The Site
All continues on as it generally has for quite some time.
I did experiment with a possible replacement for the unreliable blogger RSS feed on my side bar. Feedly was all full of news about it integrating with a service called Zapier. They do a whole bunch of what I guess I would call “data manipulation and consolidation” services. One of the new features of Zapier is the ability to move content you flag or otherwise indicate in Feedly into its own RSS. That sounded ideal.
Unfortunately, after a week or so of tinkering with Zapier, I could not get it to produce an RSS feed that would play nicely with WordPress.com’s RSS sidebar widget. Not sure whose fault that was (Zapier, WordPress.com, or me), but it wasn’t happening. Plus Zapier was really keen to have me sign up and pay for the service, which would run $15 a month to run a feed to my sidebar that got updated with any regularity. That is probably a fair price if I had a business use for the service, but it is really more than I want to put out for a widget on my side bar. So I’ll put that money towards an MMO scubscription instead.
One Year 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.
And it was kind of a quiet April Fools at Blizzard.
Five 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. Now they have millions of people who have signed up for the game, but since it is free to play, that is no indication of revenue. My daughter has tried to sign up four times, so that is four out of the millions. SOE was advertising the game heavily on Cartoon Network. But FR does not run on a Mac. I know she has signed up because her email gets routed to me. And, as a side note to SOE, if you’re going to require a parental email address for approval, allowing it to be the same as the child’s email address isn’t really an effective way to control under age players. I realize you’re in a bind on this, but you seem to have taken the easy way out.
In EVE Online I was mulling over the Apocrypha expansion and configuring up a Cerebus to try out as a mission runner.
As usual, there was much ado about WoW.
PETA was planning some event in WoW. I still have trouble believing this 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.
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.
And then there were new comers as we brought home two wee kittens.
New Linking Sites
The following blogs have linked this site in their blogroll, for which they have my thanks.
Diaries of a Space Noob
BadWrongFun
Please take a moment to visit them in return.
Most Viewed Posts in April
April Fools at Blizzard – 2014
Coming Soon – Burn Jita 3
Running Civilization II on Windows 7 64-bit
Blizzard Isn’t Giving You a Free Copy of Warlords of Draenor
The Seven Day Landmark
World of Darkness Goes Dark
Considering Star Wars Galaxies Emulation? Better Grab a Disk!
April Fools at Blizzard – 2013
The Mighty Insta-90 Question – Which Class to Boost?
Remembering Our Time in Zul’Gurub
Level 85 in EverQuest… Now What?
Quote of the Day – When You Have a F2P Hammer, Every Nail is a Microtransaction
Search Terms of the Month
i need a email address for someone i can contact who is responsible for shutting down warhammer online age of reckoning
[You tell them!]
rapid assembly jump clown
[That would be the name of this blog if I were launching it today.]
i want to gift warlords of drainer but keep the 90 boost
[Selfish are we?]
Civilization V
Our first multiplayer game of Civ V came off this month. It seemed to go pretty well, well enough that we are ready to go for round two. Of course, Civ V and games like it are binge games, where you always want to go just one more turn, so I have played a couple of single player campaigns over the course of the month as well.
EVE Online
After a couple months of rather minimal activity in New Eden, I actually went out on some fleet ops. A busy weekend prevented me from spending any time observing Burn Jita 3 (something that has me in trouble with our current corp leadership), but I was able to get into fleets for our simmering little conflict in Pure Blind and actually get into some fights with our major opponent, Black Legion, which is acting as a proxy for the actual people we’re fighting because Black Legion needs fights. That is their thing, to the point that they appear to be having problems because they are not getting fights often enough. I hope our presence helped Elo Knight out.
Pokemon
While we launched into Pokemon X & Y with lots of expectations, we ran into the problem of pacing. Basically, my daughter finished the game and was done before I had managed to get the second gym badge. So I have been pottering along slowly, but there hasn’t been a lot of “lets play Pokemon!” time around the house. I am almost done at this point myself and will have a post at some point to discuss the good and the bad.
World of Warcraft
The instance group has pretty much finished up Cataclysm content and is ready to move into Mists of Pandaria. There we have some dungeons awaiting us, Timeless Isle, and maybe some other five player content, all of which we will have to stretch out to last until Warlords of Draenor ships. Considering that we generally go on hiatus during the summer, we can probably manage that without feeling the need to run off to another game as a full group.
As a sub-group or individual though… I don’t know. Pandaria already feels very much like a known quantity to me at this point. Twinking old content has a certain charm, but is more of a hobby than a vocation. And one can only level up so many characters. We’ll see.
Coming Up
Is anything coming up? What is going on in May?
I suppose we will have a new CSM in EVE Online and we’ll know more about the summer expansion. And there will be fleets. But EVE is never really a full-time game for me. I need to play something else along side EVE, because the players are the content, and players are notoriously unreliable in lining up to entertain when it is convenient for me. Damn them!
WildStar is coming up, but I am not so interested in that. At least not enough to buy another box and sign up for another subscription.
If I felt any nostalgia for Vanguard or Wizardry Online I suppose I would go back and play those before they close. Honestly, I am not much on anything SOE has to offer at the moment.
The Elder Scrolls Online seems unready for prime time, depending on who you read, though even those singing its praises have to admit there are issues. It is more a matter of the issues being worth the experience or not and whether or not it really is an Elder Scrolls game or not.
I could be facing a fantasy MMORPG lull, unless I want to head back to Middle-earth. And the thought of re-learning my characters after the big skill/talent change is holding me back there.
It might be time to get out tanks or airplanes and shoot stuff.
Filed under: entertainment, EVE Online, Month in Review, World of Warcraft