I’m still playing catch-up when it comes to all these new blogs i’m following, all the people i followed via Twitter and so on. This week has been a busy one, for me, so some nice posts might have slipped- which i guess is always true, because it possibly is impossible to follow all these great blogs out there.
Bloggers and Media
This topic carried on through this week, as well. We already saw people chime in who know both sides of the medal, this week Syp from Biobreak also took a turn and offered an interesting perspective on the matter.
Ravious from Killtenrats thinks MMO journalists should concentrate on being less a part of a games’ PR and keep the dev studios more on their feet. He wants MMO press to be “needed” instead of “wanted”.
Ironweakness shares the opinion that on Massively, there were authors who are from a range of play styles and Massively served as a kind of good example in letting every opinion be valid and important in a discussion. He thinks that in a blogging community, this wouldn’t happen as much.
The last one ties in with another discussion that went on some time ago where someone mentioned that bloggers rarely seem to disagree. I’m so sorry, i can’t find the source right now and i’m pretty tight on time, so i’ll maybe get around to sharing a link when i find it.
More than pixels
There’s also been a discussion if online relationships are somewhat different than real life relationships. Belghast thinks it’s only different if you make it different, while Braxwolf thinks online relationships lack multiple things that real-life relationships have, while having some advantages, as well. I think he’s of the opinion that they lack depth.
My view on this, in short: i always try to treat pixels as people- everything else wouldn’t be true, after all there’s another player playing on the other end. But i’m not equating online friends to real life friends, this doesn’t work- have you tried to explain to a non-gamer who calls you once every several weeks that you can’t talk right now because you’re in a group? Yeah, i tried and it didn’t go so well. I’ll try and keep appointments, but really, when a friend’s standing at the door i’m not going to tell him to go away because it’s Guild EQ2 time.
Daybreak
Daybreak Games have been a topic this week- i guess there’s a good roundup out there. I haven’t shared my opinion on the topic because….i have none. Or i had none. I don’t know, i guess i was and am slightly worried, because investment firms aren’t very good for the longterm health of the companies they buy, in my opinion. But then Daybreak decides to let Dave Georgeson and Linda “Brasse” go- and, forgive me, i’m not a longterm fan of SOE/Everquest and haven’t followed the games religiously, but come on! These names, i do know. I know Dave’s face, he was very enthusiastic about the games he lead, which is always a good thing. In my opinion, letting these two people go was a poor decision and i have to wonder if they didn’t know that already- or might it be true that they stood against something that Daybreak wants to do in their games and had to be removed?
Anyway, here are the opinions of people who know more about the subject than i do.
General
There have been other great posts, as well. First of all, i love how Syp tells his gameplay experiences- it’s just one way to do it, mind you, but i like how they are quick to read and entertaining, as well, with all these pictures.
J3w3l from Healing the masses took a look at the new content in Firefall, while Wilhelm Arcturus took an outlook on SWTOR’s 2015 and Telwyn went and did some advanced solo dungeons in Everquest 2 (looking forward to those!). A completely different approach was taken by Belghast, who shares the best games he isn’t playing.
And then, Massively Overpowered’s Eliot, who also writes the shaman class column for Blizzardwatch, was very mean, at least in my book. He shared his view on the Enhancement Shaman as the last true hybrid. I loved playing the Druid as a hybrid and i’d love to experience something similar again, so i was quite tempted to see if what he writes is true.
Party Business 