“What are the facts? Again and again and again — what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what “the stars foretell,” avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable “verdict of history” — what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single clue. Get the facts!”
—- Lazarus Long
A motto for pre-release/beta MMO reporting among bloggers if ever I heard one.
Objectivity first; save the emotionally invested testimonies – good or bad – for when you’ve been playing the game for six months after release.
Bonus Poster’s Commentary:
It’s an obvious statement, but as an MMO developer you simply can’t win when it comes to a great many bloggers.
If you hide your MMO from view and choose to hype it through your marketing department then many bloggers will be massively disappointed that the game didn’t live up to every fantasy they had based upon the details upon which you fed them; details which they spent months or years speculating over to their audience in the hope of being able to produce the ‘told you so’ post at the end of it all.
If you let bloggers see for themselves beforehand, many will burn themselves out on the game, ruin every aspect of delight, exploration and discovery, and eventually become disheartened with the whole affair as they let their passion consume them in a flurry of trying to be the first to report on the all the details, to be The One who discovered X, or revealed Y, so they can produce an ‘I told you so first’ post at the end of it all.
I honestly don’t know how developers see the blogging community with respect to a pre-launch game, but I would picture it as treading that fine line between a blessing and curse. A blurse, maybe? Or a Curessing, but that sounds a bit creepy.
For example: on the one hand you can see the massive swell of interest that has been built around Trion’s Rift by all the reports coming out of the beta, a marketer’s wet dream. Yet we are already witnessing the beginnings of the backlash – oh fickle winds of the blogging blurse how quick your change of direction, from frothing adulation to cold cynicism in the blink of a beta. I feel that’s the problem with a much of the ‘reporting’ in the blogosphere, it’s all so black and white – no shades of grey; MMOs are either Amazing! Fabulous! Divine! or Garbage! Broken! Unacceptable! These are the reasons why most bloggers can never be considered journalists – Objectivity and Emotional Investment. We as bloggers get too close to the subject, invest too much into it on a personal level – if a war correspondent reported in the same way that some bloggers do, it would be the equivalent of them taking-up arms and involving themselves in the fighting.
I’m not sure there’s a good answer to it, this situation we find ourselves in, one which seems almost unique in the gaming industry – where the grass roots can sample huge sections of a game before it is released (to the point of not needing to buy it on release because they’ve burnt out on it) and thus report on it to others. A situation that is needed in order to be able to test the vast number of multiplayer interactions, something which cannot be replicated by a small Test or QA team, and which would be prohibitively expensive to try to carry out using employees on a payroll. Thus the blurse: the developer gets a veritable horde of free stress testing (for many applications of ‘stress’) which can quickly highlight undesirable emergent behaviour and exploits well before release, but at the same time they expose their game to the opinions of bloggers who may have been emotionally involved with it for many months, through thick and thin, and who will by their very nature play the game to the point of destruction – the destruction of their own enthusiasm for the thing as much as anything.
It’s a system that seems to lack any natural checks and balances. It is insular, self-feeding – incestuous almost, and thus subject to the mutation of sentiment that such a system creates.
The law of gravitational MMO enthusiasm: what goes up in one’s estimation, must eventually come down. World of Warcraft being the only MMO so far that managed to break free of gravity and achieve an, albeit vastly elongated, decaying orbit.
Every MMO that is praised by the thronging masses need only wait, soon enough someone will shout “The Emperor has no clothes!” and everyone will suddenly see that the emperor is naked and that they have been fooled! Yet sometimes I wonder whether the emperor is, in fact, still clothed. The fable inverted. Consider that perhaps sometimes the crowd has been fooled by the person who claimed that there were no clothes, and now they are all convinced it is so, not wanting to disagree with someone so adamant. They all point and laugh at the emperor, mock him, and imagine that they can see all his naked faults, when in actual fact he was still wearing very fine clothes indeed.
It seems that the very nature of the blogging blurse is to raise an MMO out of obscurity into the hearts and minds of millions of players, and then, inevitably, attempt to drag that image back down into the depths of murky insignificance.
All before the game has even been released.
Yet after all that, the proportion of potential players who actually follow the MMO blogosphere is probably still quite small, and while those players may indeed be the invested opinion makers in the MMO community, if a post-launch game ends up being quite-good-actually, it will almost inevitably find an audience to reflect that.
My own beta-ometer is saying that Rift seems better than WAR was at this point, and of similar quality to open-beta LotRO. If it’s as successful as either one of those games, I’m sure Trion will be immensely pleased.
Yet after all that, the proportion of potential players who actually follow the MMO blogosphere is probably still quite small,
I’m not sure it’s anything we could ever measure, but it would be fascinating to see what sort of influence the MMO blogosphere does have, maybe not over all potential gamers, but over that core of MMO players who might provide the groundswell of enthusiastic support that gets the word out to non-MMO players. Understand I’m talking about the bigger blogs, not KiaSA which I think it’s fair to say barely registers in the MMO blogsphere; I do wonder what influence those bigger sites have, perhaps not directly, but through their readership telling their friends, and they their friends, and so on.
Certainly some developers have tried to engage MMO bloggers as a way to promote their game; I wonder how many more box sales WAR, for example, got through its various courtings of MMO bloggers. Obviously, no amount of gushing is going to get people to stay if the game is bad.
As for the case of the general populace not following MMO blogs, well that’s almost certainly true, but then, type “Rift review” into Google, and for me, at least, it provides an MMO blog as the top search result.
My own beta-ometer is saying that Rift seems better than WAR was at this point, and of similar quality to open-beta LotRO.
I’m certainly encouraged by what I’ve seen, but whether the game will have substance… whether it will have legs enough for the long run? Well, that’s the impossible question that some bloggers seem determined to attempt to answer long before the game has even released.
Get the facts? Really? For something that purely entertainment, for something where the enjoyment is primarily emotional? When have mere facts ever been able to tell the real tale in this situation?
But if we must attempt to stick to the facts on making a buying decision, we have only what Trion Worlds let us see/play on which to make that decision. We can only interpolate and project based on what is available. That is all we can slice and dice and stare at.
And it was Trion who invited us in, encouraged us, waived any NDA. Go forth and spread the word seemed to be the message. In that environment taking to task bloggers who write opinion pieces about the game based on what they have been shown plus their past experience with a bit of gut feeling mixed in seems a futile and misguided endeavor.
Get the facts? Really? For something that purely entertainment
Yes, for something that’s still in beta, I feel this is right. I’m not saying don’t report about experiences, but non-objective and emotional opinion pieces and reviews of a piece of software that is still in a state of flux are getting old. This ‘Brilliant! Brilliant! Brilliant! Oh I’ve played it too much I don’t like it any more’ reporting before a game is even released reflects badly on bloggers as a community.
When companies start to call them Review/Preview Events then by all means people should go for it, let rip; all the while it’s a beta test, however, it would behove people to report the details of the game, and save the love/hate opinion pieces for the final product, the product that customers will actually be paying for.
This isn’t meant as some sort of law, they are simply the musings of one who has stopped reading certain blogs because they keep doing this with every new game that gets released. And it’s pointless.
“while it’s a beta test, however, it would behove people to report the details of the game, and save the love/hate opinion pieces for the final product, the product that customers will actually be paying for.”
I disagree. Facts and details are fine for support of opinions, but make for dry reading on their own. Opinion and perception is all that bloggers really have to add.
I think when a company runs events like Trion has been, they are clearly asking for public responses. They want buzz in the build-up to launch and clearly buy into the “no bad publicity” school of thought.
Besides which, the game is already for sale and people are paying for it. Buying decisions are being made right now. I’ve seen my share of “pre-ordered and subscribed for 6 months” posts.
I think when a company is actively marketing and actively selling a product, the gloves are off. What we’re seeing in a beta a scant two weeks before the pre-order launch is pretty much what we’re going to get when things go live.
To your last point, I concur that there are bloggers out there that offer… shall we say opinions of little value? But I am fine with that, since it helps be gauge the value of their opinions going forward.
I know the bloggers whose opinions I value, whose opinions often mirror my own in the long run, and those bloggers with whom I tend to disagree with, often drastically, but to whom I continue to listen just to make me think about what is going on.
In short, letting idiots self-identify is not part of the problem, it is part of the solution!
There’s a further part in that MMO bloggers (and people in general) are herd animals. A few influential people get into an MMO beta and loves it, everyone’s clamoring to get into it. “Best thing since sliced bread” this and “better than the second coming of robotic raptor Jesus” that.
Then, as you point out, the tide turns for whatever reason. Maybe they’re tired of the game. Maybe the looming launch date makes it seem that the person’s pet issues won’t be implemented by then (despite the developers PROMISING it would be… in some obscure comment on a third-party site responding to a question not even vaguely related to the topic…) whatever. Again, like a herd following the leader, the attitudes change. “WoW ripoff” or “releasing too early!” or whatever.
And then the cycle repeats for the next one.
@wilhelm2451:
I disagree. Facts and details are fine for support of opinions, but make for dry reading on their own.
Hoom, I would have to disagree in turn, as I believe it is possible to construct a well written piece that outlined the systems and mechanics and details of a game without resorting to whether the author thought it was necessarily good or bad. This would not, for example, rule out comparisons to other games for reference purposes.
Opinion and perception is all that bloggers really have to add.
I agree that it is one of the things bloggers do best, but I don’t honestly believe it to be the only thing. It is almost certainly guaranteed to makes a piece more compelling, but not doing so in an article does not exclude the piece from being interesting, engaging and informative.
I think when a company runs events like Trion has been, they are clearly asking for public responses. […] I think when a company is actively marketing and actively selling a product, the gloves are off.
I’m not trying to protect Trion here, as perhaps some people might think. With a product as accomplished as they had very early on in the beta, it is my belief that they are clearly a clued-in company, and obviously dropped their NDA with eyes wide open. Really I’m trying to point out that I think bloggers do themselves a disservice when they get so emotionally involved with a game that is still in beta; whether they are slaves to the hype, or are themselves responsible for it, is probably irrelevant, it’s the fact that until the game has released, until player populations have stabilised, and until the game has some level of… permanency, perhaps trying to cast anything but an analytical eye over the game is asking for trouble. As seems, to me, to be in evidence, yet again.
In short, letting idiots self-identify is not part of the problem, it is part of the solution!
It’s a fine point.
@Brian ‘Psychochild’ Green:
Indeed, and yet those same blogs remain influential through several iterations of that cycle, so clearly there is a large portion of the reading public that approve. I don’t believe it’s healthy for the blogging community; whether it is merely a reflection of the poor state of the overall MMO community or actually feeds it, however, I couldn’t really say.
Hmmm, you said it quite a bit more diplomatically and with less harrumphing than I did on my blog. That is, I wholeheartedly agree.
Blogging is such a personal thing, we each have to write in our own way.
Having said that, if bloggers are finding people objecting vehemently to their posts, then perhaps there are some pointers here as to why that may be.
Whether a blogger chooses to adapt in this regard, or carry on regardless, is entirely and understandably up to them.
Caveat lector. Any reader who takes the hyperbole and mood swings of the typical game blogger as objective fact is a fool :)
Most blogs are extremely subjective and unconstrained by any desire to be held to professional journalistic standards. This is why a blog is the top search result for “Rift Review” – any print journalist would at most call their thoughts a “preview”, being well aware that games in beta are subject to change (even Rift, which has made a number of fairly large gameplay changes over the last month).
If a blog has any duty beyond satisfying the writer it can only be to entertain the reader.
I read the ones I read for the wit or prose-style of the blogger, not for information about games. If a particular blogger happens to swing from hysterical fawning to apoplectic rage in consecutive posts on the same game, that just adds to the entertainment value.