Of Content Mills and Zones of the Month in Wizard101

I've been waxing a bit reminiscent lately about all my time and energy spent working on Wizard101. There are a few good stories in me from those days, and I'll have to write them out someday. Today, however, I'm thinking a lot about the Zone of the Month feature I instituted. 

I'm really fond of list projects like this that choose a random "thing" and expound on it a bit. It feels like there's a natural sense of surprise and collection to them that all feels good to me.

A couple examples of this here on my blog are how I used to do a pet of the day feature for Wizard101 or how I made a collection of wizard101 player mini-interviews and turned it into a card game. I LOVE IT! It's such an easy content mill for blogging.

Ahh, the Death Cyclops pet!

At Kingsisle I instituted (and it's still going on) the Puppet Pirates "of the month" comics with Jeff Toney where every month you have a new comic that fans caption. I instituted the Rogue's Gallery spotlights "of the month" that highlighted NPCs in Pirate101. Again, it's just a great content mill format that fans track and appreciate so much. 

When I was knee-deep in Wizard101 community management, I set my sights on bringing that content mill to the newsletter with something that seemed endless to me: all the freaking zones in Wizard101. There's a bajillion of them. You'll never run out of them! Even better, we still had access to the original zone-level designers, and I felt like it would be great to partner with them and pick their brains. 

When I was concepting the article, I asked my old coworker Natalie Akilian about how we handle zone pricing, and when I found out we could sneak in price changes with weekly maintenance, I sold our Marketing Manager on it and we were golden. I got approval to discount that zone to go along with the article and with the help of Natalie, we made it happen.

So there it was and my randomness led me to close my eyes and point to a list of zones and BAM, in the December 2017 Wizard101 Newsletter, I was gathering info on the Celestia Science Center, talking with the writers and designers, using the flycam to take screenshots, reading quest text, coordinating zone pricing, and working with the marketing web designer to make it happen.

The flycam let me get great shots like this one!

It went over surprisingly . . . quiet . . . at first. I think people were a bit confused, but eventually, the masses seemed to approve and the discount was actually what made people appreciate it the most. There typically weren't any discounts on zones for Crowns-only non-subscribers, so picking up a random zone on a discount was actually pretty welcome and unique. 

I kept that feature going strong each month up until my transition out of Marketing into Design in August 2018. So in the end I helped coordinate these:

• July 2018--Zone of the Month: Zanadu Sewers 
• June 2018--Zone of the Month: Pegasus Place 
• May 2018--Zone of the Month: The Wild 
• April 2018--Zone of the Month: The Crystal Grove 
• March 2018--Zone of the Month: Crescent Beach 
• February 2018--Zone of the Month: Savarstaad Pass 
• January 2018--Zone of the Month: Chamber of Fire 
• December 2017--Zone of the Month: Celestia Science Center

What's pretty great to see is that the Community Manager and Marketing Team kept that going well beyond what I started, which is impressive. 

• February 2020--Zone of the Month: Chronoverge
• January 2020--none 
• December 2019--none 
• November 2019--Zone of the Month: Aggrobah 
• October 2019--none 
• September 2019--Zone of the Month: Throne Room of Fire 
• August 2019--Zone of the Month: Jade Palace 
• July 2019--Zone of the Month: Regent's Square 
• June 2019--Zone of the Month: Sunken City 
• May 2019--Zone of the Month: Firecat Alley 
• April 2019--Zone of the Month: Pigswick Academy 
• March 2019--Zone of the Month: The Oasis 
• February 2019--Zone of the Month: Urville Station 
• January 2019--none 
• December 2018--Zone of the Month: Northeast Aero Plains 
• November 2018--Zone of the Month: Aeriel Shores 
• October 2018--Zone of the Month: Pet Pavillion (again) 
• September 2018--Zone of the Month: Pet Pavillion 
• August 2018--Zone of the Month: Wizard City Commons  

Good on 'em! I'm glad they kept it going as long as they did.

Seeing all this is making me wonder now, hmm. I wonder what it would be like if I brought this back on my personal blog? Obviously I couldn't direct zone discounts anymore, but it might be fun to let randomness once again direct a zone of the month. It certainly would get me back in the game and playing around more often!

I don't know ... I guess, don't be surprised if you see it pop up again here on TFN!

Happy Dueling!