Blog Features Archives - Page 56 of 281

Blaugust Reborn

July 9, 2018 by Belghast

What Was Blaugust?

Back in April of 2013 I started this thing I referred to as the Grand Experiment, where I attempted to force myself to write something… anything every single day. Prior to that I had been a very infrequent blogger to say the least, having an entire year pass between posts. Any time I lapsed there would be this wall of pressure and anxiety that would build up that kept me from starting posting again, feeling like when I came back I needed to make some spectacular re-entry worthy of the length of time I had been gone. The daily posting things did a lot for me and my confidence and also the level of my life I was willing to share with my readers. For me personally… it was a good transformation and while I only kept with the daily posting for three years I have since settled into a more comfortable routine of only posting during the week days.

In 2014 I had already noticed a change in the way I wrote and how I felt about blogging in general and to some extent wanted to share that with the rest of the blogging community. So in my infinite wisdom I decided to create an event where I challenged other bloggers to go one entire month without missing a post. In my head I rammed together a bunch of sounds until I came up with Blaugust… only to find out later that it was already a thing and that a bunch of Aussies had been doing a blogging festival thing for years. My version however focused on the rigor of posting every single day and being super hard core about keeping track of who was and was not still in the race. While entertaining this was really not healthy for the blogging community.

One of the side effects that I found is that many blogs that were started for Blaugust or were fledglings going into it… went into massive periods of not posting anything at all as a sort of recovery period. Similarly as the years went on those same blogs never really seemed to recover, and it is my fear that Blaugust wound up killing more blogs than it wound up helping. Each year I tweaked the formula a bit until 2016 was my attempt at creating a kinder gentler Blaugust, and then last year I just couldn’t muster the oomph to make it happen at all and instead promoted something my friend Grace was trying. I had this overall feeling that I harmed the community with the event, and this was only reinforced in my mind by the constantly shrinking pool of active bloggers.

What Was the Newbie Blogger Intiative?

The thing is… at the time of the inception of Blaugust it was just one of many events that the community did during the year. The grand daddy of them all was the Newbie Blogger Initiative that ran most often during the month of May. This was an idea originally spawned by Syp of Bio Break and he realized that game blogging was a thing that was on the decline, and the only way to keep it alive was to set out to “grow our own” as it were. The first year was 2012 and had a flood of participation that you can see summarized here, but it helped more than anything to build a sense of community to the folks out here blogging as independent island nations floating in the internet. There are lots of game blogging communities that gain cohesiveness through shared love of a specific product… the World of Warcraft community for example has always been fairly tight knit and recursive. However those of us nomads that jump around from game to game have never really had a similar family… that is until NBI came along and crafted a sense of shared community. Unfortunately the last running of NBI was also in 2016… because quite honestly the tail end of 2016 and all of 2017 were extremely rough to struggle through. There were events that happened in the real world and events that happened in gaming that caused people to fear for their own safety and sort of batten down the hatches. All of this was an unfortunate blow to our already shrinking blogrolls.

What is Blaugust Reborn?

The idea is simple… lets take the best features of both Blaugust and the Newbie Blogger Intiative and sorta ram them together into one festival of blogging. It isn’t necessarily that I feel like I am qualified to do this thing… but it is something that someone needs to do. Over the last few years those of us who are out here posting regularly has shrunk to a pretty small pool. There was a time when I could never actually read down my blog roll, because by the time I got through with a day new posts were flooding in over the top of the dam. Now I pretty regularly read down to the equivalent of “inbox zero” while taking pretty huge breaks between reading. The world has changed and it isn’t as exciting to be out here blogging your thoughts and ideas the way it used to be, also there are a million other streams of information dividing our attention. I still feel however that blogging creates a place for yourself in that stream if information and gives you a presence that cannot be taken away by “promoted posts” or “interest based sorting algorithms”.

So what I propose is a month of mildly structured posting and developing a strong mentorship community among those of us who are still out there doing it on a regular basis. Lets help grow that next generation of bloggers and help them get started in a journey that honestly has meant more to me than I can adequately put into words. I love feeling like I am part of something bigger than myself and I think we all do to some extent. Let’s reignite the fires of this dwindling community and help to firmly affix the torch into the hands of a new generation of bloggers. While gaming is very much in my wheel house… it isn’t even a game blogging festival but more one about creating a place for yourself and showing off whatever it is that you want to show the world. You could create a blog to share your latest recipe creations or one to catalog your experiences as you start a new job. You could share your awesome screenshots and write some notes about how you felt when you took it or what you were thinking at the time. You could do your “daily blog” as a series of livestreams that you record and post later as a VOD or exported to YouTube. The core concept is to create a community around the creation of new “stuff” and a sense of us all working together in the same shared space.

What About the Awards?

One of the things that has traditionally come with Blaugust is a series of made up awards that are granted to those who participant. So far they have shaped up to look a little something like this…

Newbie Blogger Award – You did it, you created a new blog and by god we are going to sing your praises for doing it!
Bronze Award – You made at least 5 posts during the Month of August 2018.
Silver Award – You made at least 15 posts during the Month of August 2018, go you!
Gold Award – You made at least 25 posts during the Month of August 2018, you are a badass!
Rainbow Diamond Award – You did it, you posted every single day during the Month of August 2018 and deserve accolades.

Occasionally in the past various sponsors have mysteriously shown up during this event, and if that happens… awesome I will share the bounty. If not I am going to make nifty blog sidebar thingys for each of the various award categories.

Mentorship

One of the keys to making this work is that we need a bunch of you amazing bloggers out there to sign up as mentors. Ultimately I feel like mentors should have roughly two years of blogging experience under their belt to be able to gauge the ebbs and flows of content creation in front of a live studio audience. This isn’t necessarily meant as a gate keeping mechanism, but I want any participant to feel like they can turn to any mentor for sage advice. I sure as hell am not sure if I have anything resembling sage advice, but I have quite a bit of experience in dealing with the nonsense that comes up while trying to keep a regular publishing schedule. The mentors will all be clearly marked as such in Discord since that tends to be the thing that ultimately replaced forums for the gaming community. I will be doing my best to be hanging out there often myself to answer questions as they arise.

Structured Format

I mentioned this above that I wanted to attempt a bit of a structured format… which is of course optional but provides us some general content areas to focus on while the event is going on. This also helps to revive another tradition that was Developer Appreciation Week and embed it as part of this larger blogging festival as well. So right now the weeks look a little something like this.

July 25th – July 31st – Blaugust Prep Week – posts about the technical details of getting started in blogging. Tutorials, advice, tips for naming your blog… that sort of stuff to get people ready to hit the ground on August 1st running.
August 1st – August 7th – Topic Brainstorming Week – posts about ideas for topics that the participants can then mine for the rest of the month.
August 8th – August 14th – Get to Know Each Other Week – hanging out and meeting other people in this new fledgling community and hopefully gaming together a bit! Also highly support doing some sort of collaboration on shared topics!
August 15th – August 21st – Developer Appreciation Week – post about the things that you really appreciate in gaming or any other community… because chances are there is a developer or designer behind the things you love.
August 22nd – August 28th – Staying Motivated Week – tips and tricks that you might have to stay motivated and keep creating content against the tyranny of a blank screen.
August 29th – August 31st – The Final Stretch: Lessons Learned – as a way of getting us across the finish line, talk about some of the experienced you had during the month and maybe things you learned about yourself.

The Details

The sign up form for Blaugust Reborn 2018 can be found here
The invite link to the Blaugust Reborn Discord can be found here
When you share your content please use the hashtag #BlaugustReborn for tracking purposes
- Also share your content in the “share-your-content” channel on Discord!
Mingle with your other Mentors and Participants
- Maybe even use the “gaming-together” channel on Discord for play games together!
Have a great freaking August!

Plate Dress

July 6, 2018 by Belghast

You would think a work week with only two days in it would be a breeze to get through. You would be wrong, or at least I am struggling with it. There is something about being off work for five days in a row that really resets your mental clock. While I had not deviated terribly in my sleep patterns… I did deviate massively in my pants wearing patterns. What is making this experience weirder is the fact that I represent the only management team member for my side of the office, and as a result I have people I don’t normally manage coming up to me and asking advice on issues. However we push on because it is in fact Friday… the harbinger of another respite from work. That said I know that come Monday morning everyone will be expecting the entire office to be firing on all cylinders so I am trying to take advantage of this lull in people actually being around the office to catch up on things.

On the blog front… I am working on some details for Monday where I talk about the return of Blaugust. Yes that is right I am doing it again this year because I feel like the community needs something to rally around. I do intend to shift things up a bit however and make it less about posting every single day and more an amalgam of the various events that we used to do as a community but have let slip by the wayside. Expect a few elements of the Newbie Blogger Initiative to be thrown into the mix as well to broaden the sort of folks involved. I will have charts and graphs and all measure of adult looking representations of my thoughts for Monday morning (I am only slightly kidding) but it isn’t quite ready for primetime yet.

On the gaming front I am still very much engaged with Elder Scrolls Online and looking forward to Update 19 that comes with the Wolfhunter DLC. If I had to guess this will probably land sometime around Quake Con that is coming up August 9th through the 12th. The main reason why I am super interested in this update is that apparently we are finally getting single line respecs… only five years after asking for these in alpha. I’ve always been way more into being a Hunter than a Werewolf or Vampire… so the whole Van Helsing style outfit they are showing off is definitely in my wheelhouse. Speaking of outfits however… I keep playing with the wardrobe system and creating my very own “plate dress” ensemble. You can absolutely blame World of Warcraft and the Judgement set for hooking me on this appearance, but unfortunately at this moment the only skirt option I have available to me is one that is Daedric themed, so I am just sorta rolling with that appearance as a whole.

I’ve been playing with some different combinations of pieces for the Arms and Shoulders… the first image in this series is what I am currently wearing but I am thinking seriously of going back to this combination shown in the above image. I think it blended better together and I dig the uncovered hands better than the various gloved options. I also seem to have settled on running around with the adorable wolf cub as my companion as opposed to the wide variety of violent critters I also have access to. At this point I am a few quest chains deep into The Rift and still loving the whole encountering people I interacted with in the past. This time it was someone who dates back all the way to Bleakrock… which makes me wonder if I had chosen differently in Bal Foyen if I would have had a different interaction. I am guessing that would be the case, but I absolutely think I chose correctly this time around.

Anyways… time to get to work. Have a wonderful weekend and tune in Monday as I begin unrolling the nonsense that is to be this years Blaugust.

Games Played 2017 Edition

December 30, 2022December 29, 2017 by Belghast

Year End Review

One of the weird things that I do is that I attempt to keep track of the games I have played during a given calendar year. I started this madness I believe in 2015 and then have slowly been back populating that list based on a few methods. Essentially I am tracking things on a month by month basis and if I have written about a game or taken screenshots of a game… I log it as having been played during that month. The end result is this weird history of the games I have played over the course of a given calendar year. Seeing as this is the last “weekday” that I will be making a post until the beginning of 2018… I figured it was the perfect time to break out my post talking about the various things I played this year. Without further stalling… here is the data.

Click on the image or here to see the full google sheet.

During the course of the year I played a grand total of 41 different games, which is from 57 last year and 67 the year before that. Basically the key difference is that I mostly played MMOs which tend to hold my attention for larger periods of time than burning through a bunch of single player titles. Lets take a swath of the top ten titles and look at them a little closer.

World of Warcraft – 10 months
Destiny – 8 months
Diablo 3 – 7 months
Final Fantasy XIV – 7 months
Horizon Zero Dawn – 7 months
Destiny 2 – 6 months
Pokemon Go – 6 months
Fallout 4 – 5 months
Guild Wars 2 – 4 months
Zelda: Breath of the Wild – 4 months

At first glance the clear king is World of Warcraft with 10 months of play, but if you look back at past years this tends to be the one game that I am almost always at least playing a few days a month. However you notice that I largely took a complete break from the game in March and April and I feel like it is largely due to a few games coming out around the same time… Mass Effect Andromeda, Horizon Zero Dawn and Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. I feel like the true winner is Destiny and Destiny 2 because if you include those as one game… then I played them every month of the year with some overlap between of two months when I was technically playing both. Granted I am including the time I spent playing various betas of the game but still… I feel like this was the year of Destiny for me personally. I spent significantly less time playing Final Fantasy XIV as I played rabidly during the launch of Stormblood and sorta bounced off otherwise. Another anomaly this year is that Rift did not make the top 10, and similarly odd is how much of a return Pokemon Go has had…. but I largely chock this up to getting a new phone that handles it better. The weirdest part about this years top ten list is that it includes several single player titles: Fallout 4, Horizon Zero Dawn and Zelda: Breath of the Wild. All three of these are games that I keep being able to return to and play again and again in short bursts.

Click on the image or here to see the full google sheet.

Multi-Year View

Now if we expand out even further… here is the list of everything I have played since 2012. Things get a little spottier the further you go back. Essentially I have back populated this last by going through all of my old blog posts and jotting down which games I talked about playing. Additionally I have scanned all of the screenshots that I happen to have and divided them up by the month the file was created as an attempt to create a somewhat accurate picture of what I had been playing. Generally speaking if I am playing a game I am taking screenshots because I always need images for my blog. I may or may not have almost 30,000 screenshots sitting on network attached storage… and a stack of every hard drive from every machine I have owned waiting for a day when I feel like going spelunking for more screenshots. I am not even sure why I started down this path but now that I am on it… it has become another obsession of mine. Basically from here on we are going to largely talk about the top fifteen games I have played since 2012.

World of Warcraft – 47 months
Final Fantasy XIV – 42 months
Rift – 37 months
Destiny – 27 months (including D2 31 months)
Elder Scrolls Online – 26 months
Diablo 3 – 23 months
ArcheAge – 13 months
Guild Wars 2 – 13 months
Wildstar – 13 months
Everquest II – 11 months
Fallout 4 – 10 months
Star Wars the Old Republic – 10 months
Trove – 9 months
Pokemon Go – 8 months
The Secret World – 8 months

First interesting pattern is that there is only one non-mmo on this list and that is Fallout 4. I am not entirely certain why I keep returning to that game but there are so many nights I will fire it up on the laptop while doing other things and just roam around. Once again Rift has fallen a bit in the rankings as this time last year it was tied with Final Fantasy XIV for the second place slot. Destiny slides up into number three eclipsing Elder Scrolls Online, especially if you include Destiny 2 playtime which I denoted in quotes. Guild Wars 2 and my resurgence into that game caused it to leapfrog Wildstar a bit, and then the tail end of the list is either new because I expanded things out to top 15 or in a similar position. There are some games on this list that are likely to eventually fall out of the ranking. I am not really playing Everquest II anymore in part because the management since the swap to Daybreak has just been pitiful. Its a torn community and just not the environment I remember loving. Trove may or may not see me returning to it, because I have a friend who is super into that game right now… but also playing on the PS4 and not PC which makes the return to play with him more unlikely. Additionally that game has changed so much since I last played it that I would almost need to start fresh to really get back into it. Similarly I am not sure how much more time I will be devoting to ArcheAge because I just don’t find the game nearly as compelling as I once did. As I leveled in the game it felt like the things I wanted to be doing narrowed rather than broadened given that I have no interest in PVP nonsense. I left shortly before they split the servers into veteran and new player experiences, and I am not even sure what the game looks like right now.

Looking Forward

As far as the calendar year of 2018… I am not really sure what I will be playing. It is a forgone conclusion that I will be playing World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth. In spite of me not really liking the more PVP centric focus, I would be lying if I said I would not be playing it at launch. I predict that I will be playing some more SWTOR in the near future because the release of a Star Wars movie always brings out the nostalgia for all things Star Wars. On top of that with Disney pulling the license for Marvel Heroes… I want to make sure I experience the story content in SWTOR just in case they for some reason decide to do the same thing they did with SWG. I know at some point I will make a return to Final Fantasy XIV and more than likely when they patch in the next step of the Palace of the Dead. As far as new games go… there really isn’t much on the horizon that really interests me. I am not enthralled by Crowfall or Camelot Unchained, because they seem to be creating games that don’t really stoke my interests.

Brad McQuaid will likely bring us some sort of version of Pantheon: Rise and Repeat as I heard someone call it the other day (I believe Wilhelm but not 100% sure). I played Everquest, and Vanguard… and Pantheon seems like more of the same just yet another slightly higher fidelity version of the same game Brad has kept trying to create since the 90s. I don’t have near as much nostalgia as some do for the “you must have a group with you at all times and death must be frustrating and painful” genre. Ashes of Creation looks mildly interesting… but what I have seen of the community tells me it is going to be a game I am not going to enjoy much in the same way that I didn’t enjoy ArcheAge at launch. Monster Hunter World is definitely something I am looking forward to giving a shot, in spite of the fact that I am horrible at Monster Hunter games. Anthem also seems really interesting, but the gameplay footage we have seen reminded me a bit too much of the promises Division made but never quite delivered on. In truth in the 2018 calendar year… I expect to keep playing a lot of the same games I played during the past several years because those MMOs just keep getting better with age.

Regularly Playing: August Edition

August 9, 2017 by Belghast

It has been most of the summer since I last updated my sidebar, and a lot of things have changed. I figured it was high time that I true things up since we are just about to go into the school year, and starting to enter a pretty tightly packed release schedule for the rest of the year. For those unfamiliar with this feature, I functionally talk about the things that I have added… the things that are remaining… and the things that I am ultimately removing from regular rotation. I play a lot of games at any given time… and generally speaking the moment I update my sidebar… I have a wild mood swing game wise that leads me somewhere completely differently. So here goes nothing!

To Those Remaining

Final Fantasy XIV

Since I last posted there has been a lot of movement in this game, namely the release of a new expansion called Stormblood. As a result I swapped my Heavensward icon out for a Stormblood one. As far as my time in the game… I’ve reached 70 and 310+ gear on both my Warrior and my Samurai and have fallen off significantly in the amount of time I am actually playing. There is still plenty to be done, and I want to get back in the swing of playing on a regular basis, however lately I am deep within my own turtle session which means I tend to be favoring games where I don’t have much of a crowd. Still well within the realm of active games, just only logging in once or twice a day instead of devoting all of my time to it.

To The Returning and New

Guild Wars 2

This is the first time since picking up the game at launch that I can legitimately say that I am really enjoying myself while playing this game. For whatever reason it took five years to actually click with me, and now it is like discovering hidden treasure. I am attempting to do all the things and it is fitting the bill really well because I don’t have much infrastructure in the game currently. My current goal is reaching 100% in all of the old world zones, which I believe is one of the requirements for starting down the Legendary weapon rabbit hole. Another huge boon for my enjoyment of the game is the fact that there are now proper beards for non-norn characters.

Rift

To be honest since its release in 2011 it has never really been far off my radar. Crawling back into Rift is like wrapping myself in a warm blanket, because it is so familiar. In the past six years I’ve had highs and lows with the game, but I know that regardless I will always return and always be interested in whatever happens to be going on. Recently during my turtle mode game play in general, I have been spending a bit of time trying to catch up and hit the Prophecy of Ahnket level cap. I am also digging the tweaks I made to my default outfit. Rift in many ways feels like this snapshot of what everyone wanted in a game around its release, and in some ways it is still ahead of its time. In other ways though it feels like a time capsule to a time when MMO games were slower paced and more methodical. I still find it enjoyable and am always proud to feature it on my sidebar when I am playing.

Diablo 3

Another game that is never far off my radar is Diablo 3, and with us currently being in the thrall of another season… it is obviously occupying some sidebar territory. This is the first season to feature Necromancers and it has been hilarious to see literally bone spikes for days. I really don’t have a whole lot to talk about the game because if by now you don’t get my attraction you probably never will.

World of Warcraft

I have honestly all but stopped playing World of Warcraft, but I am keeping a space on my sidebar for it because of the RoboSquid Armada. This is effectively our weird brain chain of trying to run every dungeon and raid in World of Warcraft at level in minimal gear. Prior to the launch of Stormblood we had left off at Blackfathom Deeps and it seems like everyone is coalescing towards starting this up again. I am more than happy to do some madness with my baby monk.

To Those Departing

Star Wars the Old Republic

If I am being completely honest… I have to say I love what this game has become. I had this awesome time playing through the Shadows of Revan, Ziost and Fallen Empire content and then I sort of needed a break from deeply story driven gaming. It was also around about this time that we were ramping up for the release of Stormblood. At some point in the future when I need to completely dive into something wholly immersive… I will pick this back up and run through the Eternal Throne story line. I still poke my head in from time to time, but not enough to keep it on the sidebar.

Horizon Zero Dawn

This is one of those games that I really need to finish, but I have a feeling by the time I ultimately get back around to it… I will functionally need to restart the experience. This game is a casualty of too many other games coming out at the same time… and ultimately its playtime got eaten up by Mass Effect Andromeda that for whatever reason clicked way harder with me than Horizon did. I really enjoyed the game but I feel like I am going to have to be in the right frame of mind to actually return to it.

Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild

Another game that has fallen off the radar that I want to start back up at some point is Breath of the Wild. Two things happened to harm this experience… firstly a bunch of other stuff got released. Secondly… I picked up the switch and decided to restart the game. I still play this occasionally but not enough to really keep it hanging out on the right side of the screen.