Well, I must say that 2018 was a very busy and challenging year for me. A lot of things happened in 2018 that really impacted my DDO play time as well as my extra side activities that I do related to DDO. In fact, it appears I only did one blog, one blog in 2018 😦 (not counting this one), when I was nearly blogging daily in 2016. I also had to stop updating the Crypt Crawlers Gamer Launch Site. In fact, I hadn’t logged into it for so long that Gamer Launch deactivated the site and I now have to go through the process of reactivating it. I used to also send out a weekly email to the Crypt Crawler guild members, and as you can imagine that pretty much stopped as well. Lord only knows how long it has been since I made a forum post on the DDO forum boards. In fact, I was only barely able to keep up listening to the DDOCast, DDO Players, and Damsels of DDO Podcasts. So what made this year so different than the previous few years? Well, a number of things in my professional and personal life came into play.
Professionally, my long time supervisor and friend retired and moved on (he actually retired in May 2016 but it has taken this long for everything to finally settle in). This led to a minor shake-up for my staff as one of them interviewed and filled that position which left me with a void to fill. I also had a few other staff related issues to take care of as well. As I started to fill out the ranks with my new hires, I had to take on more of the regular routines while I trained them. We also had a number of other things that rose up as priorities that needed to get accomplished as well as things that I just wanted to update and promote. All of this led to absolutely no time to help contribute to my extra DDO activities while I was at work (didn’t have time to contribute to DDO while at lunch and no longer had any down time whatsoever to speak of) and led to less play time (because I was bringing a lot of work home just to keep up with everything).
Personally, my poor wife had two major surgeries in the fall, one in her neck and another in her lower back. These were the second surgeries she had in these areas. As a result, she has had to take a lot of time off of work and has needed considerably more help around the house to take care of the daily chore routines. None of that is a problem of course, but that leads to less time to blog and do other things. Then there was Hurricane Florence. I live in coastal North Carolina and the impact Hurricane Florence this past September cannot be understated. Our house took major damage and we will be working on rebuilding that for quite some time. Couple all of these things with just the daily ins and outs of life and the amount of game time dwindles rapidly.
With that said, I did still play in 2018, Although Erdrique hasn’t completed his bard life, he is level 23 and is currently making his way to level 30 so that he can do an epic reincarnation and then another heroic true reincarnation. Speaking of that, I need to review my current path and update it. I believe Erdrique still needs Favored Soul, Artificer, Warlock, Wizard, and Sorcerer in order to unlock heroic completionist, so I still have a little ways to go. I really did enjoy the content that was released this year starting with the Mists of Ravenloft with Update 37 in December 2017 to Update 41 that was released just a few weeks ago. I found the Ravenloft, White Plume Mountain, and Disciples of Rage quests pretty run and interesting. I really did enjoy the Barovia landscape. I also liked the update to the Night Revels and return of Eternity. I found it nostalgic to encounter her once again. Overall, I think it was a good year for DDO, even with my reduced play time.
Erdrique running in the revamped version of Delera’s Graveyard in the Night Revels.
I’m hoping I can get back to participating more heavily in the DDO community once again. That’s my plan at least but we’ll see how well it will go. I really did miss the opportunity to blog and to try to extend the lore and fun of this great game!! I hope everybody has a safe and happy New Year and I look forward to see what 2019 brings us in DDO. Thanks for reading and happy hunting all!!
Erdrique's Blog 