800 Posts!

Time to celebrate another blogging milestone! It's been nearly a year since I hit the 700 post mark, as my posting frequency has dropped a bit in the past year. The problem is that I'm just trying to juggle too many things at the same time: Not only do I have a full-time job with a long commute, am going all out on SWTOR which inculdes running operations three nights a week, participating in Conquest and blogging about it, I've also been giving more attention to my secondary MMO, Neverwinter, and to making videos. Not enough hours in the day! Not that this stops me from trying.

Anyway, I still haven't really come up with a good replacement for the old Google Analytics search term fun, so I thought I'd celebrate with a reprise of the "most popular posts on my blog" theme from last time, only instead of looking at my top ten posts of all time according to Blogger, I'll be logging at my top ten posts from the past year according to GA. There are some interesting differences.

1. The Best Classes to Take into KotFE / KoTET (2017) - 1249 views

Okay, so this one was in my top ten posts of all time last year, and it was the "rising star" of the lot so to speak, as it was the most recent post to earn the honour of being included. As I said at the time, it covers a question that I think is relevant to many new and returning players and was linked on reddit, so that explains a lot of its popularity.

2. Galactic Command Is Alright Now (2017) - 767 views

This post made it to second place mostly because it was also linked on the SWTOR subreddit, by the ever lovely Swtorista, who thought that it raised some interesting points. Unfortunately she didn't exactly do me a favour in this case as most people there seemed to disagree with my stance, which is fine, but some of them actually got quite worked up about it too (as people do on the internet). It was quite amusing when someone in the reddit thread concluded that my opinion proved that I was clearly too much of a casual who couldn't have been playing for very long, but some of the anger people expressed was less fun. I even felt a bit sad for some of them, because what else must be going on in your life if a reward system in a video game can make you that mad? I mean, obviously we all care about this stuff more than average or we wouldn't be writing about it, but still... At least I didn't see anyone getting really nasty (or if they did, the mods were quick to delete those posts), and no toxicity spilled over onto the blog.

3. So what's the difference between beating Revan solo vs. in the operation? (2015) - 665 views

I've often said that I'm not a guide writer, but sometimes I end up writing one almost by accident, usually by talking about something that gave me pause or personally caused me trouble but which is simultaneously a minor enough issue that nobody had thought of writing a "proper" guide for it before. This is one of those posts, as I reviewed the option in the Shadow of Revan story on Yavin to deal with the temple solo or in a group. As I said in the post, it was ultimately much ado about nothing and not very well explained, so I'm not surprised that people are still googling it to find out what all the fuss is about.

4. Which Healing Class Should I Choose? (2016) - 551 views

Okay, this was one of my rare attempts to write a proper guide, even if it was a very short one. It didn't really gain much traction after its original publishing date in February 2016, but earlier this year Swtorista (again!) gave it a signal boost in a post on the official forums called "The Ultimate Guide of Guides for SWTOR 2018", in which she collected and curated links to a bunch of different community resources. I felt quite honoured to be included in that.

5. The Art of Achieving Map Completion (2014) - 495 views

This was another one of my more accidental guides, and yes, it was in my top ten of all time as well. A guide to one specific achievement is always something a bit niche, but in this case even more so since exploration is not something for which you can easily write up a few instructions, as success is more about understanding how the underlying system works than about following a prescribed order of steps. Good thing I quite like writing long rambles along those lines. It's also worth noting that this is the oldest post to still make this list.

6. The Missing Companions (2016) - 395 views

Here's the last one that was also in my top ten of all time, the one about which companions still hadn't returned after the release of KotFE. Considering that this post is now two years old and we've had a veritable surge of companion returns this year, it's getting more and more out of date though... For anyone interested I can recommend Vulkk's Companions Status List instead, which is much more detailed and he actually keeps it up to date.

7. A Traitor Among the Chiss - The Story (2017) - 359 views

Seeing this one on the list actually came as a bit of a surprise to me, as it was "just" a story review. Why were people so keen on reading someone else's thoughts on this flashpoint? Did lapsed players want to know what was happening to help them decide whether to re-sub for this new content or not? Maybe it was just because this update raised some questions at the time it came out, such as about Theron's real status or what was revealed by the mysterious star map, both of which were matters I addressed in the post.

8. KotFE Chapter by Chapter - Chapter 16: The Battle of Odessen (2016) - 274 views

Another kind of surprising one to me. I have several theories as to why people might be finding this one. One is that they are looking for help with the Arcann fight, for which the post provides some guidance but not much, and the other is that some might be agonising over whether to shoot at Senya or not and wondering what consequences it has. Surprise: there are none; the outcome of the chapter is the same either way.

9. KotET Chapter by Chapter - Chapter 6: The Dragon's Maw (2017) - 250 views

I'm guessing this one gets a fair number of hits because people are looking for hints for the puzzle section. Unfortunately I didn't provide any myself, but I did include links to actual guides in the post, so I don't feel too bad about people finding this post while searching for help.

10. So THERE's That Skytrooper Control Device (2016) - 230 views

This post is pretty much what it says on the tin - an explanation of where to find the Skytrooper Control Device for the bonus mission in KotFE chapter 15. Ironically, the last time I played through this chapter, I failed to find it myself again. After writing a whole post with screenshots about it. I suck. Still, I'm glad it's on the list because it's one of those few posts that were specifically meant to be helpful, and it looks like it has been.

It's interesting to me to see how many of last year's most popular posts were related to story. I guess this is not something that a lot of SWTOR fan sites discuss in depth anymore?

Anyway, see you in about a year for a celebration of the next 100!