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Blaugust Results

September 2, 2015September 2, 2015 by Belghast

A Phenomenal Blaugust

The time has come and as I said in my original post this year, I would tabulate the results and post them on September 2nd. This month really was an absolute deluge of content, and there is really no other way to say about it. I know I personally struggled to keep up with it all. I have to say however one of the best moments for me was reading the many “last posts” of the challengers. They all seemed to have a theme of “this is what blaugust taught me” or “I am proud of myself that I survived”. Reading each of those was so amazing. As I remarked yesterday I feel like the bulk of the community is not quite sure if they want to give me a hug… or flip me the bird. It is interesting being both Hero and Villain at the same time. After reading the posts… I can be perfectly fine with either distinction because the end result was pretty awesome.

This year we had far greater participation, and I am still completely floored by it. In 2014 we had 52 folks participating, and of those 28 managed to “win” the challenge of posting something every single day. One of my frustrations however is that because of the way I was running the contest, it kept someone from joining late, playing catch up, and being eligible for the final prizes. This year I changed the guidelines to something I am much more happy with, which is simply getting thirty one posts during the month of August. We had a grand total of 88 folks who signed up and participated in the challenge, posting at least one blog post. From there I made a separate distinction to give folks some credit who at least made it to the half way mark with fifteen posts and in that group we had 76. The most impressive thing however is that we had 56 people who managed to complete thirty one posts during the month of August. For added benefit I also kept track of who happened to participate last year as well, and we had 24 who were returning. Without further stalling… here are the lists!

The Challengers

The thought of posting something every single day for a month is a scary prospect, so simply signing your name on the dotted line and participating is pretty awesome in my book. This list is folks that joined the Blaugust initiative and posted at least one blog post during the month of August. Some of them however got really damned close to the halfway point. So lets take a moment to recognize them. You have all earned the right to use this badge in whatever fashion you like! It is available in a full resolution version and a sized down version ideal for sidebars.

Of this batch, there is a group that I want to give special recognition to. These are folks that participated for the second year, and for them I have special versions of the badge also available in full resolution and sized down versions.

The Survivors

This year I made a special distinction for all of the folks that managed to make it through at least fifteen blog posts during the month of August. We had some folks in the group that barely crossed the line, and others that damned near hit the final mark. There were several that managed to hit fifteen only to decide that this daily blogging thing really was not for them. In any case posting essentially “every other day” for a month is quite the feat as well, and I wanted to acknowledge this separately. I’ve dubbed this group the survivors, and they have earned the right to use this badge and title in whatever form they wish. Once again it is available in both full resolution and scaled down versions.

Once again I wanted to recognize the folks who managed to “survive” the challenge this year that also participated last year, so we have a special badge for them available in full and scaled resolutions.

The Conquerors

I hate the term “winner” for a challenge like this, because it doesn’t really encompass the purpose. Just the simple fact that you signed up and made an effort to be more active and create more content makes you a winner in my book. So when I was looking for a new term, I decided to go with Conqueror, because really every person on this next list did just that. They conquered fear, they conquered apathy, they conquered doubt, and they conquered Blaugust. I am so irrationally proud of every person on this list that I struggle to put it adequately into words. Once again they have a badge available in both full and scaled resolutions.

Once again we have a special group of Conquerors that returned from winning the previous year, to kick this one in the face. I find it pretty awesome that 13 of the 28 “winners” from 2014 returned. I feel like I also need to give special recognition to the Mystical Mesmer who managed to complete Blaugust on two completely different blogs this year. If that is not a microphone drop… I am not sure what is. Regardless this group also has their own special veteran badge in full and scaled resolutions.

The Prizes

So now that all of the acknowledgement is out of the way… lets talk prizes. Since not everyone that crosses the finish line can actually win the grand prize, we have to unfortunately rely on random chance. Last year I struggled with figuring out a good way to do this, and as a result this year I just wrote my own damned dice roller. This allowed me to type in the number of folks who managed to get thirty one posts during the month of August, hit the big Roll the Dice button and get an output stream with one result per line perfect for pasting into a spreadsheet. I sorted the thirty one club alphabetically and then pasted all of my results in a new column. If you are curious what the final numbers looked like, I am working off of this spreadsheet as a award prizes.

There was a slight monkey wrench thrown in my original plans as to how to give out awards. This was a good monkey wrench in the form of a bunch of prizes from Kings Isle entertainment. This actually gave me more “big prizes” to spread around which was really awesome as they gave me three prize packs from Wizard 101 and three from Pirate 101. Sometimes random chance is serendipitous. I had said from the very beginning that I would purchase a steam game for whoever managed to get the grand prize. It turns out… today is the birthday of this years winner. The dice were in the favor of Paeroka from Nerdy Bookahs. For winning the random number generator she got a Steam game of her choice… and she chose Valhalla Hills. Additionally since Kings Isle was so damned cool to chip in prizes, I also gave her one of the Wizard 101 and Pirate 101 packs.

That left me four more codes to hand out… so starting last night I messaged folks and had them give me their preference of Wizard 101 or Pirate 101. The next four in line were…

@knifesedgegames – Wizard 101 Code
@BaneFalcon – Pirate 101 Code
@Hidden_Wings – Wizard 101 Code
@Jasyla_ – Pirate 101 Code

The Prize Closet

Since we had so damned many people manage to complete the challenge, I am going to try and give out as many prizes as I can. I have a stack of various game codes largely left over from humble bundles gone by. I have a spreadsheet that I am starting to circulate down the list of folks who managed to “conquer” Blaugust. I may not have enough codes to get through everyone, but I am going to try! So expect in the next few days to get a private message from me with a link, asking you to tag one of them items with your name. This was a pretty crazy month, and I want to thank all of you for participating. Next year I am going to start planning significantly ahead of time and am hoping to get more game companies to chip in goodies for the prize vault. I know at this point you are saying “What about Anook?”. Lonrem was up late last night tabulating the results, and since that prize is based on community participation on Anook I will be letting them make their own announcement. I am really happy that they have been so supportive of us essentially taking over a chunk of their website during the month of August. Blaugust will return next year and hopefully be even bigger than before!

Paragon Levels with Friends

September 1, 2015 by Belghast

Blaugust Administrata

Blaugust is officially over… I mean it… put your pencils down and turn in your papers. Now begins the fun part of actually attempting to “grade”, and by that I mean tabulate the results. I started doing this yesterday afternoon with some of the early finishers, and if everyone that was a day away crossed that finish line… we have a pretty huge bunch of winners. Equally impressive as of yesterday we had 76 “Survivors” meaning that during the course of the month they managed to get in at least fifteen posts. Mostly I wanted to say a little bit this morning about just how proud I am of everyone who attempted any length of posts this month. The concept of daily posting is rather daunting and there are still days where I question my sanity as I plunk away at the keys each morning trying to make sense of the jumble of thoughts in my head. So while I will be terming people as “winning” the challenge you are all winners in my book even if you didn’t make it to fifteen posts.

My goal all along has been to get more people creating more content about the things they love doing. After a point folks stop caring so much about what you are writing, and focus in on the fact that it is YOU behind the screen that is writing it. The whole idea behind Blaugust is if you can prove to yourself that you can churn out thirty one posts in a single month… then posting a handful of posts every week on a fixed schedule is really not that terribly daunting. Whether or not they realize it, people crave consistency. I started this blog with a decent boost of readers, but over the years of my lack of posting… I pretty much pissed all of those regular readers away. When I became consistent, folks started tuning in every morning to read all of these seemingly useless thoughts I was dumping out of my head… and apparently enjoying it. Today is my day for calculations, but I wanted to close Blaugust with one thought. Don’t let Blaugust be this marathon that you run once a year and then stick back on the shelf until the next year. Let Blaugust be a spirit that you embrace every day, and an excuse to create regular posts throughout the year.

Boys Will Be Boys

First off I have to say that I have always hated this phrase… but sometimes it absolutely fits. Last night I talked to my mom on the phone, because it had been a few days since I had called my folks. They have had to deal with the fallout of a flood in one of the bathrooms, and this weekend they got into my childhood bedroom. My closet backed up to the bathroom so it was a assumed that pretty much everything in it would be ruined. The funny thing is… my Mom expected me to remember what I had in my closet over two decades ago. Luckily it seems that for the most part all of my comic books, and various sundry cards that I never bothered to “move out” were left untouched. Apparently some plywood seems to have wicked up the bulk of the water that made it through to the closet. As she was pulling stuff out of the closet she kept stopping and asking my dad what various things were. Then she got to an item that threw her for a loop.

I was a little skater kid, and there was a phase in my life where everything that mattered about anything… was skateboard related. She pulled out this baseball bat that was scrawled with all sorts of skater terminology and logos in a combination of sharpie and paint pen. She wanted to know why this bat was all scarred like it had been hitting concrete and “defaced” in such a way. My Dad just said that it looked like “little boys were playing”. So I had to explain to my mother what the bat was used for. We used to go to the tennis court with our skateboards, as much padding as we had, and baseball bats. My friend and I would ride towards each other, each of us on one side of the tennis net like we were “jousting”. At which point we would put as much padding on our left arms as we could and use the right arm to swing the baseball bat at the other person. The goal of course was to knock the other person off their skateboard and the padding was in a vague attempt to block the blows. It is a miracle we didn’t do serious harm to each other. This apparently did not phase my father, because it turns out his childhood friend and he would fire arrows at each other from recurve bows… so I guess in the grand scheme of things getting beaned with a baseball bat doesn’t seem that dangerous?

Paragon Levels with Friends

Since a good chunk of our raid was still doing the whole Pax Prime thing, we were not able to put in any attempts on Ravana Extreme last night. Instead I spent a good chunk of time fiddling with Bitdefender and ultimately uninstalling it. I guess I should have known better when my good friend Wulf struggled to keep it from blocking the Final Fantasy XIV game client, but I went ahead and gave it a shot. This time around it was the Glyph client for Trion Worlds that I could not get it to unblock. I finally uninstalled it and went back to AVG because at least I am used to it. That of course killed an hour, so by the time I finally logged into Diablo 3 it was fairly late in the evening. Grace was already hard at work doing rifts and such so I joined her until she left to go eat dinner. Then there was a block of time when the server was rebooted and patched, and I could not get reconnected to save my life. All the while I am watching The Strain on Hulu, which is a show I would absolutely suggest if you like Horror. The added benefit is you get to see Argus Filch playing a Van Helsing like badass… and yes I know the actors name is David Bradley but he will always be Filch to me.

The big take away of the evening is that we managed to get Mor to 70 on his Crusader, and I managed to get up to 47ish Paragon levels before the end of the night. I still cannot deal anywhere close to as much damage as Grace can at this point so I feel like I need to do some research into how best to gear and spec out a Barbarian. I mean I do respectable damage but I think my gear just isn’t quite at the same level as hers. She is still absolutely carrying both of us hard when it comes to doing group content. Though last night I did manage to stay alive most of the time, I think I took two deaths throughout the night, which is significantly better than previous outings. We spent most of the night on Torment IV, and I can personally solo Torment I pretty effectively… it is just that bosses seem to take forever. I am not sure how long this current addiction to Diablo 3 will last, but for the time being I am rolling with it.

Blaugust and Nephalem

August 31, 2015 by Belghast

Last Day of Blaugust

As the subheading says, it is in fact the last day of Blaugust and as such very soon I am going to begin tabulating the results. It has been an interesting month, but also a very quick one. It seems like just yesterday I was kicking off this challenge, and now we are staring at the finish line. It has also been interesting just how many people have participated in one way or another. Even if you did something as simple as retweet a Blaugust post, you are part of this and I thank you. In truth I was not really sure how the turn out for year two would end up looking. The biggest surprise honestly was just how many year one folks came back for this year. You’d think that they would have learned better by the time the second event rolled around. As I sift through the results it is going to be interesting to see just how many folks have completed both years at this point.

The big take away this year is that we have already reached a point where we are just too big to be planned somewhat “on the fly”. Up until July I was still questioning if I would actually go through with a second Blaugust. I was somewhat shocked at the number of people who were looking forward to it. So I pulled things together and we ended up with this year, that went significantly more smoothly than the first. As a result I think for the 2016 Blaugust I will be starting to pull things together about four months in advance. Folks offering to sponsor prizes was a brand new concept to me, and this year we had Anook and KingsIsle Entertainment both chipping in prizes. I greatly appreciate them both, but I am hoping if I start the wheels moving several months ahead I will be able to get a few more people to come on board. It would be awesome to get some game keys donated for a sort of “Blaugust Game Club” like our AggroChat Game Club. Where every Blaugust writer has the opportunity to play a specific game and write about it, because it is super interesting when you collect a bunch of opinions on the same title. I realize we are just how wrapping up, and folks are I am sure sick of it for the time being… but I am already thinking about how to make next year better.

Nephalem Ascended

Friday night when I got home from eating with friends I started a brand new Female Barbarian, and as of last around 8 pm I managed to hit 70 securing at least some of the Season 4 rewards. While I managed to get drug along for a handful of levels, this is still the fastest and most dedicated I have ever leveled in Diablo. In part a huge chunk of it has been that I have largely been leveling with my friend Grace, who keeps pushing me to go do content rather than just piddling around like I normally do. Pushing is the wrong word because she was not even insistent… she just gave me a reason to keep grouping up and doing interesting things. The other big change this season is that I pretty much completely ignored the story line. In Season 3 I attempted to level my way through the story, which is apparently the worst possible way to level these days. Instead I largely started adventure mode from the moment I created the character, and the result is as I leveled I tended to always have legendary weapons that I could craft for my character.

One of the big changes that came with Season 4 was the introduction of the “Season Journey” interface that serves as a way of unlocking the various rewards. Just for hitting level 70 on a seasonal character I unlocked the transmogrification pieces, but in order to get the Portrait Frame and the Pet I have to complete all four Chapters of the Season Journey. As of last night I have completed the first three and they were honestly all pretty easy. The final element that I needed was to defeat one of the major bosses on Master difficulty or harder. Since Belial is the fastest to get to on Adventure mode I popped over there and took him out with relative ease. Now I have to do some of the more grindy things like taking out each of the key masters on Torment difficulty. I also need to finally use the Kanai cube to extract a Legendary power, but I am trying to sort out what sort of power I want to keep. Honestly I feel like I need to read up on how exactly that process works before making any decisions surrounding getting powers from it. I know that once you do this you can choose at least one power as a permanent buff, and I have a few that are really nice.

I really did not spend much time playing Reaper of Souls, and as such I had never actually done a Rift of any sort until this weekend. Grace on the other hand is an expert at such things and as a result I spent some of my “post 70” time last night with her working on Rifts and then the Greater Rifts that follow. I have to say they are crazy amounts of fun, and I am trying to sort out how best to use my legendary gems. Right now I have two of them, and I need to run more Greater Rifts to power up the second one. The first one is now at level 6, but once again I think I need to do some research in how best to utilize them. The game is so much more intricate than I remember it being, and in truth I have never played Diablo 3 seriously. I am having a blast so I guess that is really all that matters. My hope is that tonight our Final Fantasy XIV raid can down Ravana Extreme… but after that… I hope to put in big ole dent in some of these Chapter IV objectives.

KingsIsle Blaugust Prizes

August 20, 2015 by Belghast

KingsIsle is Awesome

Some of you may know KingsIsle games as the creator of the wildly popular Wizard 101, Pirate 101 and the upcoming mobile monster destruction game Rise and Destroy. For those who do not they occupy a unique niche in the MMO industry. They create these awesomely rich cartoon worlds populated with tons of content, and all of aimed at being appropriate for pretty much all ages to play. I’ve not spent a ton of time playing these games but on a whim one weekend some of the AggroChat folks spent it rolling brand new characters in Wizard 101 and wandering around together. The game just exudes charm and I had enough fun that weekend that I decided to spend a little money on the game even though I really didn’t intend to keep playing it regularly. I’ve always heard they have an amazing community, and that KingsIsle in general does a lot to try and foster this. However I was pleasantly shocked when I was contacted by a representative from KingsIsle yesterday and handed some prizes for our Blaugust event. They handed me several codes for special bundles in both Wizard 101 and Pirate 101, each bundle having a retail price of between $29 and $39 bucks. That is absolutely awesome, and I actually spent a bit more time playing my Wizard 101 character yesterday. For those curious, I dug up the release videos for each of the trailers. I have yet to decide how I will reward these but it is awesome to have more options in the prize pool. If you interact with any of the KingsIsle employees, seriously give them a huge thank you!

Grand Tourney Gauntlet Bundle for Wizard 101

HooDoo Bundle for Pirate 101

Exhaustion Hits

Last night is traditionally the raid night for my second static group in Final Fantasy XIV. However we were missing a significant number of the key players, namely our second healer and tank. For a bit we considered other options, and were on the verge of just running an expert for the day and calling it good. Problem being as I sat there at the keyboard waiting for things to happen I kept dozing off while leaning forward, literally waking up when my head banged my boom microphone. So instead of doing Final Fantasy XIV shenanigans I retired to the couch to peacefully doze in and out of consciousness while waiting on my wife to get home. I didn’t really want to go to bed for real yet, because once I conk out I am often times dead to the world… and I wanted to make sure she made it home safely and didn’t have car trouble or anything out of the ordinary like that. Before the attempt at raiding, and a small bit afterwards I continued playing some Diablo 3. The game worked mostly because I had no one relying on me, and quite frankly I was playing on normal level which means I can doze off for a second here and there and suffer zero consequences from it. After I beat the normal storyline and unlock the content I will end up dialing up the difficulty as I attempt to level to 70 before the 23rd.

This is really a stupid mission I have set out on… largely because I really need to be in Final Fantasy XIV instead capping esoterics for the week. The interesting thing about Season play in Diablo 3 though is it feels like they have ratcheted up the drop rates of everything. While my profile has not updated to show it yet… at level 13 my crusader already has three legendary drops… including Genzaniku the awesome axe that summons a spirit to fight for you. When I entered into this seasonal thing I fully expected to lose my character at the end of the season… because I didn’t actually do any research before saying “sure” and clicking on the seasonal button. I guess however everything you earn in season just rolls over into your normal characters at the end of a season which is pretty frickin cool. So even if I don’t make any real progress in season 3, I will absolutely be starting a fresh season 4 character to play as well. I guess in the coming days I will be popping into Final Fantasy XIV to get in an expert or two and then popping into Diablo 3 because it makes an excellent way to wind down for the evening. I mostly enjoy soloing over there, but I am always looking for people to chat with while I am doing it. I finally got around to adding my friend Byx last night to battle.net and I know there are tons of other people that I should as well. I am finding that I am really enjoying the crusader, but in truth all of the classes I have played so far have been enjoyable in one way or another. I just find it so bizarre that at this point, World of Warcraft is probably my least favorite Blizzard game.