Why do I blog? (Day 2)

Continuing on the track of 20 (non-consecutive) days of posting...

I talked about this earlier, but initially, I started writing in a blog mostly to catalog my raiding experiences so I could  review them over time and see how I had been progressing. It's kind of funny to think that I've been blogging for nearly a year now about Warcraft, but have more-or-less completely stopped blogging on my old Livejournal. But that's a pretty boring answer. Let's see if I can dive a bit deeper and find some other, more meaningful reason...

February of last year was an odd time in my WoW career. After six months of hard-core raiding, I was getting a bit burned out on guild management as an officer, raid management and dealing with the stress of being part of a 50-plus member guild and managing two different raid groups on four different raid nights. I finally quit, moved Horde-side to play with the guild of an old friend and immediately found myself isolated.



 I didn't know anyone Horde side, my friend was really only playing during raid times, and the rest of the guild was very cliquish. The moment was made abundantly clear when I was running Heroic Occulus as my daily and I got the mount from it, but had no one to tell about it.

I think it was around then that I decided to start writing a blog, maybe just as a way to get out all my social interaction needs that I wasn't getting in game anymore? Perhaps. It's certainly a more interesting answer.

Very shortly thereafter, I came back to the Alliance side, started my current guild with friends and after a short break, I found myself continuing to blog. Raiding After Dark has since turned into a record of how we went from a group of scrappy underdogs who had to PuG half our raid group frequently to finishing up the drakes and building a very strong core of raiders.

The blog continues to served me well as a medium for venting about issues that bug me in the guild, game or general MMO scene; a motivator for competition; a training guide when I write out boss strategies to really solidify my understanding of those fights and a platform to try different styles of writing than I might normally pursue. Man, that was a difficult sentence to structure.

With my first year anniversary coming up next week, I'm hoping to increase my posting rate. While I don't really have many readers, I think only a small handful of folks are even aware of this, I haven't really made any effort at reaching out to the community and advertising my existence or anything of that sort either.

I would certainly enjoy more interaction with people in the blogging sphere, but I'm also sort of okay to write a blog that someone might stumble across occasionally if I'm going on about a topic of interest with some level of lucidity. I know I lack the theory-crafting class-knowledge to really ever be a class-blog of any sort, but hey, if I happen to write something that helps someone, great!

Right now, I'm happy to keep writing and say hi to anyone who waves at me. :-)