Moving to battlestance.org

So I’ve been using this blog for 9.5 years and I think it’s grown up enough that I can move to my own domain. There are several reasons why I didn’t do this so far, but now I decided to do it. For all things digital, it’s kind of fitting this is blog post #256.

Please move your browsers to https://battlestance.org and update your feed readers to https://battlestance.org/feed/. All content has been transferred, the url structure is the same, and that’s it.

2018 in review

As is customary I am writing a “year in review” post that shows my exploits and ignores the rest of the world, there are better writers for this kind of stuff 🙂

What I played a lot:

• SW:TOR (there’s not even a close second)
• Two Eyes (Picross on Android)
• Picross Luna II (Android)

Where I spent a decent amount of time

• Diablo 3 (50h in Season 13)
• Destiny 2
• Picross Fairytale
• Dead Cells
• Star Wars – Galaxy of Heroes (Android)
• Pokémon Go (Android)

Played a bit:

• Quake Champions
• Guild Wars 2
• WoW
• EVE Online
• Torchlight II

Gaming expenses in 2018:

• SW:TOR: 7x 13 EUR = 91 EUR for subscriptions
• WoW: 1x 35 EUR for Battle for Azeroth, no subscription yet
  • Oh my, just checked the Blizzard store. It’s on sale *again* for 25 EUR. Stupid me for buying it, but I really had planned to play around this time. Is it selling so badly they need to have it on sale twice in the first few months? Wow.
• Games on Steam: 24 EUR for Quake Champions, 0.42 EUR to complete 2 Card sets
• Games on GOG: 3.90 EUR for Torchlight 2
• Games on Humble Bundle: 20 EUR for Dead Cells, 1 EUR for Shadow of Mordor

This means: 176 EUR in 2018, at ~15 EUR per month. WTF, this is a new low I guess.

• Amount of MMO subscription months paid: 7
• Bought stuff in the ingame shop: SWTOR, but with no additional cash
• Full price games: 2 (Quake Champions, Dead Cells)
• MMO Expansions: 1 (WoW: Battle for Azeroth)

So (and this is new this year) some analysis:

• I’m still mostly playing one MMO at a time
• Although I have 4 mobile games up there, this was only a few minutes at home this year, mostly while waiting for something
• Depending on how much public transport commute I have, I play some mobile games. Usually I read RSS feeds, this winter I preferred gaming
• I guess I didn’t buy so many games that I won’t play then. Yay.

There are still a few Steam games on sale I’m thinking about 😛

• The Flame in the Flood
• Convoy
• Tooth and Tail
• Cat Quest
• Prison Architect
• Another Brick in the Mall

Christmas shenanigans

Did I already rant how I hate December and all the stress about Christmas? Probably not here (at least this year) but it’s real. I stopped playing Destiny 2, I still haven’t resubbed to WoW.

Torchlight 2 was on sale the last days, so I finally bought it after some nudging. It’s fun, although I didn’t play a lot yet. The only game I was playing a little was SWTOR – but I’ll have a separate post for that, maybe sooner. At least now the real part of my vacation time starts, all the Christmas stuff is over now.

Thinking about a blog move

I accidentally posted twice yesterday, that second post was supposed to be for today after a quick edit of “I finished the Conquest target on 3 chars and made ~50k points”. But yeah.

Haven’t done much yesterday and today, but I did start KotFE on my Agent and if you spacebar hard enough you can get Chapter 9 done pretty fast. This chapter is important for 2 reasons: Unlocking “To Find a Findsman” to get Alliance Alerts, and to be able to start the Star Fortresses story arc.

As I read lately that the ads on wordpress.com seem to be getting worse and overall because I’m feeling like it, I’ve been researching domain names and hosting options – if I should move off here. So far it’s been pretty good, but maybe I don’t want to scare off all my 5-10 readers with too many ads. 😛 I don’t want to spend too much money and I want a domain with whois privacy. The latter already soured me on that awesome domain name I was already about to buy. I’m not so good with catchy names, so I guess I’ll ponder a bit more about this. I’m pretty sure we had this topic as a writing prompt in Blaugust this year and I’m not happy with my choice (name of the author in the domain name) right now, although I was for years and maybe it will come again 🙂 Also at Blaugust I didn’t think this through renaming most of my accounts to Nogamara and just keeping the blog name and the twitter handle. Poor people had to write Nogamara/Armagon all the time…

And yes, I know about the wordpress.com plans, but I’d either have to get the 4 EUR/month plan and pay for the domain from year 2 on, so that would be like 110 EUR for 2 years, or just get an external domain which would probably cost ~28 EUR per year (~15 EUR for the domain, 13 EUR to map it here) but not even remove the ads, so no big win. Self-hosting is some work, but I guess I can pull it off for ~25 EUR per year.

Enough rambling, off to bed now and trying to get up early tomorrow to be home sooner and be able to run some errands quickly so I can be online after maintenance and get my Juggernaut to Command 300!

I missed the 9th blogoversary

Is that even a word? Last year I managed to remember the 8th birthday of the blog on the 18th of October, now it’s a month late. Bah, who cares. I managed to write around 73 posts in that year (until the 18th, that is) – but with 31 in August and 29 in the 2 weeks before and after  that’s only 12 posts for the remaining 10 months. As far as I can see I didn’t do any of these posts before last year.

Last year I had just restarted SW:TOR (and played for like 2-3 months) and also had played a lot of Guild Wars 2 just before.

2 years ago I was back in WoW, having fun in Legion – this was an extended stint in the Alliance, after having abandoned WoW in early 2014 and only returning for 2 months for WoD a month after it launched iirc.

3 years ago I was back in Ragnarok Online, my first MMO ever. But this was on another server, the first two ones I had played on had been closed down years ago. It’s a long tale of franchises and other things.

4 years ago I apparently wrote about mobile games, and my view hasn’t changed much, but maybe another post is due, having written about mobile games three times in total. I had stopped playing WoW in spring (after a fun visit to another server) and when WildStar launched I was fully on board.

5 years ago I was playing WoW and not much else. That’s also the year where I came back after a 3 year hiatus, not having managed to keep a full year running, only from October 2009 to March 2010 (20 posts in total). Since July 2013 I didn’t have any breaks longer than 3 months, which isn’t too bad. So maybe July 26th, 2013 should be the date to celebrate, but to be fair I did some games blogging in Dec 2011/Jan 2012 [1, 2, 3] – just not here. But these 3 years can be summed up quite nicely by: I finished university, I started working full time, I played a lot of WoW. I also wasn’t not blogging (~25 posts on other blogs in that time), just not about games.

I’m back and I failed

As I wrote in my last post I took some Game Boy games on my work trip, but -oh surprise- I neither had a lot of spare time nor was I in the mood to play. Just a bit of idle surfing around before going to bed filled my time quite well – I didn’t even have time to read a lot of feeds. Also the lighting in the hotel room was really bad, so probably the GBA wouldn’t have worked as well anyway. Let’s see if I manage to log in to SWTOR tonight, otherwise I’m looking forward to the weekend, my posting streak is broken anyway, but it was fun while it lasted.

Conquest fails and the end of an experiment

So, today is day 59 of daily posting and tomorrow’s might be the last one for a while, as I’m leaving for a 2 week trip tomorrow where I don’t know if time, energy and wifi will be readily available. No high hopes, but we’ll see.

This time I only prepared one post for tomorrow and only because at least it makes it 60 days, damn those love of round numbers, it was actually planned for today 😛

Just had an oddity in Conquests. I wrote I finished twice on my BH this week, but maybe I was wrong and only planned to do it. I looked at the counter today and it sat at 27.xxx of 30.000. So I quickly hopped over to Yavin 4 to do some RAMPAGE. Apparently I had done the dailies on a non-conquest character (getting complicated yet?) so my counter for Rampage III was at 94/150. So I killed a few mobs and it showed me the popup for Rampage I (yes, I, not II, sadly was too confused to screenshot) and at some point I got the popup for Rampage II, but the chat said +300 CXP which again matches Rampage III. I also didn’t get the Conquest rewards again, but apparently I just failed to read swtorista’s guide correctly. It says “You can complete your personal goal on as many characters as you want!” and not “as many times as you want”. Ah well, it’s not as if I went out of my way to get to 30.000 instead of 15.000, wouldn’t even say “bummer”. * shrug* I blame the multitude of days with strong headache in the last two weeks, no wonder you make these mistakes if you can’t really concentrate.

Blaugust 2018 Analyzed

Belghast posted the final tally. Wilhelm chimed in. Rakuno as well.

I’m gonna steal the summary (sorry Bel):

• 90 blogs signed up in Blaugust Reborn 2018
• 83 bloggers made at least one post during the month
• We added 1404 new blog posts to the community as a result of Blaugust Reborn
• This equated to an average of 45 new blog posts per day
• 26 Bloggers had 31 posts during the month or in a few cases considerably more

 

Officially Certified: Rainbow

So it’s official now, and I’m pretty happy. I’m usually not one to value awards or official recognition, but this was a goal I set for myself. I’m usually bad at achieving any goals that include doing something daily (except brushing my teeth, sadly the time for recognizing this as an achievement is gone for a few decades already), but I managed to do this one!

Autumn Gaming Goals

I saw quite a few people just continuing to post like nothing had happened (it’s ok, you can take a break now), and there quite a few gaming goals posts.

I don’t usually do these, but right now I have some stuff planned. But these are not really hard goals, more like “this is what I originally wanted to do when I fell into an SWTOR-shaped hole” – there will absolutely no “I managed to do X out of Y”, my conscience is clear 🙂

• SWTOR
  • Already posted here – mostly achievements and a few Levels
  • Do I want to join a guild? Maybe. Would be cool to not play solo, but… Republic or Empire? What is my main? Do I want to raid?
• WoW
  • My plan is to buy BfA and subscribe in the first or second week of October, because I won’t have time to play before that
  • If I do it, will I try to rejoin my Alliance guild as I did in Legion, only to go back to my Horde main characters soon?
  • If I start with Horde, do I stay with my kinda dead guild of maybe 5-6 active ones or do I search for a new one? Will I be disappointed like last time?
• Dead Cells
  • I really should pick it up again, it’s fun – but it’s hard. Maybe I should really try to get a 360 controller going and Just. Do. It.
• Game Boy Advance
  • Maybe I should pick this up again, maybe finish Pokémon?
• GW2
  • I should really play again, shouldn’t I? Maybe if SWTOR loses its pull and I don’t end up subscribing to WoW.
• TESO
  • Same thing, but it just didn’t really convince me, which is a shame
• Quake Champions
  • Yeah, I feel really guilty here – it’s fun, I should play more!
• Cities: Skylines
  • Bought this in August 2017 but I haven’t felt like playing this kind of sim/building game

 

But there’s also stuff I’d like to try, but for that I’d have to buy it first, so it’s out for now.

• Nintendo Switch
  • I’d really like to try one with one or two games. Maybe Zelda, Mario Odyssey, Mario Kart, Dead Cells… but why bother, I have a 360 I’m ignoring.
• FFXIV
  • This is the only MMO right now where I’m like “I want to try this, but I have no time!” – I really have enough MMOs available
• Graveyard Keeper
  • As SynCaine put it, “Graveyard isn’t perfect […], but in terms of pacing and how it affects your enjoyment, its an improvement over Stardaw Valley IMO”

This was Blaugust Reborn 2018

Hooray, we did it! We made it through 1 (or 31, or any number in between) posts in the month of August! Congrats Blaugustians new and old!

I don’ have much to say, so this is purely a statistics meta post:

• 31 consecutive posts in August
• exactly one post per “day”, as in sleep cycle. Two or three came 1-2h after midnight, but before I went to bed.
• so I think I’ll get a “Rainbow Diamond Award”, yay!
• as I started in July, this makes 42 consecutive days with one post per day each
• including this post, I wrote 10463 words (subtract 50 for emoticons I guess, this wasn’t scientific counting)
• the average post length was 349 words
• the median post length was 262 words
• the longest post was 1043 words
• the shortest post was 106 words, so even for whatever threshold you use, I wouldn’t say I cheated
• WordPress says I had 551 visitors, which is more than 10 times the normal amount. Thanks for reading 🙂
• 43 comments, oh wow! (I guess nearly half of them were me responding though)
• even though I was away on vacation for a few days… it wasn’t two weeks, so scheduling in advance worked fine
• I’m not sick of posting, so I might continue for a bit, but latest mid-September I’ll have to take some time off anyway

PS: Blaugust has come to an end and this is my thirty-first post – thank you Belghast and all participants.