Looking Back at Blaugust 2014

Tipa had a grand idea for her kick off post for Blaugust, a look back to what else she had posted on August 1st over the years, going as far back as 2006.  That pre-dates this blog by about a month and a half.

Blaugust of 2014

I kind of do that looking back a year, five years, ten years, etc. with my month in review posts.  But here we are at the start of the 10th Blaugust and I figured I might swipe Tipa’s idea and restyle it for my own needs and go back and look at what was even going on back in 2014 during Blaugust.

On the one hand, I wrote 39 posts in August of 2014, so I was well over the post a day metric that was the goal of the event back then.

On the other hand, I barely wrote anything about Blaugust itself.

So what was going on back in August of 2014 that got me writing that many posts?  Lots, apparently.  Wasn’t August supposed to be the quiet month for gaming?  And there was Steam selling Tropico 4 for 39 cents. (By mistake.)

I kicked off the month by writing a lot about Sony Online Entertainment, or SOE, which was clearly, in hindsight, trimming down in preparation to be sold to Columbus Nova a few months down the road.  Free Realms and Star Wars: Clone Wars Adventures had gotten the axe back at the end of March, and July 31st saw the shut down of two more titles.

The first was the long troubled Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, to which I devoted a farewell post with links out to similar posts.

The other was Wizardry Online, which had only been around for a year and a half.  That post was more a wonder at what SOE had been thinking.

There was also the soon to depart Dragon’s Prophet.  I took a look at that.

Speaking of long gone titles, Darkfall was still a thing and was introducing its PLEX-like currency, DUEL, which was a short hand for an ongoing “Do You Even Lift?” joke.  But I digress.

SOE Fanfest… changed to SOE Live… was set to go and I was invested enough to have opinions about news I was expecting or hoping for.  I mean, SOE still had some games.

SOE Live 2014 list

The actual results of SOE Live were somewhat less than I had hoped for.  But I did have big dreams.

We all had our eye on Blizzard because they had an expansion coming up, Warlords of Draenor, something of an attempt to rekindle the excitement (and subscription growth) or The Burning Crusade.

I say that because the Q2 2014 financials showed that WoW had shed another 800K players, bringing the count down to 6.8 million.  That is well below the 12 million Wrath peak, but I bet that number would look really good today.  (Also, remember the days when they gave us subscription numbers that made them look bad rather than MAUs… which, honestly, also make them look bad.)

So Blizz first gave us a date for when they would give us the launch date.  Then on August 14th they told us that the age of the whimsical panda would be over when WOD launched on November 14, 2014.  We would soon have ALL the bad guys.

Chieftain Cheat Sheet

That led to a WOD trailer made up to look like The Expendables.

Blizz was getting everybody in the beta to build up anticipation.

Also doing a build up was Nintendo with the coming of Pokemon Alpha Sapphire and Omega Ruby, also set to launch in November.  There was also a new 3DS to consider.

Actually in WoW I was pursuing the Loremaster achievement, and I was hitting The Burning Crusade content, which ended up thwarting my attempt.  I ran around Terrokar Forest, made it through Nagrand, but hitting Bloodmyst Isle made me declare it the worst zone in WoW.

Then there was EVE Online.  The Hyperion update landed, bringing burner missions that started out blowing up a lot of player’s ships.  They became a solved problem soon enough though.

I was also on about hats in the game… in every game frankly.

Out in space, we were fighting down in Delve… like every summer until we lived there… Querious, and Fountain.

On a smaller scale, the so-called “strategy group” was trying to have a regular weekly session playing Civ V, which came with its own problems.  Our weekly bouts led to fall of Babylon.  But game, which had been running since May, ended when Matt secured the win by having himself voted world leader by paying off as many city states as he could manage.

Elsewhere, Project: Gorgon was returning to Kickstarter for funding.

In more general posts I did a retrospective piece about a GDC 2007 panel of MMORPG luminaries who… pretty much predicted what would happen to MMORPG development.

I was also looking at the go-to sites for specific MMORPGs.  Those aren’t all active anymore.

I was wondering about Raptr, the game time tracking and gamer social media site.  It eventually went under, like so many such ventures.

I was worried about my RSS feed.  But I changed my mind later about which feed you should use.

I did, in the end, do a couple of Blaugust posts.  I did ten questions about WoW, and a video game questionnaire thing about my history.  I might revisit that.

And, finally, when I hit the month in review post, I was complaining about the new block editor that WP.com introduced.  It remains a mystery as to why they thought this block UI metaphor was at all appropriate to long form writing.

So it went.  That was what I was writing about for the first Blaugust.  Not particularly Blaugust-y I suppose.  But the event was in its infancy and the main goal was just to hit 31 daily posts… of at least 150 word I seem to recall, Bel wasn’t going to let anybody slack.

In my event summary post on September 1st, I listed out all 51 blogs that participated, many of which you can only find on the Internet Archive these days.  Even Anook, the social site we were using as a base of operations, is long gone.

So it goes.  Things on the internet are temporary at best and often so fleeting as to be missed completely.