Blaugust is Coming

Goodbye NBI

As of this morning the month of May is officially over and with it goes the Newbie Blogger Initiative for 2015.  I have some mixed feelings about the 2015 run, but in the important ways it seemed like a success.  The good folks at MMOGames had offered me the ability to highlight NBI specifically during my “bonanza” blogging round up.  The problem being there was a pretty massive falloff in the amount of blog content after the first two weeks.  I still highlighted the Talkback Challenges but found it quickly hard to make an entire post made up of nothing but Newbie Blogger Initiative content.  So I guess the question I am trying to answer is what specifically caused this cooling effect in the posts?  Generally speaking in past years if anything there is a ramping up with new people joining the initiative as the month goes on and folks having a burst of activity right towards the end.  That didn’t really happen this year.

That said any program that gets new people into blogging is a success in my book, and as I have said many times our community needs a constant fresh infusion of people willing to add their spin to the conversation.  Here is a relatively final list of the Class of 2015, so you should absolutely add these blogs to your blog reader and check in on their progress every now and then.

• Aspect of the Hare
• Chaotic Pixels
• Gamer Girl Confessions
• Gaming Adventures
• Imperial Intelligence
• In Character
• Knifesedge Adventures
• Lair of the Wolf Dragon
• Light the Beacons
• Memoirs of a Lady
• My Game Ramblings
• Pleasant Gamer
• Randark’s Review
• Simcha’s Many Lives
• Soultamer Gaming
• The Balance Force
• The Iron Dagger
• The Legacies in SWTOR
• The Rykter Scale
• Tyrannodorkus
• Waiting for Rez
• Zerneblog

Blaugust is Coming

I’ve had a lot of questions and commentary asking me to do the Blaugust event again this year, and since I had been mostly coy about this…  as of this morning I am committing to making it happen once again.  For those who did not participate in the process last year, or were not around the blogosphere…  Blaugust is a festival of sorts devoted to the regular creation of blog content.  Above anything else I have become known for my mission of posting something every single day on my blog.  Granted there are lots of bloggers who do this and should be celebrated.  I know personally I saw a massive spike in my readership when my content deliver became for lack of a better word “predictable”.  The idea for Blaugust is simple…  post at least one post each day during the month of August.  That is thirty one days of posts, and if you win the competition you get the pride of being able to display one of our badges on your site showing you “won”.  Additionally last year we had various prizes to give away and I am sure that will be the case again this year.

The big thing that is going to have to change this year is I am going to have to wrap some tools around the process.  My life during the month of August revolved around making sure that everyone had gotten in their blog post each day.  Where this got squirrely was when I factored in our Aussie bloggers who were blogging from the future, and even our six hour offset European bloggers were a challenge to keep track of.  What is going to happen instead is that in order to participate you will need to submit each blog post through some sort of a form that is going to keep track of if you posted for a specific day.  This should help out some of the folks that would end up posting after midnight, when they really intended the post to count towards the previous day.  The important thing is the regular creation of content, not necessarily technically when you post it.  We have a two month reprieve, but I wanted to get notice out there that I would in fact be doing Blaugust yet again, so that folks could start psyching themselves up for the “marathon”.

Infernal Horsebirds

This weekend I managed to push my crafters in Final Fantasy XIV to level 21, which gave them access to a whole new set of gear and allowed me to get rid of the other set I had been using.  I figured this was as good of a place to rest for a bit as any.  With only eighteen days until the head start I don’t figure there is a real chance that I will actually be able to push my crafters to 50.  With that in mind I opted to start working on my Rogue a bit this weekend.  For awhile now I have been torn as to which class to push next, and I have juggled both Monk and Ninja.  What finally pushed me over the edge to Ninja was when I managed to get the Malignant Mogknives to drop awhile back.  As such this weekend I managed to go from level 28 to almost level 34 which is not the fastest progress in the world but still acceptable.  I figure I will speed up significantly in a few levels when I can realistically start doing Coerthas for FATEs.

For the time being I am running FATEs in the Costa Del Sol region while queuing for whatever the max level dungeon happens to be.  Currently that is Brayflox Longstop which also gives me the opportunity to pick up the couple of pieces of the Infantry set I had been missing.  I have no idea if I will manage to push up Ninja to 50 before the expansion, or if I will return to Crafting madness, but in either case I certainly have plenty to do to keep me engage until things launch.  I really should devote a weekend day to the Post Moogle quests because I really do not think they would take that long.  I did not end up with as much play time this weekend as I thought I would, otherwise I probably would have done precisely that.  One of the things that I think is amazing is that as a Free Company we are still bringing in new people.  Sure it has slowed down from the initial burst of players, but over the weekend we added another five members or so through our extended networks.  This gives me hope for Heavensward and our ability to get things like the guild airship.  I am certainly excited about the prospects this expansion has for our group.