After one month of publishing at WordPress I’ve decided to let you readers in on how I come about writing articles, guides and more.
I’m going to start out with guides. As you’ve probably noticed, most of my guides have what I call “Blurbs” at the beginning. These are mainly just little snippets of info about the skill that can be useful to people who are new to the skill or want to look into training it or getting 99. These “blurbs” make the guides open with information that gets straight to the point about the skill, leaving the rest open for more general tips or training guidelines.
Whenever possible, I try to include XP/hour or “x number of item to reach x level” descriptions for each step of the way to 99. This helps players plan their goals without having to use a calculator. Including the loss or profit gain is also helpful in aiding players to how much they will lose and if different, more cost-efficient methods are available.
Articles can be a little different. As you can imagine, I can brainstorm for quite some time on what to write about, as a weekly article can sometimes be nerve-wracking. I try to write about interesting topics effecting the RuneScape or RSM community, but sometimes I’ll go “cheap” on you guys and release a post detailing a new guide instead.
Articles that are fun to write, like my book review or “A Guide to n00bs,” will often make it onto the site because my general idea is that something fun to write should be something fun to read. Feedback from the Twitter community also helps on making article decisions.
Going back to what is fun to write, I will oftentimes start writing an article, get maybe a few paragraphs in or a page’s worth in Microsoft Word and decide if I like the article. If I do I’ll keep writing. If I don’t, I will usually save the document and brainstorm something else, or find a way to make the article more entertaining.
Update reviews are probably my favorite posts to pen – erm, keyboard. I try to release update reviews the day of the update’s release on RuneScape, but sometimes the article may not get up until Wednesday of that week, but preferably not any later. I use my own rating systems for the articles, a description of which follows:
Usefulness of this update: This basically just is a rating of how useful the update is in game or on the website from my point of view. If the update isn’t very coherent or just plain isn’t useful/is bad the rating will be low.
Practicality of this update: This rating shows how practical the update is. Was it foreshadowed in a Developer’s Blog or Behind the Scenes? If so, how long ago? If the answer to the former question is “yes,” then the rating will be high. If the update is something players have wanted for a long time, the rating will be high.
How much I like this update: This is basically just a representation of, well, how much I like the update. Obviously I’m free-to-play, so if an update has no new content for me then the rating will be low. However, updates like the rune energy update, dungeon maps, animations pack 1, etc. that benefit free players as equally as members will receive high ratings.
Overall: This rating is simply an average of the three other ratings. It’s just a total representation of the week’s update in a simple x/5 rating.
My newly launched series of Concepts articles has my excited because it will give me a new medium every week to express what I think should be added into the game to all my readers. These articles will almost always make it onto the site because they are fun to write, mostly because I can just dream up anything I want and write about it as if it’s been implemented into the game, or just provide a list of theoretical updates much like I would envision would appear in the In Other News section.
Time for a little statistical viewpoint of things! Obviously, I get more views on days when I post new articles or guides mostly through my Twitter followers. I also get quite a few hits from search results alone, and the day that my Twitter buddy @Linkbuilder linked to my very first post, my Magic guide, on his own site (www.rskillers.info), the view jumped.
The peak of views each day has exceeded 40, something that I’m pretty happy about. The average day has 18-25 views, still a high amount by my standards. So far, over the course of one month, I have received fairly formidable 500+ total views of www.thersmasters.wordpress.com. So thanks to all of you regular readers who have bookmarked the site and visit on a regular basis.
All that being said, I think it’s time once again to plug guest writers. I haven’t had any emails at all so far since setting up thersmasters@gmail.com, so send in any guides or articles for this blog and with any luck I’ll put them up, obviously crediting the author in full. But please, no copy and pasting from sites like RuneHQ, Zybez, etc.
And just a little preview of what’s to come…
• This blog will soon be part of www.runeguys.com. Being a staff writer for the Rune Guys is an underlying part of this blog and I think that having my blog hosted with the site will drive more traffic both ways.
• Quest guides! Having conquered skill guide I now plan to move on to quest guides. Hopefully these guides will help you finish quests and reap their rewards; currently I have none in development, but I plan to make my very own guides for most, if not all, free-to-play quests.
