The dead horse blog drama

I stumbled upon a post over at Plaguelands, where Krones calls out Jeff Freeman for a rant Jeff wrote about the quality of blog posts on Nerfbat and Massively. Woot! Blog drama! And for once I'm not even in the middle of it and can smirk from the sidelines. Well, *could* smirk, but I long ago decided that I won't smirk on anything Jeff Freeman writes, because I can never decide whether it is brilliant or crazy. So instead of smirking I write my personal opinion on the subject of "dead horses" in the MMO blogosphere subjects.

The discussion of MMORPGs is a narrow subject, a very narrow one even. The total number of MMORPGs is just in the hundreds, and most people only discuss the major ones, which brings the number down to a dozen or so. The genre is very narrowly defined, especially if you only discuss "games" and exclude social virtual worlds with not much gameplay. Thus the number of possible interesting subjects for discussion is limited. A good newspaper article can cover half of them at once, and a good book on MMORPGs probably covers over three quarter of the subjects there are. I have 1675 blog posts (this is #1676), and there simply aren't 1675 different subjects to discuss about MMORPGs. Add hundreds of other MMO blogs, plus gaming sites like Massively, and it becomes inevitable that the same subjects are discussed over, and over, and over again. PvP, RMT, the casual vs. hardcore debate, MMO business models, class balance, those are subjects you'll find discussed repeatedly on every MMO site. But that doesn't make them "dead horses".

There are several factors that keep the endless discussion of the same subjects alive: news, analysis, and new players. For example the recent round of discussion on "welfare epics" was caused by the news of the changes in the latest WoW patch, which made season 1 arena gear available for honor points. Today's PvP post here was reporting the great analysis done by Lum on that subject. But more important is the fact that while *I* might be aware of a large part of the previous discussion of RMT or PvP, I cannot assume that everybody visiting my blog has read all the previous discussion here and on all the previous sites too. You'd be surprised how many people send me mail with questions like "Hey, did you ever play game X?", when my review of game X could be found by typing it's name in the search box at the top of my blog. With every discussion here is a chance that somebody new posts an interesting comment with a fresh point of view. Google Analytics tells me that 62% of my visitors every day are "new visitors", and only 38% are returning visitors, so I can't automatically assume that everybody who reads this already knows what I wrote before.

Eliminating every subject that already has been extensively discussed from our blogs would not only leave them rather empty, it would also be counterproductive. Because none of these subjects are closed. There is no consensus on virtual property rights, or how much PvP a game should have, or whether raiding is good or bad for a game. You'd *think* for example that developers would have learned a lesson from Ultima Online, and then Auran brings out unlimited PvP MMO Fury and promptly goes bankrupt over it, with 9 out of 10 bloggers thinking "I could have told you so" without even having played it.

So when I read other people's blogs, or sites like Massively (where the discussion admittedly tends to be less deep than on personal blogs), and I stumble upon a well-known subject, I just read it quickly or even just diagonally to check whether there are any hidden news or new insights. If not, I just move on to the next article. But just because something might be a "dead horse" to me, doesn't make it an invalid subject for discussion for the rest of humanity.
- posted by Tobold @ 2:43 PM Permanent Link