The Site
WordPress.com announced this past month that paid plans will be allowed to upload premium themes downloaded or purchased outside of the stock selection they maintain. Or fail to maintain, which is probably the real reason for this.
I have suddenly gone from “All the supported themes kind of suck for my needs” to “There are too many choices!” So I’ll have to see if I can wrestle with that problem.
Also in this month was the PHP2Shell critical vulnerabilities crisis that got a lot of site owners in a panic. WP.com assured us that sites it hosted were all protected… and what would I be able to do about it in any case?
Then there was the Monday morning I woke up and found that the classic editor had once again disappeared from the hosting panel. The block editor is probably fine for something, but writing isn’t it. This turned out to be related to a changed WP.com made to the dashboard settings, where if you are set to “default” you get the classic editor and if you are set to “classic” you do NOT get the classic editor. Somebody make sense of that.
War is Peace and Default is Classic
Anyway, I was back up and running by lunch.
And then, somewhere along the line in October, the site passed the 8,000 post mark. I didn’t know you could stack crap that high, but here we are.
One Year Ago
The deal for the Saudis and Jared Kushner to buy out Electronic Arts had been finalized and approved and I was saying farewell to whatever the company meant at that point.
Amazon Games gave up on big online games, announcing New World would be closing and that their ever changing plans for something in Middle-earth would be changing again. They were more interested in AI driven slop like their Snoop Dogg voiced Chaos in Court title.
There was also the big Pokemon Go update that boosted the level cap to 80… which was a bit of a let down actually.
Over on the Enad Global 7 front I was wondering if we were going to get any EverQuest 3 news.
With that not forthcoming, EverQuest did announce the Shattering of Ro expansion, while EverQuest II did the same for the Rage of Cthurath expansion.
Meanwhile, on the LOTRO front, SSG was giving people a chance to transfer characters off of the recently closed 32-bit worlds.
I was also wondering if we were going to see any more updates in No Man’s Sky to follow up Voyagers and expand on the corvette thing. They seemed to lack for a landing pad, for starters. The Breach expedition did give us some new corvette parts at least. I went off to try that. Potshot and I also started to search for a paradise planet to settle on.
Over in New Eden CCP launched the annual Crimson Harvest event. They also announced the candidate list for the CSM20 election, published the September 2025 economic report, announced the upcoming Catalyst expansion, kicked off Alliance Tournament XXI, began the CSM20 elections, and ramped up the final week of Crimson Harvest with new rewards.
In null sec Fraternity announced its invasion of The Initiative space, something they would never, ever come to regret, and PanFam pulled back their staging system, a portent to their coming collapse.
Also, the Reavers SIG turned eleven, though it existed mostly as a Discord chat channel by then.
In Palworld we were poaching in the No.1 Wildlife Sanctuary after which we were off to the mountain cold. The it was on to a fiery mountainside climb.
We were also taking a look at the cozy title Palia. We ran around and made ramen together.
In a Friday bullet points post I looked into Valheim coming to PlayStation, Microsoft laying people off and raising the price of XBox game pass, Sackbird studios being formed from layoff refugees, the demise of Greg Street’s Fantastic Pixel Castle plans, Embracer spinning off Coffee Stain while loading it with debt, and Ship of Heroes complaining about being review bombed.
And on the streaming front we watched Kaos with Jeff Goldblum, Rick & Morty season 8, and House of Guinness. I wrote whole posts about each.
Five Years Ago
In a bit of irony I unleashed ads on the site in order to pay for the premium WordPress.com plan, otherwise they would be unleashing ads on the site. But at least I was getting some of that ad money guess. I kept that up every so often before finally deciding I had done that enough.
Facebook changes its name to Meta and Mark Zuckerberg announced they were going all-in on the idea of a VR based online metaverse. John Carmack had some issues with the plan, while reality… made Zuck look like the man-boy dumbshit he is. Nothing since has changed my view on that.
Then acting EG7 CEO Ji Ham spoke about the company and its plans. Meanwhile EverQuest announced the Terror of Luclin expansion and EverQuest II announced the Visions of Vertovia expansion. It was also Panda time in EQII.
Those expansions got me on to a bit of a comparison between the EQ expansion machine and WoW.
Blizzard announced the WoW Classic Season of Mastery plan, set to launch in November, an attempt to give a slightly different vanilla experience… and a temporary one at that as it closed down just a year later.
There would also be no BlizzCon 2022. Covid and stuff.
We were getting into Diablo II Resurrected as a group. We remade our group after a bit, working our way through the first act. We got stuck into Act II pretty quickly, making it through to the end.
On my own I played a necromancer through the first difficultly level. I was playing on Battle.net for some reason, where there were queues to get online.
Carbot and Honest Game Trailers had their own special D2R videos.
Amazon Games’ New World was live and I was trying to play… though there were issues.
In EVE Online there was a bit of a mining boom in the wake of World War Bee. CCP was also going back to native MacOS support. They also introduced CRAB beacons to the game and changed the tax structure. And then there was the return of the Crimson Harvest event.
the Reavers SIG turned seven years old.
I also did an EVE Online Friday Bullet Points post about Quasar, Totality Day, Faction Warfare, mega skill point offers, monocles, and an exploration of the new user experience.
In my series on immersion I tackled Minecraft.
I wrote something about Words with Friends 2.
At home we were getting ready for No Time to Die by watching the previous four Daniel Craig Bond films… and rating them. And then we went and saw it and I wrote a bit of a review.
Likewise, with the coming of the new Dune movie (part I) we watched the 1984 version of the tale. The new film got a bit of a review here too.
Ten Years Ago
Amazon’s game studio announced some games including the alleged MMO New World. Being given almost no information about New World did not stop some people from banging the hype drum, boosting expectations, and generally setting themselves up for disappointment. I wonder how that turned out?
Also announced was the Nintendo Switch, which would allow millennials to play video games at roof-top parties, if the trailer was to be take literally.
Civilization VI launched and became the first Civ title I did not acquire at the soonest opportunity. It just didn’t excite me. Instead I was getting my strategy game fix with Stellaris.
I reviewed the Mineserver Kickstarter campaign a year after its launch. The units were nine months late at that point, with no end to the wait in sight. The whole thing eventually failed to get off the ground. Another Kickstarter crash and burn.
I made it to level 20 in Pokemon Go. There was also a Halloween event.
Tom Chilton, of unfortunate quote fame, let out another one when he said that World of Warcraft had over 10 million subscribers again after the Legion expansion launch. Blizzard, having taken a vow of silence on subscription numbers the year before, denied everything and claimed he was mis-quoted.
Over at Daybreak they were discontinuing game cards and taking H1Z1: King of the Kill off of Station Cash as an RMT currency. They did give us firm dates for the two Kurnak based expansions for EverQuest and EverQuest II.
In EVE Online, while we were fortifying Delve our foes in the Casino War began to turn on each other, with Pandemic Legion and their followers declaring their intention to take Tribute and Vale of the Silent away from Circle of Two and TEST. All I could do was give a Nelson Muntz, “Haw-haw!” at that turn of events.
Still, that wasn’t half as much fun as CCP declaring casinos against the EULA with the coming of the Ascension expansion. Our foes would have to actually earn ISK in-game. I wondered what that would do to the economy.
We also got the YC118.9 update which, among other things, meant the death of the in-game browser. We did get breast cancer awareness skins. Yay, pink skins!
At our end of New Eden there was a lot to do. I was fighting the Blood Raider menace with my Ishtar and looking for ways to help the coalition. Reavers turned two years old and were blowing up citadels and fighting over timers in Querious. The coalition itself was ranging up into Fountain with a new doctrine.
CCP was also busy on the VR front, launching EVE Valkyrie and EVE Gunjack, the first games in the VR offensive. EVE Valkyrie was an Occulus Rift launch title FFS! All of their VR titles would sputter and fail… along with VR itself, frankly… and later be shut down, with everybody involved laid off… unless they were Icelandic citizens. They get lifetime employment.
And in World of Warcraft the Legion got its first post-launch content drop while my own enthusiasm for the expansion was starting to wane.
Finally, I was at EVE Vegas, but since it lasted through Halloween I didn’t post about it until November. Also, a new version of my blogger feed was operating in the side bar.
Fifteen Years Ago
We all said farewell to Steve Jobs.
Tobold was predicting that CCP would go bankrupt in 2012. I am NEVER EVER going to let that one go… at least not until Hilmar does the place in.
I summed up what I liked and disliked about Need for Speed: World.
I got Civilization II running on Windows 7 64-bit. People still come here for that article. I managed to get it to run on Windows 10 since then. But it didn’t work back then with my original 16-bit copy, I had to get the 32-bit version, Civilization II Gold Edition.
I started another contest, this time for Azerothian travel posters.
I recalled the start of the alien invasion!
EA was planning to unify all of its free to play online games to use the same in-game currency… something that never actually happened… also, I think all the games on the list are dead now.
Nintendo was talking about augmented reality on their new 3DS console. Five years later we got Pokemon Go… on iOS and Android.
The announcement of their Unity release got Gaff and I back to TorilMUD to mess around with the Tako Demon. I had to work to remember some MUD command syntax to get his corpse afterwards.
Then there was BlizzCon. The instance group was already bemused by Cataclysm, and the mention of Pandas did not revive our spirits. Pet Battles seemed interesting at the time. In coming to grips with the Pandaria announcements, I assumed that I would end up buying the expansion.
And then there were other WoW related things, like the announcement of the Guardian Cub, which some people predicted would be like PLEX in EVE Online. Not quite, but it probably provided test data for the eventual WoW Token idea.
In EverQuest, on the Fippy Darkpaw server, after much complaining, SOE seemed to suddenly wake up and start doing things. Problems were, you know, solved! It was becoming a kinder, gentler server. Sort of.
And then there was Rift. We started scouting it as a potential home for in instance group after the disaster in EverQuest II. The scouting went well enough that we all ended up in Telara.
Finally, I was sorting through many press releases and wondering where this so-called GDC Hall of Fame was.
Twenty Years Ago
The site got a mention in VirginWorlds Podcast episode 33 while Blessing of Kings was telling me how to be a raider in World of Warcraft.
I was defending instancing and game company forums as well as moaning about the fact that I couldn’t find a decent video card for my AGP motherboard. Also, Blizzard’s WoW patcher was pissing me off as well while Lore was mocking WoW groups. [Damn, that was done in Flash, so I guess it is gone now.]
Our Saturday night World of Warcraft instance group completed our first full dungeon run in the Deadmines. That meant my first dungeon run write up. And my second. But we got it on our third try. Then it was off to The Wailing Caverns. Did anybody have a five player dungeon adventure path like WoW back then?
I decided in EVE Online that covert ops would be a good career choice. It certainly sounds cool. However, the effort was cut short when I got to some of the pricier skills.
When it came to the then upcoming Lord of the Rings Online, I was up in arms about pointy ears and monster play, while the approaching Age of Conan made me think more about Barsoom.
I felt that fall urge to run around in EverQuest, no doubt prompted by another EQ nostalgia post, plus I wanted to take some pictures of Faydwer in order to compare them to the upcoming EverQuest II expansion, Echoes of Faydwer.
I also jumped into EverQuest II and got all confused (nothing new there) about the trade skill changes that occurred during the 10 months I was away.
And I spent some time carping about MMO pricing plans and wondering what pen and paper games might make good MMOs.
Twenty-Five Years Ago
Dark Age of Camelot launched. While I never played it… we were about to have a new baby in the house and we were having internet issues, and the world was falling apart due to 9/11… I had some friends who gave it a try. I remember it being billed as “EverQuest without the suck” at some point. Anyway, it is still alive, which is surprising because EA owned it… and still owns it, through Broadsword runs it for them.
Civilization III also showed up back in October of 2001, and I most definitely bought a copy of that. I liked a lot of the ideas it brought, but it lost some of the raw simplicity of its predecessor. I ended up playing a lot more Civ II even after Civ III was around.
Then there was Motor City Online, which was a bit of a precursor to Need for Speed: World. I am kind of sad I missed it. Of course, it was an EA MMO, so they scrapped it in less than two years, opting to go all in on The Sims Online.
Thirty Years Ago
Marathon Infinity, the last of the Marathon series of shooters from Bungie came out. That was the era of the awkwardly shaped software boxes. I owned a copy.
Most Viewed Posts in October
Out of the 20 posts on the list, only 19 and 20 were published this month. But you can see the theme for what was popular; WoW nostalgia, Enshrouded, a bit of No Man’s Sky, Pokemon Go, and a couple old favorites.
- Alamo teechs u 2 play DURID!
- Cat Catching in Enshrouded
- Planning My Path to 50 Platinum Medals for Level 80 in Pokemon Go
- Enshrouded and our First Night Sanctum
- Building My First Corvette in No Man’s Sky
- Planning my Platinum Medal Strategy for Pokemon Go Level 49
- EverQuest Legends – Some Additional Unrest
- This One Simple Trick will Up Your Pokemon Go Steps Dramatically!
- No Man’s Sky – Playing with Friends
- In Which I Fish and Play with Water in Enshrouded
- The Test of Righteousness
- 20 Games that Defined the Apple II
- The Purloined Letter – WoW Subscriber Numbers Leak from a GDC Presentation
- Wrath of the Lich King Zones Ranked
- Finding an Infested Mine in Valheim at Last!
- Making Level 73 in Pokemon Go and onward to Level 74
- Getting to The Elder in Valheim
- The Journey to Orgrimmar and Ragefire Chasm
- Crimson Harvest 2026 Lands in EVE Online Today
- The Search for Music in Enshrouded
Game Time by ManicTime and Nintendo
I had eight titles with time recorded in October.
- EVE Online – 40.92%
- Over The Hill – 31.00%
- WoW Forever – 9.87%
- Stardew Valley – 8.64%
- Valheim – 4.56%
- Art of Rally – 1.73%
- Stars Reach – 1.72%
- No Man’s Sky – 1.57%
EVE Online
I spent a good chunk of my gaming time in New Eden this month, mostly pursuing the Crimson Harvest event objectives and working on that achievement to visit all of the systems in Amarr space. I finished the former… I did not get a Molok BPC sadly… and then kind of left off on the latter with 612 of 689 systems visited. I’ll get to that later.
No Man’s Sky
The start of the month saw me finishing up the Our Journey Continues expedition. But once that was done I moved on to other things… though we did get the Forsaken update just this week. I did briefly peek in on that.
Over the Hill / Art of Rally
Somewhat unexpected, Over the Hill showed up and gave Potshot and I something to fiddle with while waiting for WoW Forever to arrive. It is a simple yet fulfilling title which clearly ate up some time. I also reinstalled Art of Rally just to take a look at the previous Funselektor driving game. I am much better at off road objectives that don’t have a timer than rally racing, that is for sure. But I’ll get to that.
Pokemon Go
You’d think I could have gotten three more max battles this month… and I would have been there had I been willing to use the cash shop to unlock the artificial limits imposed by the Saudis… why is it always them? Anyway, that will be done in November for sure.
- Level: 76
- XP Progress: 97.5% of the 203,353,000 xp needed for level 80
- Tasks for Level 77
- XP: DONE
- Platinum Medals: 41 of 41- DONE
- Power up 7 Pokemon to their max CP: 7 of 7 – DONE
- Win 100 Max Battles: 97 of 100
- Make 10 trades with Pokemon caught at least 300km apart: 10 of 10 – DONE
- Pokedex status: 944 (+4) caught
- Pokemon I want: Phione, Manaphy, and Arceus, none of which have been re