A Green Mushroom

A Green Mushroom is officially one year old today!  That went by fast.  I didn't know if I was even going to survive the first month of blogging, much less an entire year.  I must say I'm proud of myself and I'm very happy with what the site is becoming. In the first year I've had 40,077 pageviews from 17,664 visits and at least 11,975 unique visitors.  That's simply amazing to me.  My posts are thoughts I'm writing down for myself because I enjoy gaming, but you internet citizens keep coming back to see what I write.  So, thank you readers!  I love your feedback, comments, and discussions.  Thank you for finding and returning to the site over the course of this last year. When I set out, I wanted to write about gaming with a side of media analysis.  My goal was to average about 3 posts per week.  I currently have 225 posts on the site.  This means I've actually averaged 4.33 posts per week, something I'm very proud of.  T...

  An example of Recount, a typical damage meter. I've been running a lot of dungeons and heroics in WoW with my main, which is a melee class .  Last week Spinks pointed out how much harder it is to be a melee DPS in Cataclysm compared to ranged.  I had never really thought about it before, so I started paying attention. I was surprised by how we get royally screwed.  Trying to stay behind enemies while the tank keeps moving them, paying attention to boss AOE abilities, dodging lots of bad stuff that shows up on the ground, having to run around to adds when they spawn, dodging AOE melee attacks from trash, and keeping up my damage ability rotation at the same time.  I always just assumed these things were part of the job as DPS, but then I started looking at the ranged guys and realized they don't have to deal with most of it.  They just stand back and watch the show while hitting the same sequence of buttons over and over. I'm not giving up my charac...

I've been thinking lots about grabbing Cataclysm when it releases and in the meantime I've been playing the descendants of DoTA to fill my gaming time.  In that vein I found some great articles about the upcoming WoW expansion and DoTA too.  Spinks on the front loaded nature of expansions.  Syp talks about how WoW is like an ex-girlfriend .  A great index of info for WoW players looking to come back after a break. A look at DoTA and the games it has spawned recently. A new Dragon Age 2 trailer that got me excited.

Blogathon 2010 is going on.  I learned this from Professor Beej 's post on the subject .  I love reading his blog because he covers the intersection of all things media.  It isn't always gaming, but if you have an interest in TV, movies, books, games, and emerging media you couldn't find a better site to read. Wordcount Blogathon 2010 is about writing a post for your blog every day of the month.  So far I tend to write about 5 times each week, but I'll try to make it 7 times per week this month.  Let's see if I can make it.  I think pre-scheduling posts is about to become my new best friend. Last week I forgot to direct your attention to a great post by Spinks on the slow but inevitable death of 25 man raiding .  She has some really good points about the way World of Warcraft raiding is heading in Cataclysm.  Her point about it being less friendly for casual players really hit home with me because I am never a hardcore raider. W...

There were two great posts by Syp this week.  The first discussed escapism .  He slants his post towards Lord of the Rings and LOTRO but I think the same concepts apply to all gaming.  Very worthy of your time. At the very least, take a look at his arguments for investing in a fantasy world.  It will give you some ammunition next time someone says playing video games is a waste of time. The other post is about explaining a MMO to a non-gamer .  Syp's mom asked him to explain what he does with blogging, which in turn led to an explanation of MMO gaming in general. Spinks had a rant which turned into a really interesting analysis of where social gaming is taking us .  Spinks' posts tend to be longer, but they usually have a unique take on a given situation. There you go, some Sunday reading for this week.