The Anook Thing
Blaugust is officially upon us, and with it comes a deluge of people posting to the Nook. I just wanted to take a few moments to highlight a few things as far as that goes. First off Lonrem made an awesome post on how to get the most out of posting on Anook. Also of note the very awesome Green Mushroom aka Void has been creating forum posts each day to collect the various daily posts. This is a pretty great idea as it makes it easy to read everything that has been happening for that day in one place. While this is amazing idea I also highly suggest that you advertise your post separate from this forum thread. The Anook Community prize is going to be solely based on how many hearts various posts get from the Anook Community as a whole. Our forum is a great place for collaboration and communication with other Blaugustians, but the only people that will actually see it are people who are following the nook.
Basically you have two options to make a post see larger circulation. You can either create a blog post on your profile page, which will allow you to attach images and keywords as well as associating it with a game. This however takes some time, and feels a little repetitive when you are already writing a separate blog post. What I tend to do however is to click through to the Blaugust Nook, and at the top of the screen is a box that says “Share What’s on Your Mind”. Generally speaking I open this box, link to my blog post… write a quick blurb about the post and then associate it with a game. This will create a post automagically shared with the Blaugust nook and also associated with the individual game nook. From there if you so choose you can click the Megaphone icon to share it with any other nooks that you might think would be interesting. My key problem generally is that I tend to write posts that cover multiple games… which makes it really hard to determine which to associate it with.
69 Challengers
At the time I am writing this Saturday morning… we currently have 69 Challengers. As we went on through the month last year we picked up steam, so that at the end of the proceedings we had fifty people who had either participated or won the challenge. I am completely blown away by the support I have seen thus far, and I am amped to see what the end of the month will see our numbers at. I have to admit there was a period of time when I didn’t think I would do Blaugust again. For some people it was this amazing experience, and others… it ended up causing them to take several month lags in their posting. The last thing I wanted to do was contribute to bloggers… not blogging. However as we got closer to August this year more and more people asked me if I was running it again because they were really getting excited. At this point… I am absolutely happy that I did because apparently this challenge strikes a primal chord with folks. The happiest moment however is that I am watching it branch out of my little circle of blogger friends and helping to discover brand new circles that I didn’t even know about. I think we are going to have really great things happen this month. Now… for the updated list of participants as of Day One.
Returning to Norrath
As I mentioned during the Games of the Week post, I plan on diving back into some of the games I am linking to as well. I am mostly focusing on free to play games, that have no barrier of entry for folks to pop in. That said however… as I delved back into Everquest II last night… I had a barrier of entry. It turns out that the time locked progression server Stormhold is for subscribers only, so for the moment… I am once again subscribing to EQ2. This has always been one of those games that I have had rose colored lenses for, because I have this deep connection to Norrath. In many ways it was my first MMO World, because in truth… Phantasy Star Online doesn’t really count when it comes to the whole “rich lore driven world” aspect. It had been since March 2014 that I had poked my head into Everquest II, which is a bit of a long absence for me. This is one of those games that I have tended to play every few months, and in spite of having it installed I really have not given it much loving. I have to say… maybe that was for a reason.
In many ways this game is a time capsule locked in a different graphical era. I’ve never been a fan of the “new” models that they released in an attempt to sell the game in Asian markets, but I have to say the original models look extremely dated at this point. It isn’t so much the models as the fact that they are animated so poorly as compared to modern titles. I guess in the time I have been away I have gotten accustomed to the way the other worlds looked. In truth this game ties back to a time when the fact that we were playing online at all… was miraculous and as a result we simply accepted that a lot of things didn’t look nearly as clean as the console counter parts because we were getting huge worlds to explore. Another thing that nostalgia does is makes you look back upon experiences as better than they actually were. I remember having all of these fond memories on the Isle of Refuge… but unfortunately the act of playing through it again is something entirely different. The later start zone experiences work so much better than the Isle, and I found the whole experience of leveling through it again to be cludgy and annoying. Even worse was the transition to Freeport, because quite honestly I am not a big fan of the redone versions of Freeport and Qeynos. I miss the small dungeon zones attached to Freeport as way of leveling through to 10 and being able to survive the commonlands.
For the time being I am running my Iksar Shadowknight just outside the gates of Freeport in the Commonlands, and I am able to take down level 9 and 10 mobs at level 6. My working plan is to grind my way to 10 and then start questing in the commonlands proper again. The problem being… I just ran out of drive to make this happen last night. I finally logged into Final Fantasy XIV and worked on my hunts there instead of continuing the leveling process. Another thing I had forgotten, is just how slow the leveling curve in EQ2 used to be. Getting to 10 is going to feel like a significant accomplishment, since I am not dual boxing this game the way many other people are. Basically this time locked server experience is reminding me that you can never actually go back home. You change and your home changes… and things are never quite the same. I still had some fun poking my head into Norrath again, and if I can get over this hump I think I will enjoy myself again as an “off night” game when I am not feeling like much human interaction. I have definitely been going through one of those slumps lately, where I am perfectly fine to chat with people over twitter but somehow grouping up and doing content together just seems to taxing. I need to get past this however because I need desperately to cap Esoterics this week.
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Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
69 Challengers
