Friday, September 1, 2017

#RPGaDay 2017 - A Retrospective

Another 31 days down, another 31 posts for #RPGaDay finished.  As always, it was a fun activity. Although there was one major dud of a question (Day 24: PWYW was a very niche question), the alternate questions saved it from being the sub-par day.

On the selfish angle, I've subscribed to a few extra blogs with interesting answers, but most stopped posting by Day10.  Heck, some haven't posted anything for the rest of August!

Reading through the throngs of  dull "My favorite character was a warforged alchemist with the transplanted brain of a were-kanagroo in 4th Edition." answers on Twitter, I honestly gave up my daily search on the latest tweets pretty quickly.   I barely watch Youtube videos as it is, much less people sitting there talking about gaming, when I could read their blog in a quarter of the time and get much more out of it.  Heck, I rarely go back to my "note to self" recordings about gaming I make when I drive home from work and many times I should.  Sorry, I'm not that demographic.

Traffic on this blog did get a boost, which was far better than prior years.  I try to post "normal" stuff everyday, so with the extra post from #RPGaDay, I was up about 30% from when I normally double post in a day.

Then that third week hits (with or without GenCon) and historically traffic sort of tapers off.  Nature of the beast (or the questions), I guess.
As of Midnight 9/1/2017 - Previous years include all historical pageviews. 
And despite an effort on my part to make my tweets "pleasing," with a picture, a link, and an attempt to make it appear that I actually wanted someone to visit my site, Twitter traffic was a veritable ghost town.

I got a serious boatload of traffic from my public Facebook links.  A lot of my blog-less friends gave their answers in the comments, and since I posted it publicly, their gaming friends must have seen it on their own feeds.  Lots of conversation, some interesting discoveries, and a good time by all.

In a pleasant surprise, Twitter got slaughtered by Google+ as a traffic source for most of the process. There's a very active gaming community on it, and a few key "+1's" generated some surprising hits.

So, where do we go for the 5th Annual RPGaDay in 2018?  I say let's go back to RPGaDay 2014 questions, and use  a "where are they now?" style, where applicable, for those gamers who have participated since the beginning.  That wouldn't help the "Still playing only Pathfinder" crowd, but would expand answers to "Toon is still my #1 humor game, but I had a great time learning Paranoia XP." or "PbtA is soooo much better than Fate Accelerated (or vice versa)."

Waiting with bated breath for #RPGaDay2018....

2 comments:

  1. This was fun - thanks again for bringing it to my attention!

    I posted stuff on both my blog and on Facebook - although the Facebook stuff was in a private group that I initially set up as a place to organize gaming amongst my friends. I posted daily for the first bit on the blog, but then started posting every few days. On the Facebook group I managed to post every day. Even though it was a closed group of just friends (or perhaps BECAUSE it was a closed group of just friends) the Facebook posts ALWAYS got responses and some stirred up some serious discussion. The Blog posts mostly got [sound of crickets]. It was fun to think about the questions and that got me thinking about role-playing more and hoe much I REALLY MISS running role-playing games (or "tabletop skirmish adventures")!

    Will I do it next year? Well... it seems like they're really scraping the bottom of the barrel trying to come up with all new questions each year, so... I don't know... I might. I'll probably stick to posting on the Facebook group and maybe stop by here and post my answers as replies to yours. I don't think I'll bother posting them on my own blog though.

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  2. Tim, It was my pleasure!

    I'll continue to this year in and year out. With kids being little, this was my only RPG outlet some years.

    I do hope they revisit some of the original Year one questions, especially for those who just found out about it. Don't know about what to do for the other years, but 5, 10, 15.... should go back to some standard stuff. I'm posting a wargaming survey later this months hat I did years ago that in that same vein....

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