NaBloPoMo

I was struck with an idea for a blogging-related event to run on Astaria last night.

As many people know, November is National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo.  People participating are encouraged to push hard on getting an entire novel written throughout the course of the month.

It turns out that November is also NaBloPoMo: National Blog Posting Month.

So my idea is this: Any Astarian who starts a blog in between now and November 1st, and posts at least one on-topic article demonstrating at least some minimal level of real effort, per day for the entirety of November wins a prize.  I haven’t decided what the prizes are yet.

Anyone interested in participating should comment in reply to this post, and when their respective blog is up, I’ll happily add a link exchange to my sidebar.

Behind the scenes

While I was writing about caravans yesterday, and mentioned templates, it occurred to me that a lot of people have probably never seen the code behind an Astaria object, and that I could use one as a very basic guide to what wizards see as opposed to what players see.

This, then, is the template I used for weapons for that caravan.  This is the glowing green Matrix text waterfalling down my screen.

Caravans

Beggars can’t be choosers.  I’m short on ideas for anything to write today, so I opened up a code/design Q&A on the Astaria line to see if anyone asked anything interesting that might prompt something to write about.

Lyric [astaria] you could write about the creativity of players vs
wizards when it comes to the old caravan items
Kizayaen [astaria] That'd be a really short article.
Kizayaen [astaria] "Oh my fucking god creating these items made my soul
hurt."
Kizayaen [astaria] done.
Lyric [astaria] its still an article is it not
Kizayaen [astaria] Actually not a bad idea, though.

I’m going to stray beyond the provided scope and talk more generally about what a caravan looks like from the wizard end of things, though.

Idea report

I received a mail ingame recently posing the following question concerning the feathered cape that one can purchase from the Snipe Hunter as a reward for a number of tokens:

I saw that the cape isn’t autoloading or pvaultable. That’s a lot of points to dole out for something that won’t last more than a boot…. Not to mention how hard it can be to find a hunter sometimes you don’t catch up with one until a couple days before a boot. Any thoughts on changing it?