Newbie Blogger Initiative Archives - Page 9 of 10

Return of NBI

September 24, 2013 by Belghast

Return of NBI

One of the coolest initiatives that I can recall in the gaming blogosphere is returning, and this time the torch has been passed from Sypster of Biobreak to Contains Moderate Peril and T.R. Red Skies. As a result they are asking for new bloggers and sponsors to sign up and be counted over on the newly relaunched NBI Forums. You can check out the official announcement here… but the bulk of it is as follows.

Whether you’re a vlogger, blogger, podcaster, artist or whatever …if you own a blog dedicated to video games, the Newbie Blogger Initiative 2 needs your support! A great number of bloggers supported the Initiative last year and we are calling on you again to participate as well as imploring new bloggers to snatch this opportunity as well. The goals of the NBI are simple: Find, visit, and promote new video game bloggers. Create a friendly network of support. Increase survival of new bloggers. (This is a new area of focus this year!)

I participated in the program as a sponsor blog last year and it was a great upwelling of community support. I look forward to seeing what all comes out of it this time. Back in May, Wilhelm did a post running down who all had survived the year. We had 110 start new blogs during the program and a year later 30 had survived. So as the above statement says… the focus this year is to find ways to help bloggers keep up with the blogging. This rings true especially for me… who has embarked on this whole post something each morning madness.

Signing Up

Once again I will be signing up as a sponsor blog, but quite frankly I still feel like a babe in the woods when it comes to blogging. I shared a number of more technical topics last year, since that tends to be the end of the thing I am best at. This year… I will likely share some of my experiences after setting down this daily blogging path. I still think this is one of the most awesome community sponsored events we have, and while we did not keep many of the voices that started the process, I think it is a start in the right direction.

You can see a run down of the posts I made last year by following my newbie blogger initiative category link. Additionally I made a post awhile back called Infertile Ground where I talked about how the gaming blogosphere lacks a real sense of cohesiveness. Maybe during this years NBI, we can start to work on that as well. During the last round, I added pretty much every blogger that had twitter to my personal feed, and while many of them dropped off the face of the planet… quite a few have become constant fixtures in my scroll. Hopefully this year can do the same, and build our blogosphere into a more tight knit community.

Wrapping Up

Really don’t have a lot more to say this morning, so I am honestly using the NBI announcement as a bit of a crutch. I ran a truly silly amount of low level dungeons last night for various guild members, and then wrapped the night up by doing a bit of questing. My Warrior is almost 47 now, which still seems a long ways off from 50… but I am starting to pay attention to all the things I need to do once I reach cap. Hopefully all of you out there have a great day, and that the week as a whole is turning out to be a good one.

Infertile Ground

June 10, 2013 by Belghast

On Thursday of last week Psychochild posted on his blog an interesting article, musing where did the MMO Bloggers go? My immediate thought process is that they have not really gone anywhere. There are lots of bloggers as evidenced by the fact that the Newbie Blogger Initiative brought droves of them out of the woodwork and a year after the fact roughly 35 were still actively blogging. I think it is more an issue that the online community changes drastically on a regular basis. Older bloggers have dropped off and newer ones come in to replace them.

The Lack of Community

I think one of the big problems at hand, and why it seems like the ecosystem is not nearly as fertile as it once was… is the fact that there is no one overarching community. There is no single home base that bloggers check into, especially when it comes to blogs that are not so game-centric. I started my journey into blogging thanks in part due to the massively supportive community that is Blog Azeroth. Granted of the original batch of active bloggers, there are only a handful remaining, but that ecosystem has remained fertile thanks to the constant tilling of the volunteer staff and the works of podcasts like the Twisted Nether Blogcast always bringing new and upcoming blogs to the forefront.

The problem is… I no longer play wow as my primary game… and once I shifted away from that I lost my warm cocoon. There are friendly people out there in the outer reaches of the blogosphere, but it is far less certain once you are no longer looking at a single game. We have no broad gaming blogging community, because quite frankly we rarely get any form of consensus on anything out here in the black. This frontier community is far less friendly to newcomers, and while I have been blogging off and on in spurts of activity since April of 2009 I still very much feel like an outsider in this community. Instead of the attitude of "lets be lifelong friends" it usually feels a bit more like "lets be independent states with temporary alliances".

Infertile Ground

There is definitely a community out here on the rim of society, but it feels like it is mostly limited to the first pioneers to reach the outer rim. So the same dozen or so blogs link to each other frequently, but seem very closed to newcomers on their territory. Sypster did an amazing step forward by trying to reach a hand out through the cold black space, with the Newbie Blogger Initiative. But for those bloggers that participated as mentors… I ask you… how many of those new bloggers do you follow on twitter or G+ or facebook or have on your blogroll and or RSS reader? Basically I feel that we have made some steps, but have done nothing really to create a fertile colony out in the game agnostic reaches of space.

If we want bloggers to set down roots we have to make them feel a part of something bigger. Blog Azeroth did an amazing job of this, and gave me the confidence I needed to venture out into the black once World of Warcraft was no longer giving me what I wanted. But once I got out here in the outer reaches, I was just not prepared for just how different the community was. Admittedly I have a bad habit of just assuming everyone I am friendly with, is an actual friend… but sadly out here in the black that hasn’t always been the case and minor conflagrations occasionally turn into full blown wars. All of that said… I feel that the MMO and Gaming bloggers themselves could do a much better job of trying to help others out.

Shining Beacons

There are several examples of people out there doing amazing jobs to bridge the gap and found communities. I have to give @Sypster massive amounts of credit for the Newbie Blogger Initiative program. For awhile it felt like we were really gelling into a nurturing environment thanks entirely to his efforts in bringing disparate communities together. Unfortunately as a community we seem to have dropped the ball in keeping that effort rolling. I wonder what we could do to bring things back up and running and jump start some life back in that effort.

Another person that I have to recognize is Rowan. He does the most amazing job of trying to retweet people and give them recognition. I have no clue why he has latched onto my blog posts, but he does a great job of rewording things to make entertaining and original retweets. As much as I sometimes disagree with the quotes they choose, MMO Melting pot in the past has done a pretty good job of rebroadcasting and aggregating various topics from within the community. Lately however even they have seemed to be slowing down.

As of this Friday I have started my own little plan of sorts. Each Friday I have decided to do 5 #FF tweets, each singling out a specific blogger or member of the gaming community. Instead of a generic blast of a bunch of names, I am trying to write some reason why you should follow each individual person, giving them their own 140 characters. I am not sure if it will work, or make any difference, but I felt like it was a good thing to try anyways. Additionally making something routine is a way for me to keep doing it… and I have been pretty horrifically bad at doing the #FF practice in the past.

By Will Alone

As Psychochild states blogging is a lot of work. There are so many times where you are throw up against a choice… of do I blog about games or do I actually play said games. My problem is that in the past I too often chose to play the games, and then at the end of the night I lacked the oomph to actually cobble together sentences to say the words I wanted to say. In April I started a new experiment, where basically I would force myself to write something every morning as I am drinking my coffee. It might not be the best post ever, but it would at least be constant movement forward. I have no clue if the experiment is working other than the fact that 46 days later I have not missed a day… and on some days I have done extra posts like this one.

I made a commitment to blog about something, and even if I don’t want to… or it is extremely inconvenient as it was this morning… I have kept up the vigil. There are definite days where I am brimming with ideas I want to talk about… then there are other days where I have to make a post happen by surfing through my blog roll until "talky words" appear in my mind. I might be posting pure crap, but I am posting something… and for me that is progress considering I have had some pretty epic lapses in content during these four years of blogging.

Where to go from here

If we want to do something to offset those leaving the blogging community… we have to nurture those just entering it. This is where we are really failing as a "community". We have made some amazing efforts for short periods of time… but we really need to come up with a solution for the marathon. Individual game blog communities are thriving, and that is awesome for that specific game… but we need to come up with a global community that supports all the games. My only thought is to maybe create a permanent forum similar to Blog Azeroth that acts as a central home for all gaming bloggers regardless of their chosen game. I have no problem building such a forum community… but I want to make sure it would even be used before going through the effort.

Would such a community get used? Is there a community that already exists that is acting in this manner? I am open to suggestions… but these are the problems as I see them. Thanks for reading.

Bring On The Storm Legion

June 1, 2012 by Belghast

It is the beginning of a new month, and with it closes the #NBIMMO fun. As a result Syp has posted a poll for the NBI Awards on Bio Break. You can cast your vote in categories like “Promising Star, Game Specific” and “Most Interesting Angle”. The categories have narrowed down the field with five blogs competing for each award. I am not really sure how long the voting is set to run, but get over there are show all these new blogs some love.

Entering the Storm

There had been some rumors circulating about this, but yesterday Trion dropped a 100 megaton bombshell on the community announcing their upcoming feature rich expansion: Rift: Storm Legion. The announcement of a new expansion is never that huge of a surprise. We have come to expect them roughly a year after release. However this is one of the most ambitious and feature packed expansions that I have seen in recent memory. Some of the features include:

Two huge new continents, reportedly more than tripling the size of the existing game world.
Dual-faction island city of Tempest Bay.
Four new souls, one for each of the callings
Level cap raised to 60
Ability to “Instant Adventure” your way from 1-60 if you choose.
Greater variety of onslaughts, rifts, and events.
Seven new dungeons zones.
Three new raid zones.
A new single player Chronicle.
Massive colossus battles that supposedly effect the world in ways we have not yet seen.
Personal dimensions: Guild and Player Housing.
New “Cape” inventory slot.
New Grandmaster tier of crafting.
New puzzles, artifacts, collectables, achievements, mounts, pets, titles and more.

The Past Year

A little less than a year ago, I made on post on this blog titled “It’s Not You, It’s Me”, where basically I admitted to cancelling rift and outlining some of my reasons for doing so. There are multiple reasons, some of which I have come to realize really were about me, and my lack of wanting to commit to doing any form of organized gameplay. I can’t hold any game responsible for that, because honestly it has been an evolution I have gone through, from very serious raider, to very serious casual player. Since then I have played a ton of EQ2, LoTRO, gotten bored with SWTOR, and been dabbling in Guild Wars 2 and Secret World betas.

The primary problems I had with Rift, was the lack of “fluff” the world had. Nothing in Telara seemed to exist, just for the fun of it. All things seemed to be tied to some purpose, or needed by the single questing patch per faction. I enjoyed the game, but just ran out of things I felt worthy of doing. There were plenty of collections and achievements that I could have gone after, and I had many factions I could be running dailies with, but when I ran out of quest storyline, I just ran out of things I was interested in. Rift events were a blast, but after a point they also became old.

Trion Listened

I can’t say that Trion listened to me, I don’t have the ego to even imagine that, but what I can say is that my entire guild seemed to go through the same gradual leaving that I did. We went from having 50 active players, to 10, to 5, to none. So while they may not have listened to me, I can tell they heard the community as a whole that wandered off, because in the last year they have been insanely busy. I stopped actively playing the game sometime last June. Here is a list of some of the major content achievements as taken from this amazing “welcome home” thread, for folks coming back to the game.

PVP Rifts.
Cross Server Looking For Group.
3 “Sliver” 10 Man Raids.
Chronicles Solo/Duo Instances Added.
Planar Attunement Post 50 Advancement System.
Master-Mode Dungeons.
Support for player made Add-ons.
Ember Isle – New questing zone for level 50 characters.
Instant Adventures – LFG open world adventures.
Cross-Faction Auction House.
Rift Mobile App.
In-Game Character Weddings.
6th Role Slot.
Crafting from bank.
Mercenary System to balance the sides in PVP Matches.
New Fishing and Survival Trade-skills.
New “Seal” crafted Inventory Slot.
Nameplates for mobs and players.
Streaming Client.
Guild Finder system.
Leaderboards.

Expansion before the expansion

So in one year they have added an entire expansions worth of content already. I’ve always respected the folks at Trion, and thought given time, they would turn the product into a really amazing place to be. I subscribed for roughly a years time, even though I only played the game roughly 4 months. I had faith in the team, and figured my subscription was a “donation to the cause” of sorts. Seems like that “donation” has been repaid in massive amounts of hard work. Even before the expansion proper launches, 1.9 is waiting in the wings and seems to fill up any of the remaining gaps in the game.

The two big things for me that are coming in 1.9 are Conquest Mode, and Mentoring. Conquest promises to take us back to DAoC style 3 faction PVP. I have long held the opinion that what is wrong with PVPin general, is the fact that games focus on the Red Vs Blue mentality. I can remember in DAoC, the factions to some extent self balanced. If one team was a bit stronger, the other two would temporarily gang up to even out the odds. I think the Conquest mode will be a shot of adrenalin to a languid PVP culture.

If you’ve read my blog at all, you have heard me go on and on about mentoring and how great it is. Literally this is the one feature that I think every game needs. Being socially focused, it gets frustrating when new friends start and you can’t really help with out without absolutely steamrolling content for them. This is really no fun for anyone, for you laying waste without consequences is boring. For your friends, they end up just following you around aimlessly never actually learning how to play their classes. When you can mentor down to your friends, and run the content for real, you get to relive the experience and do so with your buddies.

A Pat on the Back

It is so easy to focus on the negative things in the game industry. Trust me there are plenty, and I have been a bitter ass for a very long time when it comes to the flaws in games. That said, I feel that it is all the more important that we point out what is going right in the industry. With the expansion, Trion will have added in every single one of the “must have” features I could even muster. On top of that, it triples the size of its game world, and with that comes a flood of new content for players to experience. Essentially they have answered the challenge posed by all of us who unsubscribed, and have done so in really heroic fashion.

I still very much love Norrath, and am having a blast still in Everquest II, but I almost feel like I need to resub to Rift just to applaud them for their efforts. At this point I have been gone long enough that essentially I will need to completely re-roll to remember how the hell anything works. That said I think I will be doing just that, and taking a tour of all the changes first hand.

I had already decided that I would not really be playing Guild Wars 2 or Secret World anymore until the launch. I played enough of the games to realize I liked it, so I don’t want to wear off that new game smell. So between the ever present EQ2, Rift, Diablo 3, and piddling around with SWGEmu… I think I will have plenty to do for the foreseeable future. It needs to be said: Great job Trion.

NBIMMO: Resources and Final Thoughts

May 31, 2012 by Belghast

#NBIMMO

Well apparently it is that time, the end of the Newbie Blogger Initiative month. I think overall it has been a great success for the community. Syp has a nice wrap up post, and a list of all the blogs and articles over on his site Bio Break, so rather than copypasta, I will just send you guys there. Huge thanks to Syp for pulling this all together, and it cannot be sheer consequence that this all culminates on his birthday. So in addition to the thanks, sending a bit Happy Birthday your way.

The Cutting Room Floor

I’ve had a stack of posts kicking around in my skull for the better part of a month, but my schedule has been insane so none of them actually made their way to paper. However since this is still technically within the month, I wanted to throw together a post I had been meaning to for a few weeks. Essentially without really meaning to, I have come at my posts from the stance of helping bloggers through some of the more technical aspects of hosting your own blog.

In the process there have been several items I wanted to talk about, resources I wanted to share, that have just been left on the cutting room floor. Pieces of debris that never quite made it into a fully realized topic form. So as a warning, today’s topic is going to be a bit more freeform than normal for me.

Gaming Tooltips

One of the coolest inventions of the post-wow world is the tooltip script. Essentially multiple websites now allow you to easily add a script snippet to your blog template, and then when you link to a given website it shows a nice mouse over popup of the items description. These really add a nice level of detail to your posts, your readers can see exactly what an ability does when you talk about it, without you needing to devote time to actually explaining it. If you want to talk about a nice piece of loot, you get instant access to the stats without needing to come up with some arcane formatting for it.

The first website I can ever remember doing this was Allakhazam, but over time more and more websites have adopted the practice. Originally it was pretty contorted to get this information into your website, but now most of these sites offer a simple one line script include. It is likely that whatever game you play, has someone offering a similar service, but below are some of the more common ones by game.

Star Wars: The Old Republic

Torhead

Torhead offers for SWTOR the same level of support we are used to from WoWhead. Updated constantly, should have pretty much any tooltip you would want to link to. To include them in your site, just add this snippet somewhere in the header of your template.

   1: <script src="http://tor.zamimg.com/tooltips.js "></script>

The links that are produced look a little something like this: Jolee Bindo’s Lightsaber

DarthHater DB

DarthHater really hit the ground running, and early on claimed a huge share of the item database traffic. Does not seem to be nearly as complete as Torhead, but still definitely a viable option. To include the links in your site, just add the snippet somewhere in the header of your template.

   1: <script type="text/javascript" src="http://db.darthhater.com/js/extooltips.js"></script>

The links that are produced look a little something like this: Jolee bindo’s Lightsaber

KnoTOR

KnoTOR honestly seems to be abandoned, or at least they update extremely slowly. I am including them however because they really had the nicest looking links available when it was being developed on actively. To include the links in your site, just add the snippet somewhere in the header of your template.

   1: <script src="http://i4.knocdn.com/assets/tooltips.js "></script>

The links that are produced look a little something like this: Jolee Bindo’s Lightsaber

World of Warcraft

WoWhead

Really as far as wow item databases go, the only one of any real significance at this point is WoWhead. They came from out of nowhere and have continued to kick ass expansion after expansion. To include the links in your site, just add the snippet somewhere in the header of your template.

   1: <script type="text/javascript" src="http://static.wowhead.com/widgets/power.js"></script>

The links that are produced look a little something like this: Shadowmourne

Multi-Game Support

ZAM

The Allakhazam network has been around in one form or another since the opening days of the original Everquest. They support pretty much every game that comes out. The side effect of supporting everything however is that they may not support a specific game as good as another content specific provider. However they are an add once, use many juggernaut for tooltips. To include the links in your site, just add the snippet somewhere in the header of your template.

Supported Games

Everquest
Everquest II
Final Fantasy XI
Final Fantasy XIV
Lord of the Rings Online
Rift
Warhammer Online
World of Warcraft
Star Wars: The Old Republic

   1: <script type="text/javascript" src="http://zam.zamimg.com/j/tooltips.js "></script>

Some example links: Sedition, Sword of the Bloodmoon, The Soul Reaper, Panzer Shield

Experimental

I wanted to include this one, despite the fact it is somewhat more experimental. Ask Mr. Robot was an amazing resource for World of Warcraft gear planning. They seem to have shifted focus over to Star Wars: The Old Republic, and with it they have a really cool item database in the works. The integration process is not yet as simple as the others, but they have a blog post on integrating it with wordpress. I personally have not gone through the trouble myself, but including this out there in case someone else wants to.

Those Amazing Fonts

Sooner or later you want going to want to do some work with interesting fonts, either to label images, or create logos for various post series. The problem is the fonts included in windows are boring as hell. Something a good number of users do not realize is that fonts are licensed, and the various font foundries have teams of rabid lawyers crawling the web looking for violators.

The safest option is to simply stick to using nothing but freeware or open source fonts. The big problem is, that if you type “Free Fonts” into Google you get a complete mess of sites that are sometimes a bit questionable at worst, and at best full of low quality fonts. There are a few websites I have used for years, that have consistently high quality fonts.

Blambot

http://www.blambot.com

If you read comics at all, be they digital or print, chances are you have run into Blambot fonts and never knew it. Personally I think they are the best font shop out there. They sell their fonts for a pretty reasonable price, but even better they offer a good number of their more recognizable faces completely free. All of the fonts in the above image are from Blambot, as are the fonts I use in the Tales of the Aggronaut logo.

DaFont

http://www.dafont.com/en

While Blambot represents one amazing font studio, DaFont is essentially a massive search engine for awesome free fonts. There are many websites out there that serve a similar purpose, but what sets DaFont ahead of the competition is the fact that it breaks fonts down into stylistic categories. If you are looking for a fantasy font or a Sci-fi font, within moments you can instantly jump into long lists of similar styled fonts. You are given a preview of the font in the main list, and can jump into a complete display of the entire alphabet for each. They have a huge selection of open source versions of familiar type faces, so there should be something to fit any of your design needs.

Smashing Magazine

http://www.smashingmagazine.com

I did warn you ahead of time, that this post was going to be pretty free form. I am including this resource here because they do occasionally link awesome fonts. More than anything this is just a great web design resource. I have it in my RSS Reader and they cover everything from WordPress Tips, to Free Graphic resources, to of course great open source fonts. If you are running a website in any form you need to watch this page periodically.

Software Resources

Gimp

http://gimp.org

Personally I am a Photoshop user, started using it somewhere around version 2.5 (circa 1994). While it can do amazing things, it has an equally astonishing price tag associated with it. It quickly becomes hard to justify the cost, if you are not using it professionally. Luckily for the rest of the world, there is a great image manipulation software that is open source.

Gimp can do pretty much anything you will ever need to do from photo retouching, to painting, to really nice logo work. It has a pretty rabid community supporting it, and there are plugins out there to do any manner of effects. The biggest problem for me, is that coming from Photoshop, it has a very different user interface. With the 2.9 release (not yet available for windows) supposedly it brings things more in line with the “Photoshop” standards. However luckily for the Photoshop natives out there, there is a custom fork of the gimp project called Gimpshop. Essentially it sets up the shortcuts and windows into a much more Photoshop like arrangement.

Inkscape

http://inkscape.org

If you are more familiar with vector graphics like Adobe Illustrator or Corel Draw, I have you covered too. I am actually just starting to use this a bit myself. I have been looking for a more simplistic vector program, and so far while I am still learning this one, it feels very robust. I never actually learned Illustrator very well, and was a longtime Corel Draw user. So far the controls and tools feel clean and familiar. You have the ability to export your graphics as either an SVG directly for use on the web, or rasterizing it as one of many image formats. Would have come in extremely handy back when I was trying to diagram WoW Raid strategies.

Windows Live Writer

http://windows.microsoft.com/is-IS/windows-live/essentials-other-programs

I cannot express how much I love this software. Writer used to be a stand alone project, but is now included as part of the Windows Live Essentials package. While Windows Movie Maker is pretty awesome, the only part of this package I really use is Writer itself. Essentially it acts as a WYSIWYG editor for your blog. When you configure your blog with the software, it logs into your website and downloads all the CSS information for your theme.

If you look at the image above, that is side by side screenshots of my Secret World impressions post. On the left is the site as I composed it in Live Writer, on the right is the site in Chrome. This completely frees you from wondering what a given post will look and feel like when you publish. The real money feature is the image manipulation. You can resize the images freely, set the alignment, word wrap, margins, borders all without any manual manipulation.

Basically for me it frees me up to just write, without having to worry if it is going to look right or not. Over the years I have noticed a good number of other bloggers using it. People seem to either love it or hate it. It supports a wide number of common blogging platforms. I use it for example on my custom hosted WordPress, but I have also connected to a blogger and had equally good results.

Final Thoughts

While personally I have not participated in the NBIMMO as much as I would have liked this month, it has spawned an amazing number of quality blogs in the process. Often times lately, my schedule has dictated that either I get to play the games, or write about them. I more often than not choose to play, and as a result I go for weeks without posts. Luckily however a good number of these new blogs have been extremely prolific.

I still think this was an amazing idea, and I hope as we officially exit NBIMMO month, the community sprit will continue. While there are tons of us out there, we are at the end of the day a pretty small community. I never would have started up my blog in the first place were it not for the great support of other game bloggers. So I hope as time goes on, each of us can continue to offer support when others need it.