To the one hundred and thirty or so bloggers out there who posted the Warhammer Online release date, with perhaps a token copy and paste of the blurb output by Mythic’s ineluctable hype machine.
Why?
I have a copy of the Warhammer Online newsletter in my inbox this morning, one whole day after having to trawl through an RSS Feed List that was triple its normal size, and guess what that newsletter tells me, here’s a hint: it’s not telling me anything to do with the release date of Wrath of the Lich King.
Does this stem from that laughable notion that bloggers are somehow related to the press? Is this some sort of “Stop the presses!” “Hold the front page!” mentality, because if you hadn’t noticed there are no presses, and the front pages of blogs don’t need to be held (they are in fact quite self confident and don’t need the comforting reassurance of someone’s body pressed against them). There is no scoop to be had, because this is not a format where if you get the story out ahead of your rivals they may not be able to repeat the story to their readership for a whole day because they missed their print deadline.
And what boggles the mind more are those who post a day or even two later with such one line news items. Did you even look at your RSS feeds before you posted? Did you not see the one HUNDRED posts already stating exactly the same? And you… you posted it anyway.
Let us all take a moment to bow our heads, close our eyes, clasp our hands together and boggle quietly to ourselves.
Boggle
Please, for the love of whichever Almighty it is that you observe, stop doing this. Next time you decide to post release date ‘news’, try to add two or three paragraphs of insightful commentary on why this is an interesting event and what it means in the context of the MMO genre. If you can’t do it, then it’s probably not worth posting it; do you really think that you’re informing anyone? Let’s face it, if your blog is not alphabetically first in people’s RSS reader of choice, you’re already posting old information.
Cue a raft of blogs named AAA MMO Blog and AAAAA MMO Blog.
There is a hypothetical being, we shall call him Toh Ken, who is crouched over a steam powered cog-based computer console in the basement of a monastery high in the mountains of Xiahe County, and who is only now managing to read the first few posts from his RSS reader which takes three days to process the feed through its analytical engine and then scribe the content onto vellum using a small feather quill attached to a miniature piston-driven brass arm.
To Toh Ken you are, perhaps, posting astonishing and fascinating news. To everyone else in the world, you are just posting token 1up-post-count content.
Stop it.
You tell them! This drives me nuts – even the big sites do it, quoting every release and patch update verbatim without adding a single word of their own.
My opinion: Anyone following your RSS knows what RSS is and will be following other gaming sites as well – so there’s no point in reporting something basic that everyone is going to know about within 24 hours anyway. And anyone NOT following your RSS will be unlikely to see your “breaking news” in any sensible timeframe.
There is a value to pointing things out (someone has to do it) but a single link to say “hey, look over here, Gameover has announced a new expansion on their website!” and some decent comments about the news and what you think about it is much more useful.
There is a value to pointing things out (someone has to do it) but a single link to say “hey, look over here, Gameover has announced a new expansion on their website!” and some decent comments about the news and what you think about it is much more useful.
Indeed so, I’ve no problem with my RSS feed filling up with commentary on the release date and what it might mean compared to, say, other MMOs and their expected expansions. What annoys me is having to ‘mark as read’ literally sixty to seventy near identical posts of no news or worth.
What annoys me more is that the bloggers on my RSS feed are usually better than that (because otherwise they’re invariably removed post-haste), so it frustrates me that a vast majority of them do it.
My anti-spam word was spantle. That’s a wonderful word!
I suspect it’s a case of free content – oh, whee, there’s a release date here, I don’t have to write today.
Like we don’t notice the difference. I might start pointing this out!
I call them echo bloggers. All they do is echo the news and sometimes add a teaspoon of thought to it. Drives me nuts too.
Harsh but fair.