And this blog turns 3!

Actually it turned 3 years old a few weeks ago, but that whole getting married thing prevented a timely update, so this one is a little late. 3 years is a rather crazy length of time when I think about it. It’s more time than I’ve played any one MMO, it’s longer than all but one of my RL relationships, and it will shortly be longer than any one job I’ve ever held. I think that says more about me actually than anything else, but regardless, 3 years is a long time in SynCaine land. Anyway, on to the numbers, in similar fashion to last years update.

Blog Stats as of 8/2/2010

Total views: 692,972

Busiest day: 11,852 — Thursday, September 6, 2007

Posts: 843

Comments: 11,790

Blog Stats 2009

Total views: 335,842

Busiest day: 11,852 — Thursday, September 6, 2007

Posts: 523

Comments: 5,393

Blog Stats 2008

Total views: 104,123

Busiest day: 11,852 – Thursday, September 6, 2007

Posts: 253

Comments: 1,658

What the numbers mean: While the rate of growth has slowed, things are still chugging along here, and considering the blog has been heavily niche-title (Darkfall) focused for a good year now, that’s not too shabby, although I’ve still yet to conquer that BBC-linked post for one-day traffic. Some day BBC, some day. Comments, the best part about blogging, have continued to come in at a very healthy rate. Thanks to everyone who has dropped a line here, and especially to those who comment frequently, you help keep me motivated to write and rant. The next few months should be fun, as both the 1 million views and 1000 posts milestones will be reached.

Top Posts for all days ending 2010-08-02

The love and hate game, WoW style. – 17,626

iPhone MMO, Field Runners, and a slow Friday – 10,564

EQ2, trial of the neverending download. – 9,796

Aion end-game, way ahead of WoW and WAR. – 7,701

Blizzard’s new focus for WoW, just as soon as Mythic finished it- 7,488

Level 4 missions in EVE, and my silly Rohk – 7,130

Warhammer’s major problem, the players. – 5,694

Dragon Age review – 5,378

DarkFall: 3 month review – 4,624

Screen shot comparison. – 4,260

Top Posts for all days ending 2009-06-22

The love and hate game, WoW style. -17,285

iPhone MMO, Field Runners, and a slow Friday – 9,437

Blizzard’s new focus for WoW, just as soon as Mythic finishes it – 7,259

EQ2, trial of the neverending download. – 5,982

Warhammer’s major problem, the players. – 4,767

Screen shot comparison. – 3,848

Level 4 missions in EVE, and my silly Rohk – 3,314

Burned out on WotLK already. – 2,902

Looking in the mirror; the sickness that was WoW raiding – 2,773

Help coming for low population servers in Warhammer Online – 2,526

The top two spots remain unchanged, with the BBC-linked post still holding a very comfortable edge over everything else, with no real contender in sight now that the Field Runners post has slowed its Google-fueled charge. The number three post is rather humorous, because after all these years, people are STILL searching for answers on when their damn download will actually finish. I don’t doubt EQ2 going SOE-flavor F2P might drive a little more traffic over as well.

The forth post shows just how much hype Aion had generated pre-release, along with just how many people are Blizzard trained to think end-game first, everything else last. Down to number five is one of my favorite posts, and as you can see from last year the post itself is not a favorite when it comes to random Google traffic. The post about running missions in EVE, at number 6, shows the steady interest EVE generates, and how year to year, new pilots are still trying to tackle the same challenges as pilots before them. That speaks highly to the design of EVE; that instead of having to reinvent itself every expansion, the game simply continues to add layers, and those early layers are just as important today as they were in the past.

At number 7 is another WAR-related post. Like Aion after it, WAR went live with a lot of hype and hope from the MMO community, and like Aion, it’s sad/frustrating that it did not come close to living up to expectations. Spots 8 and 9 are review posts; people seem to like those, especially if you make them just days after (or even better, before) the game in question is released. Finally last years number 6 rounds out this year’s top 10.

Referrers for all days ending 2010-08-02

virginworlds.com/home.php– 21,138

news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/defaul… – 11,015

google.com/reader/view/ – 8,833

tobolds.blogspot.com/ – 4,704

killtenrats.com/ – 3,649

news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/defaul… – 3,159

wowinsider.com/ – 2,914

keenandgraev.com/ – 2,701

tagn.wordpress.com/ – 2,529

biobreak.wordpress.com/ – 2,388

Referrers for all days ending 2009-06-22

virginworlds.com/home.php – 11,315

news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/defaul… – 11,015

google.com/reader/view – 4,346

news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/defaul… – 3,159

wowinsider.com – 2,914

keenandgraev.com – 2,701

tobolds.blogspot.com – 2,598

killtenrats.com – 2,097

bdadv.blogspot.com – 1,386

massively.com – 1,338

Virgin Worlds, just narrowly edging out the BBC last year, reigns supreme a year later, almost doubling the number two spot. The rest of the list is largely unchanged from a year ago, with some minor shuffling and the addition of Biobreak, which pushes the main page of Massively out of the top ten (of course, a lot of Massively traffic comes from individualized pages, so their overall traffic is much higher than what the above list might suggest). Out of all MMO blogs, Tobold had the biggest increase; guess a little dramalama will do that eh? I think next year I’ll break these out to show just the previous year, as this will better reflect the year that was rather than show a total accumulation, and give a more accurate view on who recently sent people over.

Search Terms for all days ending 2010-08-02

hardcore casual – 6,772

syncaine – 3,466

darkfall review – 3,275

field runners – 3,149

dragon age review – 2,439

darkfall reviews – 1,097

aion endgame – 1,038

wotlk – 1,000

darkfall account – 913

wheel of time mmo – 773

Search Terms for all days ending 2009-06-22

field runners – 3,106

hardcore casual – 2,011

syncaine – 1,117

wotlk – 998

darkfall account – 762

warhammer online server population – 749

warhammer online collectors edition – 711

field runners for pc – 670

wheel of time mmo – 583

sandbox mmo – 536

I win! Fighting off Field Runners, the name of this blog and its author return to their rightful Google places as number 1 and number 2. Fitting that Darkfall comes in at number 3, just ahead of last year’s champion. As mentioned above, people love reviews, and Dragon Age made quite a splash when it released, so no surprise with number 5, followed by people looking for even more Darkfall reviews, with others looking for information about Aion’s endgame. Cute that wotlk shows up with exactly 1000 searches, ahead of getting a Darkfall account and the long suspected and hoped-for WoT MMO.

That’s it for the numbers; now let’s talk a little about what actually happened this past year here. I mentioned in my last yearly review that Darkfall was a pleasant surprise, and perhaps the surprise for this year is that I’m still at it a year later. Blood has all but officially gone inactive, and a re-return for Inq is not in the plans atm, but I fully intend to find a new clan to play with and continue on with Darkfall to feed the MMO need. With one expansion set to drop soon, and a massive update coming at the end of the year (or so), I see Darkfall keeping me entertained MMO-wise for some time. I’m sure the release of Civilization 5 is going to cut (deeply) into everything else come September however.

It’s funny that last year I was hoping for a third faction to be added to WAR, because a year later the hope is the same, if somewhat diminished due to how poorly the game has held up overall and with all the staff reductions over at Mythic/EA/Bioware/whatever. This plus the fact that WAR never did become that fun casual PvP game for me, and little attention has been paid to that game around here, which is a major change from a year ago.

“RMT is the future” update: This one is interesting, because the ‘traditional’ F2P model has still not produced a major MMO hit in the US/EU, while at the same time it seems each week another subscription MMO is announcing some F2P-ish account options. My captain obvious prediction? Soon the ‘standard’ for MMO pricing will be a hybrid of the sub and F2P model, and more than one games future will be determined by just HOW they mix the two. As usual, I expect SOE to set the standard on how NOT to do things, someone else to set the baseline for how to do it well (Turbine?) and Blizzard to come in later and ‘polish’ that idea to set a new industry standard, for better or worse. That said, I expect F2P will be very popular (and profitable) if executed in a manner similar to how Riot is doing things with League of Legends. When the model is win/win for the players AND for the company, you know things are good.

So that’s 3 years, damn. Hopefully everyone has enjoyed it (or enjoyed hating it) as much as I have, and fear not, things will continue. Be it a new Friday Blog war, another ‘out of the blue’ MMO surprise, or a second year of ganking in Darkfall, I’ll be writing about it, and hopefully you will be here reading and commenting. Happy gaming everyone, and thanks again for dropping by!