My personal favorite blog posts are the outpost tours, not sure if that gives any inspiration or not but I wanted to put it out there.
True and true. However, I’m kind of set on doing a tutorial blog post, which I can’t do without photos, so I’m going to refrain from entering. Maybe if there’s one next year I will.
I submitted a second entry today with all photos from EMC. It's a bit lighter than the first one even though it has more words. Good luck to all entrants!
Reminder: There is one week remaining to submit your entries! As of writing, we have received eight blog posts. Keep it up!
But I actually finished writing it last Tuesday (May have done so whilst at work but shhhh )... didn’t want to leave it too late and forget to submit!
I thought there was a minimum of 500 words... so I don't think that submitting nothing will get you very far...
Tomorrow is the last day to submit your blog posts! Thank you to everybody that has submitted an entry so far. As of posting this, there have been 11 entries total.
Now... with all due respect.. there's actually a solution to the blog problem. And I describe this as a problem because I've seen the subject getting addressed several times over the years that I've been on the Empire. And from both perspectives (that as a player and as a (former) member of the contribution team). I suppose this could work, depending on the quality of the entries, but... that's also the key to the problem. In my opinion the main issue here is a lack of motivation. I never felt motivated back in the days myself because there were no guarantees that my work was going to be used. Which is seriously one of the worst things for a hobby writer: asking them to put in plenty of hours and effort into something, only to have them realize that their efforts were meaningless. Probably appreciated, but in the end still not used. Which is highly demotivating. Especially if you then pick up that same work, reword a few things, post it "somewhere else" and suddenly you get a ton of positive feedback. That's the moment where you might start to wonder where you should put your priorities. Maybe needless to say, but I speak from personal (but past!) experiences. Maybe this approach has changed, I dunno, but if I see that the last blogpost dates from more than half a year ago then I don't believe that it has. Instead of trying to maintain standards which I personally consider absurd my advice would be to lower those standards and to also allow the contributors to make mistakes. Yups: My advice is to dare and post material which is way below your precious standards. For 2 simple reasons... First of all you're definitely going to motivate whoever was behind that blog post. Positive motivation is usually always better than the other way around. But also... you're going to make the blog appear a lot more realistic and down to earth. Everyone who follows a Youtube channel will know that you'll get good videos and also bad videos. You'll skip the bad, you may even dislike it, but the thing is... more than often those sporadic bad videos will make you appreciate the good videos a bit more. Not to mention that there are probably also people out there who consider the bad videos good... You'll get more material from motivated contributors, and you'll get more exposure from a more active blog. Boasting about how high that blog is in the Google search ratings is totally meaningless when you can't motivate people to continue writing for it. Which is exactly the situation I've seen for 5 years now.
The entry form is now closed! Thank you to everyone that participated. We will announce the winners soon!
