Time to Loot Journal: May 2021

Uh-oh. Time seems to have reasserted its control over the month. That grace period that seems to come at the opening of each year, where time flies by, is showing signs of being at an end. I’m not sure how it is for the rest of the world, but New Zealand’s public holidays are very front-loaded in the year. We have Queen’s Birthday coming up shortly¹ and then a looooong stretch of nothing (beyond what you take with Annual Leave) until Labour Day in October.

So it might be that.

But I do notice that perception of time also seems to slow for me (when looking back upon a month) when there is more than one distinct ‘phase’ to the month. What constitutes a phase is entirely arbitrary. It can be something at home. At work. Or in gaming. In this case, it was the latter. There was a ‘WoW Phase’ and a ‘Post WoW Phase’ and each of them feels (now, looking back) like they made up a larger chunk of time than the month can account for.

In any case — for all that, it’s been another good month I think. Way more show watching and reading than gaming, I think. But as I’m writing this I haven’t yet opened up ManicTime to fact check that. Still- if my gaming time is up around my normal, I’m going to be surprised.

Before we get to that though, time to take a dip into the past. :)

Looking Back

One Year Ago

• Blapril wrapped up — so I shared my thoughts on the experience, as well as some general feelings on my perceived reduction in community spirit around the event; somewhat ironic given the purpose of bringing people together during the period of essentially world-wide COVID-19 lockdown. Not to say there wasn’t community spirit; just that it was impacted more heavily by the lockdown with no end in sight than we might have initially realised.
• Sharing of Top (and Least) 5 viewed posts became a thing — naturally, I also went along with this one, sharing my top five most viewed posts here and my top five least viewed posts here. It might be time to revisit this shortly and see how things have changed. Although I’m not sure I could mentally take it if all five most viewed posts were simply Humble Choice views. ;)
• I kicked off the ‘Too the Moon’ Play-Along — the kick-off taking the form of two posts. One here, the other over here. I loved playing through this game with everyone and the discussions that resulted. I had planned on doing a Play-Along of the sequel, Finding Paradise, but I let that one slide… Turns out, that’s OK. The third game in the series also had its release date slide. But perhaps I’ll look at booting this one off again before the third game comes out? :)

Two Years Ago

• I got really quite into Transport Fever — enough so that I even wrote a getting started guide of a sort. Then I followed that up with a three part series (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) with a light narrative element. Those three parts were as far as I took it though.
• Kickstarter turned 10 years old — so I went over my best and worst kickstarter decisions over the years. At that point, my latest backing was done in 2017 (Ashes of Creation), but I have done one more since! (Coral Island)

Gaming Goals

May’s Goals

• WoW: Kill Heroic Denathrius.
  In case you couldn’t tell, I’ve reached a point where I want to be done with WoW again for a while. But our team, despite literal weeks of cancellations with key people needing to drop out for real life for a time, we’re so close. We had our second night on Heroic Denathrius last Wednesday and went from struggling to line everything up in Phase 1 — from people missing stack removal to the DPS itself — to needing to slow down DPS so that we didn’t trigger a phase change before the 6th stack removal actually went off. Our next raid night is Sunday, so I’m curious to see if we can smooth out Phase 2 in a similar manner.
• Dragon Age: Inquisition — Resume playing.
  Yep- that’s it. Just start playing again. If I don’t hit this goal, I certainly need to remove it from my sidebar at the end of the month. But there have been a few reminders of late that this is a thing I quite want to do. So we’ll see how it goes. :)

Funnily enough, I got the more difficult of the two goals I set myself done. Heroic Denathrius is dead but I haven’t so much as loaded Dragon Age: Inquisition for some time now. So off the sidebar it comes! I’m sure that now I’ve done that, I’ll want to load it tomorrow but ah well. ;)

June’s Goals

• Metro Exodus: Enhanced Edition — Finish the game.
  I’ve been loving my time with the game so far. Not least because it has opened my eyes to the possibility of real-time ray tracing in games, true. But also because it seems a fantastic game in its own right!

Annnd that might be it. I have no idea where my gaming might take me after Metro. I have so many things I’m interested in, ranging from finishing Resident Evil 7 and starting Resident Evil 8 through to finally, finally giving X4 a real shot after all the patching its received and see if I can get into as deeply as I did for the X3 games.

Games Played May 2021

With 43.6 hours of gaming this month, the month comes in as the third lowest since I started tracking this in March 2019. Metro Exodus I picked up fairly late into the month too — if I hadn’t, it’s entirely possible this May would’ve become the second lowest in terms of hours of gaming since I started tracking.

As noted at the beginning though, not terribly surprising given the increase in show watching and reading this month. No particular reason — just one of those cycles I occasionally run through.

Although since I mentioned the longer term, I reckon it’s time for a look at it!

The Blog

12 posts published in May (including this one). Not as nice a celebratory number as last month, then, but this brings up the total to 412 posts on Time to Loot in total. Over 4x my previous best and I’d suggest probably starting to get into multiples against my overall total prior to starting Time to Loot too. :)

Most Viewed Posts

1. Humble Choice: April 2021
2. Humble Choice: March 2021
3. Humble Choice: February 2021
4. Deep Rock Galactic: The Solo Experience
5. Humble Choice: January 2021

And yes, if you were wondering, #6 is indeed Humble Choice: December 2020. Then it gets back to some of the more regular posts like the WoW Covenant ones.

I did the May Humble post really late this month but already that one is climbing significantly too. Honestly though, I have mixed opinions on the viewership of these posts. I think I’d like them a lot more if I was monetising the site, but I’m not, nor do I want to — so I’m not sure it’s a good fit.

I’d rather be generating content that in turn generates conversation, so that may well be something I need to turn my mind to over the coming months.

1. Monday, 7th June!