I’m like the WoW Magazine of yearly blog reviews; each one is out just a little later than the previous one.
Four years.
Now officially longer than any job I’ve had, longer than any relationship I’ve had other than to Ms. SynCaine, and certainly longer than any MMO I’ve played.
Let’s knock out the numbers first.
Blog Stats as of 8/12/2011
Total views: 1,035,401
Busiest day: 11,852 — Thursday, September 6, 2007
Posts: 1,166
Comments: 16,129
Blog Stats 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
So I never did a “hey look, a million views” post. Consider this it. Hey look, a million+ views.
Still no one has dethroned that Sept 6th day, although I believe one day earlier this year came close. Maybe next year.
Not much to report on the posts-per-year front either. Very similar to 2010. I consider that a good thing, and I’m always amazed that after four+ years, I still find something to write about almost every day.
Bit of a dip in comments this year than last. Not sure how to explain that one, although a lack of blog wars is surely to blame. I think it says something about the state of the genre when I agree with too many blogs too often to even warrant a cross-post. Everyone get off my “WoW sucks” bandwagon, please?
Top Posts for all days ending 2011-08-12
Rift Review (EG Style) 53,619
The love and hate game, WoW style. 17,966
The real Rift review 12,737
EQ2, trial of the neverending download. 11,812
iPhone MMO, Field Runners, and a slow Friday. 10,749
Level 4 missions in EVE, and my silly Rohk battleship. 9,641
Aion end-game, way ahead of WoW and WAR. 8,809
Blizzard’s new focus for WoW, just as soon as Mythic finishes it. 7,572
DarkFall Review: One Year Later 6,581
Warhammer’s major problem, the players. 6,191
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
Not hard to see the big change here. Due to some luck with Google, and showing that EG-style reporting ‘works’, we have a new highest viewed post, and by a large margin. Why is it that all the big number stuff around blogs (top post, top pageview day, etc) is always a random stupid joke? Why can’t it be that one post you really poured some effort into? It’s almost like it would be better to invent the pet rock than to cure cancer. Wait… Nevermind.
The bar to make the top ten has increased by about 2500 views, knocking some longstanding posts off, so it’s nice to see the Darkfall review post hang on. It says something about EVE’s consistency that people are still looking up how to run level 4 missions in a Rohk (how many people are looking up how to down Onyxia these days?), and I’m always amused that people are STILL Googling about that EQ2 download and how brisk it is.
Referrers for 365 days ending 2011-08-12
virginworlds.com – 4,351
Google Reader – 3,810
killtenrats.com – 2,637
greedygoblin.blogspot.com – 1,865
Google – 1,806
biobreak.wordpress.com – 1,601
tagn.wordpress.com – 1,138
massively.joystiq.com – 839
tobolds.blogspot.com – 803
solomid.net – 628
New to this year’s review is a 365 day overview of referrers, rather than an all-time list. What’s interesting is that VirginWorlds is still #1, despite the site not linking this blog for some time now thanks to me registering the syncaine.com domain. I’m not sure if Brent is WoW-ing VW and has moved on or what, but I’ve noticed fewer and fewer blogs get linked over there. Fix it up Brent, VW was/is a great site!
KTR was the #1 blog for sending people here. I love that site, and where else can you get a comprehensive list of engineers with turrets from various MMOs? Exactly.
Funny that GreedyGoblin is on the list, but I guess it was only a matter of time before he started linking to the #1 WoW blog, right?
Rounding out the top 10 is solomid, which is a League of Legends guide site. Guess people liked that Warwick guide I had up there (now outdated thanks to WW getting nerfed, thanks Riot).
Search Terms for all days ending 2011-08-12
rift review – 47,448
hardcore casual – 10,242
syncaine – 5,560
darkfall review – 5,503
rift reviews – 5,279
field runners – 3,149
elo hell – 2,791
dragon age review – 2,764
kingdom conquest – 1,865
darkfall reviews – 1,604
perpetuum review – 1,386
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
People go to Google to search for reviews. Especially Rift.
I have to say it was pretty disappointing year overall for me with MMOs. Rift fell off the “Not in Azeroth” wagon in record time, Aventurine has basically stopped updating DF1 to play “is it vaporware?” with Darkfall 2.0, and the only things on the horizon that I’m even remotely interested in is GW2 (and that’s very 50/50) and Prime, which is also a 50/50 based on some of the info we know (3-way PvP, good. ‘Discovery’ crafting, bad).
With that said, if DF2.0 actually gets released in 2012, I’m guessing I’ll be back to playing one single game for a while. Or if Prime shapes up and gets Inquisition playing as a clan, that would be cool. Maybe GW2 will actually be a decent PvP MMO. Could happen. Problem is, none of those things are even close to a “sure thing”, and the next few months look like they will be filled with more LoL and whatever single player game crosses my desktop. Not terrible by any means, but I am an MMO gamer at heart, and not having a solid title to play for so long is disappointing.
Four years though; still kinda unreal.
Hardcore Casual 
Congratulations on hitting that milestone, Syncaine. You have a unique voice in the MMO community, so I’m glad that you are still around.
Congrats as well! Glad to see I am on the top referrer’s list.
I am even now trying to come up with a creative title for five years. I have a month still to plan.
Also, I see that you do not link back to yourself often enough for your own ping backs to be suspect. With my monthly round ups, WordPress now automatically flags ping backs to myself as spam.
Congrats man. I think were in the same boat, I spend all this energy researching and being let down my MMOS when I’d rather have a good one to play. Hopefully between GW2 or the 3 or 4 mystery MMOS I keep hearing whispers about we will get a decent one. Til then I think I’ll have to live in Skyrim and read your blogs.