The one year anniversary of LoreCrafted's unofficial darkness has recently passed. We now step into the future of this site as I polish up the final pieces to the new version of this place. Yes, this is another repurposing of the site--one that I hope will find its own place among the Warcraft creative community.
Did someone level up the WoW blogging community high enough to get the Mass Ressurection perk?
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Original image by Keven Law, used under a Creative Commons Licence
Where are the blogging protocols or standards of practice for us medium sized bloggers? Huh? On behalf of medium sized blogs, I am offended! How have I even continued blogging for over 3 years without standards of our medium sized blogs' very own? /boggle! and /flail!
Oh noes!
Does this mean we need to develop a "long-running but niche and frankly a bit lightweight" bloggers' code as well? /treepanic
:-)
More seriously, to all those out there involved in this "blog drama" . Guys. Guys. Listen.
This is not new. Every blogging community goes through phases like this. (Those who do not know their blog history are doomed to repeat it… ;-) )
And the solutions always pretty much come down to this:
Any attempt to develop any form of bloggers' code, bar it be a personal one, is doomed, because there is no real way to enforce or widely communicate it.
In the end, I agree with Ama when she says:
No, you can't control what is said at other people's blogs about you/your blog, but you can choose to respond to it or ignore it.
You can't control others. You can only control your response to others. And that's a vital skill in public discourse, m'kay? ;-)
Anyway, I doubt any of those bloggers, big or small, actually read this, so I'm probably just wasting electrons here. Back to the normal fripperies…
(picture included at the very special request of Please Feed The Troll)
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Another from the "things I should have linked before now" file:
Back in late December, I joined in the Blog Azeroth Secret Santa, published a lovely gift here, and sent off my own post. And then... nothing. Silence. No response from the blogger. The blogger had, it seems, ceased to blog. And to answer e-mails. Eventually I went to head Secret Santatrix Ophelie and discussed the issue. And she found someone who had never recieved their secret santa gift.
And thus, a slightly embrassed Redhawsk lowered the tone of their blog terribly by publishing my nonsense. The very least you can do is visit it, as a gesture of some kind of sympathy...
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So, the short, heartless individual going by the moniker Gnomeageddon has a post up, seeing how many love children he and other prominent WoW bloggers have.
And he DIDN'T INCLUDE ME.
Still, I'm not a bitter tree, so I can move on from HIS CALLOUS and VICIOUS NEGLECT, and just do the damn research myself. So, let's see: how many Leafshines populate the US servers?
Two? TWO? And one of them isn't even a Druid? Awful.
Surely my EU compatriots will be following in my footsteps a little more closely...?
Four. And one of them's me. In fact, the only one at the level cap is me.
So…people aren't inspired to follow in my footsteps? I'm not an inspirational tree? *sniff* Perhaps that's why Gnomer neglected me. He was trying to spare my aboreal feelings…
To balm my feelings, I did a Google for myself. And this blog is the top result for "leafshine". And all the other results are something to do with polishing plat leaves, which just seems weird to me. Stiil, whatever floats your boat. And talking of boat-floating, this was at the bottom of the post:
Someone penning some weird blogger slash fiction, maybe...?
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I’ve been getting into the Google Reader swing, thanks to some neat iPad apps for feed reading. If you want to see what I’m sharing, you can follow me on Google Reader.
Prepare to be Edified*.
*Edification not guaranteed. Leafshine Enterprises PLC deny any responsibility for headaches, stomach aches, wipes, limb loss or decapitation that occur as a result of using their products. Your statutory rights are damn well affected.
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Amongst the blog posts discussing Gameplanet’s interview with Ghostcrawler, I completely missed the the fact that there was one with Cory Stockton, lead content designer, as well. (This says something, I think, about the WoW blogging community’s emphasis on game mechanics over narrative and experience, but that’s fodder for another post). I found much more of personal interest to me in that post. For example:
For example, on a quest we might send you to go kill a specific quest mob. When we do that now, we can phase you and have that mob act like you’re the only person there – no other players are visible. It creates a much more customised experience, we can do a cinematic, you’ll get more of an individual set up.
Now, that’s awesome. Quest-specific phasing and encounters? That really opens up the storytelling opportunities for Blizz this time around. They can craft genuinely dramatic encounters with individuals or groups at the end of quest chains that are much more in tune with what we’d see in film or tv as compared to the convention for MMoRPGs.
The fact that the revamped Deadmines and Shadowfang Keep won’t hit until 4.1 is revealed there, too. But I found this revealing:
And a zone that you didn’t see today, but a zone that has had a 95% revamp would be Westfall. Westfall is completely different, huge changes. Almost no quest line is intact because the Defias don’t make sense any more as a threat. Now the Cataclysm is a threat, so things have really changed and all of that will play into the new Deadmines, the boss there and the way that experience is going to happen.
So, there’s going to be a narrative reason for the new dungeons? It’s not just Van Cleef on Heroic? I suspect some people will be disappointed by this news, but I find it rather exciting. Long-term players are really going to get a sense of an evolving, changing world.
And there’s an interesting little hint of a revised strategy for patches:
We actually have a list of old dungeons that are the highest candidates to actually do revamps for. Stratholme’s on that list, Scholomance and Diremaul are there – there are a couple of others that players also really, really liked. So [revamping] those instances are things for when there’s a patch, a gap, and there’s time for us to do it, that’s what we’d fill it with, rather than making entirely new content.
That’s revealing – possibly more so than meets the eye. Can we read a new approach to the patch/expansion cycle in this? They’ve got scheduled time for each patch, and any spare will go on revamping old content to make it relevant again – which must be more time-efficient than starting from scratch. There’s no doubt that accelerating the patch cycle will be crucial to picking up the pace of expansion releases. It may be wishful thinking – but I think I can see something beginning to emerge…
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My secret santa gift post for Stop of The Stoppable Force is up on his blog.
'tis the season to be silly…
:-)
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