Hey, Angel’s Citadel! What’s Up With the New Format?

I wanted to take a brief amount of time today to discuss the new format that our content presentation is taking at Angel’s Citadel. We’ve been at this for just over a year so far. It’s been an amazing ride. Lots of advice, lots of reviews, and every bit of it our attempt to help all of you, our friends, make better purchasing decisions, and take your games to the next level. Your support has been amazing and we’ve watched as our blog viewership has gotten strong and remained strong. You have no idea how much that means to us and how humbled we are at your trust.

So why the change?

Joann and I have been talking a long time about breaking into streaming. Almost as long as we’ve been doing a blog or content for Angel’s Citadel. We’ve agonized over that decision. Yes, actual agony. Partly, that’s because we both struggle with change. Partly because we struggled to decide how we wanted to leave our “mark” on the community and what we wanted that to look like. And partly because we still wake up and look at Angel’s Citadel and wonder when you all are going to figure out that we’re just two regular people shouting into the void of the internet and not some amazing gaming oracles that have all the answers to everything that might be plaguing your games.

That aside, in looking at our Advice Monday columns, we discovered that while we were getting quite a bit of viewership, we weren’t getting any particular interaction – the number of comments on the blog is still really low. One of the things we’ve come to feel is important to us is “live” conversations. It’s one of the reasons we’ve created our Discord server and you can find us there most of the day every day. But we want to do more. Twitch offers an opportunity to both record our discussion about advice topics and allow for a real-time conversation through chat. We’ve done two of these now and in both instances, people have come with questions about us and about gaming that we’ve been able (and happy) to answer and they have turned into (what we think are) great conversations.

So what we’re planning on doing is continuing to limit Review Fridays to a traditional blog post, but Advice Monday will become a Twitch stream on our Channel. Everyone is invited because the format is going to be a Fireside chat. Anyone with questions can ask them in chat and we’ll do our best to answer. A discourse is even better, but we understand that there is a bit of a limitation there too.. We’ll have a topic to talk about as well (hence, the replacement of Advice Monday), but we’d much rather address the needs and advice requests of our viewers, our readers, our friends.

We will also be streaming live plays of roleplaying games that people from our community will be able to join. Our first one of these will be an Invisible Sun campaign that I am going to run, but there will be more. We’d love you to come and play with us. We’ll also be playing video games and chatting with you on other days. Joann and I have already started a playthrough of Halo: the Master Chief Collection. All of these videos will be uploaded to our YouTube channel “for posterity”.

As of right now, we’re going to be streaming Halo on Friday Nights from 9 PM Eastern time until we get tired. The Soul’s Direction, my Invisible Sun campaign, will be every other Sunday from 3 PM to 6 PM Eastern time opposite Mana Pot Studio’s Hole in the World making every single Sunday an #InvisibleSunday. And our Fireside chats in the Citadel Lounge will be Every Sunday at 8 PM Eastern time.

So yes, there are some changes. We hope they’re exciting ones. They’re a bit nerve-wracking for us. But as when we started out, we welcome you on this journey with us. Let’s play some games, have some laughs, and make some friends in Angel’s Citadel.

• Josh Walles