Seven Years of AggroChat

Morning Friends! Today is the seventh anniversary of AggroChat the semi-weekly podcast that I record with some of my friends. At this point I have no clue what it was exactly that prompted me to start a podcast. I have fuzzy memories of it being inspired by Cat Context that my friend Liore started, and realizing that pretty much every night we used to get into these long winded discussions on the guild voice chat server. There were times I thought it would have been interesting to just hit record on that and edit it into a podcast form.

Episode 1: Finding the Format – 04/13/2014

The first episode at this point is largely unlistenable, but cobbled together the basic structure of the show that would evolve into what it is today over a large number of episodes and host changes. We started the show with Ashgar, Audrae, Belghast and Kodra. Over time I co-opted more folks to join me along with a cast of occasional guests from our larger community. Rae went her own way but we picked up Tam first and then Grace and Thalen around the same time and our most recent addition Ammo has even been with us for almost three years at this point. At some point I am going to chart out the timeline of guests on AggroChat because I think it might be interest.

Seven hosts is a lot of hosts and I worry sometimes that not everyone is getting their word in every week. There are times I kick around switching back to a format where we go around the table and share what we have been up to that week. The problem with that however is it sorta puts people on the spot, especially if they had a busy week and didn’t really get up to much of anything. This also was part of what extended the length of our shows and lead for us to record some that were upwards of three hours long. Essentially as it stands now we record roughly an hour and a half of show and that condenses down around the neighborhood of an hour.

I’ve never really shown our planning system, but here is a carefully chosen snapshot of the Trello that we use to maintain our show notes. One of the columns that we have running that rarely bears fruit is the “Media We Should Talk About” list… because we don’t really want to do a full spoiler discussion unless everyone is ready to have a full spoiler discussion. You might notice there are checklists in a few of those topics and folks have gone in and indicated that they are good to talk about it. We still sorta talk about the media we just do it spoiler free until everyone is ready… which largely means we just put those topics off indefinitely. There is actually another card not shown called “Tabled Indefinitely” with things that we never really got around to talking about and are now no longer viable discussions.

Essentially we have a rolling batch of topics and Trello allows us to easily roll them forward if we don’t get around to it. The only problem with this is that occasionally there are orphaned cards that just keep getting moved forward. The “Freeform vs Guided Gameplay” card for example has been floating in this zone since November of last year and I could not for the life of me remember what the hell actually spurred that thought. When we ACTUALLY dug down to it last week I just sorta winged it and turned it into something that was valid at this point, which happens on occasion.

In November of 2017 our Podcast hosting provider switched the statistics program and since that point the most listened show is “Bribed to Be Content” where we talk about Battle for Azeroth. This is a pretty common thread in that when we do a World of Warcraft show (or a Pokemon show) they get just a silly amount of listens over time. I can still access the legacy statistics and looking at those numbers tell me that nothing has actually surpassed the show recorded that was part of the 10 Years 10 Questions initiative for the 10th Anniversary of World of Warcraft. I also apparently did a blog post around the same time for the same initiative.

An awful lot has changed since we first started recording. Back then we were on voice chat together all the time and that isn’t quite the case for me anymore. Life has conspired to push me out of the general time band that Ash, Kodra, Tam and Thalen all operate in. Ammo, Grace and I all share a general time space but we are also all sorta introverts and only on voice chat these days if there is actually an activity that we are participating in. I worry that this might have changed the show because we just aren’t interacting nearly as often as we once were. It still floors me that we have been doing this for seven years and have recorded just over 340 episodes. Probably what shocks me even more is that we still have a regular group of listeners each week.

To all of you out there that consume our nonsense I salute you!