Blaugust

If this was a different year you might have seen me participating in Blaugust, but we had Blapril (and it was super fun) but there’s another event going on, Promptapalooza. Go check out Belghast’s intro blog post if you haven’t already.

Yesterday it was Bhagpuss’ turn (so I’m keeping the theme of how headlines are formed) and tomorrow you should go visit Solarayo, but today I have something for you.

Do you “finish” games/hobbies/projects and move on or do you come back to the same things again and again?

This blog will be 11 years old in a few months and maybe I’ll break the 400 post mark, but there are several things you won’t find here. Reviews of new (or old) games for example. Or a whole lot of “I finished a game!” posts (The Completed category has a whopping 11 entries. One per year, and that basically says enough already, doesn’t it?), but as I’ve been a MMO player first and foremost ever since I discovered them around 2003, that isn’t too surprising I guess. So maybe let’s get back to the topic, although I think I already answered a good part of it. I’m not the kind of person to see completion of a game as a primary goal, otherwise I guess I would have a bigger pile of finished games. On the other hand I do seem to come back to the MMOs I liked quite a lot. 8 years of WoW, 4 year break, 2 more years of WoW. Played SWTOR at launch and came back for the second time now. Came back to EVE several times. I’ve yet to come back to FFXIV, but I’d love to, there’s just not enough time. I just think the ship for LotRO has sailed (to Aman?). For the record, I’m not going back to replay single player titles though, with a few exceptions, where I really like one installment, like Heroes of Might and Magic III.

Games aside, I’m actually someone who loves to try new things in general. And who is very bad at staying with them. As a kid/teen I tried out every sport under the sun (on of the things I liked at school, despite being not the sporty type and disliking sports in general, we often rotated disciplines every semester: Football, Handball, Basketball, Badminton, Rowing, and a few more). I also stopped mountain-biking at some point and only took it up a few years ago. Had to skip 2019 for a few personal reasons and 2020 also didn’t help in getting to the mountains with friends, but I’m really, really hoping for spring 2021…

I also used to paint miniatures for years and had a lot of fun. I’d love to do that again, but it would mean buying tons of equipment again, making room, and where do I put those minis then? I’m not even playing BattleTech anymore, and I never actually played Warhammer (40k preferably).

When I look at Pen & Paper roleplaying games, I think I’m the one in our group who’d be most open to trying new things, but right now we’re starting a new Shadowrun group (and that’s fine because it’s my favourite setting, but we’re using the 25 year old 2.0 rules because… I don’t know, at least we have the source books and it’s what everyone knows, although I also have 3 and 5…) yet again. I don’t think we’ll ever manage to do Earthdawn or real D&D.

So to sum it up, I guess there are things where I actually come back and there are things where I’m one of those “I really should take this up again” people who never actually get anything done. Maybe I do lose interest quite soon, but in the end I think I live on a sort of priority queue. If A is fun but B is more fun and there’s no reason not to do B, I don’t need a lot of mixing up things and am totally happy to do B.

Also maybe this topic is also good for a bit of introspection. I like to learn new things but I hate to try to master them. Get good enough to take part and do the thing with people – yes. Try to get good enough to actually win against or do better than people who didn’t start as late as I did – nope.

Although I had a lot of fun doing Blaugust last year – I did 31 posts in August and 52 consecutive days in total, I guess I’m gonna sit out this year. I’m not hyped for anything, I’ve nothing new to say about WoW (continuing to play, even winding down a bit after getting flying, no plans to raid) and FFXIV (ok, it is new to me but everyone else is already finished with Shadowbringers already ( well, everyone except Naithin) and I’ve a few goals but am in no rush) and no new games planned. The SWTOR expansion is supposed to launch soonish, but it’s still too far off to commit.

This wasn’t really a great year overall and I’m not in the mood to commit to anything, although Bronze might be easily doable even with traveling for a few days. Maybe I’ll change my mind last minute as I often do 😛

Anyway, here’s Belghast’s full post and I wish everyone participating good luck and hopefully as much joy as I had last year.