Happy 11th Birthday, Wizard101!

Hello Wizards!

Today is a very special day! As you have read from the title, today, September 2nd, is Wizard101's 11th Birthday! Eleven years ago, Kingsisle released Wizard101 to the public. Today, Wizard101 is still going strong & Kingsisle has released so many amazing updates for the community that plays their game.

Since 2008, Kingsisle has updated the game in so many different ways, that if I listed all of them, this post would be one of my lengthiest posts. Overall, Kingsisle has done an amazing job keeping the game updated and going strong after 11 years! I remember celebrating their 1st Birthday in 2009. To be honest with all of you, I never thought I'd be playing the game this long! If someone told me in 2009 that I'd still be playing the game & interacting in the community 10 years later, I'd laugh. I'm sure those who have played even longer than me feel the same way. But when you think about it, you won't find another community like this anywhere else.

 Anyway, I wanted to make this post short & sweet (since I have another post planned for Friday - to celebrate Wizard101's Birthday). Thank you, Kingsisle, for such an amazing game! It truly is amazing seeing Wizard101 last as long as it has. I look forward to seeing what you have planned for the game in the 2020s. You have many that support you & your efforts to continue making Wizard101 the best game that it can be. And I must say that your efforts are recognized. Thank you for everything that you do. Keep up the great work, Kingsisle!

Welcome to the 'Bers!

Hi there!

I hope all of you had an amazing August. I hate to say it, well not really, but I'm so glad August is over. The 'Bers has always been my favorite time of year! For me, as soon as September arrives, I start preparing for the Holiday Season - Halloween, Thanksgiving, and of course, Christmas!

At the moment, I am mostly looking forward to Halloween - next month. It's crazy that Halloween is already so close! I actually added a Halloween Header to my blog last month to celebrate the Holiday Mashup - which I'm extremely far behind on, I promise I'll catch up on announcing winners of contests asap - and didn't take it down! Since Fall is quickly approaching, I've decided to leave it up through the end of next month. Speaking of Fall & Halloween, I know many of you look forward to the Halloween Run each year. We actually did a live poll in-game during the Holiday Mashup and the majority of you stated that your favorite Run was the Halloween Run. I really do appreciate that! 

I recently had another poll on the SpiralVision Twitter Account asking what day you like seeing us host events. The Majority of you (over 70%) voted for Saturday! I had no idea so many of you would rather see us host events on Saturdays, so we are definitely considering bringing the Run Events (and other events)  back to Saturdays! So keep an eye out for more information about those type of events. One thing that I want to work on this month is to brainstorm ideas for the events. We want to make them unique, but also a lot of fun. I look forward to hosting more events for this awesome community. I would like to thank those who stick by the events after so long. Even if you're unable to attend, your support for the events truly means the world to us. Thank you! 

Other than Wizard101 stuff, I am hoping to bring back Edward Cringle back to the Spiral very soon! My plan is to start streaming his adventures live on Twitch! I don't know when I'll be able to start live streaming, but do keep an eye out for an official announcement here on this blog. Some of you that have kept up with this character may be shocked to hear that I created this character nearly 7 years ago! Well... nearly meaning December of 2012. Edward Cringle Update Posts have been on the decline over the past few years, but they will return! I also plan to upload every questing adventure to YouTube to publish here on this website. I'm hoping to announce the first livestream towards the end of this month, so keep an eye out for more information! :D 

Anyway, that's all I have for you for this post, other than a piece of news that I forgot to share! Please keep an eye out this upcoming Friday (September 6th) for a new Wizard101 Blog Post. This post comes straight from my heart and I hope the community likes it. I do think you will, but we will see. If you don't, that's okay too. But my goal is to have the opposite effect. So do keep an eye out on this website and my blog's official Twitter Account, @AroundTheSpiral for this new blog post. Thank you all so much for reading. Until next time, I'll see you around the spiral.

A Long-Needed Break

Hello Wizards!

It's actually been nearly a month since I've made a new blog post. Today, I wanted to talk about our events, and a bit of what we have planned for the future. We recently celebrated our recent Holiday Mashup event (the recap post will be published later this week) which was a lot of fun even though we had to improvise unlike ever before. But we recently decided it was time to take a break from hosting events.

I started the first Run event back in December of 2012 - known as The Santa Run. In December of 2015, I decided it was time to bring it back and we started hosting events nearly every Holiday since that time. With each event, we would further improve how we hosted the event & even started hosting activities that would take place before the main run event. Back in the day, we would wait in the commons until it was time to run & then after the run, we'd teleport everyone to the after-party. Today, we host many activities, run, and then have an afterparty. With that, came a lot more work. 

We started working with Kingsisle to get codes to giveaway to you all during our events, further improved our activities so most were able to participate and started streaming our events on Twitch. All of that also came with a lot more work. In 2015, it would take an hour to prepare for an event. Our 2016 events? I'd say around 3 or 4 hours. Today's events take countless hours to prepare for. So it does take a lot of time & energy to come up with everything. It is fun hosting them, but after nearly four years (30 major events) of doing this, we thought it would be good to take a long-needed break from the events.

We were thinking that a perfect time to come back with the events would be the Bunny Run of 2020 - which will either take place in March or April of 2020. This will give us time to improve SpiralVision when it comes to our normal streams & try to think up a new direction for the events going forward. Again, we are in no way leaving. We're just taking a temporary break from the events. The purpose of these events has always been to bring the community together. So let's create a SpiralVision community. Our vision of the spiral has always been the same as the old community leaders. I look forward to bringing that to life next year. So get ready for major surprises going forward. In the meantime, feel free to join us on our new upcoming streams on SpiralVision! Also, feel free to give us a follow!

https://www.twitch.tv/spiralvision