'Tis the Season for Screamin'

First, a bit of administrivia: This post is my 125th of the year, matching my total for 2012. Obviously, I anticipate posting more, but I probably won't reach my personal record of 214 from last year. This year, my posting has been really inconsistent from month to month, for various reasons. I started out with an ambitious goal of posting every day, emulating Belghast. However that quickly fell by the wayside, except during the Blaugust community event sponsored by the Aggronaut himself. I came to the realization that posting daily is really not practical for me. My readership has steadily grown, however; such that as of this morning, October is my fourth highest month for page hits since I began blogging almost 5 years ago, and it only surpassed September a couple days ago. This not exactly another Bragtoberfest post, and there are certainly more prolific and more popular bloggers out there. But these sorts of stats excite me, so thank you Dear Reader, for sharing some of your day with me.

Scooter and I are about halfway through Stonefield on our new characters, Sonnenblume and Girasol. I am definitely enjoying Rift right now. We're approaching this play-through much more casually, doing things we wouldn't normally spend much time on, like fishing dailies. The game has been retooled since the Storm Legion expansion, I guess. A lot of quests no longer require returning to the quest giver, and all the KTR-style quests have been reinvented as "Carnage" quests that trigger as soon as you kill the first creature of a given type. It certainly helps the flow of the zone, though we still got ahead of ourselves twice already in Stonefield. After a couple years of playing together, Scooter and I have developed a rhythm of combat and communication that I think works well. Not that there aren't glitches.  But I really love that we can share this hobby.

It's Autumn Harvest time in Rift, complete with a bunch of Halloween style items in the store: mounts, costumes, and dimension items. I am having technical issues with my dimensions right now, being able to access only Faen's Retreat, even though I own Warden's point and (in theory) Dormant Core. But I am very tempted by the Halloween themed Dimensions on offer—not to mention all the decor, like cobwebs and jack-o'-lanterns. I don't have enough experience with the event to know if it extends into the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday—celebrated in late November—but for now, there don't appear to be any items reflecting it in the store.

Despite downloading a pretty big patch yesterday evening, I couldn't find any evidence of the Autumn Harvest in Meridian or Granite Falls. Perhaps that crops up in a day or so? Or maybe I just don't know where to find it.

Meanwhile, Halloween has begun in The Secret World. Arguably the biggest event of the year (barely rivaled by Krampusnacht), Halloween in TSW is something special. Heck, The first major zone, Solomon Island, is locked in an eternal October. Of course, they've added something every year, from the Cat God, to SuperJack, and Urban Legends missions. Any TSW player interested in the shirt modeled above can redeem it for their account using the promo code: HALLOWEEN2014TEE. I assume it is a free gift from Joel and crew, available for only a limited time. Since the patch dropped just this morning, I haven't had a chance to check it out. But I will tonight, as Beyond the Veil airs live from in-game with plenty of tricks and treats. Join us about 7p.m. Eastern Time on Holosuite's Twitch channel.

~~~

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. If you are reading this post through RSS or Atom feed—especially more than a couple hours after publication—I encourage you to visit the actual page, as I often make refinements after the fact. The mobile version also loses some of the original character of the piece due to simplified formatting.