Krater first look

Posted on by Nimgimli

Fatshark’s Krater launched today and I couldn’t wait to take it for a spin. So what’s Krater? The official blurb:

Krater is a squad based roleplaying game set in a colorful post-apocalyptic world. It combines the combat mechanics of action-rpgs with the top-down view of the classic old-school RPG and RTS games. The game brings you far into the future of a post-apocalyptic Sweden.

It plays a little like the original Dungeon Siege, maybe a little like Dawn of War II (I base that on what I’ve heard…I’ve never played DoWII). You have a party of 3 characters to start: a tank, a dps and a healer, and you move them, RTS-style, by right-clicking on terrain. You can move them all, or just one of them. So mechanically it plays a bit like an RTS, but each of your guys has stats and gear and other RPG tropes. Each guy can use 2 skills (at a time) and you fire them off by clicking hotbars or using number keys, a la an MMO. The trinity is MMO-like too. The tank has skills that generate hate, the healer heals and the dps has some stuns to do a bit of crowd control.

I’ve played for just a very few minutes but wanted to knock out a video. Sadly it didn’t come out too well. I’m still learning the ins and outs of Pinnacle studio and I have no idea why it reduced my full res Fraps files to postage stamps. Ah well. Thanks to Chris from Levelcapped I have a better quality video now.

So far the game seems like it’ll be interesting and delightfully weird, but it’s a bit janky too. You’ll see a few times where I take a curiously long time to decide to gather loot. Actually that’s my clicking around the button trying to get it to ‘take.’ You’ll also see guys running back and forth oddly as they encounter obstacles. Finally, there’s no multiplayer in the game yet; that’s supposed to come on July 10th.

Krater is $15 and you can get it on Steam or on Fatshark’s site (where you can but a special $10,000 edition and have your game hand-delivered by the developer).

Bird on a Rift-y wire

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So I joined the flock and re-subbed to Rift yesterday, for a variety of reasons, the main one being that gamer enthusiasm is, for me at least, super contagious. Too many of my friends seemed to be having a blast for me to not at least take a peek in. I mean, it’s only $15 to sub-up for a month and satisfy my curiosity.

What I found was that really, things haven’t changed. Player population is still a huge issue in the mid-levels. I play on Faeblight, Guardian side, and I checked the Social Window at 9:30 Eastern on a Saturday night and here’s what I found (click for a readable version):

You can see that the level 50 population seems pretty healthy and there’s a reasonable amount of under 20 people running around but between 20 and 40 is deserted. Now, I don’t know how accurate the Social Window is — honestly these numbers seem crazy small even to me. But they do bear out my anecdotal experience; it’s really difficult to get a group together in the 30s.

The reason this is a problem is that there are Story-Quests that require a group. In my particular case, I had to close a Fire Rift (a static, placed Rift like you encounter in the intro, not a random Rift) in the Scarlet Gorge. Ironically I did encounter another player in the Gorge and helped him close the Rift before I got the quest, but when my time came there was 1 other player in the zone and s/he was AFK or just ignoring me. I tried and tried to solo that Rift but it’s designed for 3 players and even though I was over-level I wasn’t -that- over-level. I’d given up on the whole thing and was riding out of the zone to find other entertainment when I got a ping of exp/reputation and I realized someone had just killed a Rift mob I’d previously tagged. I rode back, dragging a train of mobs with me in my desperation to get there on time (I’d pushed the Rift to stage 4 of 5 solo) and found a level 50 taking down the final boss. I auto-joined her group and managed to tag the mob with 1 spell before she killed it, and I got the quest complete.

I know the announced expansion will support Mentoring so that those level 50 players can come back to the rest of the world and help out the mid-tier folks and get some fun out of doing so, and I think that’s the single most important feature of the expansion. The only other solution I can think of is some kind of Hireling system for folks who’re stuck with no companions to help them take down small-group content.

So my day in Rift sucked, right?

Actually, no it did not. It didn’t take me long to slip back into the cadence of my bardic rogue and it was fun to be roaming the world of Telara again. Also there is one upside to the sparseness of the population and it’s that when you do run into someone you’re more prone to interact with them. Think about it…when you’re walking down a city street you don’t talk to strangers but when you’re on a country road and haven’t seen anyone for 20 minutes and pass someone walking the other way, you’re more apt to say “Hello” and exchange a few pleasantries. That’s how Rift feels. Also the lack of other players out there makes the world challenging in a good way.

Also the dynamic Rift scaling seems to be working as advertised. I closed a few Rifts solo while wandering deserted areas. The only tricky bit is when you push the Rift into 1 too many bonus stages and get it to where you can’t defeat that stage’s mobs. Then you can’t close the Rift and don’t get credit. That seems like a flaw to me. Why punish the players for pushing into bonus stages? I got to where I’d run around until the timer ran out after about stage 2 so things didn’t get too difficult.

So I had fun and I don’t regret spending my $15 but I don’t think there’s enough here to hold me. The solo PvE experience isn’t that compelling and is filled with very unheroic feeling chores. Last night I had to gather firewood and water plants, for goodness sake. My bard dude fights almost on auto-pilot, spamming the same 3 attacks to build combo points and restore health and then hitting a finisher, either melee or ranged depending on the mob. Over and over again. After TERA this kind of combat feels really uninspired solo; clearly you need the dynamics of a group to make all these skills meaningful. Ditto the varied Roles. When playing alone there’s no reason to change Roles.

Still, I’m sure I’ll re-up for a longer term when the expansion comes out. Trion is still enjoying it’s “Good Guy” status in the MMO Player community; they seem to have managed to avoid doing anything to really piss us off and the regular roll-out of game updates makes me want to see them succeed.

I do wish I could summon the moral fortitude to get rid of all these past World Event trinkets though. My inventory is FULL of those things!

Flock of Gamers

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Wednesday afternoon I started feeling a little sick. By the time I got home from work I was feeling a lot sick. I went to bed and stayed there essentially until this morning. So I was off the social networks for about 36 hours.

When I got back online, everyone I know (not literally) was playing Rift again, or getting ready to play Rift again.

I have to tell you, that was freakin’ surreal. Made me feel like I’d been offline for 36 days, not 36 hours!!

As best I can figure it there were two factors leading to this sudden (and I expect, brief) resurgence of interest in Trion’s flagship MMO:

First, an expansion was announced and second, Raptr was giving away copies of the game to certain users.

Oddly everyone who went to PAX East got a copy of Rift but that didn’t seem to lead to anything, so I’m guessing it was the expansion news more than anything that has re-kindled player interest.

Being one of the flock, now I’m interested too. One of the reasons I grew tired of Rift was that the player population left me in the dust and so the mid-levels found me wandering the world with no one to take on rifts with. I’d be in zones with literally 3-4 people. The new expansion is supposed to add a huge amount of content; I sure hope it can also pull in player population to fill that content.

I have to wonder what MMO marketing people think about the viral-ness of an MMO’s waxing and waning. If a marketing person could figure out how to motivate the flock to come back to a game…well it seems to me they could write their own paycheck.

A little more Diablo 3

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When Diablo 3 launched, I wasn’t a fan. I was hoping for a real sequel to Diablo II in more than just lore and the very broadest of brush strokes, but that’s not what Blizzard delivered and I found it hard to adjust. I was anticipating a game with endless character building possibilities but Blizzard opted to deliver a more mainstream title for today’s more casual gamer. People no longer see having to re-roll a character as part of the challenge of gameplay and learning a game; they see it as an annoyance.

Anyway while Raptr was showing people racking up 18 hours in the first 3 days of launch, I put about 5 hours in total in the first week. I just didn’t find it all that interesting so I stopped playing.

Friday night, after almost a full week away, I picked it up again. I spent some time tweaking the controls (I have Move on W and Stop on E & D) so it controls a little like a direct control game (downside is I keep hitting S meaning to backup but instead pop up the Skill window in mid fight) and I have easy access to the few hotkeys the game gives you. I think these adjustments helped me let go of the dream of a sequel to Diablo II since the game now played so differently. I also turned off the stupid, stupid system that makes you bind certain skills to certain buttons and only lets you have 1 skill in every category active at a time. Now at least I have some tactical customization options.

You can probably tell by the tone of this post that I still harbor some ill-will towards the game, but at least I’m finding it fun in small doses now. Mostly I’m just soaking up the lore and the random chat going on around me. My Templar companion makes me chuckle fairly often and the things the villagers say can be amusing as well. The gameplay still seems awfully simple and there are some very odd decisions that seem to have been made as a result of yanking features. For instance they’ve gotten rid of Town Portal and Identify scrolls. Casting Town Portal takes a few seconds and I understand that…you don’t want it to be an escape mechanism from a tough fight. But Identify takes a few seconds, too. Why? Why have Unidentified items at all if you just have to right click them to identify them?

I do miss those scrolls though. I miss having a full inventory and having to decide if it’s worth the cost of a Town Portal to go back and sell, or if I should just discard some low value objects and press on. On the other hand, not requiring them keeps casual players clicking away, which is what Diablo 3 is all about. Click click and click some more! It could almost be a Zynga game.

Another thing that’s a bit disappointing was finding out that my rate of fire while holding down the left mouse button is much slower than the rate of fire I can obtain by rapidly clicking it. On the one hand, the ‘hold down’ rate of fire is sufficient to kill most enemies before they get near me. On the other hand, if the game ever does ramp up the challenge spamming that button is going to play hell with my RSI issues on my mousing hand.

I’m a bit baffled by the loot system, too. I’ve had a few Rare items drop but they’ve tended to be no better than Blue items I already had equipped, even though they both have the same level requirements. Nor do they salvage into anything interesting. I guess they’re meant to be vendored? Or maybe I’ve just been unlucky. I did find one rare Quiver that is pretty interesting..it has a bunch of stat boosts on it. Most of my Rare stuff has been dull, though.

So far gold has been kind of irrelevant. I’ve been spending all mine to level up the Blacksmith since the merchants never have anything worth buying, I’ve never had need of potions, and scrolls have been removed from the game. Essentially there seems to be a lack of gold sinks in the Normal Difficulty game. I understand this all changes a lot on higher difficulties though. I don’t want to use the AH because honestly the game is providing absolutely no challenge at this point (still in Act 1, remember) and I certainly don’t want to make it any easier.

My goal for now is to chip away at my first play-through, enjoying the story and the lore. Then when I have the higher difficulty levels unlocked I’m hoping the gameplay gets more interesting (or maybe even before then…perhaps later Acts get more exciting). Or perhaps I should re-roll as a barbarian (I’m playing a demon hunter) since I hear in general the game is much more challenging for melee characters. Or maybe Blizzard will put a $9.95 “unlock” item up for sale that lets me jump to higher difficulty levels before finishing normal.

Still, I’m at the point where I can jump in and spend an hour having fun just making monsters go “Blammo!” and listening to my Templar pal hoot and holler and ask for more fights like that one. This is way beyond where I was during launch week when I was just pissed off that I’d flushed $60 down the toilet for a game I really didn’t like.

I really wish players could just pick a difficulty level from the start. I think that would’ve changed my experience considerably.

TGIF Gaming Wrap-up for 5/25/2012

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This will probably be my last TGIF post for a while. I do these mostly for myself and at this point, week after week of nothing much to report is just boring me. I can’t begin to imagine how dull the posts are for others! I might start ’em up again when I find myself juggling a bunch of games.

Purchases This Week
Aside from some extra Hero Academy armies, no new purchases this week.

Played This Week
Raptr says 1 hour of TERA and about half an hour of Diablo 3. I’ve also been playing a lot of Hero Academy and Ascension on the iPad.

Plans for the Week to Come
Hope to fit some TERA into the weekend. I also feel kind of obligated to give Diablo 3 another try in order to understand what all the fuss is about. At this point I’ve only put in 5 hours, which means I’ve paid $12/hour to play. That burns me up! But I just am not feeling any compulsion to continue playing.

I might be on the lookout for some new strategy games to play, too. Real, turn-based strategy games, not “RTS” strategy games that depend on APM or whatever the measurement is. But I need to find something that’s not too complex because I don’t have hours and hours to devote to learning to play. We’ll see.

For my US readers, happy 3 day weekend! To everyone else, happy 2 day weekend!

Taking a break, and turning to tablet gaming?

Posted on by Nimgimli

I’ve been doing “TGIF” gaming summaries here at Dragonchasers for a few weeks now, and I often rough them out on Thursdays since not much is going to change between Thursday night and Friday evening. So I was checking my Raptr profile and it shows that in the last week I’ve played 1 hour of TERA and 30 minutes of Diablo 3.

Apparently, I’m taking a break from gaming. I was wondering why I was feeling so relaxed.

See, with sunset so late in the evening now, I’ve been getting in from walks with Lola at about 9 pm. Trying to then compress catching up on RSS feeds, catching up on emails and writing a blog post and leaving enough time to get into a ‘real’ game like TERA was really starting to stress me out, and I kept staying up much too late to try and fit everything in. I was tired and grumpy at work, where I was trying to juggle keeping up with G+, getting in some RSS tracking and, y’know, doing my actual work, all while feeling like I could put my head down on the desk and go right to sleep.

So this week, I just stopped gaming. At least, I stopped playing TERA which is the only ‘real’ game I’m interested in right now. Instead I’ve been gaming on the iPad.

WTF? What have I become? I’m the guy who is always ranting and raving about how we need true handheld systems and true consoles because “mobile gaming” just doesn’t cut it. So have I switched teams?

No, actually I haven’t. I’m not playing action-based games on the iPad and I still think the lack of physical controls makes action-y games not great on a tablet. Instead I’m doing a bunch of asynchronous multiplayer strategy gaming (back in ye olden tymes we’d call that “Play by Email”) with friends. Friends who, like me, were hardcore gamers at one point (and possibly still are) but who (and I’m doing a bit of assuming here) find it hard to squeeze gaming in during the week these days. But grabbing the iPad to play a turn of Ascension or Hero Academy? That, they have time for.

So I chill on the couch, send off a turn and do some work until I get the notification that one of my buddies has taken his turn. Then I bounce over, make my move and go back to working. It’s a great way to fit some fun into the evening without making it into a stressful thing. And it’s been a great way to re-connect with my gaming friends, who’re scattered all over the world.

I’m Dragonchasers in GameCenter and pasmith in Hero Academy. I still suck at both games so if you want some easy wins send me an invite.

I’ve been really happy with the 3rd generation iPad even though I really still prefer Android over iOS. For multiplayer gaming, iPad vs Android is like Xbox vs PS3. What matters isn’t the actual platform so much as being where all your friends are. When I had an iPad 1 I was kind of on the bleeding edge and not many friends had tablets (nor were there many MP games out there). But now, iPad ownership is common among my old friends and, while we’re focusing on just two games right now, there are plenty of others for us to move onto if we get bored.

Angela and I are planning on moving in a few months and we need to start planning and packing for that. The days are still getting longer and Lola is showing no signs of losing her ‘puppy energy’ any time soon. Packing and long walks aren’t going to leave much time, so I’m not sure I’ll be getting back to doing much ‘real’ gaming before the fall. I do plan to keep Saturday nights as my big ‘gaming’ night though (Sunday is the 1 day of the week I can sleep in so I can stay up late gaming…when I don’t fall asleep by accident!)

I’m actually kind of looking forward to coming back to gaming reinvigorated after taking a semi-forced semi-break.

First look at Torchlight 2 (and how it differs from Diablo 3)

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Runic Games is running a Torchlight 2 stress test this weekend and I was lucky enough to get an invite. I already have TL2 pre-ordered, mind you. I’ve been waiting for this game with the same kind of anticipation many of my friends have been waiting for Diablo 3.

The two games share an awful lot of similarities. Both are action-RPGs that are focused on looting and leveling and both are pretty casual-friendly. Both are mouse driven and played from a 3/4 view 3rd person perspective.

The big difference? Torchlight 2 is the sequel to Diablo 2 and Diablo 3 isn’t. 🙂

My biggest disappointment with Diablo 3 is that there’re no strategic decisions to be made when it comes to growing your character. For a given class, everyone unlocks the same skills/runes at the same level. There are certainly tactical decisions to be made (Which skill/rune combo is right for this area of the dungeon I’m in?) but everything is easily reversible and at a given level everyone has the exact same skills to pick from (disclaimer: I’m still in Act 1 so maybe this changes).

Compare this to Torchlight 2 where every time you level you get 5 points to put into stats. Here’s a strategic decision: do you want to focus on one stat or spread things out? If one stat, which one? With the dude I’ve been leveling I’ve been putting a ton of points into Dexterity and relying on increased critical hits for causing damage, and my dodge stat for avoiding damage. Is this smart? Not sure yet, but it’s the strategy I’m using with this character. Later I could roll the same class and put a ton of points into strength and have a different kind of character.

Diablo 3 also has stat increases each level but the game decides what they are and most players probably don’t even notice them. Fans of the game like that they’ve got one less thing to worry about and tell me that they’d probably spend the points the way the game is auto-spending them anyway, so it’s just more convenient this way. That may be true for your first character in a given class but I think Torchlight 2 will have a lot more replayability.

But it isn’t just stats, there are skills too. Each level you also get a skill point, and each class has 3 skill trees. You can specialize in one tree or spread things out. You can also craft a character that fits your playstyle. Spend a lot of points in passive skills and your actual playing experience will be fairly simple. Or spend point unlocking a ton of active skills and your fingers will be dancing on the keyboard hitting different skills constantly. It’s all up to you.

Diablo 3 has some of this on a tactical level, but in Torchlight 2 you won’t be able to get everything on a single character. That’s going to encourage multiple play-throughs with variants of the same class and should help keep the game interesting long after folks have squeezed all the goodness out of D3. (Let’s face it, this style of game is all about the journey and leveling up characters after you’ve experienced the story once.)

It all boils down to more choice. Diablo 3 is about cool loot and tactical choices, while Torchlight 2 is about cool loot, tactical choices and strategic character building. Torchlight 2 also gives you two sets of weapon slots and lets you toggle between them, which makes combat more interesting. Add in the pet you have right from level 1; a companion who’ll run back to town to sell excess loot and buy you some more pots, as well as helping out in battle. Oh yeah, and you can fish for treats that’ll turn your pet into some other creature for a while.

I’ve been playing an Outlander, a class described as “a gunslinger with some secret weapons!” He was ‘born’ with a pair of pistols but soon enough I found a nice bow and I was playing him as an archer for a while. But then I found a nice magical ‘claw’ weapon, so now when things get into melee range I switch over to a pair of claw weapons. Plus he has a ‘glaive’ that he can throw and that bounces around hitting more than one enemy (that’s his first magic spell) and I’ve been leveling that up. He also has a kind of rage mechanic where the more things he kills quickly the more powerful he becomes, and I’ve been spending points on a passive skill that slows down the ‘draining’ of rage between fights. Basically I’ve ignored his ‘gunslinger’ side and he’s still very playable. I could roll a new Outlander and put all his points into ranged attacks and that would be a very different character.

Now, let’s give Diablo 3 its due: in terms of sheer spectacle, D3 beats Torchlight 2 hands down. The artwork is better, the lore is better, the NPCs are more interesting, the sound design is better. And D3 has the ‘bonus’ that everyone and his brother is playing, so if you’re looking for a multi-player game, someone is probably ready to join you.

Torchlight 2 just has more interesting gameplay, more replayability, and costs $20 instead of $60 and probably runs better on older computers. If you find yourself enjoying Diablo 3 gameplay but are hankering for something a bit more meaty to sink your teeth into, then consider dropping a Jackson on Torchlight 2 when it comes out in (I’m guessing) a month or two.

Here’s a gameplay video. This isn’t an epic fight or anything; I just fired up a game and started recording. It’s a little hard to make out but about a minute in I switch from bow to claws, and later back again, and you can see the blue glaive flying around now and then. The wolf is my pet; her health is at the top left corner of the screen. Middle center bottom of the screen is my rage meter.

Game And Let Game

Posted on by Nimgimli

One of the biggest challenges of being part of a global gamer community based on social networks is existing in such a huge ‘hive-mind’ without losing your identity.

Definition of hive-mind in this context: The majority opinion of the influencers in my social graph. The hive-mind that I experience is almost certainly not the hive-mind that you experience since you and I follow a different set of individuals. I don’t mean hive-mind in a negative context, by the way.

For me personally, I find it can be frustrating when I don’t “get it” when it comes to a particular game. A couple of recent examples: Guild Wars 2 and Diablo 3. People who I know, respect, and even look up to are ecstatic about these titles and their enthusiasm is infectious as heck. They get me super excited about these games.

But the excitement dies as soon as I start playing. Now don’t get me wrong, I liked what I saw of Guild Wars 2 during the beta weekend, and I like Diablo 3 well enough, but I’m not feeling the passion that the hive-mind is feeling. I don’t find myself dying to play them while I’m at work, for instance. I certainly don’t feel the urge to cheerlead for them. They’re good games but I don’t love them. I want to. I want to be as excited about these titles as my friends are. It’s fun being in love with a shiny new computer game!

[Backdoor clause: I reserve the right to change my mind about GW2 once I play it more. LOL]

But love is fickle and you can’t make yourself love a game. The best you can do is try to open yourself up to it’s possibilities and see if it can win you over.

But too often we don’t do that. Instead, we give in to the temptation to try to ‘correct’ the hive-mind. While I think to some extent this is a natural tendency (we want our friends to have the most fun possible and in our opinion the games they’re playing aren’t the most fun ones out there) it almost never leads to a positive outcome because our technique is flawed. Our friends love their game. 90% of the time [I made that number up] pointing out its flaws is just going to annoy them (and some of what you see as flaws they’ll see as great features).

(Think of this in terms of people. Your best friend just fell head-over-heels in love with someone who is really cheap. You point out how awful it is that your friend’s new love regularly stiffs the server at your favorite restaurant and it’s making your gang unwelcome at the local hangout. 9 times out of 10 your friend will find an excuse for his/her new beloved’s behavior and if you push the issue, they’re just going to get mad at you. They’re in love! They aren’t looking for reasons not to be!)

For me, and for plenty of others (whether they realize it or not), it’s a constant struggle to “Game and let game.” on social networks.

It’s OK that I don’t love Diablo 3 or Guild Wars 2. Yes, it’s a little sad that I can’t join in on the constant delight that my friends are experiencing, but game-love is fleeting and by the time the dog days of summer hit the hive-mind will have moved on to something else and maybe I, too, will love the new discovery.

I’m going to try and adopt “Game and Let Game” as my new motto. I will continue to extol the virtues of the games that I love on social networks, but I’m going to try to refrain from pointing out the obvious (to me anyway) flaws in the games my friends love.

Oh, and just to be clear, I’m not saying that we shouldn’t talk about a game’s flaws. I’m really speaking to context. I’ll write a blog post explaining what I find missing in Diablo 3, sure. But I won’t jump into a thread on G+ where a bunch of people are sharing the delight they’re finding with the game in order to point out flaws. Let them enjoy the game they clearly love. If they want to read my criticisms, have it be their choice. Don’t shove it in their faces.

I’m hoping if I adopt this new philosophy it’ll make my social graph a tiny bit more pleasant for everyone, including myself. (I’m no altruist!) And maybe, just maybe, others will pick up on the better karma and kick it forward to others.

TGIF Gaming Wrap-up for 5/18/2012

Posted on by Nimgimli

Whoa, almost forgot this. Still boring…

Purchases This Week
Almost got through the week unscathed, but just today I bought Crusader Kings II for $10 during an Impluse “Flash Sale”. I blame Chris.

Played This Week
So here’s an interesting thing. I use Raptr to track my time. If I go to my Raptr profile it says I played 4 hours of Diablo 3, 1 hour of Guild Wars and 55 minutes of TERA this week.

But this morning I got my Raptr Weekly Summary and it says 4:24 Diablo 3, 2:34 TERA and 1:18 of Guild Wars. That seems more accurate. I know I played more than an hour of TERA!

I’ve also been dabbling in Hero Academy on the iPad (I suck..want some easy wins? Start a game with me, username pasmith), and last weekend I spent a good amount of time in The Secret World beta, though I wasn’t tracking it so I’m unsure exactly how much time it was.

Plans for the Week to Come
There’s another The Secret World beta weekend this weekend, and I’m hoping against hope to get into the Torchlight 2 stress test weekend.

Otherwise, I’m planning on diving back into TERA this week. And I’ll keep poking along in my solo play-through of Diablo III, depending on if the lag clears up.

Happy gaming, folks!

NBI: How not to build an audience

Posted on by Nimgimli

Hello again, new bloggers! You thought I’d forgotten you, eh? Not so, not so…

So by now you’ve got your blog going and you’ve hopefully found a writing frequency that fits your schedule. Now maybe you’re wondering how to attract readers.

Well, I can’t tell you. I’ve been writing Dragonchasers for 10 years now and I have like 500 readers who generate less than a thousand page views a week.

Why?

Well it could be because I suck at writing, but I don’t think that’s it because on my other blog I get as many as 10,000 page views/day (though that’s not typical… about 1,000/day is typical).

So I’m going to have enough hubris to not blame the quality of my writing, but instead to blame the quality of my marketing.

I figure if I tell you what I do, you can do the opposite and you’ll probably get plenty of page views.

So the first thing I do is, I don’t care about page views. I’m narcissistic enough that I actually enjoy reading my own writing, so I tend to write this blog for myself, not for my audience. I think they can tell and so go find someone willing to cater to their needs.

You should probably be more aware of your audience and try to judge what it is they’re interested in. How? Simple: ask them. Your fans will tell you what they like and don’t like if you ask them. In fact they’ll feel more committed to you because they’ll realize that they’re important to you. You may not have a lot of fans yet, but nurture the ones you do have and their numbers will grow via word of mouth.

Second, if you really don’t want an audience, be really inconsistent. Write three posts on one day and then go two weeks without writing any. Be nurturing and rational in one post, and in the grip of a flaming nerd rage in the next. Keep the audience totally guessing about what to expect next and it’ll guarantee that you’ll never have to pay for extra bandwidth.

But if you want an audience, you should probably find a voice and try to stick with it. Being angry is fine if that’s your shtick. There are plenty of popular rage bloggers out there. If you want to be wacky and weird, go for it. Again, plenty of wacky and weird bloggers have devoted followings. Ditto thoughtful bloggers who talk about game theory or what not. Just don’t mix these things up. Don’t go from philosophical musings on the nature of gaming to talking about how you want to build a sculpture of your favorite character out of navel lint and ear wax. People find that jarring. Once you’re established you can drift a bit, but even then it’s worth it to preface ‘out of character’ posts in order to warn people that they’re about to get a taste of something different.

Third, I’m an asshole on social networks. People block me all the time. People who block me certainly don’t read my blog. Mission accomplished!

In order to build an audience, DO get involved with social networks but remember that now you’re selling yourself. People absolutely will remove your blog from their RSS feeds and unfollow you based on one outburst. We all have more things to read than we really have time for and in some sense we’re all looking for excuses to cut down on sources. So don’t be a doormat, but do remain rational and respectful on social networks. You probably do this anyway because you’re probably not an asshole.

Fourth, swear a lot. Some people hate swearing and many will get nervous about reading your blog at work if you’re filling their screen with 4-letter words. As soon as I finish writing this I’m going to go find a nice jpg of a naked woman to insert into this post. I bet I can get 50 people to drop me from their feeds if the image is raunchy enough.

For you, keep a lid on excessive swearing and provocative images. None of us can admit it, but most of us do a lot of our blog reading at the office. Don’t make your audience nervous about opening one of your blog posts within sight of their co-workers.

Fifth, and I don’t do this one, but plaster ads all over your blog. People hate ads and they’ll avoid you in order to avoid them.

For you, skip the ads for now. Not everyone is sensitive about them, but some people are, and until you’re established you’re not going to make enough for it to matter. In particular stay away from sponsored posts or links because they make you look like a sell-out in some people’s eyes.

Bandwidth ain’t free and the best way to keep your costs down is to keep your audience down. So follow my plan and you’ll never have enough of an audience to worry about.

Or if you’re one of those crazies who’d like an audience and maybe to grow your blog into something more than a hobby, use me as an example of what not to do. Work hard, be true to yourself and your audience, be consistent, and before long you’ll have a huge number of devoted followers.

I can’t believe you want that kind of pressure, but whatevs.