The Site

Welcome to the new year… already 1/12th of the way done.

One of my goals this year is to move the site to a newer and actually supported theme.  I like the current theme, Twenty Twelve, but it is from… well… 2012… and, like a Mayan calendar, has gone beyond its time.

The problem, as I have stated before, is that most of the options from WP.com that are recent and supported… suck.  Or suck for my intended goal, which is to have a blog with a side bar full of links and dynamic content.

WP.com put out a blog post about the 12 Top Themes People Actually Use, which is likely a sign of some sort.  Of them, 11 are absolutely not what I want.  The 12th, a theme called Nook, could work.

The problem is that, out of the box, it is only partially assembled by my standards.  Or, rather, it comes fully assembled for a cooking blog and you have to apply the theme then figure out how to undo all of that and put it back together how you like with some of the most obtuse design tools known to man.

Maybe they will come up with a Twenty Twenty-Six theme that isn’t pretentious garbage.  And maybe pigs will fly.

Also, for the month in review posts I am going to retire the Search Terms of the Month section.  It was an occasionally amusing gag, but these days I have to go dig into the Google search console to find some amusing theme… and I am not feeling it of late.  I am never one to shy away from beating some gag into the ground, but I think my job there is done.

One Year Ago

As is tradition, there was a New Years post about the upcoming year.  I chose to make wishes this time around.  At least if they didn’t come true I couldn’t be blamed.

I also did my usual wrap-up of the Steam Winter Sale, covering awards, stats, and what I bought.

I also reviewed what I played in 2024 and tried to guess what I would play in 2025.

In EVE Online we had moved to Tenerifis and started to settle in, so I got my PI farms started again.  I didn’t know we’d be moving again.

I also finished up the AIR Career Program.

I summed up 2024 destruction in New Eden, at least according to what the MER told us.

CCP also gave us an entirely predictable 2025 roadmap for EVE Online.

SSG put out a pretty sparse 2025 roadmap for LOTRO.  Among other things, it completely omitted easily the biggest event of the year for the game; the voluntary, then mandatory, migration to the new 64-bit servers.

We also got bland, but at least complete, roadmaps for EQ and EQII from Daybreak.

In Enshrouded we were delving into the Nomad Highlands Hollow Halls.  Then it was time for a swing through the Kindlewaste Hollow Halls… literally.  The it was time to seek the ghost glider.

Then came the Pact of Flame update and a roadmap out to 2026.  Roadmaps everywhere!

My wife and I hit level 48 in Pokemon Go, which was back before the big level cap increase.

In the Stars Reach pre-alpha testing, it was a new year, a new planet, and an upcoming Kickstarter campaign.  The team was asking what they should have for pledges, a bit of a fraught topic.  But if you would follow their Kickstarter page, they said they would let you into the pre-alpha tests.

I looked at Josh Strife Hayes and his Ultimate MMO Tier list.

From the depth of time, the still alive TorilMUD added a new campaign mechanic to the game.

And on the topic of old games, I got Total Annihilation out again.  Still available and playable after all these years.

Then there was the start of the first TAGN Fantasy Critic League.  I am not going to link to every entry, but I had a whole introductory post before the draft.  And then there was the draft itself.

I declared Threads as dead.  Others were declaring it to be like dating Leonardo DiCaprio in that there was no engagement.

And at WP.com, the once again deleted the classic editor before having to restore it due to customer complaints.  They also put in a pretty low effort Fediverse integration that brought its own problems.

Finally, there was some holiday binge watching to sum up.

Five Years Ago

For my new year’s post I chose to ask questions rather than make predictions.  I’ve always been told that there are no bad questions, though that statement usually precedes attempts to prove it wrong.

I also reviewed the games I played in 2020 and attempted to guess what I might play in 2021.

Twitch told me what I watched there in 2020 and I did that Quantic Foundry gamer profile thing again.

SuperData Research also did their review of 2020 which, along with its penultimate monthly chart, as their end was on the horizon.

There was that GameStop stock craziness.  There are still some out there that believe it will rise again.

I wrote a timeline of SOE/Daybreak Games.  I did not extend it into the EG7 era.  That will be another post some day.

The Steam Winter Sale ended with awards and stats.

I was wondering what LOTRO needed, since it clearly needed something.

People were wondering when we were going to get Burning Crusade Classic, with the current rumor being early May, which seemed too early to me.  But we ended up getting it in early June, so I guess it wasn’t that far off.

The instance group was still working on Blackrock Depths, this time for a love potion.  Then we went off to Dire Maul East for a change of scenery.  Dire Maul North proved too much for just the four of us.  We also hunted for recipes out in the Burning Steppes.  Meanwhile, my paladin was catching up to the group in levels.

And then there was World War Bee, which kicked off the new year with the another huge titan battle, though this time the results were much more one-sided.  The war bullet points:

• PAPI Thwarted at Final M2-XFE Keepstar Timer by the Early Bird Imperium
• 26 Weeks of World War Bee
• The Imperium Retakes the NJU-QV Constellation in Delve
• World War Bee Six Month Review
• 27 Weeks of World War Bee
• Quantum Cores Now Required in Upwell Structures
• Life on the M2 Hell Camp
• 28 Weeks of World War Bee
• United Eden Login Event comes to EVE Online
• 29 Week of World War Bee
• CCP Offers Up Broken Monthly Economic Report for December

Somewhere along the way I hit a year in KarmaFleet and the 230 million skill point mark.

There was also more binge watching and we had HBO max finally, so I took a look at it and its app.

And, finally, January 20th was a happy day, even if it was just an intermission before things got much worse.

Ten Years Ago

I had 16 predictions for 2016. (Results for those who need to know.)

I was also included on some sort of MMO info page thing.

It was the end of another Steam Winter Sale.

I was wondering what Early Access should really be.  I was also checking out which MMOs made PC Gamer’s latest list.

Smed was going to Kickstarter for Hero’s Song.  It got cancelled before I could finish the post about all the problems it had.  More than a bit of foreshadowing in that I guess.

People were troubled by a potential paywall in Rift.

The price for the Occulus Rift was announced, which led to quite a sum if all I wanted to do is play EVE Valkyrie.

In EVE Online I ran my first incursion boss.  We also got the first of the “no name” monthly updates.  Karma Fleet turned one.  CCP told us about skill extractors. Blog Banter 71 was about spaceships.  Also, there was some sort of conflict going on between I Want ISK and SpaceMonkeys Alliance.  It started in mid-December 2015.  The bankers of I Want ISK were banned then unbanned and eventually the whole thing spiraled out to become the Casino War.

In space we reinforced a tower and ran about in Typhoons and Jackdaws.  At the end of the month Reavers headed south to Wicked Creek to tangle with TEST.

Outside the game Battle Clinic, long a staple of the EVE Online third party universe, was set to shut down while the election process for CSM XI was kicking off.

Daybreak announced that they were going to port the five year old DC Universe Online to the XBox.

I went in to Diablo III to try out the Season 5 content.  I ran through the story quickly, but there was more to do.

I wrote a bit about The Force Awakens.

Finally, I was marveling at all the movies from 1986 that I remembered.  Aliens! Top Gun!  Platoon!  Ferris Bueller’s Day Off!   It was a hell of a year for movies.

Fifteen Years Ago

Eschewing the predicting convention, I issued demands for 2011. and then tried to figure out the scale used for the Blog Health-o-Meter that WordPress.com sent out to various sites.

The blog was listed at a Vietnamese gaming site in a top 10 post that looked suspiciously like one from Massively.

TERA was trying to win notice by telling people how they had boars in their game!  BOARS!  Can you imagine?

EuroGamer tried to tell us PlanetSide 2 would be out by Q2 2011. (It eventually shipped in November of 2012.)

Rift, on the other hand, gave us a more believable release date.

It was time to start messing with the then new EVE Online character creator.

DC Universe Online launched.  I played in the beta just long enough to remind myself I am not a superhero kind of guy.  Sales of the game were pretty evenly split between Windows and PlayStation 3, but play time seemed to be impacted by American Idol when it came to the console side of the house.

Of course, that was back during the subscription era of MMOs, when Smed was telling us what paying a subscription to lead us to expect.

Meanwhile, competing superhero game, Champions Online, went free to play after less than a year and and a half as a subscription title.  This would end up being foreshadowing for DC Universe Online.

I used Google to tell me World of Warcraft’s five most pressing issues at the time.

Meanwhile, the Twilight Cadre was back in Azeroth in force and checking out Cataclysm.  We got our first guild achievement.  Our group of new characters, four worgen and a gnome, went through Westfall and all its phasing magic, wailed in the Wailing Caverns, before settling down to a pattern of doing three instances every Saturday night.  I wasn’t sure if we had skilled up a lot or if the game had been dumbed down that much, but clearly the 1-60 game in Cataclysm was proving to be not much of a challenge.

The official World of Warcraft magazine was asking me to renew my subscription, though they weren’t really up to mail merge technology it seems.

There was some cool stuff in Cataclysm.  I like the balloons.  Redridge, never one of my favorite places, got turned into a fun solo experience.  And there was the Murloc combat ability.  But otherwise, the game was starting to lose us.

I was muttering about rebates.  My daughter and I were rounding up LEGO minifigures.

And, finally, Pokemon was coming to town.

Twenty Years Ago

SOE announced that they were going to merge EverQuest II servers a little more than a year after the game went live, trimming the server count down by folding 10 low population servers into 10 low to medium population servers.  The reason given is that the world was sooo big that the population was too spread out.  I’m pretty sure most people thought that the game had just lost too many players to WoW to make that many servers viable since MMO populations are rarely evenly spread but tend to form a bubble in the latest content.

Nintendo, which was still selling the GameBoy Advance (and would continue to in the US until 2008) announced the first major update to their crazy two screen DS handheld platform.  The new Nintendo DS Lite would end up being, in my opinion, one of the finest handheld consoles ever, with sharp screens, a compact form factor, excellent finish, and great battery life along with continuing the backward compatibility with the GBA.  The only problem I ever had with my cobalt blue unit involved me getting old and being unable to read text on the screen without glasses.

Twenty-Five Years Ago

RuneScape launches as a Java based browser game.

Phantasy Star Online launches on the Sega Dreamcast, one of the first proto-MMOs on consoles.

Forty-Five Years Ago

The first DeLorean rolled off the production line.  Not really game related, but very much pop culture related.

Most Viewed Posts in January

1. The No Man’s Sky Holidays 2025 Expedition Schedule
2. Cat Catching in Enshrouded
3. Planning my Platinum Medal Strategy for Pokemon Go Level 49
4. WoW Classic Anniversary Edition Prepares for The Burning Crusade with the Expansion Pre-Patch
5. Building My First Corvette in No Man’s Sky
6. No Man’s Sky and the Last 2025 Holiday Run – Expedition 20 Redux: Breach
7. No Man’s Sky – Playing with Friends
8. RuneScape Shows How It’s Done with its 2025-26 Roadmaps
9. Blackrock Depths and Shadowforge City
10. Total Annihilation: A 2025 Return to a Retro RTS Classic
11. The Altar of Zul and Jintha’alor
12. Enshrouded and our First Night Sanctum

Game Time by ManicTime

Back to just recording time with PC titles, since those are in competition with each other for my time.

1. EVE Online – 27.22%
2. Guild Wars – 26.97%
3. No Man’s Sky – 24.48%
4. Civ 2 – 9.84%
5. Blue Prince – 8.45%
6. Project: Gorgon – 2.51%
7. World of Warcraft – 0.39%
8. WoW Classic – 0.13%

My WoW subscription ran until earlier this week and I checked in briefly to see if the pre-patches for both Anniversary TBC and Midnight had landed.

Civilization II

It came up somewhere that Civ II is turning 30 this year, which got me to spend some time playing it again.  It remains a strong title in my book, though it does have the mid to end game problem of the whole series.  You get yourself into an interesting situation in an hour or two… then spend another half dozen micro managing an empire.

EVE Online

I came into the month still working on the Winter Nexus event and the like, but once I wrapped that up things slowed down for me in New Eden.  I did go on a couple of ops, got my participation chit and put some kill mails on the board for the month to prove I am still alive.  But I didn’t do much besides mind my PI farms.  Oh, and I did do the new mining epic arc and… I am not sure you can be “epic” or for anything like an “arc” with just three missions.  I was done, Pioneer in hand, saying, “Was that it?”

Guild Wars

The new game for the group, we are enjoying exploring an old/new game.  The whole henchmen thing also makes it a pretty viable solo title, so I have been playing a few alts.  The only thing is that it does take a bit of a time commitment to get something like a mission done, especially the first time you run it, so I can run into the end of the evening “nope, don’t have time for that” problem.

No Man’s Sky

As with New Eden, I started off the month in an expedition and rode through that, coming out the other side and somewhat running out of steam.  I am sort of waiting to see what they will introduce next.  The evolution of the game has become the game… or something like that.

Pokemon Go

My wife and I made it to level 73, so we have been moving right along.  As with the previous level, we had the xp covered and just needed the tasks done for the new level.  We both have the first two wrapped up, but still have to finish the last two.

• Level: 73
• XP Progress: 75.2% of the 203,353,000 xp needed for level 80
• Tasks for Level 75
  • XP: Done
  • Platinum Medals: 30 of 30
  • Level up a Max Move 20 time: 20 of 20
  • Explore 200 km: 62km of 200km
  • Complete 250 Field Research tasks: 147 of 250
• Pokedex status: 920 (+4) caught
• Pokemon I want: Hawlucha
• Current buddy: Wigglytuff

Project: Gorgon

Well, I didn’t really play it…. not seriously.  But I downloaded it and logged in and ran around the seriously overcrowded starting area not know what to do.  It took a bit to get any sort of orientation… I think I must have missed something back when I first ran it.  We’ll see if I get any farther than that next month.

Coming Up

EVE Online will always be there.  I mean, it has been for more than 19 years at this point.

Likewise, Guild Wars seems to be the destination for the group.

I might keep dipping my toe into Project: Gorgon.  There is a fresh start server available as of this morning, though it is initially reserved for players whose accounts were created on December 1, 2025 or later.  The rest of us swine… will be swine.  Older accounts will be forced to play as a pig for the first week.  Edit: They changed that to accounts with more than 40 hours of play time this morning, so I qualify.  I am just not sure it matters that much… one over crowded starter zone is like another.

The Civilization II anniversary no doubt portends some nostalgic bloviation on my part, which will probably add up to the fact that it is the one version of the game I have spent the most time with.  But the anniversary isn’t until March, so you have at least a month to brace yourself.

In Fantasy Critic League we’re going to see a bunch of titles get scores in February.

And it will remain cold and miserable most places… though it is getting to be sunny and close to pleasant here.  But that is part of why it costs so much to live in coastal California.  Mild winters, warm summers, low humidity, and well paying tech jobs.