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Server move, again

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Just like in April 2021 instead of upgrading I switched servers and if you can read this the hamsters are running.

I hope the performance will be a bit better and I was also running out of space.

Nothing fancy happened, but please holler if you notice any oddities.

  • Hoster: Hetzner Cloud
  • Domain: staying with namecheap.com
  • OS: from Ubuntu Focal to Debian Bookworm
  • PHP: From PHP 8.0.30 to PHP 8.3.2
  • WordPress: staying with the rolling auto-upgrade method
  • Theme: staying with Astra

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Ten years of reviewed years

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Happy New Year! While writing yesterday’s post I noticed that it was the tenth of its kind, mostly focusing on expenses, so if you find that boring, I can’t help you.

Let’s start with the easy numbers:

Overall Expenses

  • 2014: 450 EUR
  • 2015: 355 EUR
  • 2016: 374 EUR
  • 2017: 298 EUR
  • 2018: 176 EUR
  • 2019: 467 EUR
  • 2020: 976 EUR
  • 2021: 916 EUR
  • 2022: 535 EUR
  • 2023: 400 EUR
  • 2024: 236 EUR

So 2018 was an outlier due to unknown reasons and 2020+2021 were outliers due to Covid 19 and me not going outside a lot, but other than that it seems to be safe inside 300-550 EUR bracket, which means 25 to 45 EUR per month, so less than 1 AAA title per month. I can live with that.

MMOs I paid for:

  • WoW:
    • 2014, 2016, 2017, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023
    • about 72 out of 96 months (not counting two years with zero game time)
  • EVE:
    • 2014, 2016, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023
    • as of 2020 it’s three accounts, only one before that – too hard to count I think, but I guess it’s between 105 and 120 months, (out of 120 months) so accounts number 2+3 for the last 3 years make up the time I was not subscribed
  • WildStar:
    • 2014, 2015
    • less than 12 months of subs
  • SW:TOR:
    • 2014, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020
    • about 21 months spread over 5 years
  • FFXIV:
    • 2019, 2021, 2022, 2023
    • about 20 months spread over 4 years (only one free month in 2023)
  • Marvel Heroes:
    • 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017
    • no sub, bought some packs and ingame currency
  • Guild Wars 2:
    • 2015, 2017
    • basically buying expansions with diamonds included

I suppose any statistics about other games are moot, there were some I played a lot, some I played from time to time, some were free and some were bought. Nothing spectacular in a 10 year review I guess.

Hardware

Hardware costs could be another interesting breakdown but I’m not sure I’ll manage to meaningfully break that down, but I’ll try. My gaming PC from 2019 was about 1500 EUR, then a monitor for 400, some more SSDs (let’s say 300), my old graphics card (maybe 300), another monitor (let’s say 300) and some peripherals. That would be about 3000 EUR in 10 years. Sounds low, but even with a bit of research I think I got most of the parts and might not be missing a lot. Taking notes helps.

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2023 in review

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And another year over, which means another review post.

What I played a lot:

  • World of Warcraft
  • EVE Online
  • Diablo IV

Other games I played:

  • Against The Storm
  • GameDec
  • Diablo III
  • Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag
  • Submerged
  • Stellaris

Gaming expenses in 2023:

  • WoW: 102 EUR for 11 months
    • 1x 6 months for 66 EUR
    • 1x 3 months for 36 EUR
    • 2 months for WoW tokens with ingame gold
  • EVE Online: 392 EUR plus 70 EUR (prepaid in 2022) minus prepaid for 2024 (see below)
    • 1x Platinum Pack for 58 EUR
    • 2x Silver Pack for 12 EUR
    • 2x Bronze Pack for 5.50 EUR
    • 3x 3 months for 40 EUR
    • 2x 3000 PLEX for 90 EUR, mostly used for sub months though
  • Diablo IV: 70 EUR – the game on launch

Small intermission:

OK, I’m at the point where I need to redo the math for last years because I am not sure how to handle these “prepaid XX months of subscription” and this year is especially egregious I think.

In 2019 I counted 26 EUR for 2020 subs in 2019, in 2020 I had both numbers (with and without prepaying), in 2021 I counted the prepaid stuff in this year, then 2022 had nothing from 2021 but 70 prepaid, so I guess I’ll count that in 2023 and have something for 2024, because calculating EVE will be something more complicated this time…

Summary:

  • Amount of MMOs played: 2
  • Amount of MMO subscription months paid: 9 (WoW) + 12 (EVE) + about 15 (EVE) = 36
  • Amount of games purchased: 1
  • Amount of MMO expansions purchased: 0
  • Amount of money for ingame/services stuff: hard to tell with the EVE packs, maybe 50-100?
  • Amount of games I got for free and didn’t play: some
  • Amount of games I purchased and then didn’t play: 0

So that brings the total to 636 EUR, that’s 53 EUR per month, slightly more than 2022. This would still be a perfectly valid number, but it’s not painting a realistic picture.

Now if I subtract the EVE sub months for 2024 (oh boy, that’s 23 of them, split over 3 accounts, so basically two of them for the whole year… if I use a 24 month package from the website that would be 270 EUR but if I use the biggest discount paying with PLEX it’s more like 190, so let’s say about 236) then it would only be 400 EUR, or 33 EUR per month. So something in between. So we’ll see how much I will spend on EVE in 2024, but I hope it won’t be that much, even if I’m running my 3 accounts.

Yes, you may laugh, but with the discounts on PLEX, and being able to buy subscriptions with ingame money, just calculating how much you paid for your EVE subscription can be a whole afternoon in itself. Of course it involves spreadsheets, so make of that what you will…

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August in review

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Maybe I’m getting old and caving in to people’s trends, or maybe I’m just trying to learn from the insights and “month in review” posts make sense if you still have something to say that you already didn’t and don’t want a ton of mini posts.

Didn’t get a ton of gaming time in this month, summer has been great, I’ve been outdoors a lot despite no official vacation (except one day, iirc).

We played some WoW, killed the Raid Tier’s end boss on Heroic, have since been struggling to get enough people together for a reclear for the people who missed it (but those also didn’t show up consistently, so maybe only half-way bad form?) but otherwise I’ve ignored it. Logged in a couple of times to grab some achievements or just to relax and do some weeklies, mostly ignoring alts. Refreshing to be a casual for a few weeks!

The 14d free login event in FFXIV came and went and I did put in some hours, but I think I didn’t stress it overly much. I kinda planned to resub directly afterwards, but life got in the way, so I’m holding off until I am needed to tank or heal some Stormblood story dungeons, probably soon-ish.

Then I was craving something different and played a couple games of Stellaris, which was usually a full evening. I suck at it but I like the game. Dug out Age of Wonders III again to see if I might be interested in Planetfall, which was (maybe still is) on sale at the time. But I’m still not feeling it. AoW always teases me with looking and superfluously being like Heroes of Might and Magic, but something is off. PF could be different enough because it’s in space, but i doubt it. I still don’t see them as 4X games for the most part. Might try Civ VI that I found in my library, probably from Epic.

Oh and Blaugust – I managed to keep up with some reading in the first half of the month, not so much in the latter. Discord looked busy though, good times.

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Topics, games, WoW

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I’ve written many times that this is not a WoW blog, just a blog by someone who has played WoW for quite a few years (started in 2005, some short breaks until 2014, then mostly subbed since 2019 again) – but in the last year or so I think 90% of the posts have been about WoW. I do play EVE Online, and at times more than WoW, but I find it very hard to write about, so not many posts. I’ve been slowly progressing through Diablo IV but this is the second post mentioning it, without it being the main topic of the post. (Yes, it’s still fun but not awesome, but I’m still in the story part). And then there are other games. I’ve basically zero interest in Baldur’s Gate III, but all the talk made me wonder if I should replay the original Baldur’s Gate or Planescape: Torment. I probably shouldn’t.

Anyway, after a few weird months (see posting frequency since April) I should probably be happy to have some topic to write about once per week, even if it’s just a small blurb on how the raid went, even if I don’t want to exclusively write about WoW. But then again, there’s nothing drawing me to FFXIV or SWTOR or GW2 at the moment and that list of upcoming games for 2022? Yeah well, I played Gamedec and it was good and then the reviews for Redfall were abysmal and the ones for Forspoken were mixed or worse, Nightingale hasn’t released and so on…

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June in review

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Oh wow, a second one of these posts. For several reasons June was probably my month with the least amount of gaming time in a long while and July doesn’t look much better with some plans.

I did end up buying Diablo 4 and starting the campaign, and it’s fun, but I’m not particularly far – taking it slow but I kinda wanna see more.

June 4th was my (and our) first raid day, cleared 8/9 Normal that week (Sun+Tue as usual) and then my next raid was the the 25th + 27th when we ended up at 5/9 Heroic. Tbh not completely sure what the guild did in the 2 weeks that I missed, I think they were on 9/9 Normal 1/9 Heroic.
Still at zero M+ and didn’t log in a lot, but at least I managed to get my gear in shape, in relation to my online time – 423 iLvl, where 424 is the max iLvl in Normal. But I guess if I can not totally fall behind with just raid logging I’m happy enough, and I got my 4 set bonus via Catalyst and a bit of rolling luck. Oh, and I’m back to playing Fury. Guess it goes hand in hand with this low-stress season where I couldn’t really be motivated to learn a new class and/or even gear it beforehand in our break between the seasons.

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May in review

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Ugh, May has been wild and I’ve neither had the time nor any real incentive to play WoW. I think I finished the 10.1 story line so far but didn’t even begin to grind out gear etc.

We only start raiding on the 4th of June (if we even get the people) – it’s been a weird transition from “ok, patch soon, everybody relax” to… no one logging in, no signups going up, or I just missed them because I wasn’t on a lot. Haven’t done a single M+ either, we’ll see how it will work out in that raid week, but I’ll be on vacation soon after.

I did play quite a bit of EVE though, but as usual I find it hard to write about that. I did have fun though.

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2022 in review

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Another year has passed, so it’s time for a review post!

What I played a lot:

  • World of Warcraft
  • EVE Online

Other games I played:

  • Final Fantasy XIV
  • Minion Masters
  • Guild Wars 2

Gaming expenses in 2022:

  • WoW: 196 EUR for 10 months
    • 1x 66 EUR for a 6 month subscription
    • 1x 50 EUR for the Dragonflight expansion
    • 1x 80 EUR for an 8 character transfer offer
    • 4x 0 EUR for 4 months of sub with WoW tokens for gold
  • EVE Online: ~270 EUR for ~17 months (+70 EUR prepaid for next year’s subs)
    • 2x 96 EUR for 2x 6 months sub
    • 1x 12 EUR for a single month
    • 2x 50 EUR for two discounted Platinum packs
    • 1x 40 EUR for a 3 month sub
  • Final Fantasy XIV: 69 EUR
    • 5x 13.80 EUR for subscriptions
  • GOG, Steam, Epic, Humble: 0 (Actually one Humble Ukraine Bundle, but my wife paid that one)

Summary:

  • Amount of MMOs played: 3
  • Amount of MMO subscription months paid: 10 (WoW) + 5 (FFXIV) + 17 (EVE) = 32, so nearly 3 per month
  • Amount of games purchased: 0
  • Amount of MMO expansions purchased: 1
  • Amount of money for ingame/services stuff: 80 EUR, plus an unquantifiable amount from the EVE packs
  • Amount of games I got for free and didn’t play: a ton
  • Amount of games I purchased and then didn’t play: 0

The total this year is around 535 EUR, that’s 45 EUR per month. Another very cheap year, even if I’d take the prepaid sub months in, then it’s around 50 per month. Quite ok for your main hobby.

Unfortunately my plan of buying and playing more indie games did not pan out at all.

I did manage to look at a few games in my backlog (most of them I got for free) and write about some of them, no AAA titles this year.

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Kickstarter and games

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Belghast had an interesting post up last week about backing games on Kickstarter. That’s quite a list of games.

I’ve had a kickstarter account for at least 11-12 years now and I backed 6 projects, despite being a huge fan of the idea initially – and none of them were games. Maybe it’s because I develop software for a living (and despite all outcries from game developers that it’s different and that they’re such special snowflakes) I am wary of release dates and have a healthy dose of paranoia towards things and their funding (same with startups, really – and what is a fresh game company with no history of delivering but a sort of startup?) – and there are so many games already that I hardly play, except for my few favorites. (Right now I have a little craving for EVE for example, but I’m waiting).

So, my 6 projects. One (the first I think) was a comic, from Kingdom of Loathing, which I had been playing at the time, 2011 or so. Two were CDs (Amanda Palmer and Jeph Jacques, of Questionable Content fame), one was basically a GoFundMe, maybe before GoFundMe was a thing. One was hardware that actually got delivered (I think on time) and I am happy with it, but still some remote personal ties and not a random “Oh shiny!” and the last one was actually software. And I’m not even sure if it shipped in the final form, but I pitched in because I liked the idea and also because I had interacted with the main developer in the past. So this was a bit of a “thanks for doing good” and I didn’t care that much about the software itself. Overall I spent 212$ and I don’t regret a single cent. Well, the comic was kinda not needed but I was happy at the time, at least.

Not really sure what to make of it, I guess me being not big into consumerism and mostly deliberating every purchase that’s more than a beer or an ice cream (yes, even single months of MMO subs or a book are usually not purchased on a whim) doesn’t make myself an avid backer of things that might not show up. Then again it’s been a while since I saw a thing on Kickstarter that was actually awesome and at the same time not completely ridiculously expensive – which means definitely not the “I WANT THAT” range. Still glad that Kickstarter exists for the people that like the experience, but I guess I’m not backing anything soon, although statistically 2022 or 2023 would be due another expense…

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