Not just me

· by · in Blogroll, Misc., MMO, WAR, writing. ·

What were we all thinking a year ago, to start blogs like this?

I blame Warhammer Online and I blame Casualties of War, the guild, not necessarily in that order. CoW has a large proportion of bloggers, was started by bloggers, and showed us such a glitzy, ritzy lifestyle that most of us couldn’t wait to start being bloggers ourselves!

Okay, so maybe I’m lying about the glitzy ritzy lifestyle. That or someone’s lying to me and I haven’t received my pass to the Ultra Special People’s Lounge yet. (That sounds oddly Communist. I’m not going if I have to share my coffee!)

Well anyway, another blogbuddy celebrated his first year yesterday and since he does want the glitzy ritzy fame and fortune, he gets a link too. Happy Blogday, Harbinger Zero!

I bet there are more of us out there, too. (If you’re one of them, let me know!) This time last year the Warhammer Online beta was ramping up, people were jumping up and down and foaming at the mouth with hype, hope and antici………………… pation, and what would be one of the best meta-game communities ever was already shaping up nicely despite the fact that most of us weren’t even playing (ahem, testing) the game yet.

Warhammer Online may not have been my cup of MMO Joe (I just don’t have that much PvP in me), and it may have some fairly serious flaws, but it’s a great attempt at a great game made by some seriously creative and dedicated people who clearly give a rat’s ass (one of 10) about their community, and who encourage said community to grow and thrive. I wish more games companies were as proactive about that kind of thing.

I want MMOs in general to do well, because the more of them we have, the easier it will be to challenge the 800-lb gorilla design and revenue model, but Warhammer has a special place in my heart for all the things it did right and despite all the things it could have done better.

Happy birthday bloggers, and happy almost-soon-release-delay-headstart Warhammer Online.

beatles-birthday

11 responses to “Not just me”

  1. Looks like I still have another month to go for mine 😛 But yes, it’s been a fun, interesting and very social ride. I’ve met some people I truly consider myself lucky to have met and read others that just continue to build on my belief that Darwinism needs to step it up a bit.

    Anywho … happy birthday indeed!

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  3. Aye, Ysh, you and I share a blog birthday as well, and once up on a time I had various sneaky thoughts on swapping authors for the day to see what people would do. I’m just too swamped with stuff to get too sneaky these days, though.

    As for why I blog at all, well, I’ve a rather strong writer’s urge, and the delusion that what I write might make *someone’s* day brighter now and then. More than once I’ve thought I should spend that energy elsewhere (specifically on my kids’ journals, which I will be doing soon), but I do want to maintain the ability to get ideas out there, especially when I whip up some more PDF games like I did with Alpha Hex (one more in the pipeline!).

    If I can build an audience for something that I might be able to sell someday, and maybe chronicle game design in the process, it’s a sort of journal that I can point to someday and tell my kids “this is what Daddy did”.

    Right before I tell them to go get real jobs like I should have…

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  4. I’m lucky Tesh, my wife takes care of my kids journal and just kicked off her professional photography career, so it looks like I’ll be blogging for awhile longer. (-:

    I guess I have to own up to Ysh’s comment. I do want the fame and fortune, at least to some extent. I just wanted to carve out a little niche for myself, and so far so good. The true irony here of course is that Ysharros has far more fame and fortune than I!

    Speaking of, when did you start this thing Ysh? I thought you’d been around longer than a year….

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    • First post was August 13th, 2008. I set it up maybe 30 minutes before that, heh. I’d been dancing around the idea for some time and I’d started a couple other blogs elsewhere, but nothing felt quite right. I’ve also been LiveJournalling off and on (more off than on) for… eh, a bunch of years, but that’s mostly to help me keep up with what my UK buddies are up to.

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  6. Warhammer Online certainly did a whole lot to make Epic Slant more known in the blogging community. I’ll always be grateful for that!

    The game also looks to be making some great progress now so I just might end up back there some day!

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  7. Well, I missed my anniversary a few months back. This will be my third year bloggin, but I am so glad I decided to bore people with my gaming observation and rants, otherwise, I would never have been part of CoW’s, which lead me to meeting a great bunch of bloggers or soon to be bloggers like you, Ysh and Werit.

    Now, my observation of WAR is that, it didn’t match up to all the Pre Hype. The WAR PvP was fun, creative and addictive, with lots of lag, grouping and unbalanced issues, but still very addictive. Where WAR really failed was on the PvE side. I discovered that I do like my PvP sprinkled with a bunch of addictive fun PvE that isn’t a version of “lead the player around by the nose”. Overall, if they had more time, test played it for a year, they might have fixed a lot of what was wrong and produced a fantastic game that was competitive with WoW, but what they did was release an unfinished game that lost a lot of players not long after start.

    I hope to go back there some day (I have over 6 months of game cards I picked up when Circuit City closed.) But as with all things, I’ve become addicted to an old favorite and hate to waste time on something I’m not sure will be much improved.

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  8. I miss CoW. 😦

    Eventually, there will be another MMO for me. But it’s pretty much single-player and console games for me right now.

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