A holiday, a holiday, the first one of the year! Best of 2009.

Happy Birthday, blog!

((twilight zone music))

On this day last year, I wrote my first proper post for the blog. It was our first trip into Naxxramas, and I wanted to talk about why it felt like such an edgy period getting raids started at the beginning of an expansion.  It also  documents my first raid as one of the main tanks for our 25 man raid group (which they have kindly let me keep doing all year).

Oh, I was nervous alright. 24 other people relying on me to not mess up their evening.

I’ve gotten a lot more confident since then, both with writing and tanking. So has our raid group, which happily spent much of last night wiping on one of the new bosses that got patched in this week.

I’d like to thank everyone who follows or has ever commented on the blog, it’s just amazing to me that I can write some blurb and people want to come and chat about it. I love you all. My goal was to try to write something every day, and although I have given myself the odd day off, it’s mostly been realised.

I’d particularly like to thank Larisa (who was the first person who ever linked here that I didn’t know personally), and Matticus (who was very decent in responding to a critique I wrote about one of his posts; and he’s a big blogger and doesn’t need to do that, I was and still am touched).

So with no more ado, here are some of my favourite posts of the year:

• The end for pure classes? (this seems prescient now although I was talking about why tanks and healers should all be hybrids, not dps.)
• I first mentioned that I was getting bored of heroics in January last year. Bad news there, I’m afraid.
• LOTRO: Living the Fanfic Dream (in which I check out Moria, runekeepers, and legendary weapons). More about Gating in Games, particularly LOTRO. The Glory of Naming Everything in LOTRO and my introduction to skirmishing.
• Our game is female friendly, we have wonderwoman
• Dual spec bringing back the hybrids? (I love dual specs and this is my explanation of why it wasn’t going to ruin WoW.)
• The metagame of MMOs (raid leading and guild leading feel like a different game to the one everyone else is playing)
• Are you ‘that troublemaker’?
• A little touch of Spellborn in the night
• Fixed Levelling Groups: Myths and Mythconceptions
• 11 reasons to run 10 mans (I do love 10 man raiding, wish I could do more of it. This post was supposed to be 10 reasons but then I thought of another one while I was writing it.)
• Fury for Beginners, and Protection for Beginners (I haven’t updated these yet for patch 3.3. Not much has changed, except that devastate moves up the priority list for tanking. I’m still using pretty much the same spec.)
• 20 Ways to Fail at Tanking
• Overcoming the Fear of Tanking
• Becoming a Crusader: Guide to the Rep Grind
• 10 Ways to Annoy the Heck Out of Me (I don’t even remember now what prompted this but it does contain the useful life principle “treat people like people.”)
• Is it time to stop making MMOs for a hardcore male audience? (My prediction for 2010: APB will fail.)
• Teach your orphan to be a mighty warrior and also How to be Horde
• Review of Free Realms, and More about Free Realms
• Soloing, going casual, and the tragedy of the commons (why soloers don’t contribute as much as they think)
• The Four Year Itch (yes, I called it before Cataclysm.)
• Howling Fjord: Sins of the Fathers (Why I like my favourite zone in WoW. I was so pleased with this post that it made me wonder what other bloggers had to say about their favourite zones – I suggested that as a shared topic on Blog Azeroth and a few people rose to the challenge.)
• Venturing into Everquest 2 and another post where we decided to switch to playing Fae. Also some more about crafting in EQ2 and how not to write a crafting tutorial. And this was my summary of the experience.
• KOTOR vs Planescape: Steel Cage Deathmatch
• Raiding and the Great Tank Problem, also The Great Healer Problem
• How to get people to read bulletin boards
• Two’s Company: Duoing in MMOs
• Bad-o-Phobia, the fear of being bad
• Achievements for non-Achievers
• Finding the game to suit your mood (my father died this year, and I found myself looking to different types of games to help myself cope.) Osmos was one of them, and here I’m writing more about Professor Layton and the Curious Offline Experience,
• Why Superhero MMOs have failed us
• Redefining Character Classes and the End of Niche Protection (Massively liked this one! Rar to them!)
• Religion and quests that make you go Hmm (it turned out later that this particular quest actually was a tribute to someone connected to the dev team who died)
• A day in the life of a cross-server PUG – I was speculating on what life might be like in WoW with the new dungeon tool. So, was I right?
• Space, the Final Frontier. In which I get 10 minutes with the Star Trek Online demo and like what I see.
• Dragon Age: Your Ending and My Summary
• We also had a membership to the Tate Modern last year, which spawned a couple of posts on Games as Art, and Boobs in Games and Modern Art

My Roleplaying Posts
One of the things I really enjoyed writing this year was a six part series on roleplaying in MMOs, what the main problems are, what works, what doesn’t, and how it could be improved.

• 5 Issues with Roleplaying in MMOs: Why you can’t just live the dream
• Improving Roleplay: Starting Zones
• Improving Roleplay: How to find other roleplayers
• Improving Roleplay: Props, Emotes, and Dressing the Set
• Improving Roleplay: Sharing our Stories
• Improving Roleplay: Measuring and Rewarding Roleplaying

And, finally, my cat.

Thanks again for coming along for the ride. If there’s anything you’d like to see more or less of next year, feel free to leave feedback either in comments, via twitter, or  email.