First of Blaugust

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Good Morning Friends! Today is the first official day of Blaugust and we are already starting to see a great number of posts trickling out into the ether on the #Blaugust2022 hashtag among other sources. If you are curious about what Blaugust is, you can check out the official announcement page. However, if you don’t want to click through at its core it is a festival of blogging designed in part to spur folks back into regular blogging. It began its life as a challenge to try and get people to blog 31 times during the month of August. Over the years it has morphed and changed as needed and now is more a general stirring of activity with the hopes of keeping the fires of blogging lit. Every year we get a new think piece talking about how blogging is dead, and we serve as an anachronistic wall attempting to keep it all live.

I know for me my blog ceased to become something I did for others and now is something I do for me and my own sanity. My blog is effectively a daily journal of what is going on in my life and helps to serve as a temporal anchor. So often every week looks like every other week, but when I commit my thoughts to the blog, I can always go back in time and find out when this item happened. From there I can often reconstruct a matrix of sorts of events that happened in sequence near each other. Generally speaking, if something was significant, I probably wrote about it. So this blog started in 2009 and captures the death of family members, the arrival of new pets into my life, and all sorts of other key events that I might want to remember at a later date. Which I guess is weird considering all of this started its life as a World of Warcraft Warrior Tanking blog.

The Truth About MMO Content Creators by Josh Strife Hayes

I often listen to YouTube videos as though they were podcasts while doing other things, and last night I listened most of the way through “The Truth About MMO Content Creators” by Josh Strife Hayes. In the video, he gets a good number of YouTubers that over MMO content to sit down and answer some questions. Towards the end of the video, he tackles the concept of whether or not to specialize and this really hit home for me. This is a topic that I see coming up almost every Blaugust, especially as folks start new blogs. Essentially there is a double-edged sword that if you specialize in a specific MMORPG or other game, you are likely going to inherit a baked-in audience of folks who are interested in content about that game. If you really get engaged with that community it might even open up other opportunities for special content creator events or maybe even further down the line… some sort of official community management position.

Those of us who have been at this blog game for a while have known MANY bloggers who have eventually found their ways into the ranks of a specific game company that they were covering. It is absolutely an exit strategy from blogging that can and does happen. However, I took the other path because I knew that as my own interests changed if I was going to keep a blog going… the blog itself needed to change with me. The life of a generalist however is a weird one, because people have to essentially stick around because of you… instead of the content that you happen to be creating at a given time. I have a massive bounce rate among my readers because I tend to go through periods where I hyper-fixate on a specific game and create a significant amount of content for it.

A Random Photo from Outriders

So if we take Outriders for example as a random game that popped into my head. When I have been going through one of my periods where I am playing a lot of it, I might legitimately write something about the game every single day. During these periods of fixation, this means that someone might stumble across my posts and follow me because they too are super interested in this game. However, when eventually I move on to talking about something else, it can lead to a pretty jarring experience when I randomly shift to talking about building things in Minecraft for example. To the consumers of your content, you are often viewed as a monolith attached to a specific topic that they first engaged with. I’ve seen this play out not only in my own audience but in the audience of countless YouTubers that shift between games.

A very early Genshin Impact Video by Demone Kim.

A prime example of this playing out is something I have seen with the YouTuber Demone Kim. I originally started following his content when I was super into Genshin Impact and then as I lost interest in that game I stopped clicking through to his videos quite so much. I know when he too fell always from the game he got a good deal of backlash from the Genshin community for abandoning the game that made him popular. When he shifted to New World and I eventually caught back up with his content, it was a regular occurrence during his live streams of someone popping in to berate him for not playing Genshin. Then again when he shifted from New World to V Rising… the same happened but this time with New World fans. The more tightly you associate with a specific game the harder it is for you to eventually pivot and move away from it.

I went through my own version of this when I stopped playing World of Warcraft for the first time and transitioned in a big way to Rift. I know my Twitter account lost what felt like half of my followers when I started talking about how great of a game Rift was. At this point, I am some thirteen years into this journey and have come to the realization that if someone is still reading my content, it means that they are here for me. If they wanted to jump away I have given them countless reasons over the years to stop reading. I realize that I will never reach the level of saturation that a devoted blog might get, but I also know that my content will effectively remain evergreen for those who are interested in it. So essentially the choice between being a specialist and being a generalist is that you are either pinning your fate to the success of a specific game or franchise, or you are taking a chance on folks sticking around for you the person behind the screen tickitytacking away at the keyboard.

Gracie snoozing on my wife’s lap

There is also the distinct possibility that folks stick around here for the eventual adorable animal photos as well. So with that, I welcome you all to Blaugust. As always if you want more information about the event then check out the announcement post or the media kit page that has all of the relevant links. I am trying to keep my blog roll updated with all of the folks running in the event but given that there were four signups while I slept, I am certain to be lagging behind. There is still plenty of time to join in this nonsense and I look forward to seeing the overwhelming flurry of posting. Thanks to everyone who shows up and makes this event interesting each year. You, fine folks, are Blaugust and I am merely the person who lights the fuse each year.

AggroChat #397 – Flight of the Dracthyr

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Featuring:  Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen

Tonight we are back and instead of Bel being sick this time we have Kodra who sounds awful.  First up we start with a discussion about Tam’s experiences with the Steam Deck and how it is a phenomenal device.  From there we talk about Tam dropping down to 1440p high framerate after spending time running at 4K and how he has been a better experience.  Ash talks about Digimon Survive finally released and his experiences with the game.  Bel gets into Dragonflight Alpha for World of Warcraft and talks about his first few weeks.  From there we talk about some of the early experiences with Multiversus and the high-quality smash bros style gameplay.  Kodra talks about the upcoming Kickstarter for Nara: Facing Fire.  Tam talks about Anno: Mutationem and its interesting take on Cyberpunk and that it is not at all connected to the Anno Series.  Finally, we wrap up with some discussion of the recent Ocarina of Time TAS play for Summer Games Done Quick.

Featured Topics

  • Steam Deck Ownership
  • Downgrading to 1440p
  • Digimon Survive Released
  • Dragonflight Alpha
  • Multiversus
  • Nara: Facing Fire
  • Anno: Mutationem
  • SGDQ Ocarina of Time TAS

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Reluctant Enforcer

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Good Morning Friends! I spent another night roaming around the countryside in Red Dead Redemption II. This is something that I have been told by friends who have played the game… but this world is damned gorgeous. Once I managed to slow down my own pace of only tackling a single quest at a time, the entire pace of the world seemingly slowed as well. I sat down to play this and before I knew it three hours had passed and it felt like minutes. This is really only something that happens to me in a large way when I get into the “just one more turn” cycle of a 4x game. There are so many times that I am on my way to do one thing, and a side event will pop up that catches my attention. I lifted a horse off a lady and took her back to town for example. I dig the way that the game gives you temporary waypoints for these activities without completely removing what was your previously tracked waypoint.

When I first started the game over a year ago, it was after playing Witcher 3. As a result, when it came time to name my horse I named it Roach since that horse was such a reliable companion. So far this Roach also seems to be an overwhelmingly reliable companion. Similarly, Roach seems to always be tied up nearby whenever I need a ride. I got waylayed by the O’Driscoll gang that just happened to have a stagecoach. After dispatching my assailants I hid their bodies and took the Stage Coach off to the fence to get a little pocket money. I wondered exactly how this would work, but after parking the Coach in the barn… my trusty Roach was tied up on the fence line waiting for me. It seems like I picked a fitting name.

The other thing that I have noticed is that while I am a bandit… I tend to make the good guy choices more often than not. I did not like being an enforcer for a money lender, and quite honestly wish I had an option to just give them some of my money as a result. It seems like I make more than enough money killing O’Driscolls who are constantly hunting me it seems. I made the mistake of riding into Blackwater the other night when the waypoint system went nuts and tried to take me through there. It is disturbing just how fast the roaming bands of lawmen found me. I’ve got someone down in that area that the game is pointing me towards and I am not really sure how best to get to them.

All in all this game is acting as the perfect diversion to keep me from burning out on Path of Exile. The new season dates have been announced and I know in a few weeks I will be grinding up an entirely new set of characters. I am pretty set on playing the Inquisitor, and as a result, I am cool to taper off my playtime for the moment and dive into something completely single-player. It is funny how for me at least I have to be in the right frame of mind to attach to a game. This was true for Guild Wars 2 and Path of Exile that I bounced off so many times, and has been true so far with Red Dead Redemption II. I have to be in the mood for a specific sort of game experience to really open up to it. I think this is why the whole AggroChat Gameclub thing galled me so much in the past, is that it forced me to play a game that I wasn’t necessarily into it at that exact moment… and wound up ruining the experience of playing those games because my brain viewed it as homework.

Jail Breaks and Drunken Preachers

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Sometimes I get hit by a whim and have to indulge it. Last night was one of those nights and the particular whim was to boot up Red Dead Redemption II and see if I could get into it. There is something about the style of game that Rockstar makes that I do not love. Namely, I greatly prefer the open-world questing style of something like Witcher 3, where I can load up on a bunch of quests and then do them willy-nilly as I roam the countryside. RDR2 however requires you to focus on a single quest chain until it is complete and harkens back to an older on-rails style of mission-based questing. I think this realization ultimately caused me to bounce from this game when I first attempted to play it. However knowing this and expecting this, I had hoped that maybe I could return with the right frame of mind and actually enjoy myself.

In the grand scheme of things I think it worked. I enjoyed my evening roaming around on horseback and doing small adventures, including busting a character that I do not like very much at all… out of a jail. That mission was “a lot” but we survived… but I am guessing I won’t be able to go back to the town of Strawberry very soon. I also spent some time saving a drunkard preacher from getting hit by a train and am slowly working my way through the quests that I know I have. I am guessing there are also bounties that I can run for the local sheriff, which might be a good idea given that I have done a few unsavory things lately.

Arthur Morgan is a really interesting character because he is not exactly what I would expect from the hero of a western adventure. He seems like one of the background characters from something similar to a Bioware game… that has been suddenly thrust into the forefront of the adventure. He is not unlikeable but also not terribly charismatic either. I guess this quality makes it fairly easy for you to insert your own intentions into his character because he doesn’t seem to have any particularly strong leanings from the start. It seems like his defining characteristics are his reliability and willingness to do whatever needs to be done. I have a feeling before we finish this adventure that those traits are going to be used and betrayed.

I am uncertain how often I am going to be returning to the winding world of Red Dead Redemption II, but I enjoyed my time spent better than my last foray.