Programmer, Analyst, Learner, Leader, Gamer

So apparently I am an epic fail at advertising. Aside from a few select places on the net, my attempts at advertising so far have not… gone well. :-(  Call me a little overly ambitious, but I advertised my new side project on 27 different places across the net. Most people said things like “good luck with your gold sales” and other such comments. MMORPG.Com didn’t shun me though which is promising. My hopes are that the few places which haven’t shunned my advertising will start to spread the word. Hopefully my story gets Dugg as well and more and more people start to get exposure to the site.

Once I have a ton of people signed up for the newsletter then I will announce the beta launch of the site. You know after dealing with this advertising crap, I think back to my days of owning my own business. I loved doing the work, but hated the advertising.

I guess since the word is out, I might as well announce it here:
http://www.mmoleader.com

I’ve been blogging since 2005. Over the years I’ve run a personal blog, a professional blog, and some gaming blogs. I got tired of blogging in so many places that if you are a reader of my blog you know that about a month ago I merged everything “under one roof” so to speak. Now that I’ve merged so many of my different blogs into one place, I am now forced to ask myself… do I have an audience? Has the merging of my content into one blog helped or hurt my ability to advertise and get comments on some of the things I blog about?

I originally made my blog for my own memory keeping purposes, but I wonder if this has changed. Do people care about the things I’m blogging about? I’m sure my guild cares about some of the guild blogging I do, but does the general public care about some of the leadership blogging that I do or general gaming blogging. Should I blog about game reviews more? I’m not sure anymore.

So in an effort to answer the question “Do people care?”, I head out to WarhammerAlliance.Com to ask the writers out there for feedback. Maybe people do care and I just haven’t ever bothered to advertise my blog. Maybe I should. I await their comments.

So if you’re reading this. What’s your opinion of my blog and should I bother advertising it?

Today hallmarked a new day in the lives of pen and paper geeks everywhere. When Wizards of the Coast bought TSR many many moons ago, many Dungeons and Dragons fans were skeptical. DnD 3rd Edition alleviated most of the fears people had with a slightly expanded core rule set, expanding the D20 structure to allow 3rd parties to write modules, and graced the rulebook with the art styles we’re accustomed to from the Magic: The Gathering team. DnD 3.5 made a decent step forward for the game witha lot of new  classes and again further expanding the game. With the release of 4th Edition next week, apparently the game is going to change in ways no one saw coming.

Victor Hermenzee, great friend/co-worker/DM, is apparently spending his evening tonight going over the new rule set. According to what I’ve heard to far, “This is a completely different game. A great, but different game.” From another friend of mind I heard, “The changes between 3.5 and 4.0 is like the differences between 2.0 and 3.5″. It will be interesting to see what this does for the pen and paper genre and hopefully, if we’re lucky, we’ll get another DnD campaign going.

Who deletes an account off of a website without telling the person why?
Particularly who deletes a friend off of your website without telling them why?

A day ago after watching more and more videos about Age of Conan, I was thinking about playing Age of Conan for a little bit. Particularly a Priest of Mitra. Why? Well because from a single player, story driven RPG standpoint, it seemed like that alone was worth playing. So I made an account on TheConclave.Org and posted on their boards letting them know I was thinking about playing. A lot of the Browncoats/HILYMI members are hanging out there until Warhammer launches and a lot of the other cool people I knew from Tabula Rasa. I said I had my doubts because I wasn’t sure if the healing was “up to snuff” for my taste, but there wasn’t anything horribly negative. Again, I am still at this moment downloading the client. /shrug

Well apparently somebody (I don’t know who… yet) thought it was a good idea to not only delete my post, but delete my whole damn forum account. Now I can’t even PM anyone asking why. I’ve had to go to PlanetTR and PM the moderators of TheConclave.Org, asking them why my account was deleted. Maybe it was a misunderstanding and someone who didn’t know me from TR nuked my account unknowingly (like a conclave member who didn’t play TR). Still though, it says a lot about their moderation policies if a potential friend of the guild can just up and get deleted out of the blue like that.

An interview that Kevin Flick of Microsoft (aka Fhearl of HILYMI), conducted with me a few weeks back. He’s going to conduct a series of interviews with gamers for his blog with the sneaky and underhanded goal of helping to demonstrate that gaming is just like any other hobby we may engage in. The interview of me was the first of the series of interviews. He’s not to great with post production work, but it’s a greater interview. http://blogs.technet.com/immerse/archive/2007/10/19/gamer-interview-1-victor-f-laurence-aka-livistos-aka-soriathus.aspx

The interview itself covers my history in gaming and about half of it covers my leadership of the guild Hit it like you mean it. We really went into a lot of high level philosophical stuff in there and really put somethings I do for the guild in perspective. Sometimes I’m too humble about all the work I do.

So today started around 9:00 with family breakfast at Ray and Carrie’s house with French Toast, sausage, and OJ. We proceeded to open presents and have all around merriment. I was pretty pleased because everyone seemed to love my gifts. I then took a nap because I was tired from the evening before and then met back up with the family at 3:30 at Mary/Peter/Adam’s house for Christmas day dinner. Of course the food was fantastic especially Mary’s famous Bacon/Cheese Potatoes and a new recipe for green beans. The rest of the evening was spent talking smack and shooting up each other at Ray’s house. Adam came over and we played Counterstrike CS1.6 until we passed out.

So not only did I win the war, but I won on HARDENED difficulty which I was shocked I did so well on that level. Amazingly though VETERAN difficulty is psychotically harder. It’s a lot easier to walk around a corner and be dead at the blink of an eye. My gamer score is getting up there. Maybe now that I won the war I’ll get back into Tiger Woods and win some PGA tour matches.

Had a very relaxing day today involving a return to Norrath after a hard week and a half. Got a Smooth Onyx Torque in Time P1 and Barrier of Freezing Winds from Inny in P5. Plan on playing for the rest of the eve and maybe finishing up some work later. Half way through Time, Sean stopped by for about an hour so I had to break from EQ during that time, but returned just before Inny.

After some restocking I got to 299 alchemy, then did some farming of Lily’s to finish getting my 300 Master Alchemist title. Happy fun time.