For years I have complained about doing escort missions in MMORPGs. They generally involve taking some hapless character along a fixed path as they aggro every single thing in sight. I have long wished I could literally just pick the NPC up and carry them along to the goal to hopefully get it over with quicker. I’ve now played Death Stranding and can without a doubt tell you that having to carry an NPC to the destination is not better, and also apparently humans are really hard to balance on your back. You might be wondering also how in the hell did we get into this situation and I will explain.
One of the things that porters occasionally carry is the bodies of the dead to the nearest incinerator to prevent a “void out” when they go necrotic as they attempt to pass over to the other side. You have to understand that the world of Death Stranding is extremely dangerous and unforgiving, and most of the individuals in this world live in a bunker or vault and have never gone outside for any length of time. So there have been a few cases where some NPC needs to move to another location and asks you to carry them on your back like you would a body. In this case I had to carry a fairly important story NPC effectively the entire length of what was the currently discovered world at the time. It took a good chunk of last night and the entire time I was having to adjust for her listing to one side or the other.
In this case it was an NPC that I have come to really like over the course of our interactions, so as a result I felt like I needed to be super careful as we traversed the landscape. Every time she would shift on my back I felt bad that I was not more careful transporting my “cargo”. Another thing that I love about this game is the random holograms that players have access to, which ultimately break up the wastes. It was really cool to see a Tallneck looming out over the horizon, because it is literally the same size as one in Horizon Zero Dawn making for this massive hologram. I’ve seen a few other HZD cross overs, so I am guessing this is all due to the fact that both games use the same engine, so Kojima more than likely spent a lot of time working with the Guerilla Games team.
If I am correct, I think I am at roughly the halfway point of the game. My goal is to try and finish things up to a reasonable level of satisfaction before the launch of Horizon Zero Dawn on August 7th. That gives me roughly 15 days worth of play time to push across the finish line. I feel like this is a game that I most definitely want to finish, especially given that there is supposedly a 15th chapter that is open ended allowing you to play around in the final state of the world. I always hate it when the continued play option for a game is to effectively “roll back” the world to the moments before the final conflict. Those are the games that I often times never quite finish because I know poking around in the world after that will feel fairly unsatisfying.
On the me front, I am doing better. Taking yesterday off was a pretty good idea even though I hate not actually blogging for a given day. You need to give yourself room to make these decisions every now and then, because in my case it gave me another day to clear my headspace a bit. My wife is healing nicely from the accident, and me… yesterday day was really bad but I am dealing with it. It is like every so often I kinda have to mentally bandage myself up a bit. I have all of today and half a day tomorrow and then it is my weekend which should help a bit. As always thanks for the kind words I received, they do help and they do mean a lot but I mostly share my struggle for anyone out there who might also be struggling.
So I did not get 31 people for the promptapalooza, but I have decided I am going to try and make it work nonetheless. I got pretty close and as a result I will just stub in myself for several days in order to make it work. Tomorrow afternoon since I am off work I will be pulling it all together, creating the list of prompts, the tentative posting calendar, and contacting everyone to try and link topic prompts to people. This is way less lead time than I would have liked, but I should have been more vocal about it. I’ve been in a really bad headspace this month so trying to deal with this has added a lot of stress to my plate as well. For those who have no clue what I am talking about, check out this original post that sorta outlines the idea. There is still time to sign up.
I had one of those moments this morning, where I suddenly realized that it had been a really long time since I have done one of these topics. The intent is to use this opportunity to actually lock in what I have been spending my time playing and update the sidebar of my blog. The goal has traditionally been to do one of these each month, but I regularly fall short of this. The last one of these that I did was during the beginning weeks of Blapril, and prior to that… it was August of 2019. As with many things in my life I have failed to keep track of that goal.
It has been a weird few months for the world, and I think we can all agree that maybe goals deserve a little bit of slack right now. So this morning I am going to do the thing and talk about the games I am actively playing, an the ones that are getting removed from the list. Given that several months have passed I expect a significant amount of shake up.
To Those Remaining
Destiny 2 – PC
Hello Darkness, my old friend. Destiny and I have had a long tumultuous relationship since its original launch back in 2014, but it is never very far from my list of regularly played games. I had reached a point where I was deeply disillusioned about the seasonal system, and finding it really hard to muster the drive to grind out the content each time. Then recently I have found myself back in the orbit of this game and greatly enjoying my time. What changed? Well the Darkness has finally arrived and we are seeing some significant forward momentum in the story line. Additionally we have an event going on right now that is a farming bonanza that is a mix of Gambit and a Escalation Protocol. I am active and enjoying myself but time will tell how engaging the next expansion drop in September will be.
Diablo III – PC and Switch
Diablo you are so rarely very far from this list, but admittedly right now I am playing a lot more of you on the Switch than I am on the PC. A new season will be dropping very shortly, so I am sure that will change at least for a brief burst of activity. This has replaced Dragalia Lost as the thing I often play before falling asleep, because the length of time it takes to do a round of bounties or grind a handful of rifts is about how long I have before sleep claims me. My greatest wish however is that my Switch account was actually connecting to my PC account allowing me to farm real progress from the handheld. Cross play should be the rule of the land, and I am hoping as we enter this next general that it and cross save become more of a fixture.
To the New and Returning
Guild Wars 2 – PC
So recently Tam has been on a Guild Wars 2 kick and trying to upsell folks hard on playing it. As a result I have been back poking my head into the game and I still am not super happy with it. This is a title that I have had an extremely long and sordid past with, as we never could quite see eye to eye and still cannot. I’ve said it before, this is the first and only alpha program that I felt the need to actively resign from. It is doing something, and a lot of people love it… but it is a struggle for me to play it. I did however spend some time on the Revenant last night and had a significantly more enjoyable time than I do generally on my Warrior… but that seems like a mountain of horizontal progression that separates those two characters. This might get removed from the list as quickly as it was added, but for now I am throwing it on there.
Final Fantasy XIV – PC
I came back about a month or so ago and spend a significant amount of time grinding mounts and leveling the bard the rest of the way to 80. Now I find myself languishing a bit with not really being certain what I should be doing next. I leveled my three harvester classes to 70, with one of those being fishing that I leveled completely from scratch. The challenge I have with FFXIV is that I never seem to be able to find a rhythm of repeatable interactions. I show up… grind for awhile… burn out for awhile… and then return when more story drops to repeat the cycle. I wish I could find something more favorable to use as an engagement pattern, but I struggle for whatever reason to find it.
Phantasy Star Online 2 – PC
I gotta admit, this right now is the new hotness. This is the thing that I have probably poured more time in lately than anything else. I loved the original Phantasy Star Online back during the Dreamcast era, and previously went through the hell of playing on the Japanese servers. So of course when the game released to North America and on PC I would spend time playing it. As of right now my Ranger is sitting at 71 and I expect to keep grinding it up to 75. I spent a bunch of meseta to fix my previous transgressions with my mag and it is now a perfect 200 Ranged Power. Still deeply enjoying the game, but as I have said before it takes an awful lot to actually get through some of the nonsense systems. I need to sit down and push further into the story, but it is its own kind of slog. For now real happy to have Phantasy Star Online back in my life, and pretty much I am playing it and Destiny every evening at least for a bit.
Torchlight III – PC
I’ve been an alpha and beta tester of this game for quite some time, since it was originally called Torchlight Frontiers. However all of that time was covered by an NDA and as a result I have not really been able to talk about the game until recently when it shadow dropped on Steam Early Access. The game is very “early access” right now, but I am playing it intermittently while dealing the various bugs that are cropping up and the issues they seem to be having with the server infrastructure. I expect great things for this game, and expect it to be on the list for awhile as I play it every so often until it officially releases.
World of Warcraft – Retail – PC
World of Warcraft makes the list, but is kinda hanging by a thread right now. I am not actively playing it at this very moment… but I VERY actively played it since the last time I wrote about the game. WoW will always be comfort gaming, and as we adjusted to our new lives in the pandemic, I clung pretty hard to this game. It doesn’t hurt that there is a massive XP buff going on and I could abuse it as a way of catching up a bunch of characters. I started this recent run only having a Warrior and a Demon Hunter at level 120 horde side… and I closed it with having my first Alliance 120 with my Paladin, along with another Paladin, a Warlock, a Hunter, a Druid, a Death Knight, and a Mage horde side at 120. However the grinding ground to a halt and I have not been actively logging in much lately. That said I know I am never very far away from logging back in to World of Warcraft.
To Those Departing
Animal Crossing: New Horizon – Switch
Animal Crossing New Horizons was effectively my first Animal Crossing game, having only ever played the mobile title before. It was an interesting ride, and one that helped me to get through those first few covid tinged days. However the grind reached a point where I decided I just didn’t want to keep up with it anymore. Were I to play this again I would absolutely join team cheater and start time travelling, because the engagement pattern of ACNH is such that after awhile I felt chained to it. I felt like I had to log in every day because I was wasting potential progress time. Were it the sort of thing that I could play hard for a weekend and then walk away for another couple of weeks, it would probably still be in the rotation. I realize this is exactly how you can play if you time jump, so I might dust this off and figure out how exactly that works at some point soon. For now however I am going to be honest and remove it from the list.
Atom RPG – PC
You were a really cool game Atom but I never quite got around to finishing you off, and I am not exactly sure why I added you to the list of games I was actively playing and not just the “ships passing in the night” thing that I tend to do for more single player experiences. In the time since adding it to the list, they have released a sequel so I figure at some point I will return and finish this off. For now however it is getting bumped from the list.
Wolcen – PC
I can’t honestly tell you why I stopped playing, but it happened. I’ve heard there are a lot of issues going on with the game, and that in itself has kept me from returning. I had a lot of fun, but there were some issues that I had, namely that group play felt less valuable than single player play. The few times that Grace and I attempted to group up, it felt miserable. I hope they sort some of this out, and I am absolutely down with returning at some point in the future. However for now, it gets removed from the list.
Summary
During the time since the last post I have shifted further back into my MMORPG roots and away from the Single Player game sequence that I was on over the holidays. Destiny 2 and Phantasy Star Online 2 have more or less become my primary games, with occasional jaunts off into other titles. I will be curious to see if I find my roots again in Guild Wars 2 or not, but the external pressure isn’t exactly helping that desire. I have a few side projects that I am working on, and I hope to get to the stage of being able to unveil them soon… which might completely change the mix of titles. For now however we are back up to date, and hopefully I can get back in the habit of doing these as a monthly thing.
Well folks, it is that time. The first running of Blapril has closed and all of the posts have been tallied. Before I get into the reason why you are all here, I wanted to talk a little bit about Blapril. This came together on the spur of the moment because of the situation we find ourselves in, and the goal was to give bloggers something to focus on while our own personal lives might be in a state of disarray. I think in some ways it absolutely did just that, because it gave us six weeks of focus. We had slightly lower participation than what would be a normal Blaugust, but of those who participated… we had what felt like significantly more output. During the entire series run of March 29th through May 9th we had 48 total participants and they crafted 1124 blog posts. This works out to be an average of roughly 23 posts per participant. Of course the grading period being extended over the full six week run caused a bit of mudflation in the numbers for those who are the most prolific.
Before we get any further in the process I just want to take a moment to thank all of the participants who joined me in this nonsense. While I have doubts at times about the process, I never once have doubted the absolute wonderfulness of this community that seems to magically appear each year. Lets take a moment to see the full list of everyone who signed up to join in this event.
Regardless of amount of content posted, each and every person who signed up and joined in this process gets to proudly wear the Blapril Particpation badge. It is colored blue, like the color participants are given in the discord. I appreciate each and every one of you for the time you took out of what is I am sure a crazy schedule right now dealing with all of the social changes we have experienced thanks to the pandemic.
Newbie Awards
Newbie Blogger Award
This next group of bloggers get to wear a special badge because they are first timers to the Blaugust/Blapril proceedings. Some of them might be brand new to blogging, and others might be new to trying to create content regularly. Whatever the case they have put themselves out there and this is their first time going through this process. As a result they get a bonus badge that is purple, the color of the group on the discord. Join me in congratulating our new players.
From this point forward we are getting into the total post count based awards and while technically everyone that earns a rainbow award also has qualified for bronze, I am only going to list individuals under their highest achievement. This first group are bloggers who managed to get at least five blog posts during the entire event running from March 29th through May 9th.
This last batch of bloggers managed to get at least 31 posts during the entire event running form March 29th through May 9th. This is potentially our highest number of individuals getting to this rank in a Blaugust/Blapril event, because we managed to get 21 bloggers up to this rank. The highest number of posts came from our dear Bhagpuss with 48, and the closest runner up was at 45 for MagiWasTaken who was a Newbie from last Blaugust. I am exceedingly proud at everyone for their accomplishments.
Due to the impromptu nature of Blapril, we had slightly lower participation than the last few years of Blaugust. However I still think we had a pretty fantastic turn out all things considered. There are folks who just didn’t have the cutlery to be able to handle a blogging event right now, and I absolutely get that. We are going through a very scary time, and because of that especially I am thankful to the community we have built here. As always I tabulate all of these results by hand, and am of course fallible. Some blogs are harder to read for the purpose of counting total posts than others, so if you feel I made some mistake in my mathematics, then by all means reach out to me and let me know what the actual count should have been.
August is only a few months away, and I can tell you with all certainty that we will not be doing a full Blaugust this year. However I have been talking with the other mentors and we hope to create some sort of mini-event to take its place. Until then however, just know that I am extremely proud of everyone who steps forward to take on the mantle of this challenge. I am happy to have you all as peers.
Today is the very last day of April, and in theory it would normally be the point at which we draw this month long experiment to a close. However due to the weird nature of the times we find ourselves in I changed things up a little bit this year. I am not exactly sure if that many noticed but the time frame of the event and as such the tabulation started March 29th and concludes with May 9th, encompassing the entire six weeks of Blapril. It always felt weird that I specifically outline six weeks of content creation and then only ever counted 31 days of that period towards the ultimate goal of the event. The problem is, now would be the normal time when I start tabulating the results but this means that I ultimately have one more entire week that I will need to include.
It is probably however time to talk a little bit about the proceedings as a whole. We had 46 bloggers sign up to participate in the event, which seems pretty solid given the very impromptu nature of the fact that we moved this up to April. That was made up of eight mentors, thirty two participants and six newbies. So in essence we brought six blogs into the forefront of this community and hopefully got them a bunch of exposure and what will ultimately turn into regular readers. Here is a quick rundown of the participants.
One of the best things to come out of last year, I think was expanding our reach to Facebook… which more or less was a completely different community of users that we were not reaching. Last year Angie from Backlog Crusader introduced the community to Geek Blogs Unite, and this year we had several participants that joined the proceedings from there. I’ve personally been down on Facebook as a whole for years, but it opened my eyes to the fact that there are other thriving communities out there that I personally wasn’t even paying attention to.
I think another significant success has been how actively the Blaugust discord has remained throughout the years between its inception and this current event. It has sorta become a base of operations for a lot of us as we go throughout our separate lives as bloggers. Blogging in as disparate a community as we have will always be a bit like island nations developing trade negotiations with other island nations, since we don’t have a perfect copy of shared experiences. However having a stable platform to communicate and share ideas most certainly helps the isolation, which I guess is an important realization given that so many of us are in very real isolation mode.
Since the topic of this post is about setting expectations, I just want everyone to be aware that the assigning of rewards is going to come a little later this year than it has in other years. Since I specifically used the verbiage “Posts during the weeks outlined for Blapril 2020” that includes all six weeks and I don’t want to jump the gun and push someone out the door that is still working towards whatever goal they ultimately had. My hope as well was by extending it out a bit, it would feel like less of a sprint after which the participant collapses at the finish line, and stops posting for another year. Fatigue has always been a challenge we have dealt with since the very first running of this event.
Yesterday our dear Bhagpuss, who has always been one of my favorite bloggers to read wrote a bit about the exhaustion. It is well worth the read but there is a bit of it that ultimately addresses some of my concerns in doing this each year.
Every time Belghast runs one of these things he takes great care to emphasize that it’s not a competition, that there are no “win” conditions and that the awards are only there for fun. Even so, every time there seem to be quite a few Blaugustians or Blaprilistas who don’t seem to be finding it anything like as much fun as they thought it would be.
Bhagpuss – Inventory Full
To which I allowed myself a moment of despair and commented about my own fears.
I always feel bad when folks seem to struggle a bit. It is this moment when I start to question if I should ever do another event like this again. I am never certain how it is going to end up. I think blaugust as a community has been good, but I am not sure if blaugust as an event really bears the fruit I ultimately hope it will. Those of us who are regular bloggers will stay regular bloggers, but I am not sure if we are really making any new ones from our mold.
Belghast – via Inventory Full
The thing is… this is always a concern that I have when deciding if we are going to do this again. This is also why the format has shifted throughout the years because I keep trying to figure out a way to get the benefit of having a focused month of blogging without getting some of the negative after effects. Blaugust is the herald of fresh content, but unfortunately it is also the warden of months of not posting as the writers recover from the marathon that they just ran. Those of us who are more or less daily bloggers have been doing this for so long that I am not sure what we would do if we were not posting content. However for everyone who has been a once or twice a month blogger, it is a major stretch to try and create so much content in a single event.
That first year was an eye opener, because so many people that managed to get their thirty one days also effectively dropped off the face of the planet. There are times I allow myself to get mired in the notion that I might have killed as many blogs as I have helped create or promote. I appreciate when folks like Naithin come along to give me a kick in the rear when I get to thinking like this, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that what I said isn’t true. I am constantly concerned about the impact I have made with this event, both the positive and the negative. Bhagpuss had some sage advice to follow my own comment.
I tend to get the sense that the pressure, such as it is, comes from the Award system. It’s similar to what you see in games with achievements – with some people, once they know they exist they feel obligated to get them. You couldn’t really have made it any more clear that the awards are just for fun but their mere existence has people setting targets.
Bhagpuss – Inventory Full
So I guess the question is… should we do away with the awards? I am wondering if they are something that is more or less vestigial at this point? Blaugust started its life as a challenge to other bloggers, to do what I had chosen to do and start blogging on a daily basis at least for one month. It was in fact a contest and we even had rewards for winning, which admittedly was mostly me just handing out some duplicate humble bundle codes that I had stockpiled. In an attempt to combat the fatigue I kept trying to open it up and make less things mandatory in an effort to lower the anxiety and stress. However for whatever reason I have kept the rewards as sort of bragging rights for anyone who wanted them.
So I ask you the participants and my readers… are the rewards making things worse? Is it time to abandon them? What changes could I make to Blaugust/Blapril to lower the stress level and reduce the negative impact of the event? What would you change if you could in the way these proceedings work? I guess the other topic we need to discuss is whether or not we want to do anything in August when Blaugust would normally run, and if so what should we do to mark it? My comment section as always is open and so long as it isn’t random pedantry about typos or spelling errors, I always welcome real criticism.
