July 2025 In Review

July 2025 has come and gone and Blaugust 2025 is here!  But before we can jump into my Blaugust activities we need to look back at July.

The Blog

Blogger recorded visits for July: 50,824 (don't ask me why the chart doesn't match the number)

In other metrics:

• Posts:
  
• Target:  n/a (been unmotivated lately to blog so every post is a bonus in July)
• Posted: 7
• Difference: +7
•  Search Trends
• Search trends changed in June and that trend continued in July:
• "arc raiders news" - everyone still wants Arc Raiders news and they aren't going to find it on this blog because there isn't much news coming out.
• "arc raiders countdown" - I don't know why people keep searching for this but they do and they end up on the blog here.
• In "things I observed in search console":
• Two of my posts about Call of the Wild: the Angler continue to be top pages visited from Google.  The game has ended development but it seems people still are looking for information.
• Bottom Fishing in the Angler 
• the Angler Multiplyer Woes
•  My thoughts on Once Human's end game are also a frequent flier for Google searchers.
• End Game Thoughts on Once Human

What I Played

My friends and I continued to play Dune Awakening.  We briefly joined a guild but the guild folded shortly after; which was OK because they let us take a bunch of supplies from the guild base.  We changed sietches and started a new base which is more well organized.  By end of month we had progressed to the end game in the Deep Desert and most of our playtime now is either going into the Deep Desert to shoot rockets from our thopters or doing crafting/gathering so that we can go into the Deep Desert to shoot rockets.

New World drew me back in to complete the Season 8 pass before the season ended in late July.  I didn't do much more than grind the pass so not much to share. 

We also had a spat of internet outages in July which meant I put some more time into my career mode in Wreckfest which continues to be my go to offline

My youngest son is also big time into Minecraft now and at the age where we can start carefully playing in survival mode.  That has been fun to get the youngest (6) and oldest (16) and myself (old) into a shared world building and playing together.  We've done a bunch of creative mode but survival is a much more engaging experience so is worth mentioning here.

Years Ago

1 Year Ago

July 2024 brought a surprise hit to my gaming PC in Once Human.  As my post on the subject indicates: Once Human Has No Right To Be This Popular.  The game was a janky buggy mess but boy was it fun.  It is very similar in nature to Dune Awakening but Dune has been much less fun in comparison.  The fun didn't last as my group and I gave up Once Human after the first seasonal reset.

We also got to test Throne and Liberty's global version.  The beta impressed enough for my friends and I to give it a go later in 2024.  

5 Years Ago

July 2020 featured no blog posts.

10 Years Ago

In July of 2015 I wasn't blogging much, but between June and July I was enjoying the game Town of Salem.  It is a hidden role game similar in nature to One Night Werewolf for anyone familiar with it.  And since I made a blog post about it during a time I was not blogging much at all it must have made an impression on me!

15 Years Ago

In July of 2010 I declared Amalur as a failure.  This was well before it became the infamous failure along with it's developer, 38 Studios.  Maybe I am MMO gaming's version of Nostradamus? 

We were also getting ready for Guild Wars 2 in July 2010.  I had posted reasons why it was going to succeed and reasons why it was going to fail. The big argument back then was MMOs with the number 2 in the title were a bad idea and the genre was littered with failed games (AC2, UO2,EQ2).  Guild Wars 2 was also causing some drama by removing dedicated healers from the game as players all focused on their own self healing.  Folks back then were very attached to their roles in the "holy trinity" (healer/DPS/tank).

Fast forward 15 years later and Guild Wars 2 is still going strong and proved the market wrong about MMOs with the number 2 in their title.  Also folks ended up not too concerned about not having a traditional healer role and more "support" type roles emerged while everyone basically got to contribute to DPS.  Guild Wars 2 is also regarded as a "top MMO" in the market these days so obviously did something right.

15 years ago we all thought MMO websites were going to be BIG BUSINESS as a flurry of activity around them resulted in website owners making bank.  Oh how wrong we were.  With that said if anyone want's to drop me a cool million for this little slice of the internet hit me up! 

20 Years Ago

In July of 2005 I was really into PvP in World of Warcraft.  I was also wrapping up my four part review for the game. 

Based on my recollection of my summer vacation in 2005 apparently you still collected bugs on your car during long road trips.  Fast forward 20 years later and I can't remember the last time my car was plastered with dead insects after a road trip; even after a 30+ hour road trip in 2024 there was barely a bug smear.