Jennifer over at Girl Interrupted finally put to words what we were all thinking: that I, and I alone, am responsible for the downfall of Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. Those missing 300,000 subscribers? All my devoted legion of followers — minions, if you will — messing with EA’s quarterly report. I devour MMO companies for breakfast and third world dictatorships for lunch. I AM SPARTICUS!
Okay, okay, that’s just a bit of sardonic humor there (insert “smiley” emoticon as to take the edge off). Jennifer’s only stating her feelings and observations, and in a way, I guess it’s a good a time as any to reveal the inner workings of Syp and Syp’s blogs. As with most all bloggers, I love having my words read and discussed and being included with the community, but as I’ve said plenty of times before, it’s not about the ego for me (or at least, shouldn’t be). I worked hard to get WAAAGH! up to where it was, through a whole heckuva lot of words, connections and plain dumb luck, and of course there’s gratification when people say that you’re one of the leading blogs for a game (but in WAR’s case, I was hardly alone — that was a mighty fine group of writers who poured out a lot of wordsmithing on Mythic’s behalf). It was great to know that your articles had weight and were even read by the devs themselves.
Yet with great power comes great responsibility, and with a medium-sized blog comes medium-sized responsibilities, I suppose. I knew that leaving WAAAGH! would send a bad message to anyone still playing the game who cared about what I thought, which is why I oh-so-delicately transitioned to Bio Break, like peeling off a band-aid in slow motion instead of all at once. At the time I felt great that there were a ton of awesome WAR blogs still out there who were more than capable of carrying on without me, and as I said, I wasn’t disappearing entirely. I just didn’t want to feel pressured to keep on writing because I was worried I’d disappoint people or pull them away from a game they genuinely liked. I’m not that “I quit and rant about it so that you’ll quit too” kind of guy.
I do sincerely apologize if I hurt people’s perceptions of the game, but I also doubt that it was as extreme of a ripple as Jennifer suggests. People, by and large, aren’t going to quit a game just because I did or because I stopped talking about it. WAR bloggers aren’t going to follow me off a cliff either — they are all their own persons, with very independent opinions and perspectives. Why are many of us leaving? Probably for the same reason why anyone does — we’ve grown bored/burned out/disastisfied with a game and want to move on to something new or different.
If WAR bloggers were a finger on the pulse of Mythic’s community (a very very small slice of a finger, at that), then the only egotistical thing I’d suggest is that perhaps our departure after having supported and promoted WAR for so long should be a wake-up call to the company that something is seriously askew.
I have nothing against Jennifer’s article — it just made me feel uncomfortable if anyone read it and then assumed I’d be sitting here, nodding along and thinking that it was all my doing. I think it’s a lot like how guilds destruct in games, really. A tight-knit, great guild forms with lots of members and potential, grows through commonly shared experiences, and sometimes just dissolves for not readily apparent reason. People grow bored and restless, guild leaders go elsewhere, and it gets progressively harder to keep the gang together. I share in the guilt of what current players/bloggers feel due to our desertion, but I don’t solely own it either.
I certainly wasn’t meaning to place blame on you, I was more trying to examine if your leaving did cause the ripple effect you mentioned. It was a naval-gazing post if ever there was one, and I never meant to imply that you single-handedly caused the downfall of the game.
I think it’s possible that your departure from the community, much like a band member quitting a famous group, a sports team losing its star player, or a company’s CEO leaving for another corporation, could have caused a loss of confidence in the organization as a whole. I am occasionally influenced by that sort of thing (all my friends are leaving WoW? must mean the game sucks), so I was ruminating on whether the rest of the WAR fanbase might feel similarly as the blogging community shrinks.
I know you’re just trying to defend yourself, and not outright attacking my post — I totally get where you’re coming from. I’m just trying to defend my post, too! (emoticon to take the edge off? Yes! ;p)
As far as I can tell, even the most influential MMO bloggers in the biz, like Tobold, have nearly no readership among the rank and file players. Only a very very very few read blogs at all. In all the guilds I have been in in EQ, EQ2, WoW, etc, nobody read blogs or felt they had any reason to, UNLESS they were themselves a blogger or worked for a game site.
Fact is, if every MMO blogger in the world suddenly decided to stop writing, the games would go on just as they have before.
I haven’t found many players with much use for opinions. Mostly what they want from the web is help with a quest, or where something drops — practical information, and a lot of it.
I am not sure how they come up with those 300k numbers, but I run Census about 12 hours a day on every server, and faction. It shows about 175k active characters, and who knows how many of those are 2-3 chars per account.
You can check out the data I have submitted along with others at http://www.warcraftrealms.com/warhammer_census.php to see your servers population in the last 30 days.
If I didn’t evern read or right blogs I would probably be gone from WAR a long time ago.
This is my opinion but alot of us “Old Schoolers” in WAR loved DAOC to the point of religon. Then when WAR came out and it wasn’t DAOC 2.0, and we couldn’t recapture that glorius DAOC feeling we had years ago.
Then the dream fell apart. We got disillusioned.
Well thats what it felt like to me, and the guild I belong to.
Also alot of use who followed the game got way to hyped up about it only to be let down by reality of it all.
I should have known you were responsible. And now you are using your power to cover many MMO’s… is this the end of the industry?
Hehe, I don’t think she meant you as the cause, more of a symptom
Hmm… I don’t really see any of it as your fault. I think your decision to cease WAR-only blogging gave other people the freedom to step down also, without feeling guilty about it. You were just the first major WAR blogger to do what the others had probably been considering for some time. I don’t think your departure created the general malaise that’s overtaken the community, nor do I think it prompted other bloggers to quit. Several smaller blogs had stopped updating before you quit, and many active WHA forum members have disappeared. Even some of the most prominent addon developers have stopped updating their addons in the past few months.
The community as a whole is scaling back. Maybe it’s a post-patch 1.2.1 correction based on more realistic expectations of where the game is going. As Jennifer points out, the blogging community was pretty large for a game the size of WAR.
I posted a similar comment on her blog, but I agree with you. I blame you for nothing. Your comment about ripples is very accurate. Blogger’s are not the end-all and be-all of opinions and enthusiasm behind a game. What about people who don’t read/write blogs? When they quit, we’ll never know. Of course, we’ll never know when they JOIN, either. Below is a portion of my stance on this:
“I sometimes feel like I’m not even playing the same game, at least from a technical/performance standpoint. Maybe this is one of the reasons that I’m still enjoying the game greatly.
Also, as far as bloggers go, we are still a very small group, we are possibly some of the most vocal players, but we are still one of the smaller groups. Thus, when a blogger quits, it seems like the ripples affect many players, but don’t forget, we are in a relatively small pond, thus the ripples seem that much larger.”
It’s cool, it didn’t come across as negative or anything, I was just like, “Wow, my name’s in that a lot… and I don’t want anyone to get the wrong impression!”
Besides, it gave me a nudge to at least acknowledge that I was conflicted at pulling out of WAR blogging because of these reasons.
“I think your decision to cease WAR-only blogging gave other people the freedom to step down also, without feeling guilty about it.”
That is one of the most horrific things I’ve read in a while. Do you really think that’s true? That gamers are such sheep that they feel they need some kind of ‘trigger’ to allow them to stop playing?
I think Tipa is spot on. The percentage of players who read blogs is tiny.
I can’t imagine I’m alone in reading sites like West Karana and Bio Break because I enjoy reading the person writing; it really has little or nothing to do with the game, which I may or may not be playing. Syp has started writing a bit about his child… I don’t have a child and never will. But I still read and enjoy those posts.
What’s the readership of some of your blogs? Are any of them even close to 200k? Do you really think blogs alone can ruin WAR just by shutting their doors?
No offense to anyone, but I doubt Syp’s decision to move on to other games had much influence on the overall population of Warhammer.
Nice post Syp. Have some faith that your regular readers know well enough not to fault your decision to leave WAR and to know you had no ulterior motives when you made the announcement.
I honestly think that bloggers have little impact on the general game playing population. Bar for information and opinion, possibly to crystalise the players current thinking.
Maybe a few of the more technical minded who want something to read at lunch, while at work. But to think that bloggers have an impact on numbers is not really, in my humble opinion, a go-er.
People will play what they enjoy. If they don’t enjoy it, they will not continue to subscribe. If you want to put it down to anything, then it’s poor game performance in large number situations..
I wield a blog so powerful I could potentially devastate 10, no, 15% of my total RSS feed readership of around 250 people! Does that make you sweat, Mythic!? It shoooooooould!
Hehe, I think the blogging community really is a tiny fraction of a game’s overall population and if WAR’s ratio of blogs to players is higher than COH or WoW, it’s only because our community is/was the most welcoming and nurturing MMO blog community evah.
I’m also willing to predict that bloggers are going to get way more emotional than regular players about the ups and downs in an MMO because they were ‘hardcore’ enough to dedicate time spent outside the game talking about it. We’re the superfans so to speak. The super-fan-o-meter probably looks as such:
1) Fansite owners (e.g., WHA, WHC, etc.)
2) Bloggers
3) Forum members
4) Fansite, blog, and forum readers (not participators)
5) Everyone else
The top four are part of a community and will probably experience ups and downs together for the most part. There is definitely a word-of-mouth factor for MMOs and people generally tend to ride the waves of excitement and negativity together.
Interestingly, group 5 comprises the largest percentage of the game’s population.
That said, when WAR went from 800k+ to wherever it is today (estimating 200k), even group 5 must have been feeling pretty pissy with the game. I’m pretty sure even the casual fan felt either burned, bored, or frustrated with Mythic.
Some of you are being absurd. Approximately 95% of my post examined the blogging community — how the departure of bloggers might affect the community as a whole, if more famous bloggers (e.g. Syp) could inspire a loss of confidence in other bloggers, etc. I started examining the topic because of legitimate concerns expressed by at least two bloggers who said something along the lines of, “Now that so many bloggers are quitting, it makes me wonder why I’m still here.” I knew that I had experienced similar feelings for different activities, so I wondered if those complaints might be indicative of a larger issue: the rapidly declining WAR blogging community.
The remaining 5% of my post (as in, the last paragraph) was the only portion that questioned what effect the diminishing online fan community might have on the game, or if a large fan community is indicative of a game’s popularity. The title of my post may have indicated that I placed more emphasis on the community’s influence over the game, but that’s only because I tend to give my posts titles AFTER I’ve posted, meaning the last few thoughts I type will usually have an impact on my titles.
Neither Syp nor I are egotistical enough to think that our blogs will have enough influence on the game community to cause widespread account cancellations. I was merely questioning if the decline in Internet community might portend a decrease in the game’s popularity, even if its barely a negligible difference.
Finally, I never implied that the blog community for WAR was completely dead, or that there still weren’t a number of blogs still going strong. For those of you still posting and pointing it out here or on my blog: Yes, I know you’re still there! Kudos for keeping the faith! It’s ludicrous to imply that the community is as strong as it was at its peak, though. I have well over 50 WAR blogs on my feed reader and only 10 seem to update on a regular basis. It seems that most have either shut down officially or gone silent.
I also never meant to ascribe any villainy to Syp because of his move. I don’t think I could have been any clearer in my post when I said that I supported Syp’s decision, that I didn’t place any blame on him for destroying the community, and that his reasons for leaving the WAR blogging community were personal and valid (not that anyone could have invalid reasons for quitting anything…). I’m sorry to hijack Syp’s comments thread like this, but I feel as though my thoughts are getting misrepresented and wanted to take a moment to defend myself, just as Syp has done in his post.
@Pete S:
I wasn’t saying that Syp’s stepping down gave people an excuse to quit the game! I’m sorry if that’s the way it came across. I was speculating that it might have helped some other bloggers who were also struggling with the idea of stepping down. I’m only referring to the idea that shortly after Syp quit WAR blogging, several other prominent WAR bloggers stepped down also. I don’t think Syp was responsible for those bloggers quitting at all, as I said. I also don’t think Syp is responsible for any decline in the WAR community, as I pointed out in the parts of my comment that you didn’t quote.
I certainly don’t think gamers are sheep, and I agree that the percentage of the gaming community who reads blogs are small. Personally, I think WAR has some very specific in-game issues that are leading people to quit. I wasn’t talking about the effect of the bloggers on the larger gaming community, but rather, the effect of the bloggers on each other, which is what I thought Jennifer’s original post was all about.