Happy Life Day and Another Blog Anniversary

I'd like to take this moment to wish all my readers a merry Christmas or whatever other holidays you may be celebrating around this time of year. In most European countries Christmas is being celebrated today, something I actually had to actively remind myself of... after eleven years of living in the UK (which I realised - somewhat to my shock - equals more than half of my adult life at this point) I've gotten so used to the way things are done here that I sometimes forget about how it's supposed to be done "properly" back home.

My last post was about SWTOR's tenth anniversary, and this blog celebrates its own birthday two days after the game. Usually I like to commemorate this with a post on the 22nd, but this year I let it slide because I got my third Covid jab that day and some side effects combined with other issues meant that I've been feeling pretty under the weather since then. But hey, Christmas is a good time for reflection too, so I might as well make that post today.

Sadly the last year hasn't exactly been a triumphant one for the blog, as my annual output declined further from it's previous average of more than a hundred posts. Last year I fell just below that for the first time, and this year I'm only up to 74 posts at the time of writing this. It would be easy to blame the lack of major in-game content milestones that I also brought up in my last post for a shortage of things to write about, but while that may have factored into things, it's not really the main issue. I still believe in my own advice when it comes to MMO writing, which is that as long as your game is alive and kicking, there's always something to write about. Sometimes you're just not that interested in what's happening at the moment, or maybe you're more interested in just playing the game without writing about it.

And really, it's mostly been those two factors that have limited my writing. I mean, there's interesting stuff happening on the SWTOR PTS right now, but I'm just not that invested in playing on there more than once in a blue moon. (No, not even when there are rewards on offer - I struggle enough to get all my alts through the story content on live!) When I'm playing, it's mostly got to do with my guild and Conquest - which I do write about sometimes, but it's not that interesting to me to write about all the time - so I'd rather spend more time just playing, even if it's something else.

Anyway, let's have a look at what I did write about in the past year:

With farming tech fragments to gear up no longer being a concern, I wrote about wasting my tech fragments gambling at Kai's back in January. Incidentally, I never stopped doing that as I'm still missing lots of set pieces and Tacticals for the achievements. I just stopped keeping track of the millions and millions of credits I was pouring into it... I probably don't want to know. On one of those occasions when I did talk about Conquest, I also summed up the reason Bioware was making changes to the way new players contribute to guild Conquest scores, apparently inspired by some strange happenings on my very own home, the Darth Malgus server.

There was more Conquest talk in February, as Bioware unleashed a Total Galactic War for the first time in nearly a year. I also started watching Star Wars: Rebels. In general, those first few months of the year were very quiet on the blog though, as I didn't feel I had much to comment on other than the patch 6.3. preview in March. In line with what I said above though, I was however very busy playing WoW Classic during that period, as my guild was trying to finish up Naxx before the release of Classic Burning Crusade. It's telling that I made a post called "Too Much To Do" on my WoW blog during that same time...

When 6.3 actually released at the end of April, I got busy again though... especially with Galactic Seasons, which prompted me to keep a diary of my activities while I was working my way through its 100 levels of rewards. These diary entries made up a lot of my blog content for the next three months... aside from that, I talked about finally beating Dread Master Styrak on master mode without being over-levelled for it, watching the rest of Rebels and finally getting caught up with the Mandalorian craze. We also had to say goodbye to SWTOR's refer-a-friend system.

July of course brought the excitement of the Legacy of the Sith expansion announcement, though this was soon marred somewhat by the opening of the PTS causing a lot of confusion and asking us to test changes that hadn't previously been mentioned at all. My Galactic Seasons grind came to an end and I wrote a series of three posts to summarise the whole experience.

August featured a wild mix of content, from me finally writing down all my thoughts about the Secrets of the Enclave flashpoint released in April, to my experiences with datacron hunting on Mek-Sha and Onderon, to grumbling about the Nightlife event once again to loving the first season of Bad Batch.

In September I had to say goodbye to being able to master loot and picked up levelling my pacifist again. I also mused about how rich the current expansion has made me and how to prepare for the next one.

In October, Star Wars: Visions challenged my ideas about what it means for content to be canon, and my achievements challenged my notion that I didn't like GSF all that much. I also hit max level on my pacifist, something I was very proud of, looked back on Onslaught as an expansion, and attempted to split the whole of SWTOR's ten years of history into distinct time periods.

November was relatively light on content again after that, as I mostly dedicated it to themed posts for IntPiPoMo. We also got a December launch date for Legacy of the Sith, just to have that changed to February only three weeks later. And now the end of the year is the usual time to reminisce and take stock.

Talking about how I haven't blogged as much this year as I would have liked to always feels a little strange, because on the one hand, a hobby blogger primarily writes for themselves - so if you don't feel like it at some point, you just don't feel like it, and that should be that! But realistically, I also feel a certain pride in having maintained somewhat regular updates on the blog for a whole decade by now, plus I enjoy getting comments and interacting with them, so letting people down by not posting for longer periods of time feels bad.

One thing I can promise you is that I haven't lost interest in blogging or the game - at any given point I've got at least several blog post ideas bouncing around in my head, it's just that when push comes to shove, sometimes I find myself prioritising something else in the end. And even if the blog topic wasn't time sensitive and you write it down for later, the spark that made you want to write about it doesn't always last, so if you miss your original chance to write down your thoughts, it often doesn't end up happening at all.

My point is, I can't promise that I'll be back to writing a hundred posts next year... but there'll be new SWTOR content for sure, and you can bet that I'll be covering it.