they become faction citadels
CSM elections, or at least a date for them

And then there is the ongoing deployment in the north to keep GotG from being able to do their day to day ratting and mining. They are hiring Black Legion to fight us and there is a rumor that MOA is going to pull back from Fade and Pure Blind altogether, though not until the June 5th null sec station conversion, so we’ll see how that plays out.

There is a huge update for Minecraft in the offing that will introduce a lot of new sea life. I’d be happy to see that in May.

The Spring Season of Fantasy Movie League will wrap up this month, and the big Summer season will launch with the Memorial Day weekend holiday and the launch of Solo: A Star Wars Story.

Other than that, carrying on with whatever else it is I play these days.

from The Ancient Gaming Noob https://ift.tt/2HHcasd

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April in Review

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