Happy Anniversary
One year ago today I started this blog. I was tempted to go through every single post I’ve written so I could give you all the breakdown of how many words I’ve written in that one year period but I got distract after the, well, 10th post or so. That having been said I did want to say a few things about this first year that has gone by. First, thanks to all those who are reading and especially those of you who have been making comments. Nothing makes me happier than seeing a comment on one of my posts, whether it agrees or disagrees. Also a special thanks to those who have linked to one of my posts as that is perhaps the next best thing to a comment.
I’ve had a pretty good year, all things considered. I’ve enjoyed writing and hopefully I’ve been enjoyed by others. I’ve found a lot of great blogs that I now read on a regular basis, if not daily then at very least weekly. I’ve got some ongoing projects as well that I want to really start honing in on in this second year. I managed to play probably two or three times more MMOs than I ever would have without this blog.
When I started writing here I was playing WoW, and that was pretty much it. Since then I’ve stopped playing WoW and am now enjoying playing, well, nothing except for the TR beta and EVE when I need to log on (and those of you who play EVE know what I mean by that.) I’ve picked up EQ2 for a short period and COH/V for a while as well, but none of them grabbed me. I tried LotRO, even bought it after my initial impressions were so poor and found out that my first call had been the right one.
In my first year of blogging a lot has changed in the MMO world. Some harsh lessons were learned. Games failed. More than one in fact. Looking over this year I think a few things have become abundantly clear.
- Bad/buggy games will not be tolerated. For a reference we can point to Vanguard.
- Solid games that lack any bit of innovation will be praised and then dismissed. I’m looking at you LotRO.
- Having an incredible player-base won’t save you from deterioration if you don’t try to re-invent yourself with additional content. That’s to you Blizzard and the Burning Crusade expansion.
It’s a lot harder now to release an MMO than it was just a few years ago. What lessons will 2008 bring us? What will we see fail?
I can’t answer that yet, but rest assured I’ll be here to find out.
anniversary, mmo gaming, mmog, mmo, mmo gamer, online games, wow, tabula rasa
October 12th, 2007 at 4:18 pm
Hear hear about Blizzard … even when they were ramping up for the BC we still had new quests to do and mini events that people at 60 could do. Where is the fun stuff to keep the 70 people happy? Raiding is great and all, but you can’t just pop a bunch of large raid areas out there in January and expect people across the board to be entertained by that in October.
I would love to see some stats on how much Blizz’s subscription numbers have dropped since, say, May 2007.
October 30th, 2007 at 11:21 am
Sorry this is late, but happy b day for your blog!